Planting Trees

Three years ago, at the start of my first fall here, we planted five or six apple trees along the back line of our acreage. In the intervening time, one has died and been replaced, we’ve added another couple, and the others are growing at a mysterious rate determined by weather, soil quality, and sunshine. Right now, one of these trees has one little apple on its branches, the first we’ve had on any of our fruit trees.

Recently the metaphor of growing fruit trees has begun to take over my thinking about how institutions change, not only relative to faculty hiring but also in terms of the various projects we undertake each year, the reforms we try to implement, the planning we do, and the processes we follow.

The applicability of the fruit-tree metaphor to hiring faculty should be clear. You recruit new faculty to the university, plant them there, tend them according to your inclinations and available time, and hope they take root and bear fruit in your institutional climate. Some of them don’t make it, while others grow quickly and sooner or later bring new strength to your programs and community. But in every instance, it takes time to find out whether they are going to work out. Your soil may be too infertile or too rich for some; others may find (literally or figuratively) that your winters are too long and cold or your summers too hot, wet, or dry.

More broadly, as this year begins I am thinking about institutional projects as well as hiring. As I have written recently, we are looking at making a large number of new faculty hires this year. Several of the positions are to meet needs or interests we had determined in the process of strategic planning and over the course of our reaffirmation process with the Higher Learning Commission last year. We have shifting enrollments and programs that have earned new lines through particular strengths that clearly call for further resources. We have some new institutional interests (e.g., sustainability) that don’t yet have the appropriate faculty expertise to move ahead.

The challenge to many of my colleagues and me is that we have a fairly good idea of where we want to go in various areas of the institution—there are plans in place, goals to be met, and initiatives to make happen. But here’s where that tree metaphor really works: It usually takes a long time for these plans, goals, and initiatives to reach fruition. What we plant now may take a couple of years, or longer, to start to grow.

We do things that express faith in the future of the institution. It’s an exercise in futility to plant a small fruit tree if you know you’re going to move in a year. It’s a huge waste of time, money, and effort to make big institutional investments without a belief that they are the right thing to do and the hope that, over time, they will accomplish the goals set for them. But instant results are not to be expected, and to think that large changes can be accomplished instantly is, arguably, to ignore the nature of the institution.

But that one little apple on the growing tree along our back fence shows that, with patience and tending, at least some of these investments will pay off even as others, for whatever reason, do not. But you have to do the planting anyhow, for without that, there’s no chance at all of a future harvest.