Find below the link to the school meeting recording that included Adam's acceptance speech and the text of his speech. Adam looks forward to being back on campus at our 40th reunion, June 9-10, 2023!
https://events.locallive.tv/events/88741
Adam Weinberg, President
Remarks at Deerfield Academy
October 26, 2022
"I want to tell a story. It’s March 2020. I am getting ready to board a plane from Florida back to Denison University when our Vice President for Student Life calls me to say that this “COVID” thing is real and it's likely to shut down our campus. Other colleges are sending students home. I respond by saying that we will weather the storm. Let’s do nothing for now. Let the students enjoy their semester.
A few days later, she comes into my office and reminds me that students are heading home for spring break. If we don’t tell them to pack up their stuff and I am wrong, we (she and I) will be personally packing the rooms of 2300 students and mailing their stuff to them.
Over the next 48 hours the world changes. It’s clear that we need to shut the campus. That day, we made a few decisions that set us down a course that was different from many other colleges. The decisions were hard. They were often controversial. But they were right. Nobody got through the COVID year of 2020-2021 unscathed, but it’s possible that Deerfield and Denison navigated the year better than most any other educational institutions. There is a connection that I will come back to in a few minutes. It starts with Being Worthy of Your Heritage. Much of how I navigated Denison through the crisis started with values and views on leadership that I learned at Deerfield.
Our first real major decision concerned our staff. As colleges shut down, they started to lay off staff. 13% of all staff in higher education would lose their jobs. Most of them lower paid and often hourly. We stood up and promised the 900 people who worked for us that everybody would have a job and benefits. Even if they did not have work to do, nobody at Denison would lose a paycheck. Denison is anchored by relationships. Our faculty and staff had stood by the college and our students for decades. This was the college’s chance to stand by them.
Then in May, we made the decision that we would open in August of 2020. At the time, most liberal arts colleges made similar decisions, but starting in late June and through July, many, probably most, changed course. They would not open their campus, they would be remote, or they would open and welcome back only some students. We stayed the course.
We partnered with a team of epidemiologists at the Wexner Medical Center at The Ohio State University. We made them a deal. We would follow their advice, unconditionally, if we got to set the goals.
Our first goal was to welcome all students back to campus. They said that could happen with proper testing and protocols. We then told them that we wanted to play sports. They were skeptical. We told them it was important, and they didn’t need to worry because most colleges were remote and there would be nobody to play. Then we said it was important to do live theatre and music. We made it happen. It was not easy. We did “walking” theatre outside. There were weekends where we believe we might have been the only live arts in the great state of Ohio.
As it got closer to the start of classes, faculty and staff and the local community questioned our plans.
People were scared about the campus reopening and the impact it might have on them or the local community. Then we did something important. We listened. We listened with intense intellectual humility. We sought out those who had different views from us and we invited them to the table. We course corrected. We did not move the flag. We were going to open. But, we changed how we would do it.
And then we opened. Almost every student came back. That was a surprise! We put up tents where faculty could teach outdoors. We bought hundreds of Adirondack chairs and put them around campus so
students could be together outside. We purchased fire pits. We found food trucks and took social life outdoors.
Nothing was easy about the year. We had to constantly course correct. We had to constantly seek to do better. But we got through it. We had virtually no COVID on campus. We found success by being clear eyed and focused on doing everything in our power to provide our students a life-shaping liberal education while keeping our people healthy and safe. At the end of the year, we were tired (exhausted really), but proud and grateful and possibly stronger as a community.
Why do I tell this story? It’s not an important story. It’s a story about how one college navigated a crisis.
But, it’s also a story about Deerfield. My approach to running a college during COVID was shaped by my time at Deerfield and my belief in “being worthy of my heritage.”
The mantra of “be worthy of your heritage” resonated with me as a high school student. It helped me understand the kind of human being that I aspired to be and the life that I wanted to live. From my time at Deerfield, I took away a few qualities that have rooted my life and my career:
• Have values and use them to guide your actions
• Relationships anchor our lives and communities
• Be committed to things larger than yourself and to the arc of history
• Have intellectual humility and be a daily and life-long learner
• Be committed to doing things well and always strive to do them better
• Learn to see failure as necessary and important if you want to succeed
When faced with an unknowable virus and an uncertain situation, I fell back on my values. When things get hard, you rise to the occasion, and you lean in and lead. You do it with integrity and empathy. You act from a place of reason and rationality. There is no shame in life in failure, but there is shame in quitting.
Relationships matter. If you get the relationships right, everything else falls into place. We were going to do everything we could to keep our people employed and safe, and to give our students the life-shaping liberal arts education they deserved.
That’s the easy part–trying. The getting it right part is “hard” and requires intellectual humility. Walk through life with the view that there is a distinct possibility that you might be wrong, so seek out alternative voices and views. See those who disagree with you as a gift, because you can learn from them. If you do, they will make you seem smarter and more talented than you really are.
Finally, be committed to things larger than yourself and to the arc of history. It would have been too easy to bemoan how hard it was to lead a college during COVID. But I felt honored. How often in your life do you truly get the opportunity to stand up and to step into a really hard and complex situation in service of others and an organization you cherish?
To close, I loved my time at Deerfield. I arrived from Texas in the fall of 1980 with cowboy boots. I quickly learned that I was in over my head. Everybody seemed smarter. They were and many still are.
For the first time in my life, there were people on the hockey team who were better than me. That was hard! People had cultural capital that I did not have.
Then I realized that people here cared about me. I felt the deep relationships that anchor Deerfield. My teachers pushed me hard because they believed that I could do better. My friends pulled me along with them to places that I did not know existed because they wanted me to be part of their communities. I learned that I had come to a place that could help me architect a life for myself that I could never have imagined when I left Dallas and arrived here. All it asked in return was that I be worthy of my heritage."
