Reunion 2024: The View from Grinnell

Transcript

Natz Soberanes ’13:

Good morning, Grinnellians. Good morning. Awesome. I hope you’re all enjoying alumni reunion here on campus or from home today. My name is Natz. I’m class of 2013. I would like to welcome all of you to this event, “The View from Grinnell.” I’m here this morning as a member of Alumni Council. We are an amazing group of alums and we are sponsoring today’s event along with the 50th reunion class of 1974. Some of you may be wondering, what is Alumni Council? So, we are a group of 26 alums and we range from the class of 1965 to the class of 2017. And we work to support purposeful lifelong relationships among Grinnell alumni and also between alumni and the College communities. Today we are thrilled to host this session as a hybrid event here during reunion. And this session is designed to introduce all of you and connect you with Grinnell College leadership.

Specifically, I’m really excited to invite you to spend some time with our incredible president, Anne Harris, and also with Michael Kahn, who is class of 1974, and he is the chair of our Board of Trustees.

So, a little bit of an explanation as we go through our session today. We’re going to invite you to write and submit a question using the card that you received when you walked in. Please raise your card in the air, and a student or a member of our DAR team will come and collect your cards and add them to our fishbowl. And this fishbowl will be handed to me at the end of the session so we can address your questions later in the session.

Okay. So, to start, I would love to offer each of you the chance to share a little bit about what recent achievements or initiatives at the College you are most excited about and how you see them impacting the future of our institution and its alums.

Michael Kahn ’74:

Well, thank you, Natz, and good morning, everyone. Good morning. So, first of all, I want to say we have a really special president and I’m awed just to have an opportunity to share a stage with her this morning. I hope you mostly get to hear from Anne. She’s the one running this College and involved in everything. And I hope at the end of this hour, all of you, if you don’t already, appreciate why I think we have the best president in the United States in this room right now.

So, I have to tell you, I’ve been on the Board nine years now. I get to work closely with the leadership here, talk to a lot of faculty, students. I’m wowed every single day by our amazing faculty and students, by the incredible diversity of our student body who now come from over 50 countries, and by everything this College does to make an excellent Grinnell education affordable and accessible. And there’s so much more that I could highlight here today — so many things that really I think are important initiatives. But if one thing just I have to talk about that really has excited me in recent years, it’s the fact that this College went no loan in 2021, ending student loans as a component of our financial aid packages, and making it possible for our students to graduate debt free. You should all be proud of this.

The College has long been committed to meeting 100% of demonstrated financial need and to do everything possible to make the College affordable and accessible. But until we adopted this policy for many Grinnell students, financial loans would be part of their package, and students could graduate with as much as $20,000 in debt by the time they graduated. That’s not bad compared to many other institutions, but if you come from a low-income household, that’s a lot of debt to graduate with. And studies have shown that graduating with meaningful debt is a primary impediment to being able to escape intergenerational poverty or to start to accumulate wealth so that your children get something that you can pass on. So, for the 67% of our students who get need-based financial aid, this is a significant impact in giving them that opportunity to graduate debt free. And I suppose more than anything, what led us to put this policy in place is — it’s the values that define us. It’s the things we believe in. So, we deeply believe in making this excellent Grinnell education affordable and accessible regardless of a family’s ability to pay. We truly value socioeconomic diversity on this campus. We have much more true socioeconomic diversity than is true of other top liberal arts colleges. And when we say, “Go forth, Grinnellians!” to our graduating students, we believe it should be with wind at their back and not debt on their shoulders.

President Anne F. Harris:

Oh, beautiful, beautiful. Thank you much for that, Michael. And it’s my honor to sit here with you on this stage. This is such a welcome opportunity. So, I can’t thank Alumni Council and the class of 1974 enough to really be together so that you all can see the things that we’re thinking and talking about when we do our stewardship and our care and our leadership and our partnership for the College. And it really is a partnership that I have come to treasure and count on for moving to the next chapter of the College, and the next, and so forth. And there are several senior leadership team members; there are faculty members here. I see you, Andy, Tracy. And that sense of partnership is something that, of course, it gives me great joy to be in with you with alumni. I’ve heard of watch parties this morning because it is 9 a.m. in Grinnell, Iowa. So, welcome to everybody on the livestreams as well!

But what I hope you walk away with is a bit of this finger on the pulse of what is administration up to in its partnership, both on campus and with the Board of Trustees. What are the issues that they’re talking about? They may be different from the things that you are interested in, although the questions, of course, come from alumni questions that we’ve developed and collected over now 20 Common Good cities that we’ve visited. So, my thing is going to be brief, and I know we want to keep our answers brief because there’s this keen interest in what your questions are right now. So, when I think about your marvelous question, what’s the achievement or initiative that I’m most excited about, I do want to register and acknowledge that even what we would call regular things, like being in community or hiring, we need to acknowledge that that is an achievement.

In this particular year that we’ve all lived through and endured, we were able to maintain community —  that was very, very hard work in the midst of a global crisis — we were able to hire amazing new faculty and staff to come into the institution. We still shine that beacon. And I’m going to say it’s not despite, it is because of, not despite, Iowa — for some people maybe — but it’s also because of what Grinnell is doing — or guess what, maybe it’s both at the same time. So, standing in Grinnell, standing with Grinnell, has come to matter a great deal. The specific event I want to highlight for you is another gift that we received, a major gift that we received for Renfrow Hall, specifically the Weingart Civic Innovation Pavilion. I do this because it’s the southern tower of the building. It’ll be there when we dedicate this in the fall, in September of 2024.

