DC President's Blog

I just returned this past Sunday morning from an eight-day trip to Costa Rica with 12 students, and what a fantastic experience it was!  One day we were in the rain forest on a boat seeing monkeys, sloths, bats, toucans, poison dart frogs, crocodiles, an iguana, and other animals.  The next day we were horseback riding and enjoying the thermal springs near a volcano.  And for the next five days after that we were working in an elementary school in an impoverished neighborhood of San Jose, the capital.  Our students spoke to English classes, worked and played with the younger school children, painted a large mural at the school, planted a garden, and did a good deal of other work at the school.  Each evening our students would return to the homes of their Costa Rican “host families,” which gave them the opportunity to get to see Costa Rica from an insider’s perspective.

While I could go on and on about the trip and how much our students both accomplished and learned, what is striking is how many different experiences students at Defiance College have been enjoying this March.  While I was with students in Costa Rica, another group of students was touring the cities of Central Europe:  Vienna, Prague, Bratislava, and Budapest.  Another group was building houses for Habitat for Humanity in Grand Rapids, Michigan, while a different group was on a civil rights tour to Cincinnati, Memphis, Selma, Montgomery, and Nashville, among other locations.  Other students were in Florida, South Carolina, visiting New York City, or touring Washington, D.C.  And in the coming two months, more groups of students will be studying the regional economy of Portland, Oregon; doing service work in Cambodia; pioneering our first McMaster School projects in Ghana; and elsewhere.

By my calculation, if you just look at the months of March through May of this semester, more than 200 students will be on the road at one time or another:  learning, increasing their understanding of different cultures, expanding their horizons, and gaining valuable experiences that can help their resumes truly stand out when applying for jobs or to graduate schools.  (And that doesn’t count the additional students who will be traveling this summer in Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium!)

Defiance College’s commitment to giving our students this world of opportunities is pretty distinctive.  It is part of what makes the DC experience such a special one, especially as under our DC Global Program, all incoming full-time freshmen who successfully complete the full four-year program at DC (in good academic and financial standing) are guaranteed an international experience in either their junior or senior years.

Not only does that sound good, but it truly does help our students.  In fact, I just heard from one of our graduating seniors who just got accepted (with a scholarship) to law school.  He had not done particularly well on his LSATs, and when he called what may well be his first-choice school, the admissions counselor told him not to even apply with that test score.  But, after reading his resume and the list of distinctive experiences that this student had had at Defiance College, the admissions counselor changed her mind and told him to send her his application.  She said they would wait for him to take the LSATs again.  Well, he did, and they just admitted him with a significant scholarship.  Of course, I’m thrilled for him, but it’s also nice to get outside verification that what we’re doing at Defiance College really does give our students a leg up in the job market and in applying to graduate schools.  And, having just returned from Costa Rica, I can also confirm that it makes for some pretty interesting students with some fascinating life experiences.

This seems to be the month of the “three Fridays,” each with an interesting but very different activity.

Last Friday, we had the official ribbon-cutting for our new George M. Smart Athletic Center, affectionately known as “The George.”  While the ribbon-cutting just happened several days ago, our students have been using The George for the past two weeks, and I have been getting a huge kick out of seeing all the activity going on there.

As those on campus know by now, The George is generally open from 5 am to 11 pm, and at just about any of those hours you can see loads of students engaged in various physical activities, whether working out in the fitness center, using the baseball and softball batting cages, playing on the tennis or basketball courts, being attended to in the new athletic training room, running on the 200-meter NCAA regulation indoor track, lifting in the weight room, and much more.  In fact, we hosted our first indoor track meet just two hours after the official ribbon-cutting, and it was a real treat being able to stand indoors watching pole-vaulting, the shot put, sprints and relays, and more all going on simultaneously.  And the vast space inside makes for perfect practice areas for all of our teams, whether soccer, football, lacrosse, softball, baseball, golf, track, tennis, or numerous others.

While we did the ribbon-cutting last Friday, this Friday I am heading off to New York City with 50 students as part of the cultural and performing arts trips of our Imagine Initiatives.  We are looking forward to a whirlwind trip, including visits to the United Nations, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Rockefeller Center, the World Trade Center site, Wall Street, the Museum of Modern Art, Chinatown, Little Italy, the Empire State Building, and much more.  On Saturday evening, we will all be treated to a performance of Phantom of the Opera, and on Sunday, we will also have an opportunity to take the Staten Island Ferry from which we will be able to view both the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.

