The Installation of Chancellor Anne Ponder
September 15, 2006

Keynote Address by Dr. Philip H. Jordan Jr.
President Emeritus of Kenyon College

I am highly honored and personally privileged to speak at the installation of your sixth chancellor at this distinguished public liberal arts college, the University of North Carolina at Asheville. I am all the more honored and all the more privileged because my presence may easily seem improbable and my message may appear to be redundant. It is, perhaps, improbable to summon a Yankee former college president from an island off the coast of Maine, our northernmost state, to these southern mountains to speak on behalf of a native daughter of North Carolina. It is, perhaps, redundant to bring a speaker far from Asheville to commend to you, who knew her way back when and on this campus as chancellor for a year, a leader whose return to this place is a homecoming. 

Not so, I protest. I do have modest claims to respectability in North Carolina, since my wife’s father grew up in and often returned to Robersonville, east of here in tobacco and peanut country; and she has a Master of Fine Arts degree from Warren Wilson College, in this mountain neighborhood, where she went to camp as a girl. After these festivities, we’ll be visiting family in a kind of homecoming for us.

Not entirely a stranger to these parts and certainly no stranger to your chancellor, I  am happy to present to you someone you already know. And some of you have known her from her Asheville girlhood. During her years away from home in the wildernesses of Ohio and New Hampshire, she spoke often of growing up in Asheville and told us that she was known here, after the title was coined by a friend who is in the audience this afternoon, as “little Anne Ponder from way over yonder.”  It is the “over yonder” parts of  “little Anne Ponder’s” distinguished career in higher education that I know best and want to talk about.

During her education and early professional experience, Anne Ponder’s “over yonderness” grew more distant from Asheville. There were her studies in Chapel Hill. There was her teaching and administering at Elon and Guilford colleges in North Carolina. And then came her really “over yonder” phase at Kenyon College in Ohio, where I first knew her, and at Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire. Now you have the good fortune to have called her back home to Asheville as a widely known and admired leader in higher education.

I have known Anne Ponder well “over yonder” as a fellow worker in academe, first as her president, later as one of her trustees. There are three distinctive features of your new chancellor’s leadership that I want to make sure that you know about in case you have not already glimpsed them.  First, Dr. Anne Ponder is, as she hopes all of the students here will become, a lifelong learner who readily passes along her learning. Second, your new chancellor is gifted in seeing the big picture and fitting smaller things into it, that is, gifted in strategic thinking and action. And third, the mature and accomplished and not-so-little “little Anne Ponder,” while deeply rooted in her native North Carolina, is a faithful colleague and friend wherever she works. She wins the minds and hearts and energies of students and faculty, staff and administrators, trustees and public officials, enlisting them all in their own and the institution’s advancement.

Speaking from my own experience, from observing or reading about other presidents and from working with Anne Ponder, I can say that the rewards of a campus  presidency or chancellorship are not the gratifications of power. The rewards come, rather, from perceiving potential, from articulating  vision, from encouraging consensus, from realizing  possibility and from seeing the academic community you lead improve, grow and prosper. And the college president or chancellor does not perceive, articulate, encourage, realize or celebrate alone. The campus leader learns from the whole college, internal and external. The chancellor is always learning, always asking the right questions, always refining the vision that animates the campus, always seeking the right path among the diverse pieces of advice so readily and constantly offered. Chancellor Ponder is a veteran and skilled practitioner of this kind of leadership.

Your new chancellor leads in a unique language and style born and bred in Asheville. An initiative is something she is “a-fix’n” to do. A campus controversy that raises hackles is a “swivet.” A new thought she puts forward is “Ponder’s Wild Idea of the Day,” or a “Pee-WID” for short. Eschewing academic jargon, your chancellor prefers Ponderisms, which are never ponderous but always on point. If I speak to you too long, you will certainly develop what she calls “fossil bottom.”
 
I was, in a sense, a mentor to Anne Ponder as she rose in college administration. That mentorship was never hierarchical. It was always reciprocal: we learned from each other, and she became a partner in the enterprise. Later, as a college president herself, she was mentor to individual colleagues with talent and promise and to the whole campus community, sharing what she had learned, learning from the learners. Plainly, you here at UNC Asheville are embarking, with a new mentor, on an era of flourishing collegiality.
 
Leaders in higher education must look beyond the immediate, the problems and opportunities of the moment, to discern and shape the longer future. They must think and act strategically, leading their campuses to join them in thoughtful planning. Skeptics may readily fear the planning exercise as an unwelcome and unproductive distraction from the core enterprise of the college, which is teaching and learning. But since the society that colleges serve, and colleges themselves, are constantly changing, teaching and learning will change, either willy-nilly or by design. Strategic planning examines the likely trajectory of change, identifies the threats and opportunities that lie ahead, appraises the capacities of the institution and devises strategies for success. Properly done, Ponder style, planning is a value-laden, intellectual, practical, and enjoyable endeavor which engages the whole campus and guides the whole campus in pursuit of a compelling vision for the future. Planning with Ponder raises sights and spirits and focuses efforts and resources. The product then is not Ponder’s plan; it is your plan.
 
The campus president as magnanimous mentor and prescient planner will not succeed in either unless students and faculty, administration and staff, alumni and trustees are enlisted and engaged. On this Asheville campus the chancellor need not be a remote personage, since you all may know the chancellor and be known by the chancellor. Your new chancellor has a strong sense of community, a commitment to colleagueship, an instinct for the personal dimension of professional relationships. You will be serving your university well and enhancing your own experience if you accept her invitations for participation, for working together, for friendship along with the roles you must play in the university community. Wherever she has worked, Anne Ponder has taken the values and expectations for social relations that she must have learned here in Asheville and lived by these on the campuses she has served and led. In case you doubt this, take note of the ample invasion by New England Yankees who have come to celebrate this installation. It will not be hard for you to let your hearts and minds be won by her as your leader who wishes nothing more than for each of you to receive your best education, to do your best work, to succeed together among these mountains, in this beautiful place.