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Statement from Ngoni Munemo

Thank you for the opportunity to reflect upon the past 3.5 years as Dean of Faculty at Hamilton College, a role and community that has far exceeded my hopes of what was possible when I was first on campus between May 1-3, 2022. Ahead of that invitation for a campus interview, I shared with Professor Karen Brewer (chair) and other members of the search committee that I was: “captivated by the position announcement for Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty at Hamilton College because of how it spoke to the college’s unwavering commitment to liberal arts education. [And was] also inspired by the acknowledgement that to deliver on the transformative promise of a liberal arts education, we have to collectively build and sustain a learning environment that encourages creativity, exploration, and active citizenship.” Four years on, the enchantment and motivation remains, sharpened and polished by meaningful everyday encounters and experiences with colleagues and all the things we've been able to accomplish together.

In this statement, I begin with a discussion of what I saw as priorities when I arrived. I then highlight some of our accomplishments together these past few years, touching on the approach and disposition that orients my engagement with colleagues. As I note above, there are areas where I have been less successful in bringing impactful change which, if I am renewed as Dean of Faculty, require my creativity and flexibility.

When I was on campus in May 2022, I was given the following prompt for an Open Faculty Forum: “ As Hamilton enters its 210th year, there are a number of priorities, opportunities, and challenges that the college will be navigating over the next 5-10 years. These issues include grounding an institutional commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging; community building amongst faculty; and ensuring that our faculty have the resources necessary to excel as teacher-scholars.” I was also asked to speak to the following at a Community Presentation: “ Hamilton College is in the process of renewing its faculty, at the same time that it seeks to enhance a dynamic, rigorous curriculum and foster a diverse and inclusive educational environment. How have your experiences in overseeing institutional changes in personnel, programs, and resource allocation prepared you to enable Hamilton to face its particular challenges and opportunities ?”

While I don’t fully recall all that I shared in my remarks at these fora [1] , when I arrived on campus in July of 2022 it was clear that the themes in these prompts–commitment to DEI, community building amongst faculty, providing resources for faculty to excel as teacher-scholars, guiding faculty renewal, supporting curricular review and development, and managing resource allocation–needed to be priorities for me as Dean.

Looking back at this list of priorities, and other needs gleaned from my listening tours, I am proud of what we have been able to move forward, even while recognizing that more is needed to continue to advance Hamilton’s distinctive educational mission. With regard to DEI, with your buy-in and commitment, as well as with the support from the incredible team in the Dean of Faculty office [2] , we worked to evolve and revamp tenure-track hiring procedures, particularly around developing deeper more diverse applicant pools. In so doing, we remained invested in taking advantage of the opportunity presented by faculty renewal to add colleagues who bring new questions, puzzles, backgrounds, and approaches to Hamilton. Here, it’s noteworthy that for the fourth fall in a row Hamilton has sent a group of faculty to the SREB’s Doctoral Scholars Program (https://www.sreb.org/doctoral-scholars-program) conference. This annual conference provides an opportunity to bring awareness of the College to doctoral candidates who may not be as familiar with Northeast liberal arts campuses, but who have all the potential to build thriving careers here. These visits have augmented the many effective and productive recruitment strategies that individual departments and programs have in place. Owing to the tremendous work that individual hiring departments and programs put into our shared commitment, I have seen first-hand the richness and diversity of our new colleagues. Of course, like you all, I am also keenly aware that retention of faculty is equally important. If re-appointed as dean, I will prioritize addressing several factors affecting our overall retention numbers including, notably, how we approach supporting partners/spouses.

In many of my early conversations with faculty upon my arrival, I learnt of the issues with our Maternity Leave policy. Many faculty expressed frustration about the unevenness of time off teaching provided by that policy. Under our old policy it was possible, depending on the timing of birth, for some faculty to get no time off from teaching while others got two semesters off teaching. Following a series of consultations with faculty, discussions with HR, and collaboration with Academic Council, we revised the Faculty Handbook to replace the old Maternity Leave Policy with a Family Leave Policy which now ensures that all new parents are entitled to a semester’s leave.

Coming out of COVID, our shared sense of community had been stretched and strained. I continued with the program of hosting faculty at the Dean’s House (After Work Drinks), focusing on cross-department/program and generational attendance. At these sessions, I have been struck by the number of colleagues who met each other for the first time or reconnected after several years of not seeing each other in person. In my first several months on campus, faculty also expressed the desire to have a space to share a meal (lunch) with colleagues, as had been possible in years past when Backus House acted as something of a faculty lounge. In response to this need, and in recognition of the importance of building community not just among faculty, but also among staff and between faculty and staff, we created the Employee Lunch program in The Hub. Looking ahead, I am eager to explore adding days to the Monday and Thursday lunch service.

