Recently, I had the opportunity to engage in a turnaround of a small college. What I learned along the way was that fiscal stress is debilitating. The stakes are high, and you can’t think about much else. Innovations that occur are focused on revenue. Then one day you finally get to the tipping point when all of your community’s resolve is rewarded and you can start looking forward to sustainability—fiscally and otherwise. Which brings me to the introduction of this volume of President to President.

In 1994, the U.S. Department of Defense closed Fort Ord as part of its Base Realignment and Closure process, the largest U.S. military base to be closed at the time. Built in 1917, Fort Ord housed 50,000 service members at its height and was the staging ground for the Korean and Vietnam wars. Fort Ord’s closure meant that a third of the economic base of the region was eliminated in one stroke.

Like any new president, when I arrived on the campus of Wofford College in July 2013, there was a sense of anticipation and an expectation of change. The 11th president in the college’s 160-year history, this was my first presidency, and I knew that there was an opportunity to be seized.

Innovation—the ability to anticipate and respond to changes taking place on our campus and throughout this 21st-century world—sets leading colleges and universities apart from the thousands of other institutions in the higher education marketplace. Innovation on our campuses can take many forms. Often it means adapting an existing strategy to emerging demands.

In 2020, those of us who have the privilege of working in higher education as college and university presidents have found ourselves at the helm of complex organizations coping with three significant crises. The first crisis is the public health emergency represented by COVID-19, a once-in-a-generation global outbreak of a highly contagious and novel disease. The second is the economic emergency triggered by the pandemic, requiring teams around the world to reinvent the way they do business. The third, prompted by the tragic loss of another Black life at the hands of law enforcement, is the unrest associated with renewed calls for social justice as we reexamine issues of racism and abuse of power.

There have been few moments as filled with transition and innovation as the spring of 2020. With limited warning, all of American higher education pivoted to respond to the global pandemic brought forth by COVID-19. In the face of a global public health and economic crisis, we found that what we value most in higher education was suddenly pathologized: no longer were we allowed to be in proximity to one another as we learned and lived together.

Hindsight is said to be 20/20, and with hindsight 2020 may be remembered as a transformational year in which real innovation took hold across the American higher education landscape. While colleges and universities are often criticized for a reluctance to change, the COVID-19 pandemic shocked the system and necessitated wholesale modifications in teaching and learning, as well as institutional policies and even business practices. As the scope of the crisis became apparent, at James Madison University (JMU) we sought to embrace the opportunity to think creatively about what we do and how we do it.

The 2019-2020 academic year will figure prominently in the histories of our universities and colleges. Early in the morning of October 28, 2019, I awoke in the President’s home located near our University to the heavy presence of smoke in the air. Looking from my yard toward our campus atop the Santa Monica Mountains in Los Angeles, the unthinkable was suddenly very real.