But the Civic Innovation Pavilion is so exciting. It is this unscripted space in that it is not architecturally bound in rows or anything like that. It is where College and community can come together to think about the problems we can only solve together. That’s what we mean by civic innovation, is how are we citizens and caretakers and constituents, both of the College and of the community. So, I’m so excited for what the students will do in that space and with that space. And then of course, we had our kickoff event for Renfrow Hall. We had about 200 students applying for 110 beds in Renfrow and we had a big kickoff event. So, they got to know Mrs. Edith Renfrow Smith, whom I hope you all know is the first Black [woman] alum of Grinnell College, graduating in 1937 and getting ready to celebrate her 110th birthday this summer. We’re going to do all we can to have her here as well in the fall. So, those are my highlights from the year. Let’s begin.

Natz Soberanes ’13:

Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing those. Now I am going to ask a few questions that were already sent in by some alums in advance of this event. And when possible, we have attributed these questions to whoever asked them specifically, and some of other questions are a composite of them that have been asked by multiple alums on the same topic. And then we will have a little bit of time at the end like I mentioned, to ask questions from you in the audience. So, I just want to mention that we may not have time to answer all of them, but we’ll do our best to answer as many as we can. So, the first topic that I’m going to address was a very popular one by many alums, and it’ll be on the topic of Israel and Hamas. Okay, so number one, many alumni raised this question in the State of the College regarding the Israel-Hamas war. Can you please speak to how the College is meeting the moment in general and in regards to the specific three following topics: a) protests; b) free speech versus hate speech; and c) divestment?

President Anne F. Harris:

I love how we start with the easy question. I think that’s terrific. No, and this is the important question, and, of course, I am not just not surprised. I’m glad that this is top of mind for so many Grinnell alumni. So, each of these is its own separate seminar. Each of these will create new culture, new laws, and so forth. So, I’m really just hitting the highlights. I’ll focus on protest free speech versus hate speech and then just touch on divestment, but really turn that over to Michael. So, in terms of the protests, there’s a whole narrative of the protests at Grinnell. We are not surprised. Again, that I can’t imagine Grinnell without protests. Now, protests — we’re in a very different period of protest culture in the United States. Protests being automatically seen as bad. We’re seeing a lot of police engagement and so forth. That is not the case at Grinnell.

I will say the protests that we had were mostly in the fall. The spring has not had the same dynamic. The last event that really happened on campus that was large scale about Israel-Hamas was a fundraiser for humanitarian aid. There are lots of small-scale events. There is grief, there is struggle to understand. There is struggle to act. There are many classroom sessions that are working through and seeking to understand what is happening in this particular global crisis as it connects to others. So, what happened in the fall and maybe and the reasons for that are still reasons that we’re looking to learn from and understand. I think — I’m going to present to you the best thesis I have right now — is that protests themselves have a long, cherished tradition at Grinnell. What was different about these protests is that they very, it wasn’t just protesting something outside the campus.

It pretty immediately through the phrases used on social media, on cardboards, and so forth, it impacted identities. Grinnell has students from all over the world. We have students with Israeli citizenship, we have students with Jordanian passports, we have family in Palestine. We have students who are Jewish American who have never been to Israel. We have students who have been to Israel. We have students who are looking at this through the lens of their own experience from entirely other parts of the world. So, I can’t emphasize enough how much identities became wrapped up in the protest here on campus almost right away. Our solution was two fold, and we stayed with this and when I say we, it is an expansive and generous we. It is all the faculty and staff doing it in different ways. Very specifically, the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion working with the Division of Student Affairs.

We sat down with students — I sat down with students. We wanted to take them seriously in their grief, in their anger, in their anguish, in their seeking. And the two words we kept coming back to: educate and de-escalate. And the reason we wanted to do education is just to listen to each other, to try to understand, why are you doing this? When you say from the river to the sea, do you know the historical context of that phrase? Do you know no matter what your intent to bring peace — many students, they just want cease-fire to bring peace — no matter your intent to bring peace — can we think about the impact on someone for whom their experience through intergenerational trauma sees that phrase as eradicating their identity and their right to be?

So, we were in that space, and I will cite here. I understand the president of Northwestern University said, “[sound cuts out] can think through this by themselves.” And I will be honest, I will acknowledge, that did not satisfy everyone. We did not say what people often wanted us to say or what they needed to hear, either condemning Hamas or either condemning Israel. That wasn’t the space we were in. And I acknowledge that that disappointed. They needed to hear something from Grinnell that they weren’t hearing. That’s because the priority was the students right here, right now, making them stop and think before they write their protest sign. “How is this going to impact somebody else?” I think the way we kept doing that — and we brought Johanna Solomon in who does a lot of interfaith work, but also conflict region work — to have students constantly thinking about how what they’re saying impacts the students that they’re eating with, the fellow students that they see down the hall, and so forth. I think that’s how we were able to be where we were in the spring.

Who knows what the fall will bring, but we’re going to bring those same principles. Quickly, then, on free speech. ... Quickly, she said, on free speech versus hate speech. The things I want to cite there: this is going to be a fascinating topic for the United States, I think right now, is the heralded First Amendment but free speech, academic freedom, hate speech, Title VI, Iowa 216F, IHRA — these are all the things that we’re thinking about. I’m going to start there. IHRA is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which provided in 2016 a definition of antisemitism that’s been picked up. It was picked up by first the Trump administration in December of 20 ... no, December of 2020, is that right? Or December of 2019? And now it’s part of the Iowa Civil Rights Code as well. That’s the Iowa 216F. It is an untested law, but it provides a definition of antisemitism, first, briefly, and then through 17 contemporary examples that we are all working through.

