Big Man on Campus - Moravian College

A View from the Top
Basketball
Dynasty
Chris Thomforde’s undergraduate experience at
Princeton University included a stellar career
on the varsity basketball team. Bill Bradley,
Princeton class of ’65, helped basketball coach
Willem Van Breda Kolff persuade him to come
to Princeton. He was featured on the cover of
the February 27, 1967, issue of Sports Illustrated
with teammate Gary Walters (class of ’67, and
now director of athletics at Princeton) as a
sophomore, captained the team as a senior,
and, like Bradley, was drafted by the New York
Knickerbockers for a professional career in
basketball (which lasted only through a two-
week training camp in 1974) after graduation.
Although he found the ministry and academe
more rewarding than a professional sports
career, athletic endeavor remains a significant
influence on his outlook.
You use sports metaphors to express many
things, and sports evidently provided a great
learning experience for you that carries over
into your life now. How does Moravian’s
Division III athletics program fit into its liberal
education and purpose?
I think wonderfully. The
idea of Division III is that
athletics should be part of
the learning experience that
students have. So it’s not
that a student learns calcu-
lus or Greek or biology over
here and then plays football
over there. Paul Moyer, our
athletics director, is good at
asking: what learning takes
place on those fields? Or in
James draKe/sports illustrated
those locker rooms, or on those buses, or during
a game? What have I learned about dealing
with pain, or dealing with the judgments of other
people, or getting along with people I don’t like,
or dealing with success? Those are the things
that can be learned there, that can’t be learned
in a chemistry lab or history class.
You cite the value of liberal arts colleges
in general. How would you say Moravian is
different from other places? What makes
it special?
Every school of which I’ve ever been
a part, either as a student or as a teacher,
chaplain, administrator, has had some
sense of community. But I think the Mora-
vian religious tradition informs the value
of community here. Probably not explicitly.
But the Moravians, the religious group,
had a notion that the truth is discovered
in community. Much of scholarship, as you
know, can be kind of a solitary, isolated kind
of endeavor. I’ve been impressed, just in a
couple of months, to find that community
is very important here, that we discover the
truth in community, and we live out our lives
together in community.
I was just reading Zinzendorf, who’s
quite clear that the interpretation of the gos-
pel only takes place in community. It’s not
ex cathedra, in which a bishop says this is
what this passage means, and you all believe
it. That value is intersected by a realiza-
tion that is occurring in many small liberal
arts colleges, driven by the complexity in
scientific discovery, that the understanding
of the world is not really departmental any
more, but that you need interdepartmental,
interdisciplinary work. I think the
days of having a major in one area
and thinking that that was enough
probably don’t exist any more. So
you have the sciences, in particu-
lar, seeing that the world is quite
complex, and you need a number of
disciplines in order to understand
the world. And this is aided by this
piece out of our religious tradition.
I think that can be very fruitful
here.
I also sense a balance here
between the liberal arts—how do
you think broadly, how do you articulate
complex ideas and paradoxes cogently, how
do you become familiar with your own great
traditions as well as other people’s—and
a healthy kind of pre-professional train-
ing. We’re not a school to train bankers, or
to train doctors, but if you’re going to be
a banker or a doctor, this would be a good
place to come to get some of the skills that
are necessary to do that, balanced with the
sort of broad thinking, creative expression,
careful articulation that comes along with
the liberal arts. And our artistic tradition,
our very important attention to music and
art, also provides a balance between aesthet-
ics and technique.
The other piece, as compared to other
schools I’ve been at, is that we’re in the
middle of a city with the rusty remains of
the Industrial Revolution. The city poses the
educational question: what kind of future
are we building for our students in the new
technological era that’s coming up, when all
our institutions—health, government, educa-
tion, religion—were shaped by the industrial
era that, at least in North America and Eu-
rope, is essentially over. The blast furnaces
are large monuments to something that was,
and they are reminders that Moravian has an
opportunity to help think about what comes
next, and what will be required of us as hu-
man beings both professionally and person-
ally in this new order that’s coming.
What personal values and traits are
most important for the president of a col-
lege like Moravian?