The next Friday is the last day of classes before spring break, and a group of students and I will be on our way to Costa Rica, where we will be spending the break doing service learning at a school in San Jose and also seeing rain forests, a volcano, and more.  While I am with these students in Costa Rica, other groups of students will be traveling to Central Europe (Vienna, Prague, and Budapest); Washington, D.C. (for students interested in criminal justice and forensics, this trip includes witnessing an autopsy, meeting with the DEA, and touring a forensics lab, as well as visiting the White House and seeing other historical sites); going on a Civil Rights History Tour (Cincinnati, Memphis, Birmingham, Selma, etc.); traveling to Florida (both the baseball and softball teams will be playing and practicing in Florida over the break); building a Habitat House in Michigan, and more.

This is all just a sample of the activities going on during this next month at Defiance College.  Stay tuned for more to come.

I was just walking around campus yesterday, and it is amazing how quiet everything becomes after the students head home for the holiday break.  Yes, there are still some students on campus (in fact, two of them were over at our house for dinner last night), but the vast majority have scattered around the country (and, indeed, the world) to spend some time with their families.

During the past month or so, I had the opportunity to meet individually with each of our separate Freshman Seminar classes, and one question I asked each time was for the freshmen to relate to me how they think they have changed during their first semester.  In almost every instance, the first thing that got mentioned by the students was “more independent,” followed frequently by comments such as “more self-confident,” “realized that I can do a lot of things for myself,” “learned to manage my time better,” “more focused,” and “got to have fun and meet people from backgrounds different than mine.”  I consider that to be very good progress on a lot of levels for the first semester.

Indeed, this past semester has seen a good deal of progress on many fronts.  Our Nursing program received accreditation by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education.  Our innovative student-run non-profit, Project 701, expanded significantly, adding numerous new student-run projects.  We became a significantly “greener” campus, with the introduction of much more energy-efficient outdoor lights and the recent installation of a solar-powered water heater for our new George M. Smart Athletic Center.  Our wonderful facilities staff just completed construction of our new outdoor ice rink (located behind the residence halls’ parking lot).  And our DC Global and DC Edventure programs are off to a great start, as we continue to add more and more domestic and international trips for our students.

We also took a significant step this semester toward our goal of giving all our students meaningful hands-on experience related to their major that links what goes on in the classroom with the realities of the world beyond.  In pursuit of that goal, this semester saw the introduction of our new and innovative collaboration with the Defiance City Schools which gives our education majors an opportunity to receive hands-on experience in classrooms starting in their freshman year.  I am very excited by the thought that our education majors will be able to enjoy four years of classroom experience, rather than the standard year or two in most more traditional programs.  And the opening of our new George M. Smart Athletic Center this upcoming semester will create a similar kind of opportunity for our Sport Management majors, as they will get hands-on experience running and managing a major sporting facility, booking events, etc.  Of course, we already have similar kinds of opportunities in many of our other majors, but these are the two most recent initiatives!

Before we know it, December will have turned to January, and we will be welcoming our students back from break.  While I will enjoy some time off during the holiday week, I am eagerly anticipating even better things to come next semester.

I am writing this at the very beginning of November, and I am still having trouble believing how time has flown by this semester.  The students are well past midterms and thinking about Thanksgiving and then finals.  We have more and more students coming to the President’s House each night to study at our study tables or just to chat.  (The last two nights, the last student didn’t leave until after 11 pm).  While students are increasingly focused on getting their work done, there continue to be numerous new initiatives and projects that they are working on as well.

One initiative that has just gotten underway in our classrooms is our new and improved process regarding Building a DC Resume.  For the next few weeks, as part of our Personal Success Plan (PSP) process, all freshmen are working on Building their DC Resumes.  What that means is that we work with them on what their resume looks like today.  But, more importantly, we are also helping them to create what they want their resume to look like four years from now when they graduate.  What are the activities, hands-on experiences, leadership roles, etc. that can help their resumes jump out of the pile when they are applying for jobs or for graduate school?  We give them advice on that, and then we use their desired resumes as part of the PSP process – as we work to help that desired resume become a reality.

Of course, looking at things this way gives our freshmen a different way to think about their activities over the next four years.  We encourage them to think strategically about the kinds of student organizations, extracurricular activities, travel opportunities, and other programs they want to take advantage of during their time at Defiance College.  And we continue to add new ways to link what goes on in the classroom with the realities of the outside world, giving students the kinds of hands-on experiences that can enable them to stand out.  In fact, one of those new ways is our innovative collaboration with the Defiance City Schools for our education majors.  We will be announcing details about this soon, so please stay tuned!