We are working to understand an untested law. That’s where we are with free speech, academic freedom, when it comes to issues surrounding antisemitism. The biggest issue, the big new thing, if you really want to follow what’s happening in higher ed now, Title VI. In the same way that Title IX seeks to assure an environment free from discrimination based on gender, Title VI seeks to assure an environment free from discrimination based on race, ethnicity, and shared ancestry, which includes religious identity. So, this is what we’re now. There are “dear colleague letters” floating around. There’s a 31-page letter from the Office of Civil Rights. There’s a whole lot of study to be done here to understand, and I do see academic freedom, freedom of speech, Title VI — these things are going to need to be in conversation with each other. I’ll stop there, but I really could go on because it’s so fascinating and important and interesting. Then it comes to divestment. The only thing I’ll say is that we were very well served by the divestment subpolicy that the Board of Trustees had created around the fossil fuel discussion we had on campus.

Michael Kahn ’74:

That policy is something we put in place in 2017. Students were asking us to consider fossil fuel divestment from our endowment. That’s a whole story. You can still find that entire thing online. I’ll talk about it a little bit later on, another question. But that served us well because that policy laid out a set of requirements and a process to follow for students or anybody who wanted to make a divestment proposal to the College and the College’s Investment Committee. So, we did have students who were protesting submit a proposal. It was late fall — it was probably December where we received the proposal; and we fairly took it up by our Investment Committee. We took it seriously. A lot of other institutions just said, no, we’re not going to talk about it. So, we had a way to engage with our students. And investment’s a complex thing.

I’m not going to get into it this morning, but you need to set a very high bar because not everybody will agree about when you should divest and not divest. And that certainly would be true in this case. It wasn’t that difficult to go through the proposal and consider it because we did not hold any of any stock or any investments in the companies that the students had identified in their proposal. And that’s not unusual. Grinnell doesn’t directly invest in a lot of public securities. Some but not much. So, most likely the answers can be we don’t have anything to divest. That was true in this case as well. And it was a key reason why Grinnell didn’t have an encampment in addition to everything that President Harris just laid out. So, our students, in the spring when we were seeing encampments, police action on colleges across the country, for those of us from the class of ’74 and a few friends who are here from earlier classes, we remember what it means to see police come onto campus to break up a protest. We remember how badly that can end and how upsetting it is to students everywhere. And our students were upset about it and they gathered to say, well, what do we do in response to what’s happening at these encampments elsewhere? Should we have an encampment? And they said it would make no sense here at Grinnell — our College is listening to us. Our College has engaged with us from the beginning. Our leadership of the College is talking to us, and our Board of Trustees responded early on to our proposal for divestment. And so the College is not the enemy to the students, unlike so many other campuses where there’s real anger and real rage. And I’d say that’s real. Thank … thanks to the great leadership here.

Natz Soberanes ’13:

Thank you so much. Thank you. Our next question is on diversity of thought. In a recent S&B article, Grinnell was named one of the worst schools in the U.S. for being comfortable in expressing ideas. What is the College doing to ensure diversity of thought?

President Anne F. Harris:

Well, first, I’m enormously pleased that everyone’s reading the S&B. Good for you. I would continue to read the S&B. It is literally an award-winning newspaper, only getting bigger and bigger. Great partnership with administration through Ellen de Graffenreid, our VP of communications, and so forth. So, I think that’s important, and they do bring issues forward that are really key. So, FIRE is the organization that brought all that forward in terms of the rating and so forth. So, of course, the first thing we do as Grinnellians is look at the methodology. It has some issues as well, but I don’t want to get into that nitty gritty of it. The statement stands — we were named one of the worst schools in the U.S. for being comfortable and expressing ideas. That tends to happen at an institution that makes you think about expressing ideas.

For example, thinking about what you’re putting on a protest poster and how it will impact other people. I will also say there is zero grace in the age of social media for young people. They can put an idea out there and then anonymously — especially with Yik Yak — anonymously, all sorts of things can come to batten down the idea. So, I think there are multiple social factors, but I also think we see schools that have policies that really seek to make students think about what they’re saying to each other and think about the impact of their speech score low. No, no. The end of that sentence is, it’s not that at Grinnell you can’t say anything you want. It’s that at Grinnell you’re really asked to think about how what you’re saying is impacting someone else. And even in that request, I think it is a request as well as sometimes a plea and entreaty, a principle of thinking about how your words impact others.

We see our students, I think, in a place of struggle. So, the way that I look at that sentence, we’re worse in the U.S. for being comfortable and expressing ideas. In some ways I want to claim that and say, yeah, ideas have power. Words have power. If we’re not comfortable just putting it out there without thinking about the impact, then we’re not really thinking about the power of our ideas and the power of our speech. So, this is something I really want to keep digging into this, though, and I really appreciate the S&B would highlight for you an op-ed response to that S&B article. So, right away you’re going to see our students in dialogue with each other, which talks about a window into what’s happening in this generation. And I think I have the writer’s name, but you can see it.

And Ellen, I know you’ll point it out to me if I haven’t. This is why I have notes here. Here we go. So, there’s the op-ed that followed in the S&B by Jenara Kim-Prieto, class of ’24, and Julia Yoo, class of ’24. That is really important. So, that’s what I would invite you all to do to understand more about that particular issue. What I want to dig more deeply into is where the expression of ideas feels curtailed. Is it in the residence halls? Is it in the classroom? Is it on social media? Let’s think about the spaces where we’re expressing ideas as well, because I think that matters. Not all spaces are the same. Different spaces have different power dynamics and so forth. So, I kind of want to own the low rating as a sense of how conscious we are about the power of speech and the impact of speech and ideas on each other. And then I want to understand better, but I would really invite you to read both the article from the S&B and the op-ed response. There’s a very important dialogue happening there.

