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Andrew Hsu is the twenty third president of the Faculty of Charleston, a public liberal arts college positioned in historic downtown Charleston, South Carolina.
In Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” there’s a second when the brooding prince climbs atop a cliff, one overlooking the Danish sea, and delivers his most well-known strains: “To be, or to not be, that’s the query.”
College presidents now discover themselves on a precipice like Hamlet as we predict by way of the various modifications gathering on the horizon: synthetic intelligence, the upcoming enrollment cliff in 2025 and a few overloud critics questioning the relevance of a faculty diploma. Simply a kind of forces alone creates an existential disaster for increased schooling, however all three coming on the similar time, properly, it feels a bit like watching a tsunami wave quick approaching our shores.
Nevertheless, to my core, I’m an optimist. Time and time once more, my optimism has been reaffirmed by how issues end up in the end to the optimistic, each on a private and an expert degree.
I got here of age in a really turbulent time — the Chinese language Cultural Revolution — and people experiences have formed my perspective and attitudes in methods I can’t ever hope to completely describe and doubtless even absolutely perceive myself. As a teen, I labored years within the countryside with the peasants, away from my household, and attended college in matches and begins. It wasn’t till getting into faculty after which graduate college within the U.S. that I had any type of continuity in my research and mental growth.
One of many classes I do bear in mind studying early on, from an schooling system tightly managed by the federal government, was that America was no good friend to Communist China. But for some purpose, I took it upon myself to study English, the language of the enemy, partly out of boredom and partly out of rebelling in my very own small approach in opposition to the command state surrounding me.
I share that info not for pity nor to light up some side of the unique for Western readers, however to say that my information of English gave me a path ahead — to graduate college within the U.S. and an extended profession within the states. Out of one thing destructive got here one thing optimistic.
On an expert degree, all college presidents skilled the pandemic in a reasonably related approach — closing down campuses mid-semester and making an attempt to work with college and workers to give you myriad fixes on the fly. It might have been good if we had been working from one template — a shared playbook — however we needed to invent a thousand totally different options on our personal to suit our particular establishments and communities.
That being stated, sensible individuals pulled collectively and located a approach ahead. It’s a credit score to human ingenuity and fortitude. For my establishment, we got here out stronger from the disaster, establishing new processes and incorporating expertise like we by no means had earlier than. Out of one thing destructive got here one thing optimistic.
In fact, the options to AI, shifting demographics for traditional-age faculty college students and the noise round a school diploma’s relevance are usually not uniform. They are going to look totally different at each establishment. Some can have higher solutions than others. And within the college approach of doing issues, these greatest practices will ultimately trickle all through the trade. The collegial nature of upper schooling ought to present hope that if one college figures one thing out, there can be extra quickly to observe. Name it evolution, group type.
These subsequent few years are going to see each super development and super disruption — “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” to borrow once more from “Hamlet.”
Nevertheless, I imagine our that means stays clear: to be the forms of establishments that reply to alter and put together college students and our communities with an increasing information base to maintain shifting ahead. For me, that goes past optimism — that’s simply human nature.
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