A New Chapter Begins: President Brooke Barnett’s Inaugural Address

This is like being at your own funeral, but the good news is that you do not have to be dead to hear all the great stories and you actually get to spend time with the people who came.

Standing here before you on this stage, with this rather elaborate getup, reminds me a bit of my first time on a stage. I was 5 and part of a dance recital. My uniform was a bright-green leotard with one of those Sgt. Pepper jackets and a majorette hat that was half my height. It was … memorable. But I don’t think I would have remembered it had Tom not printed a photo of it in icing on top of a birthday cake that he brought to my workplace my first year on the job as a faculty member. It was a surprise party. Well, it was a surprise alright.

Today, the outfit is a bit more regal, the occasion much more important. And I want to start with a message to our students, the most important part of Rollins. You are the reason we are here and why I do what I do. I will keep you at the forefront of my mind as I make decisions. I care deeply about your experience and will invest my whole self to make Rollins the best it can be for you.

Faculty, I will rely on your expertise in curriculum and pedagogy (what we teach our students and how we teach it). I know that you are working in the best interests of students and their learning. I admire your focus on your scholarship and bringing students into that scholarship with you.

Staff, I will rely on your expertise for your specific roles whether it is keeping this place beautiful inside and outside, attracting stellar students and colleagues and focusing on their holistic well-being, or assuring solid systems and practices are in place to keep this complex organization running smoothly.

To our alumni, thank you for advocating for us and for representing us so well. We appreciate how you bring the Rollins mantra “Life is for service” into your personal and professional lives. You make us proud every day, and I promise I will do everything I can to make you proud to be a Rollins alumnus.

To the trustees, thank you for your trust in me to lead this college that you love. I know you take seriously your roles to support us with your engagement and philanthropy and to focus on the long-term success of Rollins. I am reminded of the quote, “With great power comes great responsibility.” This is, of course, what Uncle Ben says to Peter Parker in Spiderman. Growing up Baptist, I knew it from Jesus who said, “To whom much has been given, much will be required.” But he didn’t stop there. He added, “and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be asked.” From the size of my email inbox, that has definitely proven true. But I have been given the gift to lead this college and will give it my all. Maybe not Spiderman level, but a close second.

To our Central Florida community leaders, Winter Park is our home. Our success is interdependent and has been since the late 1880s when Florida wanted to start a college and Winter Park answered that call. Our students are blessed to study on a beautiful residential campus right here in the cultural and intellectually rich Winter Park and Orlando.

And finally, to the previous presidents of Rollins, thank you for the wonderful foundation on which we will continue to build. Having read about the legacy of the many presidents who made a difference here, I am honored to join this lineage.

I come from a really small town in rural Kentucky and a large extended family, and from a very young age, I was taught you had to pull your weight and help out when you could. I have spent 30 years in higher education and worked at some mighty but lean organizations. That meant every person jumped in to help, learning lots of different tasks along the way. I take that collaborative spirit seriously. Maybe too seriously. Just a few weeks into starting here as president, I was driving a golf cart across campus when I saw a family looking a bit lost. “Can I help you find something?” I immediately asked. They looked relieved. “Yes! Where is the check-in for the international pre-orientation trip?” I paused to consider whether I even knew we had an international pre-orientation trip. Their relief quickly turned apologetic. “I am so sorry. I assumed since you were in the cart that you worked here.” So then I had to say, “Well I do …” He perked right up. “Oh, what do you do?”

I think they were probably a little surprised. Heck, I’m a little surprised to be standing here before you in this role. Growing up I read a lot and enjoyed learning about places I thought I would never see and lives I assumed I would never live. But I did always try to think beyond what was right in front of me. A Rumi quote captures this perfectly: “Set your sights on a place higher than your eyes can see.”

And for me I set those sights way back in my rural upbringing in Kentucky. I was the child no one wanted in Sunday school. I asked way too many questions. My grandfather said I was vaccinated with a Victrola needle. In the American South we call this spirited. “Bless your heart” was uttered frequently. (For you non-Southerners, that is not a good thing.) In other words, I was a lot.

But all these questions were my attempt to learn. I tried to live by another wise adage: to be curious, not judgmental. And I know what you’re thinking, Jesus. But this one’s Ted Lasso. 

I was blessed with many early teachers who helped me be my best. One such teacher was Rosemary Allen who was my English professor and is now the president of my alma mater. Last time we saw each other she told the story of listening to me interview someone back when I was editor of the college newspaper. She wasn’t spying on me; she was just near the newsroom phone. That was back when phones had cords so every phone interview we did was within earshot of the whole newsroom. If that doesn’t keep you honest, I don’t know what will. Maybe we ought to bring the corded phone back. Anyway, Rosemary saw in me something I had not yet seen: my ability to be a professional journalist. To ask the right questions, to listen, and to get to heart of the matter.