Michael Kahn ’74:

And I would just quickly add, paradoxically, that same FIRE study list, Grinnell as one of the top 10 schools in the country for openness, meaning our students are comfortable talking about issues such as politics or abortion. So, I think understanding the subtlety and what you’ve just described, what is it that they’re not comfortable talking about yet? They rank very high in openness. I can also tell you as a trustee who talks to students all the time when I’m on campus, and I’m not saying this lightheartedly, I’ve never found a Grinnell student to be reluctant to say exactly what’s on their mind.

President Anne F. Harris:

That’s very true. Ellen, what does FIRE stand for?

Ellen de Graffenreid:

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

President Anne F. Harris:

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. So, it’s like the ACLU in higher ed when it comes to free speech, basically. I just want to be sure that everybody’s got, we talk about FIRE a great deal. Yeah, you’re right about that. And so here we are. We’re both very open and we’re also conscious of the difficulty of expressing ideas sometimes. But you’re right.

Natz Soberanes ’13:

Thank you for that. The next two questions I’m going to ask at once, because they’re both on diversity, equity, and inclusion. So, it’s sort of a two-parter. What does the DEI programming on campus look like and how are you measuring its effectiveness? And what is the College doing to create diversity in all ways — socioeconomic, racial, underserved communities, and LGBTQIA+ among its student body and faculty?

President Anne F. Harris:

Great. Another fantastic seminar topic. Absolutely that. So, structurally, I want you to know I made some pretty big changes when I got here. DEI was held by a VP position, associate vice president position, reporting to the dean of the College. I moved that position out into its own vice presidency now running the ODEI, the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. And I really, if you want to dig deep into this question, please visit that website. If you just do Grinnell, ODEI, you will see all sorts of things that are happening there. That’s being led by Vice President Marc Reed, who comes into the work from the space of human resources, which has a tremendous amount of accountability and tracking. So, we do have, and that was very important to me, is that we have institutional and individual accountability for DEI work at the College as a private institution.

We have maintained our DEI office. We have maintained our DEI work and our DEI principles. If you follow the news in Iowa, you’ve seen pretty much an evisceration of DEI offices and programming at our public institutions. So, we’re really exercising the privilege of being a private institution and not changing a thing in our commitment to DEI. That is important. Absolutely. That the work is ongoing. The commitment is the first step. I think there are a couple of specifics, again, that finger on the pulse moment, a couple of specifics that I would want you to be aware of. The first is Marc’s partnership, Vice President Reed’s partnership with many other division heads and vice presidents across the College, including the Staff Council and Executive Council. And that’s creating intercultural affairs and affinity groups. So, here’s a dynamic at Grinnell — we use that word, Grinnellian, but we know it’s multiple, we know it’s multiple identities, intersectionalities, and experiences.

What the dynamic that I see that I really want to support here and that I see Marc’s work doing and everybody working together is a dynamic between community and affinity. So, yes, there are moments when we’re all in the same dining hall, we’re all cheering for the same team. We’re all going for a degree at Grinnell. We’re all taking classes and so forth. And then there are moments where you’re — moments of affinity where your identity can’t be affirmed necessarily in that communal space. It needs its own space, its own celebration, its own joy. And it’s been said, we want those spaces to be options, not necessities, to be affirmed in one’s identity at Grinnell. Grinnell is multiple in its — it is a multicultural, multiracial institution, and one size is never going to fit all. We are too complex, too interesting, too wonderful. And so having spaces like the Stonewall Resource Center for LGBTQIA students, and then the times that those students come and meet with me, and we talk about the latest legislation in Iowa, but that space is there.

Having Sawubona House, which is a living learning community for students of African descent students of domestic Black identity and living and learning within that identity in a space that’s really reserved and safeguarded for that within a predominantly white institution, predominantly white county and state. And we just announced this spring a new space for Latine students as well to do that same dynamic. So, the dynamic of, again, affinity and affirmation and then saying, okay, this is a very white space and this is a space that’s got normatives and majorities in all sorts of different ways, privileges, identities that are privileged by the law, identities that are confronted by changing laws. And again, I’m speaking specifically to Iowa here and other parts of the country. And so how do we preserve those spaces where there’s affirmation and joy? There’s the Black Joy Mixer. Now every year that happens. That brings together faculty, staff, and students. But what Vice President Reed has done is take that out also into our employee spaces. So, there are ERGs employee — it’s Grinnell, right? So, it’s going to be a set of initials. So, ERGs, employee resource groups. There is a resource group for rainbow employees, right? LGBTQIA employees as well as there’s one emerging, Umoja, for Black employees. And the idea again, is to move between those spaces to not assume that Grinnellian means one thing and to not say, well, if you can’t be this one thing, then you’re not part of it. No, you move between affinity and community back and forth. That’s a really deep structural and important move that’s happening here. The other thing I’d want to highlight, and this is again, Marc working within that accountability idea, is the Intercultural Development Inventory, the IDI, many of you probably have used that in your workplaces as well.

It’s a progressive self-reflective process, and it can happen at the individual level as well as at the unit level. I’m using that terming ourselves to ask those kinds of questions. That’s very important in a predominantly white institution like Grinnell, and I’ve heard the term persistently white institution. This is why our faculty are also involved in looking at the curriculum in creating new departments, which they voted on, like the African diaspora studies department. This is a constant process of evolution. I will never sit here and say, we figured out diversity, we’re done. No, it will constantly keep emerging because identities are seeking more joy, more dignity, more affirmation because there are intersectionalities we haven’t even thought of. A year ago, I wouldn’t have been talking to you about religious identity at Grinnell. Now we do think about religious identity as well. So, that is my answer, brief as I can, but ODEI website for sure.

