August 27, 2024 – Launching Into The New Year, and The Future

Friends in the Davidson Community,

A few days ago the Wall Street Journal published an article declaring which colleges ‘won’ the Olympics and included this line:

In terms of medals per capita, few schools beat Davidson, which has a population of 2,000 students and two Olympic medalists.

The bronze that Evy Leibfarth ’25 earned in the canoe slalom and the gold captured by Stephen Curry ’10 and his basketball teammates put a neon light around the countless ways that our students and alums truly excel in their pursuits.

This Olympic prowess echoes Davidson’s success in international fellowships. For the 9th year in a row, we have been recognized as a Fulbright Top Producer. Currently more than a dozen alums are representing Davidson through Fulbright and other fellowships across the world.

Our academic year begins with a terrific wave of momentum behind our mission of educating for leadership and service. Our 535 new students just arrived on campus, including 521 first-years. These courageous and talented young people pushed through a stressful and uncertain environment around college admissions and chose to join our community. They bring to campus a palpable sense of excitement about the experience that lies ahead…and a whole bunch of gear.

This fall we are launching our Strategic Plan, which you can read about here, that will guide Davidson College into the next decade. The initiatives and strategies that we framed over the past year will guide how we fulfill our mission to develop humane instincts and disciplined, creative minds – for the public good. We are educating for it, preparing students to pursue it, contributing to it and clarifying what it is in an ever-more complex world. We are eager for you to play a part in reaching these aspirations.

We recognize the turbulent global and national atmosphere in which the year begins, and we are tapping the strong relationships among those in our community to help them navigate and lead. This is why our theme this year will be “Building a Community of Trust.” We are redoubling our efforts to embrace our distinctive Honor Code for this new era and to build up the foundation of trust that surrounds it. We aim to help students find starting points amid tense moments and events, whether around Gaza or the US elections. Innovative programming and collaborative events will weave together a semester that reinforces constructive discourse, free expression, and civic engagement that honors those with whom we disagree – from voter registration to our Deliberative Citizenship Initiative to a live recording on campus of the bipartisan “You Might Be Right” podcast featuring former governors and presidential cabinet officials.

Davidson College continues to advance our acknowledgment of our history. We recently announced Martha “Marty” Gimson to lead our Beaver Dam historical site and the planned “With These Hands” memorial. Dr. Chloe Poston has joined the college as the college’s inaugural Vice President for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. And this summer, we launched the first “Summer Promise” program, which brought rising ninth graders from the Davidson and metro Charlotte community onto campus for a week of immersion in college studies. The program, a commitment we made last fall, gives talented young people and their families a better understanding of the challenges and possibilities of higher education.

We reach these milestones because of you: your engagement with the college, your care for our students and your gifts to Davidson. We received more funds to support the college during the fiscal year that ended on July 31 than in any previous year - $130.8 million. These resources make possible the dazzling array of programs on campus, overseas experiences by more than half of our students during their time at Davidson and our rare strength in financial aid. We admit applicants without regard for the student’s ability to pay. We cover the bills beyond the family’s calculated contribution. And we do it without putting loans in financial aid packages. Only about 20 schools in the nation take all three of those steps.

The return on these investments is incalculable. Our students, the curious and courageous young people who arrived on campus in recent days, and our accomplished alums venture into the world and, in myriad ways and all manner of places, bring other human beings into the winner’s circle of life.

I extend my gratitude to them and to all of you who help make that possible as we debut the new year.

Doug Hicks '90
President