August 19, 2025 – New School Year Update: Building on Strength

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Dear Davidsonians,

Greetings from campus! Fall sport athletes have been hard at work in the sweltering humidity since the beginning of August. The Class of 2029 arrives tomorrow, hailing from 40 states and 35 countries. Classes begin on Monday. This afternoon, as is our custom, faculty and staff gathered for a kickoff meeting, full of the hope, promise and excitement of the new academic year. The theme of the meeting, and our theme for the year, is Building on Strength.

With that theme in mind, I’m pleased to share some good news about initiatives, developed during the recent strategic planning process, that build on our core mission of preparing students for lives of leadership and service. 

This afternoon I announced the creation of the Institute for Public Good at Davidson College. The Institute for Public Good (IPG) will foster academic and intellectual collaboration in order to develop students’ capacity to devise public solutions and develop ethical public leaders for the well-being of society. The IPG will include program areas in civic engagement; deliberation and free expression; public policy and research; arts in public life; and ethics, honor, and leadership.

Dr. Chris Marsicano, associate professor of educational studies, will serve as the IPG’s director, and Dr. Stacey Riemer, who recently served as our interim Vice President for Student Life and leads our civic engagement efforts, will be the IPG’s managing director. Current programs in civic engagement, deliberative citizenship, and the College Crisis Initiative (C2i) are now part of the IPG, which reports to Academic Affairs. Fundraising is well underway, and we will develop each program area over time.

The Institute for Public Good will find a home in Philanthropic and Eumenean Halls, which will be renovated. Phi and Eu Hall balconies—facing one another within debating distance—signify Davidson’s tradition of respectful discussion, including Honor Council hearings. If ever there was a moment to embrace our commitment to the free, open and respectful inquiry that Phi and Eu represent, that time is now.

Just north of the debate halls, we all see construction fences and ground under improvement. In October, we will dedicate the artwork With These Hands: A Memorial to the Enslaved and Exploited, and we will open a renovated Oak Row as an exhibition space that narrates stories from the college’s history.

Even as our earliest buildings reflect the high human aspirations of free debate and preparing young men for ministry and other careers, they also serve as reminders that the college paid for enslaved laborers to craft and lay the bricks of our original campus. At Davidson we have actively chosen to add to—not to remove from—our history. Honoring those persons who have not been acknowledged is an essential part of that work.

I’d also like to highlight for you another strategic project taking shape on campus: the George Lawrence Abernethy Library. The day after Commencement, we closed E. H. Little Library and moved all its books and contents to a new library annex at the north edge of campus. Thanks to the generosity of donors, fundraising is complete for this transformative project, and renovation is underway. We have prepared spaces across campus, including the Lilly Family Gallery, to serve as an inviting and functional “interim library” for the next two years.

 The George L. Abernethy Library will feature a new top floor, which includes a large venue for community gatherings, meetings, and events. I’m pleased to announce that, thanks to the generosity of a host of donors led by Davidson trustees, this prominent space will be named the Dr. Thelma Davidson Adair Pavilion. The late Dr. Adair was a pioneering leader in the Presbyterian Church and a trustee of Davidson College. She traced her roots—and her family name—to enslaved descendants at Beaver Dam plantation in Davidson. She lived a remarkable life of leadership and service, and her legacy as an educator and community builder will live on in the Adair Pavilion.

On campus we will experience the excitement, noise and inconveniences of construction taking place. While we are literally building on strength, we are also building on our well-articulated purpose and palpable sense of community:

We are called to our work because Davidson graduates must be prepared to shape a complex world characterized by tremendous human ingenuity as well as by significant disruption, polarization, and turmoil. Technological innovation, including generative and agentic artificial intelligence, poses both enormous threat and opportunity for higher education. Meanwhile, our public life is as tumultuous as any moment in the post-War era, and higher education itself has become the subject of vociferous debate.

Fortunately, the liberal-arts approach to education that Davidson has practiced for nearly two centuries provides critical and creative resources to prepare the leaders that this era needs. Still, our education must continually adapt as communities, workplaces, and civic life shift.

At this turbulent moment, one question at the heart of our educational enterprise stands out for me: What makes us human? In our shared work to answer, we will continually strive for a campus learning environment of mutual respect, free inquiry, and openness to people with myriad backgrounds and viewpoints.

Welcome to the new academic year and thank you for the vital part you play in this extraordinary college.

Best,

Doug Hicks '90
President