Natz Soberanes ’13:

Awesome. We have a few questions that were submitted from the Grinnell Rainbow Alumni, which you just mentioned, President Harris. So, I’m going to ask both at the same time. They’re both about the LGBTQIA+ there in that category. How can the College reconcile the challenges of being a pro-LGBTQIA college in the state of Iowa with its trajectory as a top liberal arts college, working to address society’s biggest challenges? How does this affect admissions and staff of faculty retention? And how can the College better nurture its trans students, faculty, and staff in the face of a legislative environment that connects to the freedom of identity?

President Anne F. Harris:

I love the phrase freedom of identity, by the way. Yeah. If we had to create this nation all over again, we might want to put that one in there. I was remiss in my previous response to not mention our continuing response to the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action. Joe Bagnoli, vice president of admission, who is here in the front row, and to whom a great deal — we owe everything for the no-loan program, a very important partner in everything we do. Joe has partnered with Marc Reed on what they call the Diversity Design Team to come up with a series of programs and recruiting to maintain a diverse student body, specifically a racially diverse student body. We know it’s more than that. It’s identity, it’s experience. It’s also what happens once you’re on campus. So, the diversity design team begins with recruiting and goes through to admission and then to student experience.

So, I wanted to acknowledge that we’re still responding and we will always be responding now to that SCOTUS decision. We’re also, we are now all Iowa capital watchers because there’s so much happening in Iowa legislation. It probably always has, but we’ve now learned the funnel. This is what it’s called. It opens up January 2nd and it closes April 16th. It is the legislative funnel. So, all the bills come out, and it’s like unleashing something because there are so many bills, and I’m going to say this, many of them constitutionally problematic, that nonetheless get out there and they get media attention. And they are frightening. They are frightening. They accost civil rights. And I’m speaking very specifically here to LGBTQIA rights. So, let me give you just one data point that I think says a lot. There were 40 anti-LGBTQIA bills that were presented in the funnel at the beginning of the year, 40, everything from requiring birth identity on a driver’s license. And if you hear emotion in my voice, it’s because that is unconstitutional and it did not carry all the way through and it did not make it through to different ways of just targeting and identifying LGBTQIA people — 40 anti-LGBTQIA bills. One made it through. And it’s a version of RFRA, which is the religious freedom, the one that’s based on the Religious Freedom Act. I call it the “I don’t want to sell you a cupcake act.” I know it’s got a fancier name than that, but it comes from that whole tradition of discriminating against people based on religious persuasion. So, when you think about that, right? Forty at the beginning and then one at the end. So, how do we live in that environment? One, we monitor the legislation all the time. Two, we show up, and let me tell you how Grinnell is showing up because this is tricky.

We can’t necessarily ourselves lobby. What we are doing is supporting the employees who do want to go down to the capitol and protest and talk and share their stories. We support them wholly. We also keep iterating and acting on our principles, whether it’s in our health care, how we work with LGBTQIA, and specifically with trans students. So, gender affirming care is part of our student health plan, right? It is definitely a part of our employee health plan. Yes, those things matter, right? We have to live it in that particular way, and we’re not going to change that. We also talk about it. We talk about it here. We value what’s not just value the people, but we value the fact that this is a process and that we do have a say. We can vote, we can protest, we can join all the different voices that are speaking out against some of this legislative bullying, is what I have come to call it.

And I have relationships that I have needed to establish with Iowa legislators. We know we don’t agree, but I always come back to that phrase of human dignity and thriving. And I say, that’s why we’re here. And that’s going to be inclusive of the very people that you’re targeting in your legislation. So, no, we’re not going to be changing our health care. We’re not going to be changing our support of all of the people. This is the moment to say of all Grinnellians, right? Coming in. I will say, too, we’ve partnered maybe somewhat differently than you’ve seen Grinnell partner before. Grinnell standing alone is a pretty easy target, and it has been, and I can get that in the hallways later, but where legislators have come out against the College for various issues. But I will say standing with business interests in Iowa has stood us in pretty good stead.

So, we’re part of the greater Des Moines Partnership. I was able to be on the mic in Washington, D.C., for five glorious minutes. That was the time because we’re a sponsor of that trip. And I had 250 people in the room, including a whole bunch of legislators and legislative aides. And I talked about the excellence of the institution because that is what is going to overwhelm all of this. Hate is our — sorry, I’m getting passionate — but is all that excellence that we have, that human excellence, the excellence of the knowledge that we create and that we co-create with our students together. And I will tell you that is what moves the room. That is what, when they hear about the grants and the work that we do together, the fact that we’re ranked 11th in the nation, we may not care, but others do. And I’m going to leverage that for us.

So, that’s where I am right now. But the work will continue.

Natz Soberanes ’13:

Thank you. Nothing wrong with being passionate. The next question theme is on financial aid and cost. It’s a question from Elizabeth Verstein, class of 87: what are you doing to keep the cost of tuition down? Not to be subsidized with scholarships, but to reduce costs, so a student doesn’t need as many scholarships? A related question from Daniel Pederson, class of 2004, is what role is Grinnell College taking to mitigate the rising cost of undergraduate education? Similarly and related, what was the average debt burden of this year’s graduates?

