A Chronicle story on a small college is usually a snapshot in time. We drop in, record the personalities and events around some daunting challenge, then write an article that strives to transfix or inspire readers—or at least convey something useful. And then, aside from an update or two in a blog item, we move on. There are some 4,000 colleges to cover, just in the United States. We almost never go back.
In 2009, I wrote about Davis & Elkins College, a tiny, troubled private institution in West Virginia that had a new president—G.T. (Buck) Smith, a 74-year-old turnaround artist. He planned to resurrect the institution with some conservative financial stewardship, but also with a romantic, almost idealistic strategy: to build an environment that valued relationships, integrity, and compassion, emphasizing the power a small college could bring to the lives of students who either grew up or landed here, deep in Appalachia. I watched as Mr. Smith made himself the personification of that ideal: He walked around campus, stooping to pick up litter, then stopping a passing student, staff member, or stranger to engage them and make them feel important, interesting, loved.
The story was tremendously popular, but also struck some as a bit preposterous. One self-proclaimed “jaded” letter writer—a former president of the Appalachian College Association, no less—suggested that no college could turn things around on such a flimsy strategy. She recommended focusing our attention on colleges facing closure, as Davis & Elkins might be one of them.
Given the pressures on little colleges, decline and closure are a constant threat. But for now, the jaded view seems to have been dead wrong. Mr. Smith’s strategy worked. Fall enrollments are up 50 percent since he took over in 2008, to about 800 students, and net attrition has dropped from more than 30 percent to 19 percent. Students—and even some new faculty members attracted from larger, more prestigious institutions—say they came and stayed because of the sense of belonging. Programs that had been decimated, like fine arts, have been restarted. Trustees and wealthy alumni, who sat on the sidelines for years as the college floundered, are now writing six- and seven-figure checks.
D&E, as the college is known, has raised more than $30-million in the past five years. It has put $10-million into repairing the grand but dilapidated structures on its historic mountainside campus, established in 1904. And while the college was borrowing money and raiding its $21.8-million endowment five years ago to stay afloat, today, with an endowment of $29-million, it is one of the few American colleges that can say it has no external debt.
“I thought he was going to wing it—you can’t know how to turn a place like this around,” Joseph M. Roidt, a longtime faculty member who is now vice president for academic affairs, says of the early days with Mr. Smith. “He knew what he was doing. He had a plan. It was about lifting spirits and letting people know this place had a future and we were going to grow and we were going to change. But it was about the power of leadership. He was everywhere.”
Now, Davis & Elkins is at another critical moment: Mr. Smith stepped down from the presidency on June 30, to become an adviser and fund raiser for the college. He passed the top job to Michael P. Mihalyo Jr., who came here in 2011 as provost.
Although everyone expresses confidence in Mr. Mihalyo, most people interviewed for this article have pondered whether Buck Smith’s magic (or luck) can be passed along. Mr. Roidt, a sociologist, said that Mr. Smith’s tenure was an “object lesson in leadership"—particularly in Max Weber’s theories about charismatic leaders, electrifying personalities who are able to inspire others. “The scary part of charismatic leadership, Weber said, is that as soon as you try to institutionalize it, it dies,” Mr. Roidt points out. “It’s connected to the power of the individual personality.”
And no matter who is sitting in the president’s chair, Davis & Elkins faces all the challenges faced by other small, rural, non-elite private colleges in charting a path forward.
“I don’t want to claim that we have arrived, or that we are safe or secure,” Mr. Smith told me recently during dinner on the campus. “For those of us with less than $50-million or $100-million endowments, there is no margin for error.” A public-relations disaster or a bad investment could flush everything away. Mr. Smith has seen it before, and he now sees other small colleges borrowing tens of millions for buildings, severing church ties, and emphasizing athletics, all to bring some pizazz.
“I think that’s a shaky plan,” he says. “But none of us knows whether we have the right plan.”
For someone who works some 15 hours a day, Mr. Smith, now 77, seems as energetic as he was four years ago, and he’s still eager to connect with a visitor or charm a student. Just before dinner at the college’s Graceland Inn, he meets two motorcyclists, a retired cop and a former Marine, who rode 400 miles from Philadelphia for a lark. When Mr. Smith learns that they are gun enthusiasts, he offers to meet them the next day to show them the college’s collection of historic rifles and powder horns.