It is difficult to believe that we are already into our sixth week of the semester.  We had a great Homecoming celebration just over a week ago, and the campus continues to pulse with activities, from academic and sporting events to a wide range of service projects being undertaken by our DC students.  For example, during Homecoming, the students who had been working for over a year on developing a free primary care health clinic for needy people in the area saw their dreams come true.  With the tremendous joint efforts of the Promedica Defiance Regional Hospital and the Defiance Clinic and Mercy Hospital of Defiance, the first Defiance Cares Free Clinic was held on Saturday, September 17, and the clinic will be open the third Saturday of each month.  What a wonderful way this provides for our students to serve the community, and what a wonderful opportunity it gives our pre-med, nursing, social work, and other students to interact with health care professionals and patients.

The free clinic is just one of the projects undertaken by our students as part of our path-breaking Project 701 – our innovative, separately incorporated, student-run non-profit.   From DCPC Solutions (providing computer repair services in the area) to work on the new fair trade project, from Creating Defiance (our incipient student-run graphic design studio) to the Backpack Buddy Program and many more, Defiance College students are developing tremendous service programs that both give them hands-on experiences that will enable them to stand out from the crowd and also provide meaningful services to those in need.

I expect the number of programs under Project 701 to grow significantly this year, as I have already heard from numerous incoming freshmen about their desires to get involved with Project 701 already during their first year.  Those freshmen are part of a record-breaking incoming freshman class with students from all around the country.  This semester we welcomed to campus 300 freshmen and 370 total new students (including transfers and graduate students).    Our freshman class is both dynamic and diverse.  Approximately 40% of the incoming freshmen are from outside Ohio, as we now have students from over 25 states here at Defiance.  One of the great benefits of college is being able to interact with students from different backgrounds and perspectives, and the increasing diversity of our student body (with 28% of the incoming full-time freshmen being members of ethnic or racial minorities) provides new opportunities for our students to do that.  Add to that our growing international student population (including students from Australia, South Africa, Jamaica, China, and elsewhere) and you have a wonderful combination.

The energy and dedication of our students together with their diverse backgrounds and interests make our Defiance College campus a particularly exciting place to be.  I have a great deal of fun as President just walking around the campus chatting with our students and hearing about their endeavors.  And I’ve been enjoying taking them out for the occasional ice cream as well –  in fact, a few weeks ago I think we set a new record by treating about 35 students or so at once to ice cream at Coldstone.

Few times in the academic year are more exciting or full of energy than the next few weeks.  This is the time when students begin arriving on campus, full of both enthusiasm and nervousness.  From my vantage point as President of Defiance College, it is a delight once again having students arriving en masse to our DC campus.  Yes, I very much enjoyed spending time with the students who stayed on campus over the summer.  But there is no replacing the level of activity that is generated by the presence of more than one thousand students all in the same place.

Actually, the arrival of our new students started a few weeks ago with the participants in our new Bridge Program, which provides intensive preparation for college to a group of incoming freshmen for whom we thought that kind of extra preparation would be most beneficial.  Our Bridge Program was a great success, as the students became acclimated to college life and the college environment, honed their study techniques, and got practice in attending and preparing for college-level classes.  At the same time, they also had some fun, including a trip to a Detroit Tigers baseball game as well as a trip to the Columbus Zoo (as well as a nearby waterpark).

A little over one week later, we welcomed our incoming football players for their training camp.  That brought a whole new level of activity to campus, and it certainly increased the level of food consumption on campus!  (My wife Anne and I had the football team over for dinner one evening – and they consumed over 100 pizzas!).  Just the other day, we welcomed another group of incoming students, as members of the pep band, the cheerleaders, and student athletes participating in several fall sports arrived on campus.  And this weekend, both the remaining incoming students and returning students will move back to DC.  Anne and I are looking forward to hosting an ice cream social at our house this Sunday to welcome everyone back.

The new students arriving on campus are part of the largest incoming freshman class in recent memory.  And they hail from numerous different states as well as several foreign countries, so I am very pleased that DC is continuing to attract an increasingly diverse group of accomplished students to our campus.  There is much more excitement in store for these students once they get settled in, as we continue to move our academic programs forward in some pretty dramatic ways, from increased international travel opportunities to much more substantial linkages between what goes on in the classroom and the realities of the outside world.   I will talk more about both our incoming class and several of these initiatives in some upcoming blogs.  But I hope all of you enjoy these next few weeks of new opportunities and possibilities for our students as much as I will!