President Anne F. Harris:

Okay, terrific. Great, great question. And one that puts Grinnell right in the arena of the biggest conversations in higher education right now. So, I will say, and I’m going to put some numbers out there. This will be the part where I talk about several data points. And then Michael, of course, has been, and the board have been, close partners in this work. So, yes, our comprehensive fee has hit $80,000. That’s our comprehensive fee. That’s everything. That’s the tuition, the room and the board, and so forth. The actual cost per student is closer to a $100,000. So, the question, even if you’re full pay — and there are very, very few full pay students at Grinnell — you’re still getting that additional benefit from the institution. That $20,000 kind of automatic cost reduction. Why does it cost so much to have a student be at Grinnell? And the answer is — I have to say, I love this question because we have to ask why the cost of college and the cost of tuition keeps going up.

And I’ve listed just a few things in my notes. I mean, I think about everything. A lot of it is the services required, right? We do need to pay attention to things, mental health services, to things like the different kinds of spaces that we need. We are losing the race with climate change. We have to air condition our dorms. Climate change actually is a factor in higher ed costs, certainly for Grinnell. Insurance rates are changing. We used to have a whole campus insurance plan. Now it’s building by building because of the hail, the derecho, all the different things that are happening due to climate change. But I would say the services, the facilities, and then we are now profoundly nationally competitive. We compete with Williams and Swarthmore and all these other institutions for faculty hiring. So, our salaries need to be competitive. And I think you will hear from faculty, they need to be more competitive.

And I actually agree with that, and we need to move our revenue in that direction as well. There are reasons that I’ll get into that are making things tight for us. Even with that large endowment, it is because the endowment fuels 65% of our operating budget. So, that lets you know that our — here’s the quickest lesson in the higher ed business model, right? Three parts. You’ve got the tuition revenue of students, you’ve got the philanthropy of alums, and then you’ve got the endowment draw. We’re the flip of everyone else because we’re so reliant on the endowment. But that limits us in some ways. However, we’re there to use that endowment to meet evolving costs, to meet rising costs. So, I could go longer into why the cost of college is so very high, why it costs $100,000 per student to really educate them.

It’s because they live here. Because we are also isolated. We can’t rely on what’s happening. Our son went to Macalester. We can’t rely on what’s happening in Minneapolis, St. Paul for other services. We have to provide them all right here. So, that I think is important to acknowledge. Secondly, then yes, is to say, how do we bring that cost down? I mentioned the endowment. We use 69% of our endowment draw towards financial aid. Our peers, which are institutions with endowments higher than a billion dollars, it’s about 24% per average. That’s an enormous difference of Grinnell. That’s us living our values, but straining our finances to do so. Right? And this is why you’re hearing us maybe think more intentionally about revenue, about philanthropy, as how that partnership of the three. I think there was a time when the endowment could carry it all. It can’t anymore.

You’re hearing that from me kind of year after year. The other important one that I want you to walk away with in terms of the numbers is that I mentioned that $80,000 comprehensive fee, the average, that is one of those markers of excellence. So, yes, the rising cost of college has to do with a lot of exogenous factors. We want to keep meeting the needs of our students and employees. We want to be competitive for them. And we are using our resources and we’re thinking this is truly for the past two board meetings. We’ve really been thinking about the whole financial model. We think about budgets. We make our budgets every year. We’re thinking about that financial model. What is that dynamic between philanthropy and student revenue and the endowment? And then we are thinking a lot about culture. What do we hold dear at Grinnell when we’re thinking about the cost of college?

What do we hold dear? And you’ve already heard it, right? It’s no loan is the intergenerational difference maker when it comes to financing a college education. No loan is so clear. I just love it. When you come to Grinnell, you do not have to take on student loan debt. And I always will thank Joe for his vision and frankly, his gutsiness, in coming when he did in the midst of the pandemic and saying, this is going to be what makes Grinnell really, really different. There are such, so few schools, less than a dozen schools, who are doing exactly what we’re doing right now. So, that’s how we’re doing it — by honing in on the financial elements that make a difference for our students. That is why my gratitude to alumni is boundless for what you do for students, for what you make possible for students. And this is going to be the joy of the strategic plan is what else can we make possible working together within that marvelous dynamic.

Michael Kahn ’74:

So, I could go on for a long time about these financial matters and really made the key points. Just one other number I’ll throw out at you this year — we will have paid out about $100 million dollars from our endowment to the College, and we had about $4 million in endowed philanthropic gifts coming back in. So, do the math and think about that. It’s just not sustainable, where we are right now. So, we did build a big endowment and what you’ve heard President Harris talk about, we’ve done exactly the right thing with that. We’ve used that money for great good for access to make this great education affordable, but we’re at a point where that imbalance between what goes out and what comes in — it’s hard to sustain everything we’re doing. So, this is going to be very brief, but it’s the audience participation part of this discussion. So, I want to ask all of you this, and those of you livestreaming at home, feel free to shout out, too. So, are you proud of the fact that we have faculty who are ranked in the top 10 in the nation? Are you proud that we are now considered the best college in the Midwest, outranking even excellent institutions such as Carleton and Oberlin? Are you proud that Grinnell College meets 100% of demonstrated financial need? Yes. Are you proud that we’ve ended loans as part of our financial aid package?

Natz Soberanes ’13:

Yes.

Michael Kahn ’74:

Absolutely. And do you believe that the world needs more Grinnellians? Yes, especially now. Yeah. So, my message to all of you, all of you who are supporting the College, who are giving back, who recognize that yes, even with a large endowment, there’s more that we need to do to make all these things that you’ve seen while you’ve been here, all that you’ve heard about, possible. We can’t do it without the support of our alumni and friends and parents. Big thank you to all of you who are giving support to those who haven’t gotten around to it or who may have assumed Grinnell has this big endowment. I can focus my philanthropy at other places. Grinnellians make a big difference in the world, and you make it possible for there to be more Grinnellians to have academic excellence. When you’re in JRC and you see those posters of students who are here because of their financial aid, click on one of those QR codes and think about giving back or giving a little more. It really is going to make a big difference. I know you believe and love what you see. Those who love the College have a chance to sustain us for the next 20, 30, 50 years. So, thank you for considering that. That’s how we’ll do it.

