Magic Moments
"The success of any leader is reflective of the quality of the team surrounding them. All of my successes, and I mean all, are of this college, but there is not a single initiative that I undertook that I accomplished on my own." – President Christina Royal
Holyoke Community College celebrated the leadership of President Christina Royal on Wednesday, May 3, in advance of her retirement in July. She offered the following remarks at the end of a series of speeches honoring her legacy as HCC's fourth presdent.
Photographs from the celebration can be viewed in our Facebook album ...
Watch the entire speaking program on Holyoke Media ...
'I'm just so touched by all of the remarks that all of your shared today. I'm truly speechless and am just deeply grateful for the meaning behind them and how heartfelt they were.
It is truly such a privilege that so many of you came out today to celebrate with me this afternoon. There are so many people to thank and so many stories to recount. But there are three foundational pillars that have guided my life and leadership that I wanted to briefly talk about, including having a growth mindset, recognizing that representation matters, and focusing on unlearning. So I'd like to share just a few stories of significant moments in my life and presidency.
The first is about growth mindset. When I was a little girl, I found a magic set at the Salvation Army, which is where we frequently shopped. It was a huge set, but it had all of the pieces, a deck of cards ribbons to pull up sleeves and hats, and most importantly, a magic wand. I loved magic, and I learned all of the tricks and proceeded to have magic shows in the neighborhood with my friends. And it was exciting. They were enamored by me being able to guess the card that they pulled out from a deck or to be able to decipher which shell the penny was under. And while my time using magic was all child's play, I felt that there was a very powerful lesson in learning magic. It was an understanding and belief that the mind was so powerful it could make you believe or not believe anything, including about yourself.
To some degree, the future is an illusion that's shaped by our thoughts and our beliefs about what may happen in the future. Helping students to embody a growth mindset and realize the potential that's within them is what HCC does best. A term that came up in our strategic planning process was relentless encouragement. That's what we provide to students, relentless encouragement and the support for them to succeed. We have so many students, including first-generation students with parents who have never attended college, and others who may not yet have been told or shown how to utilize their own potentials and gifts.
That magical deck of cards opened up my mind to the world of endless possibilities. And our faculty and our staff do the same for our students. I am amazed by our students and what they're capable of, and also what they believe for themselves. They are indeed our future, and they are going to change our communities, their families and the world.
I want to also talk a little bit about representation and why it's so important. Shortly after becoming president, the college held an event for celebrating women International Women's Day, and they asked me to speak at that event. That was one of my first events. I shared stories from my own life to help students, faculty and staff get to know me as a person and who I was as a leader. I spoke about being born as a bi-racial person in 1972, the same year Title Nine was enacted, but also only five years after laws changed in the United States to allow a black man to marry a white woman. I am the product of this change. If you've never seen Loving versus Loving, a movie that highlights this period of racial change, I really encourage you to do so.
After my remarks at the International Women's Day, several people came up to me to say things like, thank you for being our first female president. Thank you for being open about your identity as a queer person. Thank you for sharing your experiences about being a light-skinned person of color from others who could also identify such as some Latinos, Native Americans, two-spirited individuals. And what I really learned in that moment was representation matters. You never know who is watching. I remember what it was like growing up without role models. Sometimes it's hard to dream it if you can't see it. And the best I could hope for was for me serving in this role would inspire others to break glass ceilings where progress has yet to be achieved.
And speaking of progress, when I was a final candidate for the presidency for HCC, all of the finalists were female, every single one of them. This was groundbreaking for a college that had previously had only three male presidents. And fast forward to today. The finalist pool for my replacement was an all BiPOC group of finalists. Every single one of them was a person of color.
I'm so grateful for the work that we've done together at this college to create the conditions for this to be possible. And it's the best testament to our equity work. And I'm excited that Dr. George Timmons, with all of his amazing gifts, will also become the first African-American president at HCC. I've had a few meetings with him thus far. And I believe his ability to connect with students through his own live experiences will become apparent to everyone who works for him. And it gives me a lot of encouragement about the future of HCC.
Our success as an institution has not been in our growth, it's been in our ability to unlearn outdated practices and assumptions that limit our ability to see the exponential possibilities before us. This is our differentiator, and it's what I believe makes us a great institution. One of my first presentations to the college community was on the topic of unlearning, and the faculty, staff and students through an activity that we did after brainstormed some amazing ways that we needed to unlearn our current way of doing business to ascend to the next level from old assumptions about what our students need and want to the outdated concept that we're a two-year college when 65% of our students are part time.
We started to reimagine possibilities by strengthening academic programs, expanding and initiatives to support our students of color and rebuild our workforce programs to create better pathways into credit certificate and degree programs. And to double down on student basic needs. The pandemic helped us to unleash the power of taking risks and trying new approaches. Because it up-ended all of us and it served as a catalyst for unlearning and preparing for an ever-changing world of reimagined possibilities. It is challenging for any human to change the way they do things.
