Advice to alumni:
Stay in touch, stay loyal and -- of course! -- visit the campus
Ohio Today: Is there any advice you would give to the alumni from your eras? … [Addressing Alden] We figured out your alumni are 63 to 73 years old now. [Group laughs]
ALDEN: In my speeches to alumni, I kept saying that commencement is not the end of something. Commencement is the beginning of lifelong learning. I used to quote Henri Bergson: "To exist is to change, to change is to mature, and to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly." I think that a lot of alumni, once they get out of college, just go to sleep. They don't continue to read; they don't continue to travel; they don't continue to be involved with the university; they don't watch their health. And so, I think that as a university, and as an alumni office, we can be very helpful on emphasizing to alumni that they should continue to grow and learn and to develop all of their lives
Ohio Today: That's good advice; we all should take that.
PING: I think one of the challenges to the alumni association is how they relate to their alumni in ways that reflect what the institution really is.
GLIDDEN: Right.
PING: You know athletics are fine, but in fact that's not what we are about. And yet much of the emphasis in terms of gathering alumni surrounds those kinds of events. The Alumni College was a modest effort but, for that 100 or so people who were regularly involved, it was an important effort. And I don't know what the vehicle would be, but it seems to me, seeing the university relate to the alumni and having the alumni build links to the university, related to the tasks of personal development, education, career development, can and should be very important.
ALDEN: Charlie, you mentioned athletics. I think we ought to be excellent across the board. I don't think that we need to be big time necessarily, but we ought to have quality athletic programs because, you know, people on Sunday morning or Monday morning read about how we are doing in comparison to others. So athletics are important. We (must) have quality athletics and have honest athletics.
PING: Absolutely.
GLIDDEN: I think, though, that Charlie's point is that when we have the opportunity to get people together, it is often around athletic events. That is not primarily what we are about, now. We have started, in some cases, to take speakers from the university out to alumni meetings. But that brings to mind the fact that to keep your alumni engaged and to stay in touch with them, you really have to think about the stages of people's lives: when they're young, either single or not yet with children, (and later) going to soccer practice and band practice and everything else.
I have talked to a number of alumni who say, "Sorry, I haven't been more involved, but you know, my kids are in soccer and this and that, and I just can't get away any weekends to come back." But when their kids are grown, they have another chance. When you do alumni programming in communities, there's one group that will come to a certain kind of social gathering and another group that will come to a serious lecture about something. And there will be some crossover, of course, but we have to remember that we are dealing with different populations by demography. I think we need to do more of getting the substance of the university out to meet the alumni, and I think they really appreciate when we do that. It is not always easy to do, of course, but we have a lot of people with very interesting things to talk about, if we can get them out to meet the alumni.
PING: For example, we had a First Amendment conference in Cleveland. This would primarily interest professional journalists, but I was amazed at the level of response.
GLIDDEN: Well, Charlie, right before the 2000 election we took (Distinguished Professor of Economics) Rich Vedder and David Wilhelm (AB '77 and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee) to St. Louis and Boston for a fun -- it wasn't formal -- debate. They knew each other well, and obviously had different political views, but we had a great turnout, and it was just a lot of fun. And yet, they were dealing with very serious topics. So, if we can provide lifelong learning in alumni activities, it's all the more helpful.
PING: Well we sort of all have the stock advice: Stay in touch, stay loyal, visit the campus, be generous, you know…
GLIDDEN: You know, it is amazing how many alumni we've had who are really very, very successful (as a result of) just their interpersonal skills, which I think this campus affords more opportunity to develop than a lot of places. You know I always tell people -- in fact I just the other day ran into someone who learned I had been president of Ohio University and asked, "Does your university have a reputation of being a party school?" My stock answer always is, "No, we're not a party school, but we are very sociable." And I do think that there are some good values here. Good, solid values that I think people probably bring to us –- it's the kind of students we attract in the first place. But one would hope that our alums would stay true to those values, because I think we have a student body that is honest and hardworking.
Some of the great sources of pride when I was president (were) the breakfasts or lunches in Washington and New York that we held to thank the people who work with our interns. In Washington, they were often in political offices and with people from political science or one of those fields. In New York, it was more often communications. But I heard comments often from people who were not themselves alums, but were the hosts of our people. They would say, "We love these Ohio interns, because they come with their sleeves rolled up and ready to do the work, and the kids from the Ivy League schools expect it to be handed to them on a silver platter. We love the work ethic of these kids." I always took great pride in that because it is partly Midwestern, it is partly Ohio, but it is also partly Ohio University.
Ohio Today: Are there other values that seem common among Ohio students and alumni?
PING: This would be awfully hard to document, but someone made the case to me that the sort of students who come here and the environment that they find while they are here nurtures an independence of spirit that creates entrepreneurial activity. And that disproportionately, our graduates have in fact shown a flair for entrepreneurial activity. I can think of a handful of people from Wil Konneker (researcher and entrepreneur in nuclear medicine) to Fritz Russ (engineer and business leader) to Rick Hawkins (executive in pharmaceutical development) and the Diagnostic Hybrids chief executive officer, Dave Scholl. It's true. Why did the Innovation Center, which again reflects Wil Konneker's work, why did it in fact succeed when so many of these (centers) have not?
GLIDDEN: I believe that, too, and, as Charlie says, it is almost impossible to document it. But there is something more than just what's in the water. It's the environment that really does foster that kind of independence. I've thought about a number of our alums who are very successful in that and have thought, "What makes them so special?" And I think it is almost always a special kind of interpersonal skills. They just have a way of working with people. They're not afraid of new ideas. It's all those kinds of things Charlie just mentioned.
ALDEN: Right, right.
Continue to Section 5: The university's future
Return to the introduction
Posted 09-12-06 |
