Alumni Weekend 2025 Town Hall

As part of Alumni Weekend 2025, Antoine Grant ’07, president of the CMC Alumni Association, interviewed President Hiram Chodosh during a Town Hall Q&A in Pickford Auditorium. They discussed a variety of topics, from polarizing politics and perceptions of higher education, to navigating national challenges through The Open Academy, to continuing momentum for groundbreaking projects like the soon-to-open Robert Day Sciences Center and the under-construction Roberts Campus Sports Bowl.

The following are excerpts (edited for clarity) from President Chodosh’s responses during their conversation. For more on CMC’s revolutionary approach to integrated sciences, read our Q&A with President Chodosh in the latest CMC Magazine.


On why President Chodosh told this year’s graduating class that “the 64% of Americans who have lost confidence in higher education have not met you:”

Higher education is the crown jewel of this country. It is the driver of innovation. It's actually one of our most competitive exports. It rivals soybeans. And the economic impact, the diplomatic impact, the network effect is enormous. Incalculable. And two thirds of Americans have lost faith in us. Why?

Well, some of it is political. But way before our political moment, we were suffering this decline in trust in higher education. Yes, it's a universal decline in trust in all institutions. Absolutely. But the decline in trust in higher ed is severe.

One of my points today is that we cannot compete with external threats until we compete with internal ones.

Higher ed faces internal challenges. How many students enrolled in four-year programs in the United States graduate within four years or six years? Only about 60%. How many students who are first in their family to go to college graduate within six years? 26%. How many students who are Pell-funded graduate within six years? 16%.

The cost value proposition is upside down. A tremendous number of our CEOs, VPs in HR, in our major companies, say that our kids aren't prepared. Our civic knowledge, understanding, and engagement has completely flatlined. We've made limited impact on their learning. One study indicated that 45% of college students, after two years, show no increase in critical thinking.

And higher ed has become politicized both within and without. We're developing a culture—not just of kids, but a culture of people—who only think through things from one side. Who can never admit a vulnerability of one side of the argument. Who don't create space for concurrence and dissent. Who love conclusions, only sometimes, maybe in search of evidence.

Antoine Grant ’07 (left) and President Hiram Chodosh at the Town Hall Q&A during Alumni Weekend 2025.

And so, what I was telling our graduates is this: you are the positive deviant in the parade of horribles that our politicians, and some of our journalists, want to paint about our youth. Our students prove the possible on every index. Return on value. Their ability to actually earn a living and to do well to raise a family. One year after, five years after, ten years after … Look at the data. We’re first in confidence in speaking up. We're third in tolerance of different viewpoints. And these things don't go together in our current country: We are number one in politically most aware; we're number two in student government, most politically active; and we're number three in friendliest students.

(Recently) I was doing a recommendation letter for a national award for one of our (tennis) scholar leader athletes, Ella Brissett ’25. She's a two-time All-American, two-time doubles champion, Phi Beta Kappa, and she has three peer reviewed publications in print with two submissions. And at the end of my letter, I said something like, “you probably don't believe what I've just written because Ella Brissett is not supposed to exist in our world.” So that's why—and what I meant when I said that the 64% of Americans who don't have confidence in higher ed have not met our graduating class of 2025.

On national politics and threats to higher education from the executive branch:

Our role here is to prepare our students for their “future world of affairs,” to quote from the Original Idea of the College. We have always been future- and outward-facing in our approach to education.

We had a group from Oxford come in to observe and meet with students in our PPE program, for example, and they were stunned by the ability, yes, to dig deep into the classics, but also to think about the application of that intelligence to the issues of our day.

So, on the first level, we have to take on those big controversies. Second, we need to prepare our students for navigating and resolving the political crisis that we face in the United States today. We are beyond polarized. Polarization is not just a political problem. It's also a social problem. We are living in increasingly segregated environments. Our kids go to schools that are segregated economically—75% of our school systems are more segregated racially today than they were before Brown v. Board of Education. We have been unable to restore our covenant with the future, our social contract, our constitutional values. If we do not reinforce those constitutional values, we will lose our own identity, what binds us together, as Americans.

Third, we have to understand the importance of making hard distinctions. So, let me ask you, do you think that universities should enforce the civil rights of the country? Yes. Do you think universities should enforce their own policies internalizing those civil rights? Yes, absolutely. Do you think that the executive branch should respect judicial independence and co-equal branches and congressional authority? Yes. Do you think the executive branch should enforce due process and not jump over four steps of the legal process before intervening in a particular university? Yes. Can we say all those things together when our politics want to push us to one side or the other?