Later, a student from Belington, W.Va., approaches Mr. Smith, asking if he found the butterscotch pie she left anonymously at his office. He regales her with a story about taking the pie to a 91-year-old alumna in Baltimore, who loves butterscotch pies, and who shared a piece with Mr. Smith before he left.
“If you ever want to go to Baltimore to meet her, we will arrange that for you,” he says. “It would be the thrill of her life.” The student is delighted.
Much of Mr. Smith’s talent lies in focusing his attention intensely on someone, making him or her feel important, appreciated, and listened to. It’s a disposition that served him well in the fund-raising world, where he spent a career developing donor-cultivation techniques still used by development officers. His style, as he describes it, is indirect. In one case, he first approached a prospective donor—a successful Baltimore businessman—for help in connecting the elderly, pie-loving alumna with a new financial manager. Later Mr. Smith asked the businessman about the logistics of setting up a new turf field, the sort of project he had supported elsewhere in the past. Eventually, a major gift for the field turned up.
“I haven’t gone around asking people for money,” Mr. Smith says. “I just tell them our story and ask their opinions of things—and I am serious when I ask their opinions, because I don’t know the answers.”
June Myles, whose family has a major lumber business in Elkins, is another donor who has been charmed by Mr. Smith. She joined the college’s Board of Trustees 12 years ago—she felt obligated, having grown up here. “Elkins, and Randolph County, would be a different place without Davis & Elkins College,” she says. But in years past, she gave only a little money for a scholarship fund and a running track. “I thought I was done,” she says, miming wiping her hands. “I thought I had met my trustee obligations, so to speak.”
But since Mr. Smith took over, she has given more than $4-million to support renovations in the arts center, an auditorium, and an athletics facility; to create a new gateway to the campus; and to support an endowed chair, among other projects. Her new generosity came in part because she saw that the college was back on track and debt free—she would not be throwing her money away.
But there was something else—a joy in giving, which she attributes to the atmosphere at the college. “I’m not sure I can explain it,” she says, thinking back to the first time she met Mr. Smith. “I remember one thing he said, because my daddy always said it: It is amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t mind who gets the credit. ... He has a way of saying, ‘You’re great.’ If someone tells you that you’re really wonderful, it’s hard not to respond positively to that.”
In a way, this generous, hopeful ethos pervades the college now—and has served as a major attraction for students and new faculty members. Carol Carter left a position as a tenured professor at Louisiana State University to become an associate professor of business and the chair of the business department at Davis & Elkins—much to the surprise of her colleagues in Baton Rouge. “They thought I was crazy,” she says.
When she was offered the job, her dean at LSU started putting together a counteroffer. “That night I got an e-mail from Buck"—which talked about how much the college wanted and valued her—"and the next day I went in and said, ‘I made up my mind—I’m going.’”
She misses the resources she had at a big research institution, but there are a number of things she doesn’t miss: the politics, the backbiting. In her new job, “students are actually considered,” she says. “A lot of times at a research university, students are considered a necessary evil.”
Certainly, teaching this population requires more work in some ways. Bryan Wagoner, an assistant professor of religious studies and philosophy, came from Harvard University. He says he “got tired of the minutiae” in an intensely academic environment and was looking for a small college—particularly near the region where he grew up, in western North Carolina—where he could grapple with philosophy and religion more broadly. But going from an Ivy to a relatively unknown college in West Virginia has been “a rough year of adjustment,” he admits.
“In the past, I had worked with students who were incredibly motivated,” he says, but at D&E, he has had to work harder to engage, inspire, and help students make connections. So he has tried introducing criminology students to Jeremy Bentham and his panopticon; education majors to John Dewey and pragmatism; and science majors to David Hume and his notions of induction and causation.
Nonetheless, he says, “I revel in the ability to work with and challenge some students who come from profoundly disadvantaged backgrounds, and who don’t have the sense of entitlement that other students I’ve worked with in the past have had.”