Many people seem to assume that it gets very quiet on college campuses during the summer months.  While it is certainly true that we miss a whole level of excitement and energy during the summer – as so many students are not on campus – I am pleased to report that numerous projects have made the Defiance College campus a hive of activity this summer.

Probably the most noticeable activities on campus relate to construction.  Our new Field House is under construction and looks better every day.  For those on campus who have visited the construction site, I think the most common impression that I have heard is:  “Wow. That’s a really big building.”  And, indeed it will be – at approximately 84,000 square feet.

But there is lots of other construction underway as well.  We are replacing the roof on McReynolds Hall; putting in new more energy-efficient windows into Dana Hall; installing new energy-efficient outdoor lights; installing a more energy-efficient boiler at the Weaner/McMaster Center; putting controls on the heating and cooling systems at the Pilgrim Library; and more.   The common theme among most of these projects is energy efficiency, as we strive to become a greener and more efficient campus.

Our E. Stevens Dix Tennis Facility outside is getting a major facelift this summer, and improvements are also underway to our soccer field.    And I have heard from many people who have appreciated the new field of wild flowers that has been coming up so nicely – in purple and gold, of course.

Besides construction, there are many other activities occurring, in addition, of course, to our summer classes.  Our summer autism camp, operated through our Hench Autism Studies Program, is now underway, providing a wonderful experience for 14 adolescents and young adults with autism as well as for our six college students working at the camp.  Just this past weekend I spent some time with a group of incoming student Service Leaders, who were participating in one of the three Service Leader Orientations being held this month.  And, speaking of Orientation, nearly 50 additional incoming students will be participating in our Orientation session in mid-July, one of the nine separate Orientations being held on campus for incoming students.

With respect to incoming students, we will be welcoming our first participants in our Bridge Program on August 1.  I am very excited about this new program which will give a group of incoming students intensive training and preparation in study techniques and other skills that can enhance their success at college.  And then in less than a month, our incoming student-athletes will begin to arrive.

Yes, there is quite a bit of activity underway – but I too am looking forward to having our entire Defiance College family back on campus in a month!

As you might imagine, there are far fewer students on campus during the summer than during the remainder of the academic year. Yes, we have two separate summer terms, but the campus still gets relatively quieter.  I find that I enjoy the quiet for about a week or two, but then I miss having all the students around, and I am ready for things to pick up again.

While we still have a month and a half before many more students start arriving on campus, I did have an opportunity about ten days ago to travel with some of the students who have stuck around on campus for a weekend trip to Cincinnati.  This is a part of our year-round effort to give our students opportunities to be exposed to a diverse range of cultural, artistic, historical and other experiences both in the United States and abroad.

Our first stop in Cincinnati was the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center which houses a pretty extensive set of exhibits about the underground railroad and the history of slavery.  It was particularly moving to stand on the balcony at the Center and look out over the Ohio River, knowing that a century and a half ago that river signified the divide between slavery and freedom.   The students were impressed with a number of the stories regarding escapes across the river, ways that members of the underground railroad assisted escaped slaves, and how dangerous the entire passage was for an escaped slave even once he or she was in a free state.  But I think the favorite part of the museum for the students was the genealogy center on the fourth floor where each student was able to research his or her own family background.

We spent much of the evening cruising along the Ohio River on a dinner riverboat cruise.  The views on both sides of the river were interesting and the food was quite good.  As soon as the announcement was made after dinner that there was a shop on board that was serving ice cream, all the students looked at me, knowing that given my predilection for  ice cream we would be heading there right away.  After staying overnight on the Kentucky side of the river, we headed back to Cincinnati to watch the Los Angeles Dodgers take on the Cincinnati Reds.  As luck would have it, the pitcher for the Dodgers was Chad Billingsley, who grew up in Defiance.  And the Reds brought in as a reliever Chad Reineke who is also from the Defiance area, so there ended up being a real hometown flavor to the game!

