In the early 20th century, liberal arts colleges had a firm grip on the command to educate young minds, and this mandate was given to them by the avid students who enrolled and fervently spent thousands of dollars on the cozy and high-priced liberal arts education.

Statistically, in the 1970's about 30% of all the undergraduate students were enrolled in liberal arts colleges. This percentage experienced a substantial drop to a startling 11% in the 1990's when the enrollment in the neighboring public and state universities increased and thence emerged an existential threat to liberal arts education. The institutions who catered liberal arts based educational curriculum also saw the problem of decreasing demand loom large.

The chart below illustrates how an upward trend in public schools enrollment was not reflected in the liberal art colleges' enrollment graph.

Enrollment Trend

number of students enrolled (in millions)

Colleges such as Amherst and Williams did not see any imminent danger as they stood on the stanchions of glorious histories and sizable endowments to compete with some of the best universities in the nation like Stanford and Johns Hopkins for some of the best students in the world. However, the rest of the crew of liberal arts colleges couldn't roll with similar swagger.

In the words of education leaders and renowned economists Dr. Michael McPherson and Dr. Morton Schapiro:

"Schools like Williams and Amherst have the financial power and reputation to remain in the control of their own destiny, but there are not even fifty colleges about which one could say that with confidence"

Schools on the lowest scale of status hierarchy had it worse, plenty of them went defunct and between 1997 and 2002, the number of schools that had gone bankrupt rose to 27, which is almost 6 percent of all the liberal arts colleges in U.S. A report by New York Times indicated that "dozen more are in dicey economic condition" and as situation got worse and the institutional leaders went desperate to keep their institutions afloat, many took the bold step to start borrowing to the point when financial leverage went many times above recommended standards, resulting in Standard & Poor's, an agency that rates Higher Education bonds, affirming that "a substantial cohort of [liberal art] colleges might go insolvent due to oversized debts and poor financial reserves".

This brings up the question of are low Student-Faculty ratios, intimate class settings, and pedagogy by actual full-time professors rather part-time adjunct faculty worth preserving?

In the below trend graph, we observe that bandwagon in higher education moved away from liberal arts at the start of 21st Century.

Degrees Conferred by Discipline

Compared with 25% in 1960's only 9% of the students received a liberal arts degree in 1990's and this percentage kept on decreasing. The connotations of the word "college" attached with liberal arts were the lower degree of "seriousness" these institutions associated with academics, as perceived by the market audience.

Among all this hullabaloo and fuss, in the October of 2001, a news made a blip via Wall Street Journal lauding Dickinson College to be the "hottest college this fall" and a "college that served modern students of new era with traditional education". This was an inflection point in Dickinson College's history as such positive publicity in the most gruesome of times was critical.

Dickinson College is a quintessential liberal arts institute with a historical campus located in a colonial-era town, boasting a robust liberal arts curriculum. Yet in the 90s it suffered from a problem of ambiguity and obscurity. It was not widely known and this namelessness reached its zenith when potential students start to confuse THE Dickinson College with less prestigious Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. Dickinson College was not immune to the continuous decay of liberal arts education and the result was misidentification of the College's brand name and an influx of poorly prepared students that were not ready for the kind of pedagogy the college was providing, but Dickinson admitted them anyway. The consequence being that in 1995 it was kicked out from the elite club of "nation's fifty best liberal arts colleges" by U.S. News & World Report.

In order to enliven Dickinson's lost glory and get their act together financially, a professor of German language, Dr. Bill Durden from Johns Hopkins University was hired. Dr. Durden (a Dickinson alumnus) had a track-record of spending sixteen years at the German language department of Johns Hopkins University and overlooking a for-profit distance learning organization as vice president and serving as president of Sylvan Academy. This sort of entrepreneurial track record was unheard of in higher education, where preserving intellectual integrity was more important than being starved and strapped of cash. And some concerns were raised regarding the credentials of the new president, but this unease among faculty and staff was put to rest as the hymn of praise for Dickinson gilded the headline of WSJ in 2001.

The first order of business as president for Bill Durden was to put Dickinson back on the map, and Dr. Durden realized that it had to be done in a way that preserved Dickinsonian values; staying true to being liberal arts purist to its core while taking into account the imperatives of marketplace. The rationale for parents also had to be provided so they can justify spending $35,000 per year while a close rival Penn state was much cheaper and offered similar liberal arts curriculum through its honors college.

Dr. William Durden, who later became renowned for his flamboyant bow-ties and a totalitarian style of decision making was regarded as the best choice for president by John Curley, chairman of the Board. Bill Durden possessed what others lacked; enthusiasm, experience with education business strategy and the academic credentials to be the superhero Dickinson college needed.

The dictatorial style of management was evident from his view about how the institution should be governed:

"For Dickinson to achieve its vision, it must be subordinated to the leadership and possess a desire to be led"

Dr. Durden highlighted and generously exercised all the power that came with his presidential position and was quick to realize the leadership vacuum that the previous president of the college had left behind. However, the foundation for his leadership was different, it encouraged open communication, candidness, and visibility into the issues for all the members of Dickinson community that was previously reserved only for upper administration. In the start, this approach had its implications as people started blowing those issues out of the proportion but in the end his administering "out loud" got the issues resolved.

