Andrew Hsu is the twenty third president of the Faculty of Charleston, a public liberal arts college situated in historic downtown Charleston, South Carolina.
In Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” there’s a second when the brooding prince climbs atop a cliff, one overlooking the Danish sea, and delivers his most well-known strains: “To be, or to not be, that’s the query.”
College presidents now discover themselves on a precipice like Hamlet as we expect via the numerous adjustments gathering on the horizon: synthetic intelligence, the approaching enrollment cliff in 2025 and a few overloud critics questioning the relevance of a faculty diploma. Simply a kind of forces alone creates an existential disaster for larger schooling, however all three coming on the similar time, nicely, it feels a bit like watching a tsunami wave quick approaching our shores.
Nevertheless, to my core, I’m an optimist. Time and time once more, my optimism has been reaffirmed by how issues prove in the end to the constructive, each on a private and knowledgeable stage.
Andrew Hsu
Permission granted by Faculty of Charleston
I got here of age in a really turbulent time — the Chinese language Cultural Revolution — and people experiences have formed my perspective and attitudes in methods I can’t ever hope to totally describe and possibly even absolutely perceive myself. As a young person, I labored years within the countryside with the peasants, away from my household, and attended college in suits and begins. It wasn’t till coming into faculty after which graduate college within the U.S. that I had any form of continuity in my research and mental growth.
One of many classes I do bear in mind studying early on, from an schooling system tightly managed by the federal government, was that America was no good friend to Communist China. But for some motive, I took it upon myself to be taught English, the language of the enemy, partly out of boredom and partly out of rebelling in my very own small manner towards the command state surrounding me.
I share that info not for pity nor to light up some facet of the unique for Western readers, however to say that my information of English gave me a path ahead — to graduate college within the U.S. and an extended profession within the states. Out of one thing adverse got here one thing constructive.
On knowledgeable stage, all college presidents skilled the pandemic in a reasonably related manner — closing down campuses mid-semester and making an attempt to work with school and workers to give you myriad fixes on the fly. It will have been good if we have been working from one template — a shared playbook — however we needed to invent a thousand completely different options on our personal to suit our particular establishments and communities.
That being stated, good individuals pulled collectively and located a manner ahead. It’s a credit score to human ingenuity and fortitude. For my establishment, we got here out stronger from the disaster, establishing new processes and incorporating expertise like we by no means had earlier than. Out of one thing adverse got here one thing constructive.
In fact, the options to AI, shifting demographics for traditional-age faculty college students and the noise round a school diploma’s relevance will not be uniform. They are going to look completely different at each establishment. Some can have higher solutions than others. And within the college manner of doing issues, these greatest practices will ultimately trickle all through the trade. The collegial nature of upper schooling ought to present hope that if one college figures one thing out, there will likely be extra quickly to observe. Name it evolution, group model.
These subsequent few years are going to see each great development and great disruption — “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” to borrow once more from “Hamlet.”
Nevertheless, I consider our which means stays clear: to be the varieties of establishments that reply to alter and put together college students and our communities with an increasing information base to maintain transferring ahead. For me, that goes past optimism — that’s simply human nature.