Think about how difficult it is to change our daily routine or daily tasks. Let's think about that for a moment. We're creatures of habit, we like routine. So for example, when the Mass. Department of Transportation changed all the exit numbers on I91 and the Mass Pike, it took me a long time to remember the correct exit to get to work or to tell people who were visiting our house what exit to get off, because I had that old number in my head. Or when my assistant restructured our digital file folder. And my first instinct was to look for the old file name and instead I couldn't figure out how to access her files. You can see then, just how these small differences translate to how difficult it is to make institutional change I also think about when new software upgrades change the interface and you can't quite figure out where the copy paste button is anymore.
But our ability to retool the curriculum, and revise processes for greater efficiencies, these adaptations are the cornerstone to our ability to let go of what no longer serves us and transform, and this reflects another strength of HCC, a way that we collectively leverage the pandemic for positive change. The success of any leader is reflective of the quality of the team surrounding them. All of my successes, and I mean all, are of this college, but there is not a single initiative that I undertook that I accomplished on my own.
Our investments in equity, affordability, access, and academic rigor make HCC a first choice rather than a last stop. And I know you believe that too. We are fortunate to have a community that believes in the work that we are doing and other community colleges are doing and the important role that we play in workforce development and economic development.
HCC is a first choice because of all of you so let me share a few notes of gratitude. I want to start by thanking the Board of Trustees under the leadership of our Chairman Bob Gilbert, for your dedication and belief in our college and students. Bob, you have supported me and challenged me from day one. But, most importantly, you believed in my vision for the institution. Thank you for that.
I want to thank our faculty and staff, whose commitment to our mission, vision and values inside and outside of the classroom are evident every day and reflect the heart of what we do, and also highlight the importance that we've placed on transfer, that we want students to start here and finish elsewhere. So thank you so much for the work that you do.
Students, in particular our Student Senate and our student trustees who through the years I've had a chance to work with seven of them. You are why we are here. Your willingness and your desire to co-create your own educational experience is inspiring, and gives me the greatest hope for our future. We are cultivating the next generation of leaders right now, right here.
I also want to thank our community. Our reputation is a reflection of your belief in HCC and your willingness to partner alongside of us. And so many of you are also alumni who have gone on to assume leadership roles in our region, which is another powerful testament to HCC and you continue to come and you give back to the college in so many different ways.
I also want to thank our elected officials. It's not always easy leading a college on the other side of what's seen as the nerve center of the state, but our elected officials ensure that HCC remains relevant, critical and at the forefront of conversations at the state level. Community colleges educate half of all public higher education students in Massachusetts, and Western Mass plays an important role in that. My presidential colleagues and our MACC office, both two and four year presidents who have collectively a lot of insight and from whom I've learned so much, have an attitude of collaboration and partnership that allows us to lift up higher education in our region and across the state.
And our alumni, every one of whom has had their lives changed in some way by attending HCC. They come back and they give their time. They give back with financial support, and they epitomize HCC's amazing legacy of academic student support. You give us strong roots, and you help us thrive with decades to come. Our donors, many of whom are HCC alumni, as well as those who also recognize the power of education to transform lives and positively change the trajectory of a student's future, and they want to pay it forward.
I'm especially grateful that in the audience today we have Peg and Gary Wendlandt, whose recent $10 million estate gift will impact students on a level rarely seen among community colleges. This is trailblazing at its best. Peg once told me that in 1958 Holyoke Junior College felt like family to her. And thanks to our donors, it continues to feel like family for so many of our students. I'm deeply grateful not only for your gift, but for your friendship. They have supported the vision we've enacted for the college, and students are right at the center of it.
In truth, there are so many champions for HCC who have supported me, who have advocated for our collective work to ensure student success, and whose own leadership has been an inspiration to me. There are just too many people to think individually, but please know you're all part of my journey.
And finally, I want to thank my fiancé Karen for her love and support. She is the amazing woman supporting me as I hold space for the college and the community. And she believes in my gifts and understands the work that I'm here to do in this lifetime and helps me see the world from a whole new perspective. And I can't wait to have more time with you.
And now I'm embarking on some more firsts in my life, including getting married to my beautiful partner and leaving the college presidency, a job I love. In many respects, this feels like a first, since it's not the norm for someone to leave the presidency without another job. But I'm not leaving the presidency for another job. I'm leaving because I feel called to something greater.
My purpose in being president in this moment at the college's history is significant. And my work is done. And instead of rushing into something else, I'm doing what every leader should do when they feel unsure about what's next, which is to pause. So I'm embarking on a self-imposed sabbatical to figure out what I'm meant to do in the world next. In the process.
I feel like I'm also giving people permission to settle into the unknown. While I'm stepping into the unknown personally, there's a lot known about the future of HCC. We have a strategic plan that charts our path and prioritizes equity and student success. We have a committed Board of Trustees that is in alignment with the college. We have exceptional faculty and staff who every day demonstrate their belief in our students and utilize their expertise to improve their academic programs and staff initiatives. We have a community that is invested in our success. And students, we have students who inspire us every day with their ideas, dreams for the future, and help us to design the student experience they want to have.
In the story of the college's impressive history, my leadership is just one piece of a long and impressive timeline. You all will continue that legacy going forward, grounded in our mission to educate, inspire, and connect. Thank you for the honor and privilege of being your fourth president. It truly has been an experience of a lifetime."