Still Dr. Durden's old boss, Johns Hopkins former president Steven Muller, was unconvinced that Dr. Durden can make great strides at Dickinson College, and Johns Hopkins ex-president, who led one of the finest medical schools in the world, was right to some extent; after all who dies of language? Dr. Durden realized that as part of a bigger problem, his vision was to create buzz for Dickinson brand the same way as other institutions, which find the cure for cancer, would. If one is going to build a world-class brand, it is essential to have an intimate understanding of the product to create a compelling narrative. Institutions that don't have perspective, don't have the narrative and without narrative they cannot have a brand. Bill Durden recalls, "students, even the good ones, didn't know what it meant to be a part of Dickinson College, what it meant to be Dickinsonian". So his quest to build a brand story began..."out of which he could lead the institution where it was going".

Education Institutions are not businesses and students cannot be treated like consumers, therefore, an institution must not give in to every demand of their students, and this sort of integrity only comes when it "knows its brand, its product" as the new president re-emphasized. Following this vision, a special task force was created by Durden whose primary function was to sketch an action plan that can be embraced by all constituencies of the campus and this plan was expected to drive the conversations around building a unified vision for Dickinson brand.

The mechanism behind the plan was to combine student life with liberal arts education. The plan read more like a guide was a step-by-step process that entailed measurable goals around expanding campus size, increasing the number of minority students and grow endowment through gifts and soliciting alumni. To implement this plan president Bill Durden hired a dream team from Johns Hopkins University to begin the rescue efforts, Mark Neustadt was a marketing consultant who was put in charge of "positioning", Bob Massa was admissions director was put in charge of determining the financial aid solution and bring in the most competent, high caliber students.

Mark Neustadt started by interviewing and leading focus groups to determine the mission statement for the campus which he defined as "Freedom + Guidance = Growth" but this was vague, and would not serve the purpose of making Dickinson a distinct institution with rich history, and an eye towards future. It was not setting Dickinson apart from the rest, Mark Neustadt specified that a mission statement should function as "setting apart Dickinson from competition, resonate with prospective students and evoke enthusiasm in alumni". Following this objective, a new mission statement was elicited, "reflecting America, engaging the world" around which a new Dickinson philosophy was based. To live by this statement, signs pointing to campus building were translated in various foreign languages besides English, so campus' commitment to internationalism is evident in the littlest of things. Also, new pedagogical experiments were launched that reflected America and engaged the world; interdisciplinary studies on contemporary policy which was carried out by The Clarke Center, and looking at international business and management from liberal arts perspective was institute. These projects connected the learning inside of Dickinson to the world outside of Dickinson and put liberal arts education to practical use. There was a new course called "International Mosaic" that took students to far-flung places in India, Mexico, and Cameroon where they used ethnographic and archival research methods to study how communities evolved, and this experience "impacted students and changed their way of seeing the world" as one alumni recalls.

In 2002, Dickinson College's International Program ranked as the sixth best in the nation. Dickinson operates 32 programs on six continents, around 15% of its students major in a foreign language and around 85% of its students spend at least one semester abroad. Dickinson hosted a faculty research seminar to draw on interest on the topic of tobacco use as a concern of public health, which did not only include biology but also the areas of public law and policy. Dickinson's associate dean, Joanne Brown argued that "Public health can be taught from the lens of Liberal Arts - the Dickinson way, rather as it is taught at Hopkins, where early specialization is emphasized"

This all has been done in an effort to rebrand Dickinson and its values, these premiere programs have become Dickinson's narrative Durden was looking for and as he so gleefully said, "When public thinks of Dickinson, they now think of International, global and hands-on education that advocates science and research through liberal arts".

Laying out his strategy, Bill Durden explains the rhetoric used behind defining the new Dickinson brand, "The themes and keywords that define the Dickinson story, are unequivocal: a useful liberal education, citizen leaders, crossing borders, interdisciplinary, reflect America - engage the world". Dr. Durden also emphasized college's historical roots by including "revolutionary" and "founding fathers" in his arsenal of keywords which he often utilizes during many of his marketing campaigns. For a college boasting to be "citizen leaders" and "crossing borders", it needed more influx of minority students, so a policy was enacted that did not require SAT scores from prospective candidates and as a result, the proportion of minority students was increased from 4% to 12%.

What ensued after these changes was read by many on October 5, 2001, issue of Wall Street Journal. The quality of incoming freshmen improved as financial aid to students was determined on the basis of academic merits versus student need, and used as a tool to tip students Dickinson way if a competition was coming in the way to recruiting the best students. Alumni giving also saw positive growth as it tripled to $9 million, growing from 30% to 45%. Dickinson College was regarded as an up and coming institution that showed promise to students who wanted to investigate the bigger picture and engage with the world outside of their academic chambers and campus hallways. It is true that Greek or Latin may not cure a disease and universities like Johns Hopkins and Stanford will continue to be banner holders for academic champions, but language is important as it constructs our world and as much there is to lose in translation, there is still a lot that can be gained from translation as well.