It's like we've reached this moment in our country where everyone's being forced to choose sides. And it's not just on this particular set of issues. It's not just on Harvard. It's anything. You come to the intersection and our political moment is saying, turn left or turn right. There are no choices. And the way forward is completely foreclosed.

Now, the way we deal with this particular external threat is not just to sit back and defend ourselves and say, “oh, let's just collect our own interest—you can't do this, and you can't do that, and don't do this, and don't do that.” Because to most people in the country, that 64%, it looks defensive, hollow, reaffirming of everything that they have figured into their views of higher education.

We have to own our problems. We have to own our responsibilities. We have to demonstrate the ability to prove the possible against those challenges. And then in little molecules, in the drop of water in the ocean, like CMC, we have to find some way of spreading that molecule to other drops and to others. If we can't boil the ocean, at least put up some kettles for tea around the country so that we can democratize the wild success we're having here. Spread that throughout the country—and actually help institutions that don't have our resources, that don't have our amazing community to solve for these problems.

On why The Open Academy has been successful and can cut through political polarization at CMC:

Imagine you're an incoming first year student. You get an Open Academy (admission) prompt. You’re (in at CMC) … you’ve got an online course from the Constructive Dialogue Institute. You show up for your first day at CMC. You have a two-hour training with Vince Greer on dialogue. You go on your required wilderness (WOA) trip. You're with First-Year Guides. Guess what? They’re trained in constructive dialogue. You go to your dorm. Guess what? Your RAs are trained in constructive dialogue. You go to your first Senate Assembly meeting. Guess what? They’re trained in constructive dialogue.

I can tell you the difference … we have traction. We have identification. It's built into the culture. Even when people are upset with me, they’ll quote The Open Academy now. They go, ‘This isn’t Open Academy!” I love that.

Now, there are political trend lines that run through our culture. They run through intellectual cultures. They run through student cultures. We can't be hermetically sealed off from those trends. And if I could hermetically seal us off, I wouldn’t do it. Because it's not the world that we live in. And it is not the world that our students are going to enter.

We create an environment where faculty are questioned coming in about their commitments to (Open Academy) principles. And they have to demonstrate in their presentations and their interviews that this isn't just, you know, talking the talk. They can walk the walk.

We also live in an era of credulity in that people will believe anything as long as they trust the source. But then they'll disbelieve anything as long as they distrust the source. To me, the solution to all of that is to create, to recruit, and to also prepare indoctrination-proof students.

A few years ago, someone said to me while talking about this problem nationally, “Hiram, it’s so hard, because when our students go to class, they might have a disagreement. And then they have to go back in the dorms and live with one another.” And I said, “Let's flip that!” Their relationships in the dorms, as friends, should be so close as brothers and sisters that they can withstand any argument in the classroom. That’s the strategy that we’ve built here.

On the endurance of the CMC mission and why it’s important to preserve for all of higher education:

I've grown a bit despondent about how little the word learning is in the national conversation. When I talk to my peers about the mission of higher ed, many of them are very research-one focused. That's understandable. That’s vital. But they rarely talk about learning. And some of our peers who are very strong on the commitments of The Open Academy, when they talk about why it is that they're committed, they talk about a mission that is focused on the search for truth. Now, there's nothing wrong with that as a mission. But it is such a narrow part of what even the best research universities do.

What makes our mission so special is this fusion of liberal arts and responsible leadership. We grapple with the great questions of our civilization and how to develop the most responsible leaders in business, government, and the professions.

We make a complete investment in our student body to give them our unconditional support, even when they fail, and at the same time, to raise every single ceiling of expectations that we can. Here we help them fight against every educational prejudice that they may have in themselves, and to help them tear down any barrier that stands between them and what they hope for themselves or want to do in life.

That student centricity is focused on their learning and their leadership development. This is, sadly, far too exceptional. Everything we do—from all the work on our Opportunity Strategy, to The Open Academy, to the new curriculum that we're developing through integrated sciences—is all there to build that responsibility, that leadership in the world. Yes, in business. Yes, in government. Yes, in the professions. But also in civic life and in their communities.

In addition to being first in confidence speaking up, third in tolerance of other viewpoints, and first in politically most aware, we are also third in friendliest campus. That is not an accident. That comes from all of you. That comes from culture. That comes from this bond—this social bond that is so CMC. But it also comes from strategy.

We have built a whole student life strategy around relationships and friendships, and not just peer to peer, but with us. There's tremendous trust that we built internally. It's not perfect, but it's so strong. All of that trust, that social contact—those relationships and bonds of mutual support are the foundation for all learning and leadership development.