While this was one of our shorter trips with students, it was a great way for all of us to spend the weekend, and I think the students both learned something and had fun at the same time.  We already have planned for the upcoming academic year excursions for our Defiance College students to New York, Philadelphia, Toronto, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, Stratford (Ontario), and Nashville, to name just a few, with others in various stages of development (not to mention the longer international trips to Europe, Belize, Ghana, Cambodia, etc.).  I do love watching our students as they experience new places and cultures, and I look forward to talking about these upcoming trips when I welcome both our returning and our incoming students when they arrive in August.

I am writing this blog about 16 hours after having returned from a one-week service-learning trip with the Defiance College Men’s Basketball Team to Jamaica.  And what a wonderful experience this trip was!  We all stayed together in the mission house of CSI: Jamaica which is located in St. Mary’s parish, the poorest of the 14 parishes in Jamaica.  The project we worked on during the trip was painting a school building for St. Mary’s Technical High School, but the truth is that the real focal point of the trip was getting to know and interact with the students at St. Mary’s.

Each of the members of the team spent much time talking informally to many of the students, and many of our DC students developed particularly close relationships with individual Jamaican students.  In addition, our DC students taught a series of physical education classes, teaching basketball and also playing soccer.  And then we were taught in turn how to play cricket.  Our students also had an opportunity to eat traditional Jamaican food, to learn some words in Jamaican patois, to hear Jamaican folk music and participate in some Jamaican folk dances, and more.

The challenge in writing this blog is that writing about what we did really tells just a small part of the story, as I had an opportunity to witness the impact that getting to know these Jamaicans was having on each of our DC students individually.  Their eyes were opened to a very different culture and to people living in very different economic circumstances with substantially reduced opportunities.  Their perspectives were broadened, and, perhaps most importantly, our DC students’ hearts were opened in ways that I think they never expected.  Each evening we would all sit together on the verandah at the mission house discussing the events of the day, and throughout the week the students spoke more and more about the ways they were being touched and what they were learning.

On the plane ride back, each DC student wrote a few paragraphs about the experience in Jamaica.  I just read those statements and the words/concepts that appear most frequently are “life-changing” and “appreciating the opportunities and other ways that I am blessed.”  It brings tears to my eyes to see how our DC students grew through this experience.  And I am thrilled when I consider that with our new DC Global program, starting this fall every incoming full-time student who completes the full four-year program at Defiance College will have an opportunity in his or her junior or senior year to enjoy an eye-opening international experience.  In fact, as I write this, another group of DC students is busy implementing their own service projects in Cambodia, and next year’s trips are already being planned.

One student wrote:  “Going to Jamaica really changed the way I look at my life and I also believe that it is going to make a lasting impact on the way that I live it.”  What a wonderful impact a one-week international experience can have!

At Defiance College we are focused on helping our students acquire what I call a Defiance Resume:  a series of in-class and out-of-classroom experiences that will help DC students stand out from the competition when applying for jobs or for positions in graduate school.  The opportunities for DC students in this regard are numerous, from running service projects under Project 701, our student-run non-profit, to running a graphic design studio (Creating Defiance); from getting hands-on experience training teachers or doctors in Belize or Cambodia, to helping local hospitals run a free primary care health clinic; from investigating cold cases for the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office in Detroit to taking a key role in managing and operating our new Field House.

Now DC students can add one more distinctive and exciting hands-on experience to the list:  creating and running a business through our new Business Advantage Program.  Under this program, creatively led by Professors Michael Wolfe and Jay Page, our business students just completed their first pilot project in business creation and management.  This past semester business students in multiple business courses teamed up to create BuzzMart, a new on-campus convenience store.  They handled the market research, the business planning, the sales and marketing, the human resources, the inventory and accounting, and much more – and then they took the business out for a test run.

The results were encouraging, and Professors Wolfe and Page are now working to take the experiences from this semester and use them to expand student opportunities even more next semester.  In fact, they are exploring ways to ensure that every DC Business Major gets experience not just creating and running a retail store, but also developing and managing a service-oriented establishment, an e-based business, and more.  Members of our national Business Advisory Board – who are very excited about the ways this program will provide DC students majoring in business with distinctive business and managerial experience – have also been generous in their advice regarding ways to enhance the student experience even more.

This coming week a number of students who took the lead this past semester in developing BuzzMart will travel with Professors Wolfe and Page to Cincinnati to meet with various business leaders, tour business establishments, and also enjoy the fruits of their labors as they dine and sightsee (including a visit to the Cleopatra exhibit at the Cincinnati Museum Center).  And I am sure they will come back with even more creative ways to give our DC business students an even more distinctive Defiance Resume!