What I’ve Learned: Grant Cornwell

Record enrollment. A historic fundraising campaign. A campus transformed in tune with our mission. Grant Cornwell’s tenure as Rollins president has been marked by some of the College’s most significant milestones, and the impact of his 10 years at the helm of the institution will be felt for decades to come.

Yet for many Tars the lasting image of President Cornwell could well be of him traversing campus on his blue scooter; serving alongside his wife, Peg, on SPARC Day; or welcoming students, faculty, staff, and alumni to Barker House. After all, his down-to-earth sensibility, collaborative style, and bottom-up approach to leadership were just as essential to the College’s success as his strategic acumen and passionate advocacy for the liberal arts.

Cornwell wasn’t just the chief architect of a Rollins education—he was also one of the most prominent practitioners of its core values. He embodied the Rollins ethos of kindness and collaboration and modeled the College’s commitment to relational learning and personalized attention through interactions with every member of the Rollins community. Regardless of who you were, you always got the feeling that Cornwell genuinely cared about your ideas and valued your contributions to the College and its mission.

As he prepared to leave office earlier this year, we asked Cornwell to reflect on what he learned from his decade leading Rollins.

Your mission must drive everything you do. Every project, every investment, every decision has to align with your mission and has to position you to better deliver on your mission. You cannot ever lose sight of it.

The deepest learning happens in the context of human relationships, and a good teacher is a designer of educational experiences where students have to collaborate to solve a problem. That’s what we do here.

Liberal arts education is continually remaking itself. The content and delivery of a liberal arts education is constantly changing, but it’s fascinating to watch the perpetual resilience of the model as a set of educational ideals.

Our education system is the secret sauce to American prosperity. The university system in America is the most productive engine of knowledge that humanity has ever seen, and it is a fundamental reason why the United States is the most powerful civilization the world has ever seen.

Freedom of inquiry is the basis of knowledge production in American universities. If you start to erode the basis of free inquiry, the long-term implications for American society and the American economy are extremely dire.

A college president needs the humility not to ever walk into a decision thinking they have the answer already worked out. You have to lead with a disposition to listen and collaborate. You look for good ideas and then lift those ideas up and move them forward.

The raw exercise of power never yields a totally positive outcome. If you get to a point in a decision situation where you have to achieve the desired outcome through positional power, then you haven’t led.

Always lead with kindness. That’s the key lesson I’ve taken from Fred Rogers ’51 ’74H. However much you might disagree with a person, you have to lead with respecting their humanity.

Never push your relationships to the side for the sake of work. The thing that has made my partnership with Peg so successful is that no matter how busy we get we’ve always taken time to nurture our relationship as a couple and our relationship with our family.