What a gift to reflect what we see in others that they may not yet see in themselves. My days as a faculty member are not so long ago that I don’t remember that this is one of the most important things faculty do: find that spark in each of our students and help them see potential paths for their own promise and possibility. This year I have been honored to hear so many stories about students finding and honing their own passions through the help of our wonderful faculty and staff, but I will share just one example. Makayle Kellison is student from California who grew up all around the world and came to Rollins as a swimmer. She met Dr. Whitney Coyle who invited her into a summer research project on musical acoustics. Even though she had never taken a physics class before, she then joined the professor’s research on the physics of rocket noise, specifically, the Artemis I launch. She found her passion and has now started her PhD in physics with funding from an National Science Foundation fellowship.

Faculty, staff, students, and alumni, you all tell me all the time what brought you here and keeps you coming back, but it bears repeating, not just for our out-of-town guests, but as both a reminder of our long-standing assets and as inspiration and aspiration for our future. Yes, our campus is beautiful. Surrounded by lakes, and with Park Avenue a block away, it’s hard not to fall in love immediately. But we are more than just a pretty face. It’s the strength of our college that drew me here. Long-standing pragmatic liberal arts and curricular innovation. Decades of strength in business graduate education and adult education. Faculty across all programs who serve as teacher-scholar mentors, engaged in their disciplines and creating dynamic classrooms for learning. Mister Rogers and the ethos of service that permeates every corner of our campus. The Alfond Inn. The Rollins Museum of Art. But as you know, there is much more to come, and our innovation tradition will continue on many fronts.

As we move into the future together and set up the next 140 years of success at Rollins, we tap into the legacy of bold action that has served us so well throughout our history. As the first college in Florida, we have been a dynamic and evolving college ever since famed educator John Dewey chaired our conference on liberal arts in 1931.

Today, we see that manifestation in Rollins Gateway, our signature approach to preparing students to pursue their purpose through the liberal arts in action and the embodiment of the most beneficial high-impact educational practices. Gateway provides students a future-forward foundation so they can put their education to work in the world and make a positive impact. That future-forward frame at Rollins comes from the faculty, staff, and administrators who deliver on our mission and notable strong and courageous leaders who were the right person at the right time.

Hamilton Holt led the construction of the chapel (during a depression, no less), and the Hamilton Holt School honors his commitment to adult education—a commitment that has continued at Rollins for more than eight decades.

Jack Critchfield reformed shared governance and began our first development office. When we celebrated the most recent Order of the Fox celebration with the class of 1976, one of the class members told me he figured I was the youngest person to be the president of Rollins. Not quite. Not by a longshot. Jack was 36. I guess to a teenager, you can be in your 30s and look old, but to a septuagenarian, you can be in your 50s and look young. Or maybe we’ve just come a long way in the fight against ageism.

This year I celebrated our Thaddeus & Polly Seymour Acts of kindness Day. We came from Indiana, and Wabash College may still be salty about Rollins poaching Thad because he was such a great advocate for the liberal arts. He handed out silver dollars when he caught students doing something good because he knew character and kindness were key parts of education.

Hugh McKean provided long-term leadership at a key moment in our history. He cared deeply about art and brought the world’s largest collection of Tiffany glass to our community. He took art preservation seriously. And thank goodness, because without him, we wouldn’t have our most iconic tradition today. In January 1934, two 19th-century garden figures—a cat and fox—took up residence on Rollins’ campus. Fifteen years later, however, the cat statue was smashed beyond repair, and the fox was left alone. McKean took the poor lonely fox into safekeeping as a protector. But good collectors know that art must not only be preserved but enjoyed. So on May 17, 1956, McKean brought the fox out and declared it too beautiful a day to hold class. Thus began Fox Day, a tradition we take very seriously. Maybe a little too seriously? I have a whole folder of emails from students requesting a particular day so it will fit their calendars. One student even sent me her work schedule. Students, when I said was going to put you first, this is not what I meant.

Rita Bornstein knew that Rollins had so much more that it could be and paid serious attention to resource raising for what matters most. She wrote a key book on the college presidency to help future leaders and broke the glass ceiling at Rollins, making it easier for me to be here today.

Lewis Duncan leaves us the legacy of the amazing Alfond Inn, which is a living art museum, community asset, and incredible business model, with all net profits supporting student scholarships at Rollins. And he galvanized our international recruitment efforts, and today we benefit from students from 69 different countries.

Grant Cornwell launched Rollins Gateway, added residential space so more students can live where they learn, and helped create faculty cohesion. Along with Provost Don Davison and our faculty, he was key in welcoming Phi Beta Kappa to Rollins. Grant remains generous in his time with me ensuring a strong transition and provided key insights throughout my listening tour.

I have learned so much during the past several months as part of this listening tour and will share three key takeaways with you now. First, Rollins relationships are real and really important. Two, this place is a love letter to the liberal arts. Three, folks are excited about the future.

Number one. The power of relationships is palpable in how every person connected to Rollins talks about the College. Tom and I have felt this from day one with the warm welcome we received and with how many times a student or colleague notes the relationships that make their Rollins experience.

Madison Clemens always knew she wanted to be a teacher. Right after high school, she went into a four-year college program but had to step away. She found her way back to the classroom, working as a paraprofessional aide. She joined our Pathways to Teaching program, and the key relationships in the program with faculty and staff have made all the difference. She just passed her final certification exam to be a licensed teacher.