Students pick up on this. Ellis C. Wyatt graduated from high school with 15 other kids in Harman, W.Va. He was one of the Highlands Scholars—students from West Virginia hollows who can attend Davis & Elkins for about the same price as West Virginia University, one of the many strategies D&E employed in its resurrection. Mr. Wyatt, who is dyslexic, says his schoolteachers told him he would never make it in college. “I got much more support up at Davis & Elkins than I got in high school,” he says. In May, he walked across the stage at graduation as the class salutatorian, and this fall he will start graduate school at West Virginia University, with the hope of becoming a trauma counselor.
Mark Lanham spent 25 years as a Marine infantryman, but now, thanks to the Post-9/11 GI Bill, he studies sustainability, environmental studies, and biology at Davis & Elkins. He is an Elkins native—he used to play in some of the college’s historic mansions that were boarded up in the 1970s—but he could have enrolled at lots of other colleges.
“The camaraderie from the military that I was missing in my life I found here,” he says. “Everyone knows everybody. Everyone helps. When I checked out other schools, I was a number. They didn’t really care. They wanted the government money. Here they actually care.”
Offering hope, encouragement, and care—it all sounds kind of squishy. But it may be more important than people realize. I shared the story of Davis & Elkins with Brandon Busteed, executive director of Gallup Education, a division of the polling and public-research company. Mr. Busteed studies what Gallup’s data can tell us about learning, job satisfaction, and well-being, and he says that the D&E story “brought to life” some of the trends he finds in the research.
Hope and care might sound like “soft” attributes, but they are some of the most important elements that people value in education and the workplace. Gallup has asked 18- to 35-year-olds what quality defined their best instructor, Mr. Busteed says, and “care” always rises to the top.
“One of the more fascinating finds of that study is that people who said they had teachers who cared about them personally were more likely to be exposed to 21st-century skill development in school,” he says, “and that in turn was predictive of greater work success later in life.” Hope—defined by Gallup as seeing a pathway to achieving one’s goals—is actually a stronger predictor of college success than standardized-test scores and high-school grades, Mr. Busteed says.
In fact, hope and care are often the very qualities that colleges are selling in their viewbooks and marketing materials—it’s implied in all of the talk about small classes and personalized attention, in the glossy pictures of professors and students sitting closely together, poring over texts.
The problem, says Mr. Busteed, is that hope and care are not nearly as prevalent in college as they should be. In polls, 23 percent of respondents say that high-school teachers care about their problems and feelings, while 16 percent say that their college instructors care. Eighteen percent of respondents say that high-school teachers know their hopes and dreams, while only 11 percent say that’s true of college instructors.
“Hope is a malleable construct—it can be boosted or lowered, and it is contagious,” Mr. Busteed says. “When you think about the link between caring teachers and hopeful students, it’s one thing to say ‘I care,’ and it’s another thing to actually express that—to say ‘I care,’ to ask someone how they’re doing, and to actually pause to listen.”
If D&E’s resurrection is at least partly based on Mr. Smith’s fund-raising prowess and “lifting spirits,” as Mr. Roidt put it, the question is how much the college’s health depends on Mr. Smith at the helm.
The president knew years ago that his time in office was limited. In 2009, he said he would serve only as long as he and his wife, Joni, were healthy. In the years since, his wife’s health has declined, and he has had some health scares of his own: Four years ago, he referred to the buzzing BlackBerry in his breast pocket as his “Pacemaker"—students called him at all hours to ask about enrolling at the college or getting someone to fix a dorm-room toilet. Now, after collapsing in his home in the summer of 2011, he has a real Pacemaker lodged in his chest.
Mr. Smith has tried setting up successors in the past, with mixed results. At Bethany College, another West Virginia institution where he led a turnaround from 2004 to 2007, the successor he was grooming dropped out after a family crisis, Mr. Smith says; the college conducted a search to hire Scott D. Miller, who is still there. At Chapman University, where Mr. Smith led a turnaround in the 1980s, the board initially passed over Mr. Smith’s suggested successor to hire Emerson College’s Allen E. Koenig, who developed an acrimonious relationship with Chapman professors. “He nearly wrecked the place in two years,” Mr. Smith says, and Mr. Koenig resigned in 1991. Chapman hired Mr. Smith’s choice, James L. Doti, who has run the college ever since. Mr. Koenig, who died last year, spent the next two decades as a presidential search consultant.
