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Dr. John McCardell’s shook hands with hundreds of “excited” Sewanee community members Monday evening in Convocation Hall. Excited is the buzz word concerning Dr. McCardell’s election and acceptance as the 16th Vice Chancellorship of the University. While professors, students, and alumni praise Vice Chancellor Joel Cunningham for his grace, seriousness, and strength, especially in regards to the tremendous success of the Sewanee Call fundraising campaign, many people speak of Dr. McCardell with Messiah-like expectations as he comes to the University in the midst of the most serious economic recession since the Great Depression.
In February of 2009, Dr. Cunningham announced his retirement as Vice Chancellor. Over the next several months, the University formed a search committee, hired a search firm, gathered input from students, faculty, alumni and community members, and underwent the task of defining itself as well as exploring what it aspires to be. The search committee, headed by Joel A. Smith, III, C’67 established a list of seven goals which reflect the desires the University seeks in a new Vice Chancellor: strengthening community, enriching the University’s relationship with the Church, raising national profile, ensuring financial strength, enrolling and retaining a strong student body, realizing environmental potential, and fostering diversity.
On January 6th, 2009 the University Trustees unanimously elected Dr. McCardell as Vice Chancellor. Dr. McCardell delivered a speech, followed by several minutes of a standing ovation and applause. The buzz word in Convocation Hall that day, as last Monday was “excited”. Dr. McCardell stated in his speech on the 6th that coming to Sewanee was a “calling”, a “gift”, and a “blessing”. He further stated, as he has several times since, that he did not imagine himself becoming another college president after he retired back into a professorship at Middlebury in 2004. But, Sewanee represents something special for McCardell, “It is so beautiful that people who have once been there always, one way or another, come back,” he said, quoting William Alexander Percy. McCardell knows Sewanee well. He wrote a chapter of the University’s founding in his book The Idea of a Southern Nation, knows Vice Chancellor Cunningham, signatory of the Amethyst Initiative which McCardell initiated, and he knows the University through being on the Board of Trustees at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.
Yet in an interview with the Sewanee Purple, Dr. McCardell stated that he still has much to learn, stating, “I think there are remarkable similarities between [Sewanee and Middlebury]” as he cited Middlebury’s “strong literary tradition…strong environmental studies program…[and that] Middlebury is located in a rural environment where the quality of the community has everything to do with the experience the student has.”He went on to say, “So to that degree, I think the two places allow one to think that one’s talents can be portable, transferable. But in other ways, I’m coming into a situation where everyone knows more about this place than I do.”
To learn more about Sewanee, McCardell stated that in his “first few months there will be a lot of time spent doing things like this [interview], everything from learning the names of buildings, to learning the names of students and alumni to getting a grasp of the issues.”
Issues that do confront Dr. McCardell are evident in the seven themes stated by the search committee and by students, faculty, and community members when asked what he/she would do on their first day as Vice Chancellor, if he/she were Vice Chancellor. Responses varied from “install a coffee maker in the library” to “remove all of the yellow lines that restrict parking” to “fire the football coach” to “speak to students, know them.”
Dr. McCardell believes that knowing the community—the students, faculty, staff, and residents of Sewanee—is empirical to a strong liberal arts institution. On the Monday morning of his most recent visit, McCardell met with members of Physical Plant Services. He stated that “there are several ways [to foster a stronger community and] none of them are very complicated, a mere civility, the normal day-to-day courtesies that we extend to people, is certainly a part of that, expressions of gratitude for the work people do.” He continued speaking of his visit to the PPS Shop, “You know, I’ve been on a campus for thirty-four years now, and what you have in a place like that is precious. These are people who have worked for this university for ten, twenty, thirty, forty years and their brothers and sisters and parents and children working here and that’s precious and what you have is a level of commitment that you just don’t want to ever put at risk. But what you also have is a quality of workmanship and a sense of pride that is no different than when you’re talking about a carpenter or a plumber or a custodian from what you’re talking about with a chemistry professor or a musician. If there is a case to be made for tenure in the 21st century, it is just that, it is the long term commitment and the excellence that grows out of that commitment to a particular place that justifies that kind of contractional longevity.”
Dr. McCardell believes Sewanee is special. He also believes that a liberal arts education is special. He believes in the advantages of “relationships on a human scale in a community” like Sewanee. And He believes that a liberal arts education is “preparatory for a lifetime” where graduates “learn to think and can solve problems.”
Dr. McCardell assumes office as Vice Chancellor on July 1st, 2010. Between now and then he will be learning about the University in the way it functions and about Sewanee and about its people.
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