Natz Soberanes ’13:

Yeah, I agree. The last group of questions, well, it is one question theme that we have to hit before we can go to the fishbowl. Question from the audience is on sustainability. Jim Stevens from class of 67 asks, I live near Swarthmore College. They have recently announced a plan to build a geothermal facility on campus that will take care of all the heating and cooling for the College. Does Grinnell have any plans to become carbon neutral in the near future?

Michael Kahn ’74:

So, I am so happy that we got a lot of questions on sustainability, including this particular question. Back in 2017, I had the honor of chairing a task force on campus that initially came out of students’ request to look at the issue of divesting from fossil fuel stocks. And happily, we had very little fossil fuel holdings in our endowment. But right from the get-go, we decided we didn’t know where we would come out on the issue of, nor whether divesting actually has an impact in changing the behavior of the companies fossil fuel companies, and would that impact climate? But we felt very strongly that this College has to do something to have a positive impact on climate and climate change. So, we expanded our scope to really look at that issue more broadly. We had many open sessions, many experts come to campus. It’s all still available online on the College website.

You can go back and hear that experts from all sorts of different views, investment climate, lots of things. But out of that task force, which lasted nearly a year, great things came out of that. So, one, we now have a standing sustainability on campus that does these analyses, makes recommendations, brings it forward. That’s had a huge impact. You’ll see it. You’ll see the signs around campus. One of the sessions we had was with a company that was proposing an innovative way to do a partnership, to do a large-scale private solar array. Out of that work, we now just recently went live with the largest private solar array in the state of Iowa, one of the largest in the region — four megawatts, which covers a third of our electricity, lowers our carbon footprint by 20%.

President Anne F. Harris:

Really good.

Michael Kahn ’74:

We’ve recently signed a partnership with the town, and we have a great relationship with the town right now. We’ve signed a partnership with the town for another large solar array that will be built. And when that comes online, we will have gotten to 50% of our electricity handled by solar. Mac Field was torn up for a year, sadly, for the students who were here at that time, because we put under the whole field geothermal wells, which now heat and cool are all our newer buildings. And we’re now starting to connect that to older buildings as well. And all of you who have ever lived in Iowa know what a windy state this is. And there are now large wind farms that are being built, including in Poweshiek County. And as soon as Grinnell’s utility is willing to give us the opportunity to hook up to one of those wind farms, we’re going to have even more renewable energy. By 2040, this College, this campus, will be carbon neutral.

President Anne F. Harris:

Wow.

Michael Kahn ’74:

So, Grinnell has gone from caring about climate to now being a leader among campuses in terms of campus sustainability, yet another thing that all Grinnellians should really be proud of. So, great. That’s good.

Natz Soberanes ’13:

Thank you. That’s awesome. Awesome.

President Anne F. Harris:

Can I add one tiny thing? Just to let you know how we’re living it out now. So, we now have the first year of the Social Innovator in Residence program. If you are familiar with the Grinnell Social Justice Prize, this is that next chapter. Now, the social innovator’s here longer. They’re in residence for six to seven weeks. They work with students, and I’m so proud to let you know that the first social innovator in residence will be Monica Sanders. She works at the intersection of the digital divide and climate change, forged as her work was by Hurricane Katrina. So, her project is called the Undivide Project. You can look her up, but this will just continue to not just have it happen at Grinnell, but have our students educated and carrying that work forward.

Natz Soberanes ’13:

Awesome. That is great. Thank you. Thank you both. Do we have some questions from the audience, Jayn? Yes. Awesome.

Unknown speaker:

Have one, put it up in the air.

Natz Soberanes ’13:

Is it time to redesign the Honor G?

President Anne F. Harris:

Can you repeat the question?

Natz Soberanes ’13:

Yes. Is it time to redesign the Honor G? Yes.

President Anne F. Harris:

Okay. Of course, there’s a short answer to that and there’s a much longer answer to that. I think it’s always time to look at our visual symbols and to look at how we present ourselves to the world. So, the S&B, again, I’m going to mention them because they are the news, right? They ran a story saying, is there a prohibition against the Honor G and so forth. There is a larger conversation I’d want you all to know about that I talked about yesterday at the Pioneer Athletics Luncheon, which is that Grinnell, through a really great partnership between the VP of communications as well as admissions, as well as development, and multiple other parts of the College, are going to look at what we call an agency review. Meaning, bring in an agency to review all of our visual presentation materials. So, the Honor G is one.

I do bring a very special lens to this. This is one of the few times I get to say as a medieval art historian, but I do, right? Because it is not an Iron Cross. We always correct people, and they do ask, isn’t that an Iron Cross? And I think some of it is they’re led by the color scheme, which was used by the Nazis who did use the Iron Cross. It is not an Iron Cross. It is a Maltese Cross. And then most of the time the, oh, well, it’s a Maltese cross, so it’s okay. The Maltese Cross has its own history connected to the crusades, connected to eradicating Islam and people of Muslim faith. So, Islamic faith. So, I think it’s a moment, and I will tell you, the Israel-Hamas War has made that symbol something that it wasn’t before the Israel-Hamas War, right?

