Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 22, 1993 TAG: 9308220069
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LESLIE TAYLOR STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Jane Margaret O'Brien will board a plane today, bound for Southeast Asia.
But she's not on vacation.
The voyage is O'Brien's first international recruiting trip as president of Hollins College. In several Asian countries, including Japan, Taiwan and Thailand, she will inaugurate an Asian recruiting program, an effort to attract more international students to Hollins.
That O'Brien would travel such a distance to recruit students might appear an extravagant step.
But she has her reasons.
"It's a big challenge to focus oneself on a broader student body, but it's a real strong commitment of the institution," O'Brien said. "I think it's one that, across the [college] community, is embraced. The students, faculty, staff, trustees and alum all want to see Hollins more nationally and internationally focused."
That commitment has shifted somewhat since O'Brien succeeded Paula Brownlee as Hollins president two years ago.
Brownlee was diligent in building bridges between the college and the Roanoke Valley to dispel Hollins' standoffish reputation in the community.
That accomplished, O'Brien, 39, has worked to lengthen those bridges, nationwide and abroad.
The purpose is part business - keeping the Hollins name out front and enrollment afloat - and part enriching the college's offerings.
"As we've expanded our thinking about study opportunities, in many ways it's helped us define what our core looks like," O'Brien said. "And it's a campus that is evolving into a broader outreach, a more international outreach."
Five years ago, Hollins would not have reached beyond U.S. borders for students as it has now, O'Brien said. But with campuses and study-abroad programs in France, Great Britain, Japan, Jamaica and Russia, the college increasingly has focused efforts in areas outside its traditional boundaries.
Hollins' international enrollment has doubled in the past two years, O'Brien said.
The focus leaves one wondering whether recruiting students has become so difficult - with a shrinking pool of available candidates here at home - that a college must look internationally for students.
For Hollins, the effort is less a matter of survival than it is a long-standing commitment to a broader student body - to diversity, O'Brien said.
Robert Lambeth, president of the Council of Independent Colleges in Virginia, said Hollins has been on the cutting edge of overseas education and foreign recruitment for years.
"Hollins has always had a strong commitment to that," he said. "I'm sure Maggie is enhancing it. People at our schools have always felt that the presence of people from other cultures benefits American students."
Enhancing diversity means not only extending opportunities to international students but to those of differing educational and economic backgrounds.
Sixty-one percent of the college's incoming freshmen are receiving some form of financial aid, up from 35 percent two years ago. Undergraduate tuition, room and board are $18,250 this year, making it the third-most expensive program in the state.
"We're perceived as being a rich girl's school when I'd prefer it be perceived as an enriched women's college," O'Brien said. "Nowadays, the perception of a school as a rich school is less positive than it might have been 30 years ago. As a society, we're looking for cultural broadening. That's valued now."
Diversity, for now, will not include men, at least in undergraduate programs, O'Brien said. Not that the idea hasn't been considered, she said.
"There's a pretty strong commitment to remain an undergraduate women's college and continue as a coeducational college in graduate programs," O'Brien said. "I think we're pretty happy with where we are. I think people are very comfortable with the core as a woman's college."
In fact, Hollins affirmed single-sex education earlier this year when it joined several other private women's colleges in a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Virginia Military Institute. Though VMI is publicly supported and has fought to keep women out, the women's colleges asked the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the constitutionality of single-sex education for women.
"It was controversial," O'Brien said. "We had many alums who felt very strongly that we had no business dealing with a man's college. But there was a sense that it was in Hollins' best interest for us to have a resolution on the issue of single-sex education at the Supreme Court level."
Two years ago, O'Brien spoke of wanting to wake up a campus that one faculty member said had been sleeping for 12 years. Waking up, in part, has meant reallocating resources.
Reallocation was interpreted by some as financial difficulty. As members of the college community saw positions eliminated, a resulting age-discrimination complaint filed and raises postponed, they worried.
O'Brien said the college has made a point of defining reallocation as a restructuring of resources. It is a "very regularized" system of evaluation that Hollins has not practiced in the past, she said.
O'Brien said that when the reallocation process began, the college made financial information very accessible. But the college then had to contend with "`Uh-oh, we're in trouble,' rather than `Uh-oh, we're reallocating,' " she said.
"When it hurts in the pocket, if the person is not going to have a raise at a particular time when it's been routine and expected, there is a tendency to worry," O'Brien said.
The college is operating with a smaller budget surplus than in previous years, O'Brien said. In the past year or two, surplus funds - used primarily for facility maintenance and restoration - have decreased.
That alone is not a significant financial difficulty, but indicates "an imbalance that the college had not previously had," O'Brien said.
Still, with a $15 million endowment and a balanced budget, O'Brien said she is not worried about the fiscal health of the college.
"That's not really the question you worry about," she said. "I worry about the five-year question. Every time I walk into a hotel and see a desk laid out for a $250 seminar for lawyers to learn about accounting, that's what I worry about - education being taken out of the colleges and universities."
The American Council on Education reported last month that U.S. colleges and universities were experiencing a major realignment of their academic programs and services in response to severe financial pressures and other external forces. Some institutions have been forced into budget-cutting, the council reported.
Though Hollins has strengthened its financial position in the past year, the business of higher education must remain mindful of those external forces, O'Brien said.
"The threats come from all unexpected areas," O'Brien said. "I worry about how we compete as an industry. That's where we as an enterprise, as a business, have got to be paying our attention."
O'Brien has soothed her worries with a plan outlining college objectives for the next five years. She wants to see Hollins as a campus with more international exposure, a stronger exchange with international sites, a strong science and technology base and a stronger financial position.
And if O'Brien is criticized for her efforts, she will, simply, take it.
"I have a lot I want to accomplish at Hollins, and I do want to see the institution growing and succeeding," she said.
"I'd rather move the institution along and take criticism for the inconveniences than hear criticism five years from now that we haven't achieved anything."
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