Up in the Air
By Sarah B. Drummond
Over the past five years, the Andover Newton Board of Trustees has used the term “runway” to describe how much time the School had to turn things around financially. It was then that the School took out a mortgage on the campus in order to refrain from taking cash out of the endowment to close budget gaps. The mortgage funding was supposed to last several years, but it didn’t. The runway got too short, and therefore the Board challenged the administration to come up with alternative scenarios, one of which became our future direction: partnership with Yale Divinity School.
Although I understood and even employed the term “runway” during those years, it never felt quite right to me. I was already very much up in the air. The idea of hitting a point where the School had no options, lost its accreditation, jeopardized its students’ financial aid, or couldn’t fund payroll felt like the educational administrator’s equivalent of a pilot plowing a jet into a mountain. Now that the crash has been averted — and I’ve begun to describe Martin Copenhaver as Andover Newton’s Sully Sullenberger — I want to share a few things I learned from our negotiation process with Yale that I will take with me.
1. Change is not so much bad as emotional. Constituents who care about Andover Newton are and have been emotional about change. I have been emotional about change. I have heard expression of sadness about selling the campus, happiness that we’ve been able to educate and graduate our matriculated students, and anger about the confusion that results from slow release of sensitive information. “Emotional” is not inherently bad or good; it’s part of being human, and its prevention shouldn’t be the goal.
2. The process of partnership requires getting the right people, in the right roles, doing the right things… irrespective of how much time and energy it takes. Over the past 12 years, I have been part of thwarted Andover Newton partnership negotiations over and over, including four sets of talks that got far enough along for public dialogue to be part of the negotiation. I learned through those experiences that enormous time must be invested in both the negotiation process design and the negotiation itself, even though it’s altogether possible that the partnership won’t happen. In recent weeks, we have learned of many peer seminaries that have decided, like Andover Newton has, to become embedded. If asked for advice, I would say, “Dedicate as much time to planning the who and the how as you do the what.”
3. Disagreements are to be expected: not welcomed but not feared. Martin’s and my dearly departed friend Sue Dickerman used to say to committees deliberating over difficult decisions, “Expect everyone here to have been mad at everybody else before this process is over.” All would look around the room and titter, thinking that of course such would never happen. When it inevitably did happen, they remembered Sue’s words and outright laughed.
I probably learned a lot more than this, and those learnings will come through for me over time. Sharing my learnings in this space has helped me to capture them and helped me to feel closer to those who lead in other settings at crucial times in institutions’ histories. When we take a step back, we see.
