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Q & A with Baird Tipson
Q. What attracted you to Washington College?
A. "I've been following Washington College's progress for some time. What appeals to me especially is its commitment to the liberal arts—helping its students develop the mental discipline and habits of the mind that will assure their success in any job. After wrapping up a capital campaign at Wittenberg, I thought it would be a good time to come to Washington College, to work to strengthen what has made it successful, and to help make it more widely known."
Q. What do you perceive are our institutional strengths?
A. "The College's history, of course, is one. Its setting is another. The College has developed two academic centers that draw upon those strengths—the C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience and the Center for the Environment and Society. The Sophie Kerr program and the culture of literary arts it supports are also wonderful assets. We need to expand upon those to create a third center. The water has tremendous appeal—very few liberal arts colleges can offer their students access to sailing, rowing and other water sports. Yet even if we have all these things and we don't have a first-rate liberal arts college, I'm not interested."
Q. What immediate challenges do you see looming for Washington College?
A. "We need to do something with the library. We need to anticipate how a library is going to be used ten or twenty years from now and design an appropriate facility... For me, a library is a place for books. I don't want to lose that. But because so much information is available to students electronically, we have to create a library where students want to come. If that means installing a café in the middle, I'd be fine with that. As someone who cares very much about music and theatre, I also would like to focus some attention on the performing arts center, too."
Q. How big do you think Washington College should be?
A. "Size is something we need to consider. Those liberal arts colleges against whom we competing are much bigger, and there are those who believe bigger makes sense in terms of what we are able to offer our students. I don't think a liberal arts college is in danger of losing that sense of intimacy until the student population reaches well over 2,000, and I just don't see that happening here."
Q. What do you believe every liberal arts student should know, or strive to know?
A. "For some people, that might be a 'content' question. Should students be required to study the history of American democracy, or understand molecular biology? For me, it's much more about students developing intellectual discipline and habits of mind. I think it's important that students have exposure to different ways of human existence. I'm a fan of distribution courses—liberal arts students should ultimately experience different approaches to learning, to get some sense of how poets and physicists and political scientists think."
Q. You're hoping to spend some time in the classroom in addition to your presidential duties. Why is it important for you to teach?
A. "I like to be in the classroom. I get satisfaction from teaching, even though I hate grading papers. My view of hell is a pile of papers that never gets smaller. There's no better way of getting to know Washington College students. Next year, or the year after, I'll try to persuade someone from the philosophy or history departments to team-teach with me."
Q. How do you perceive Washington College's mission among the small liberal arts colleges in America, and what will distinguish us from all the rest?
A. "Our main job is to produce people who respect culture. We need to give young people the ability to appreciate great music, good writing and the visual and dramatic arts. First and foremost we've got to be a very good liberal arts college. Then we promote our strengths."
Q. As a religious historian and as someone who has been associated with church-affiliated colleges, do you think the culture of Washington College will shift under the Tipson administration? What religious or moral sensibilities do you bring to the job?
A. "If you mean will Washington College become religious, the answer is no. What I want to do is help the College get in touch with its ethical and moral grounding. John Toll held up the importance of George Washington in our institutional psyche, and I'd like to continue pointing to Washington. But I also intend to help us to remember the values of our founder, William Smith. As a scholar, educator and clergyman, Smith was an exceptionally talented person who articulated a vision for the liberal arts that combined the intellectual and ethical development of students."
Q. In a culture that often values big over small, scale over intimacy, what's the significance of a Washington College? In the scheme of things, do we still matter?
A. "That's easy. Would you rather have a physician with hundreds of patients attend to you, a physician with minimal time to spend with you? Or would you rather have a physician who knows you and your medical history, who has the time to talk to you about your concerns and your future health? That's a good analogy of what we're about. The relationship between those who teach and those who learn makes Washington College very different from large universities. I can tell within five minutes of meeting someone whether she has had a liberal arts education. The tip-off is how she understands an issue, whether she can put an issue in context and connect it to her larger sense of the world."