Integral Strategy 129
I argued in different places and ways that the story of the place remained whole
and vibrant, with more continuity than discontinuity. and pride in its achieve-
ments more appropriate than resentment. To demonstrate that continuity, I tried
to distill the main themes and values in the university’s story. The powerful sense
of place that defined the Richmond experience through its exquisite wooded
collegiate gothic campus was unchanged even as new facilities were continu-
ally added and renovated. A sense of community, civility, and service prevailed,
inspired in part by the spiritual heritage of the campus, and by the example of
superior levels of commitment by the faculty and staff. A continuity of purpose
and practice was unmistakable in the commitment of the faculty to engaged learn-
ing through an ever-enlarging set of opportunities for student research and other
forms of active and collaborative learning. Education as the transformation of
human powers and possibilities, enabled by the faculty’s intense investment in
students and their own scholarship, remained the touchstone of Richmond’s mis-
sion. The structural condition for the story remained the same, a small collegiate
university with the intimacy and style of a college and the reach of a university.
Student learning was at the absolute center of the collegiate experience, even as
the university’s complexity was manifest in Division I athletics; schools of arts and
sciences, business, law, leadership and continuing studies; a large array of interdis-
ciplinary programs; and an extensive program in international education. A sense
of the connectedness of the different educational threads in the Richmond experi-
ence remained a constant theme and goal. I also argued that, above all, a sense
of possibility in the commitment to pursue and the ability to achieve the highest
academic aspirations had long been a part of the university’s self-understanding
and its vision of the future.
The momentous but implausible decision in 1910 to relocate the campus from
near downtown represented the touchstone of the narrative to display the con-
sistency of the vision of possibility. The site for the campus was inauspicious, an
abandoned amusement park with a small lake surrounded by barren hills in a remote
part of the city. The college had only modest resources to undertake the construc-
tion of a new campus and to create Westhampton College for women, but it decided
to borrow the money that it needed—an exceptional risk for the time and place. In
a compelling symbol of high aspiration, President Boatwright secured the services
of the distinguished Boston architectural firm of Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson,
designers of the Princeton chapel and graduate quadrangle. The board accepted
the proposal to design the buildings in the collegiate gothic style and to configure
separate colleges on the model of Oxford and Cambridge. For a Baptist College in
the South to find its architects in the North, to counter the prevailing tradition
of Georgian campus design with high-church architecture, and to start a woman’s
college that would come to have rigorous academic standards were other earnests
of a compelling vision taking shape within otherwise traditional forms.
It is difficult to gauge the success of this effort to tell the Richmond story as
a form of strategic leadership with any assurance of showing causal connections.
The ability to reach the goals of two demanding strategic plans and a major capital