One quality that’s very important is clear-
headedness: to be able to think clearly about
issues that are complex. I think another
virtue you might have to have is an apprecia-
tion for people. Because these are small com-
munities, the motivations of the people who
are here are other than power and success
or capital accumulation. So you have to be
sensitive to their motivations, and know how
to appreciate them, and support and sustain
them. And then I think there would have to be
a love for the things of the mind. Running a
college is different from running a business,
because our business is thinking, learning,
and performing, and if you don’t love those
things, and don’t enjoy reading, or you don’t
enjoy listening to music or watching a good
football game, you’re going to be fundamen-
tally out of step with the primary function
of the place. And then you need a pretty good
work ethic, because there’s a lot to do, and it
never stops.
Where do you intend to focus your ef-
forts as president? What’s your number-
>
one short-term goal, and what are the
longer-term goals?
My number-one short-term goal is simply
to learn about this community. In any com-
munity there are espoused values or rhythms
that you can see on the surface of things, and
they’re good or bad as the case might be, but
they’re obvious, and you should take them
seriously. Then there are also operational
values, and you won’t learn about those
until you’ve gotten into some kind of crisis,
because then you really see how people be-
have or what they really think is important.
So I think number one is to get to learn who
we are and what we are all about. There are
many good things in place here, so I don’t
have to come and invent everything.
Next would be to do some strategic
thinking. We have good people, we’re in a
good city, we have a good heritage, and we’re
doing many things well. What would it mean
for Moravian to grow and become better or
more mature? We’ve gone through a period
of enrollment growth and financial growth,
so maybe in some ways we’re like teenagers,
in that regard. Things are growing, and we’re
getting used to the size of our feet and hands
and body. But you don’t just keep growing
infinitely. You reach some sort of point of
physical growth, and that stops, and then you
have to become more mature in other ways.
You’ve said that Moravian is on the move.
Where is it going, and what are the chal-
lenges and what are the scary parts?
One of the destinations I would like to
arrive at is to become an “exemplary” institu-
tion. You don’t have to be big or famous to
become exemplary. I’d like Moravian to come
to mind if somebody were to ask, “where is a
really good art department,” or “what schools
with seminaries also have really good nurs-
ing programs,” or any of a number of other
questions. If we were known amongst our
companions, peers, and aspirant group as re-
ally knowing how to do things well: that’s the
sort of destination I would rather get to than
being number 25 or 62 or 198 or number 1.
I think that the risky part for us will be
two things, and they are manageable, but
risks. One is on the revenue side: how do
we increase revenue so that the school can
continue to run, and even increase revenue a
lot, so that it can be enriched, without rais-
ing tuition exorbitantly, so that we would
eliminate our historical market. For me,
that would be, how do we really make the
endowment grow, how can we make the an-
nual fund grow. The second big issue is how
we keep access open to capable students
regardless of their ability to pay. Especially
in the forties and fifties, we were recognized
as a place where the son or daughter of a
steelworker, or a high school teacher, or a
postman could come and get a really good
education and end up being a doctor or a
teacher. So that’s sort of our calling, or voca-
tion, you might say, but with the change in
demography—more and more new immi-
grant groups coming into the country—how
do we have enough revenue to make sure
that people can come to Moravian who are
intellectually able but maybe not financially
able. So I think creating revenue and keeping
the door open to people of ability are our
two big challenges going forward.
What do you see as the role of a liberal
arts institution today? And in the future?
A liberal-arts education is absolutely
essential for men and women going forward,
for this reason: at its best a liberal arts edu-
cation should enable someone to distinguish
between things, think clearly about certain
matters, and gain a kind of moral agency,
having sorted and having thought through
a decision, and taking action for the sake
of the common good. I think historically
the liberal arts have fostered those kinds of
thinking, discerning, and acting on behalf of
14 MORAVIAN COLLEGE MAGAZINE WINTER 2007 WINTER 2007 MORAVIAN COLLEGE MAGAZINE 15
photo by John Kish iV
everybody.
In our time and going forward we have
this huge explosion of access to informa-
tion. But how do you know which piece of
information is authentic, or which is helpful,
or what relationship exists between this bit
of information and that bit of information?
A liberal arts education helps you not only
discern differences, but also make connec-
tions. And to distinguish between the good
and the bad, and to prefer the good, and
have the courage to act upon what you think
is authentic. W