Mr. Smith is skeptical of the typical presidential-search process: For big bucks to a consultant, he says, you get a list of names, most of them left over from past searches. The candidates’ main ambitions are to be president of a college. “Anywhere, they don’t care where it is,” Mr. Smith says. “What does that say about commitment to your institution? Nothing.” In time, the trustees vote on someone most at the college have seen for only a few hours.
“Does that make any sense?” Mr. Smith says. “Imagine finding a life partner this way. This is a marriage.”
Rita Bornstein, a former president of Rollins College who has written extensively about college leadership, calls the search process “a pig in a poke.”
“It takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money, and it often doesn’t produce anything that is a lot of good,” she says.
Sometimes colleges have to go outside to pick a new leader, especially if they are trying to shake things up. But in most cases, Ms. Bornstein advocates grooming and promoting a president from within, someone who knows the culture and won’t miss a beat. “You know what you’re getting, the good and bad, and there are no surprises,” she says. “The problem with the internal candidates is that they are probably too well known, and they are not charismatic anymore to their colleagues.” That is why less than 30 percent of presidents are appointed from within, she says.
In looking for someone to take over, Mr. Smith had a breakthrough in 2011, as the college was looking for a provost. Faculty members attended a teaching workshop through the Appalachian College Association led by Mr. Mihalyo, who was chairman of fine arts at Brevard College, in North Carolina, and who had worked with Mr. Smith at Bethany, where Mr. Mihalyo was provost. The professors liked Mr. Mihalyo and persuaded him to apply for D&E’s provost job. He was hired.
Last year, the college came up with an unusual working arrangement for the two men. Mr. Smith remained president and the college’s primary fund raiser, but he spent more of his time at his home 2,600 miles away in Ashland, Ore., while Mr. Mihalyo got a title of chancellor and took on the daily running of the college. When Mr. Smith decided to retire, he asked the board members whether they wanted to keep cruising down the road they were on, or take a detour by hiring some unknown quantity. The choice was clear.
Mr. Mihalyo is very different from Mr. Smith. He is quieter and more careful. He doesn’t seem to have the jokey, folksy ease that Mr. Smith has in front of crowds of alumni or students. But faculty and board members here express confidence that he will nurture the environment cultivated by Mr. Smith.
While he doesn’t face the sorts of problems that gave Mr. Smith sleepless nights for five years, he faces stark challenges in sustaining the college nonetheless. Davis & Elkins is remote—a two- to four-hour drive separates it from population centers like Washington, Pittsburgh, and Columbus, Ohio. Students say that Elkins’s small size is the college’s main downside. The college has great “bones” in beautiful old buildings that climb up the hillside campus, but it’s clear that repairs are due on a stairway or stonework here, a roof or plaza there. It carries a $33,570 sticker price in a state where the median household income is $39,550. While attrition dropped from 16 percent to 6 percent from the fall to spring semesters this past year, it remains stubbornly around 14 percent from spring to fall over the past few years—exit interviews indicate that’s mainly because of the financial burdens. And any small college now has to grapple with a pervasive attitude, trumpeted in magazines and op-eds, that an education at a little college is quaint but not worth the money. In West Virginia, those pressures may be even more profound.
But Mr. Mihalyo has ideas. Given the college’s location and its experts and special collections in Appalachian artifacts and history, he plans to strengthen Davis & Elkins’s association with mountain culture and arts. The new emphasis has attracted a student who is a star fiddler from Washington State, and another who is a banjo sensation from Canada.
The college, he says, is also streamlining its curriculum and trying to strengthen its academics. The business program will focus more on entrepreneurship, while education will carve a niche in early-childhood programs.
Mr. Mihalyo added little rituals to the graduation ceremonies, like having each student’s favorite instructor bestow a baccalaureate hood on that student. That ritual dramatically increased the popularity of the baccalaureate ceremony—all but two of the 119 graduates showed up this year, versus about two dozen in 2007—and it reinforced the academic spirit of the college.
And Mr. Mihalyo talks about preserving some of the elements that have buoyed the college at its toughest times: hope, optimism, a generosity of spirit.
Asked if he is nervous about taking the helm of a small college at such a precarious time in higher education, he shrugs. “Most of the places that I have worked have had challenges, some more significant than others. If you can help people, the challenge is well worth it.” And then he laughs. “You certainly don’t want to mess it up.”