Joseph Pool takes seriously the Rollins commitment to engaging across differences, discerning reliable information, and collaborating toward productive and practical solutions. Combining what he learned in his Food and Religion course with his Moroccan family heritage, he started the student organization Breaking Bread, which fosters “culinary diplomacy”—the idea that shared meals can serve as powerful tools for bridging interreligious and intercultural divides. At a Breaking Bread table, you do in fact talk about both religion and politics.

Listening lesson number two. Rollins leads with the commitment to the liberal arts. You take the liberal arts seriously in how you teach and construct degree programs in all our programs: the College of Liberal Arts, the Hamilton Holt School, and the Roy E. Crummer Graduate School of Business. Faculty across our campus have chosen to share their talents here because of their commitment to the liberal arts and its transformative power.

I could tell stories of how this plays out across every single major and academic program, but rather than keep you here that long, I will simply note the enduring values and value of a liberal arts education that fosters independent and critical thinking, intellectual flexibility, and ethical reasoning and prepares students for evolving workplaces and careers. Our students consistently excel not only in thinking about new and emerging technologies, but in creatively repurposing existing ones to solve real-world problems.

So when NASA put out a call for students to take one of its existing patents and repurpose it as part of a patent remix challenge, six Rollins MBA students beat out more than 400 entries to win first place. Their venture reimagines a current NASA tool as a portable, handheld device that allows clinicians and first responders to visualize veins beneath the skin in real time without the need for contrast dyes or ultrasound equipment. I had the opportunity to spend a celebratory afternoon with the team—Ava, Oliver, Xandria, Ryan, McKenzie, and Matheus—and what stood out immediately was that their undergraduate backgrounds spanned the liberal arts, including psychology, the natural sciences, and art.

Number 3. Folks are excited about the future. The future-forward approach of our faculty and staff means together we will forge an inspiring vision based on what matters most for our students and the future of Rollins. We will remain realistically optimistic. Hope is not our strategy, but it is our ethos. The promise and possibility are palpable. We will not fall prey to exceptionalism, but we will know our own worth, elaborate on what makes us special, and adapt and change to remain relevant.

Listening across campus I see the many aspirations we have as a college and also the need to animate those aspirations with resources. It won’t happen overnight. It takes time to do big things.

The ancient Greeks thought about time in two ways. There is chronos, the clock time that governs our lives—when to get up, when to go to work, when to tuck in the children, when to go to bed. But there is also a more figurative measure of time, kairos—the right time, the sacred window of opportunity. It encompasses both the fleeting moment to be seized as well as the deep, all-encompassing time that nods to the eternal. It is this second concept of time that higher education speaks to, but to make the most of it, we have to be aware, present, and prepared.

In this time of rapid societal changes, we feel even more the need to preserve places for deep thinking and contemplation. To celebrate intellectualism and inquiry. To rely on expertise. To think in complicated ways about complex topics.

This will allow the horizon thinking needed to move boldly, thoughtfully, and kindly into the future. To tap into our strong legacy, and to reap the benefits of the now, and the promise and possibility of the future. The promise we make to our students, our alumni, and to each other as colleagues and to the College, and the possibility of what we can be together in the future.

As I close here, I turn from the promise of the future to the debts of the past and express my sincere gratitude to the people who have helped me arrive here, at this moment, on this stage. Gratitude is an ancient practice across many cultures and traditions. In Buddhism, there are the concepts of kataññu and katavedī, which express both the quality of being grateful and expressing that gratitude in action. In Judaism, there is “recognizing the good”—hakarat hatov. In Islam, the Prophet Muhammad said, “Whoever does not show gratitude to people has not shown gratitude to God.” Martin Luther King Jr., drawing on his own Christian faith, wrote of “an inescapable network of mutuality.” I feel that interconnectedness and gratitude every day.

First to my family of origin. I hit the lottery being born into our family. My parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews. I would want to be friends with you even if we were not related. Our relationships come from joy not obligation. And for the family I married into, I am so blessed on this front too. Thank you for welcoming me so warmly and fully into your family. And for my chosen family, my friends. We have all chosen so well if I must say so.

Together, we make a wild and wonderful group. You enrich my life, and we have so much fun together. I sincerely hope that fun is infectious, not obnoxious, when we hit the dance floor tonight.

I am also grateful to my own partner in life and all things. My husband, Tom. I cannot imagine going through life without you. You often joke that my career is greatly limited by your poor jokes, but we all know that you are my biggest cheerleader and advocate and that you are an asset to Rollins, and I hear it all the time from students and colleagues. To Jack and Lily, our wonderful adult children who are our favorite people in the whole world. We are endlessly proud of the people you are and will continue to become.

All of you have helped me along a career path where, like a snowball, I have accumulated treasured colleagues and friends as I rolled along, growing my community of gratitude bigger and bigger. Thank you to all the wonderful people in Bloomington, Indiana, at IU and public media, in North Carolina and at Elon University, in Indianapolis and at Butler University, and now, all of you here in Central Florida at Rollins College. I am grateful for your warm welcome, your generous collaboration, and your confidence in me to lead us all into a bright future. Fiat Lux!