It looks different because of the context we’re in. And here again, the only time I get to tell you, as an art historian, images change meaning all the time based on context. Images change meaning all the time based on context. So, within that important reality, I think it is time to have a conversation about this symbol and to ask ourselves, what do we want the Honor G, again, the words have nothing to do with either Maltese or Iron Cross or the colors or anything. What do we want that Honor G to be? What is the spirit of that Honor G? Is it athletic pride? Is it beyond athletic pride? Is it identity? And it’s okay to ask. Grinnellians are never afraid to ask themselves questions, even of things they hold dear, even of things they hold dear. So, that’s the space that we want to go into. Operationally, it’s an agency review of all the different visual materials. Existentially, it’s us having the courage to ask ourselves, what does this mean now in this particular context? What is the spirit that we want to preserve moving forward as we celebrate our athletes, as we celebrate our athletic spectatorship and community?

Natz Soberanes ’13:

Awesome. Thank you. KDIC was very important to my time at Grinnell. I’ve heard Grinnell lost its broadcasting license. What happened and what are the plans to get a radio station up and running for the students again?

President Anne F. Harris:

So, Michael is smiling, which makes me wonder if he had a show on KDIC.

Michael Kahn ’74:

Friends who had a show.

President Anne F. Harris:

Great, great, great. Yes.

Oh, and I had a show during the pandemic. I loved it. I want a radio show. Again, it was so much fun. I called it Once and Future Grinnell, and it was all about the strategic plan, and I had faculty and students and staff on there. It was really fun. So, indeed, during the pandemic, the license lapsed, and we did not renew it because we had found being in a digital platform extended our reach tremendously. And that’s the short answer here, is that the KDIC is alive and well, thanks to Hayden, a wonderful student who’s kind of brought it back and so forth. And we have a nice roster. I think it’s still only 5 to 9 p.m. or so. I expect it to grow. But with that digital platform, we can reach many, many more people. And when I see the reach of the S&B in its digital platform, I get excited. Thinking about KDIC, I just don’t know that we need that broadcasting license where we can only broadcast within a certain geographical area. I’m very excited about what’s to come for KDIC.

Natz Soberanes ’13:

Okay, thank you. If we are providing financial aid packages that meet need without loans, why is a food pantry/textbook loan program necessary?

President Anne F. Harris:

That’s a great question. So, the food pantry is actually overstocked, and we’ve known this for several years as well. I think it exists. Oh, I’m going to get into the meal plan. I think it exists because several students were not on any meal plan. And so it became a kind of place to go to. Now, those very same students — this was several years ago — came to us and said, well, if we’re not on a meal plan, but there are food scarcity moments, or we don’t have the time, or frankly the energy because we’re here to study and to learn, to go to the grocery store and prepare meals and do all these things, then we’re just reliant on packaged foods, which isn’t really great at all. So, we did work with that particular request to establish a meal plan that requires every student has at least one meal a day on campus.

So, guess what? This has been a big topic of conversation on campus because choice and freedom and so forth. And I’ve said to students that I’ve talked to about this, we’re always going to be in a place where we’re responding to student needs, and they’re not always going to be the same. So, right now, students are thinking about allergens and choice. When we were set up the meal plan, they were really talking more about access to good, nutritious food. And at least they said, can’t you provide one meal a day? Which of course, for students with high financial aid would be covered by their financial aid. So, I will say the food pantry really exists now — we’re going to be in a transition with that space because there’s no need for it in terms of the meal plan taking care of at least one meal a day.

And then we have to see where students are in terms of, do they still need that food pantry? It’s always overstocked, and we’re actually not able to keep a lot of the things that are in there because they get expired. The other thing is, who’s using the food pantry? We really wanted it to be for high-need students, and it wasn’t always. So, that’s where we are there. We’re definitely in a period of transition there.

When it comes to textbooks, that is a great one. So, textbooks are incredibly expensive, especially in STEM. So, Joe Bagnoli can talk more about how full demonstrated need works. It doesn’t mean every need, right? It doesn’t necessarily mean food or transportation or all these other things, although we package that, I’m looking to him for confirmation. We package help to get home. We package different stipends for students with high need.

Meeting full demonstrated need means meeting the need that has been determined by the FAFSA, by the financial aid form. That’s what meeting full a 100% of demonstrated need. It’s demonstrated by the FAFSA. It’s not all your needs, right? So, we’re always going to be working with students who have needs in addition to tuition, in addition to the activity fee and the other things that we — room and board — that we do provide. So, that’s as short an answer as I can give, but I want it to be specific about that phrase, 100% of demonstrated need.

Natz Soberanes ’13:

Awesome. Thank you.

President Anne F. Harris:

Joe will let me know if there’s anything to add.

Natz Soberanes ’13:

The last one is very short. President Harris, you are very articulate, smart, sensitive, thoughtful, and insightful. Would you ever consider running for president of the United States?

President Anne F. Harris:

Wow. We were all in the room when that happened. That’s exciting. Harris in ’28. Yeah. I’ll tell you why. Well, my short answer is my heart is in Grinnell. My heart is for Grinnell. I do think Grinnell matters to this democracy.

Natz Soberanes ’13:

That was not a no.

President Anne F. Harris:

That’s it.

Natz Soberanes ’13:

Thank you. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you both for your time and everyone here for joining us this morning and at home. We’ve really enjoyed getting to know you. Thanks. Thanks again. We really hope that you enjoy your time. For the rest of Reunion, if you would like to learn more about Alumni Council, please visit alumni.grinnell.edu/alumnicouncil. It’s so amazing that we’re all getting together here and online to celebrate Grinnell, our Grinnell community, and all that we make possible together. I really hope that each of you will continue to choose to be an active member of our community. Thank you for being donors, for being mentors, and for being volunteers and Grinnell champions out in the world now.

Please go and have a great reunion weekend, all of you. Thank you again. Thank you.