A Message from the President’s Office

My Journey to Southwestern College – Thom D. Chesney

As a lifelong writer and storyteller, I have grown accustomed to words flowing freely from my thoughts to a page or podium. I love crafting poems, weaving narratives, engaging with my audience, and soaking in readers’ and listeners’ reactions to my handiwork. As I introduce myself here to the Southwestern College community for the first time, I am feeling again the same curiosity, energy, and connection that first emerged when I saw the advertisement seeking your next president.

I remember it well, because it appeared near the end of a yearlong period of discernment and reflection following my second college presidency. Since starting undergraduate school in 1984, I had been on a college campus for nearly 40 consecutive years as a student, employee, or both. It is what I knew best and where I continuously discovered how much and how little I knew and why I would forever embrace lifelong learning and all its sources. From within the deep listening of my self-granted sabbatical emerged strongly the sense that whatever I was to do next in this life should be centered on the well-being of those with whom I worked and all those we were called to serve.

That Southwestern placed its bold and distinctive mission, vision, and core values so prominently in the position description resonated with me—so much so that I sent the posting immediately to my wife Noelle who also sensed something immediate and special and suggested to me that a consciousness-based college in Santa Fe, NM, was going to be unlike anything anywhere else and, considering the times in which we all live, never more vital and needed in today’s world.

My ensuing exploration and experience with SWC during the search process and continuing to this day has been uniquely inspiring, illuminating, and affirming of my original decision to apply. It is important to share this with you both for what it may reveal about me and the College alike. The week after I submitted my application materials to the search committee, I received a simple note, “I truly enjoyed reading your letter of application.” To some this might seem unremarkable, but in the higher education world it is increasingly rare to have a job application acknowledged with anything more than template language or an autoreply. This already felt different. (Noelle was right!)

When a week later I was invited to a Zoom interview with the search committee, I remember the sense of calm and connection I felt in that moment. I had previously watched online Ann Filemyr’s video message to the college about the search process; so, to have her personally share an interest in my candidacy and transparently offer essential information about expectations and opportunities for the next president felt authentic and inclusive. Colleges of every sort talk about being a community of learners, a supportive family of collaborators, or both. Here I was already viewing a window into Southwestern’s culture and core values of Partnership, Empowerment, Mindfulness, Service, and Love.

It soon became abundantly clear through the initial interview to campus visit to every email exchange that although the next president would be different from those previous, they must be and feel indelibly connected to their predecessors and the founding principles, participants, and history of the College. This got me thinking a lot about Ralph Waldo Emerson who I learned later is among those influencers interwoven into Southwestern’s curriculum, much as he is my personal philosophy.

I shall never forget the questions—lots of them—and each one clearly designed not only to learn about me but also to reveal more about Southwestern. After each session, in a kind of post-interview denouement, I found myself reflecting (to share a few):

• What in my career had prepared me to discuss consciousness and Light Figures? (For starters, my career is but a sliver of my earthly human experience. How I have lived this life, with and for whom, and what have I learned along the way—these provided the framework of my still incomplete and evolving answer-in-progress.)
• Should I have expected a student to ask what word or phrase in the moment I felt centered in front of me, perhaps pressing against me? (Of course! And for the record it was “believe.”)
• Was it okay to wander into and meander about my spiritual journey? My beliefs about our universal connection to nature? How numerous and diverse therapies like those offered at SWC radically changed the course of our son’s life? (Yes, yes, and yes!)

In the end—which is clearly not the end at all—I was invited to join you on the journey which I now know began without my knowing before last fall and will commence in full this coming July. I am humbled by the invitation and inspired by the colleagues, students, alumni, trustees, and community members with whom I will get to collaborate to ensure that Southwestern College, the New Earth Institute, and the Tierra Nueva Counseling Center remain adaptive, secure, and resilient in their ability to transform consciousness through education for generations to come.

What can you expect from me? To be available and accessible, curious to a fault, listening to learn and lead, and a vocal and visible storyteller with and for you. Even before I arrive in Santa Fe, I invite you to connect with me on LinkedIn (Thom D. Chesney) and Instagram (thomchesney). Just as the Bhagavad Gita reminds us to “Never stop learning, because life never stops teaching,” so I come to you. I look forward to seeing you soon.