Michael Hammond, President, Gordon College
Gordon College is focused on providing education for a different generation of students. “The younger generation is independent-minded and entrepreneurial-minded; they don’t always think, ‘OK, the best option for me is to latch onto a big corporation and just stay there for my whole career,’” college President Michael Hammond told Invest:.
What are some unique trends within higher education, particularly as they relate to the business community?
What I’ve found interesting is the way that our students have been shaped post-pandemic, and how that’s affected their work habits, not only here on campus but even as we start to see some of those classes of students graduate and go into the workforce. They’re going into a workforce has been reshaped in so many ways by, for example, quiet quitting and the transition to remote work. A lot of businesses are slowly coming back, and some have rejoined in-person work. But a lot of businesses have learned that remote work can be efficient and that there’s accountability you can build into place. That is then combined with the younger generation’s attitude toward entrepreneurial thinking and their hustle mentality.
What we’re seeing, as a result, is a promising opportunity for the next generation of workers. We see this on campus. We cultivate it with our students. We don’t want students to just think of work as a place where you show up for nine hours a day and then you go home having done your obligation. It is more efficient, and better stewardship of a workforce, if they can think of themselves as producers. Whether you’re producing content or producing ideas, your engagement with the tasks that you’re asked to do, your engagement with the strategy that you’re asked to deploy, is really what makes you valuable as an employee, not just showing up.
There are a lot of things coming out of the pandemic that have been negative, that have been hard. I see it in our students. But on a positive note, it has changed the way we look at productivity and work. There’s an opportunity there, as we think about how we equip our students in the classroom to fill those workforce roles.
How prepared are students entering the workforce today?
There’s just a generational difference. The younger generation is so independent-minded and entrepreneurial-minded, that they don’t always think, “OK, the best option for me is to latch onto a big corporation and just stay there for my whole career.” It has been a generation or so since people have thought that way. We have a strong emphasis on entrepreneurship at Gordon College. What we find is that we don’t have to teach many of those students the basics of entrepreneurship. They’re coming to college having already started and shut down two or three ventures. Sometimes they’ve started a small business that they’ve sold off. They’ve done some technology work that they independently appropriated in a different, creative way. And so, they are already thinking like an entrepreneur. That distinction can be negative at times because the younger generation is generally less patient with paying their dues in a bigger corporation. They want to have autonomy and independence and creativity. So sometimes there’s some friction. But if you harness that, if you look at that as a positive you can see that this is a generation of 20-, 21-, 22-year-olds who are ready to take the reins and create their pathways, even within a bigger corporate structure.
There are ways in which this generation’s entrepreneurial mindset can be a real positive strength, but there’s a disconnect at times. We try to bridge that gap in our classroom opportunities and campus opportunities.
What areas are you seeking to improve at Gordon College and where are the biggest growth opportunities?
Gordon, like many liberal arts colleges in New England and around the country, has always prided itself on a strong core curriculum, and that hasn’t changed. But we’ve moved toward a more school-organizing structure. We launched the School of Business, built on a position of strength in our Department of Business and our different business programs. We hired a dean, Steve Nelson, who comes to us with 35 years of experience at Harvard Business School as an executive director and fundraiser. He’s not someone who needs coaching on how to run a business program.
The goal overall is to channel our entrepreneurial spirit and release the best innovative qualities of our academic faculty. This started about a year ago. It’s kind of a small miracle in some ways. The faculty rallied around this idea of reorganizing, starting with an evaluation of our curriculum. Every academic department did a rubric study of their curriculum and updated 30 programs. Some of those were tweaked, reintroduced or renamed. We needed to redo the curriculum and reorient it toward the marketplace, toward what our students need for professional preparation. I call it a small miracle because sometimes we make these jokes in higher education that to get faculty to do anything is a bit of a lift. But our faculty here are engaged. They’re excited about innovation.
They’re excited about our mission and how that looks for the next generation of our students.
The outcome of this will be greater opportunities for partnerships with businesses or with community organizations, and great opportunities for fundraising or philanthropy.
How is the college using technology and innovation to enhance the student learning experience?
There is a growing interest in fields like entrepreneurship, innovation and data science, for instance, on our campus. Those are newer majors that have grown as more and more students have been interested in pursuing them. Because we’re small, even in the tech fields, I love that when our students come to campus they’re going to work elbow to elbow, shoulder to shoulder with faculty mentors who have accomplished a lot, not just in the classroom, but in the business community. You can come to Gordon, and you can study data science or computer science, and you’re going to study with one of the engineers who helped build Gmail for Google. You’re going to get experience not just imagining what it might look like to do a certain engineering project, but you’re going to build and test it and see how it works.
What are your top priorities for Gordon College over the next two to three years?
It has been exciting to see the transformation of our academic programs into the school structure. The foundation for that was building a sense of trust and camaraderie with the faculty and staff on campus. These are tough times for higher ed everywhere, even though there are so many great stories to tell. Our enrollment is in a good position. We’re up 10% for this fall. We have the biggest class we’ve had from New England and Massachusetts in the last 10 years, which is what we want. We want to serve New England first, so we’re glad for that.
But you can’t take your eye off the ball, so to speak. You’ve always got to be thinking about how you tell your story, how you get the word out. We want to continue to be an economic engine, especially for the North Shore, but also for Boston and New England overall.
