I learned a lot more than this, and those learnings will come through for me over time. When it inevitably did happen, they remembered Sue’s words and outright laughed. 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 this would never happen to such a chummy crew. Disagreements are to be expected: not welcomed but not feared. If asked for advice, I would say, “Dedicate as much time to planning the who and the how as you do the what. In recent weeks, we have learned of many peer seminaries that have decided, like Andover Newton has, to become embedded. 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. Over the past 12 years, I have been part of thwarted Andover Newton partnership negotiations no fewer than eight times, including four sets of talks that got far enough along for public dialogue to be part of the negotiation. 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. “Emotional” is not inherently bad or good it’s part of being human, and its prevention shouldn’t be the goal.Ģ. I have heard expressions 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. Constituents who care about Andover Newton are and have been emotional about change. Now that the crash has been averted, with Martin Copenhaver having challenged us to think like Sully Sullenberger, I want to share a few things I learned from our negotiation process with Yale that I will take with me.ġ. The idea of hitting a point where the School had no options - losing its accreditation, jeopardizing its students’ financial aid, or failing to fund payroll - felt like the educational administrator’s equivalent of a pilot plowing a jet into a mountain. ![]() ![]() Our community was already very much up in the air. 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.Īlthough I understood and even adopted use of “runway” during those years, it never felt quite right to me. The mortgage funding was supposed to last several years, but it didn’t. The expression emerged when the School took out a mortgage on the campus in order to refrain from taking cash out of the endowment to close budget gaps. Evidently, it’s a common term for entrepreneurs in the business world, but it was new to me. 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.
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