As was signaled during the interview process, I also gave a lot of thought to what it means to be a community of learning, asking questions about what opportunities we have to come together to engage with our colleagues around their intellectual/creative pursuits–those things that bring them excitement, pleasure, and fulfillment, and drew them to a life on a college campus. We launched an internal lecture series, Conversations Across Disciplines, born out of my desire to build a (ritual) space for us to come together as a community and learn from each other. I called it Conversations Across Disciplines because among my early observations of our community was that we are spread, stretched, and scattered along Martin’s Way, making it hard to imagine frequent exchanges between colleagues in different fields and divisions. My hope then was to fashion a space for cross disciplinary and divisional exchanges, asking faculty invited to pitch their talk for a general audience. As with all forms of social engineering, this experiment worked well but needs tweaking. One idea I have is to move to just one lecture per semester, adding more ‘pomp and ritual’ to the event. As has been a feature of my tenure as dean, I also welcome your creative ideas on how to evolve this program to better support our community-building efforts. In addition, I have co-sponsored with LITS a series of lunch talks at the library celebrating faculty and staff achievements that have been very well-attended and have made space for some of the synergies that draw our campus together.

Thinking creatively about professional development for colleagues to excel as teacher-scholars has been a major focus of my deanship to date and will continue to anchor my engagement if I am reappointed. Over the past three years, I have worked with the Dean of Faculty team to reorganize pedagogical development support for faculty (Pedagogy-in-Practice grant program), streamline procedures for ongoing support for faculty research (Works-in-Progress grant program), and introduce new funding opportunities (Faculty Teacher-Scholar Awards). In addition to these smaller programs, I am proud that as a Deans team we were able to develop the Hamilton Annual Research and Travel (HART) program, which sets aside $4,000 each year for professional development for faculty. This year will mark the third year of this program. Looking ahead and subject to robust analysis of utilization rates among faculty, we shall look into whether it’s possible for faculty to roll-over a fraction of their unused HART funds to future years. Such an adjustment, were it feasible, would account for the reality that opportunities for professional development may vary from year to year.

Furthermore, if renewed, another priority in the area of professional development support for faculty will be reviewing our sabbatical program. Our current leave program consists of two elements, what we offer for new assistant professors and then for all continuing tenure-track faculty. As a baseline, new assistant professors get a semester at full pay normally in their 4th-year on the tenure-track, or the full year at 50% salary. After the assistant professor leave, tenure-track faculty get a semester at full pay for every 5 years (10 semesters) of teaching. Tenure-track faculty can take the full year at 50% of their salary. For faculty who take semester-long sabbaticals, we don’t replace them with visitors. If faculty take a full-year sabbatical, we authorize their department or program to hire a replacement for the year. In the dean's office we have run some initial models to estimate what it might take to shorten the number of semesters of teaching (currently 10 semesters) before a faculty member is eligible for a semester sabbatical at full pay. Additionally, we have been looking into the additional endowments we would need to raise to increase the base pay for faculty who opt for full-year sabbaticals. These explorations are necessary to ensure that the College continues to provide the two critical resources–funding and time–faculty need in order to become the very best teacher-scholars.

Finally, on continuing to evolve and advance how Hamilton supports teacher-scholars, as I think about a second term, together we will need to address climate and lived experience among the faculty. The responses to the COACHE survey show that, while we are, for the most part, competitive with respect to our peers on many dimensions, significant disparities exist internally, by rank and demographic groups. Last year, an ad hoc committee of Anna Huff, Courtney Gibbons, Pavitra Sundar, Todd Franklin, and Zhuoyi Wang met with me once a month to review the COACHE survey responses. Together we identified a few priorities to address climate and the lived experience for faculty. I am looking forward to sharing these broad areas with the faculty in spring 2026, and developing a collective plan of action.

On the curricular front, a change we should all be proud of is the addition of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies (https://www.hamilton.edu/academics/departments/american-indian-and-indigenous-studies) program and minor. I had occasion to look back at my remarks at the November 1, 2022 faculty meeting, at which I shared that I had been thinking quite a bit about founding myths; the stories we tell ourselves about our origin as an institution, what those stories allow us to see, and the inconvenient truths our myths sanitize, permitting us to forget. At that meeting I invited faculty interested in interrogating our founding myth and its unfulfilled promise to a series of conversations to explore developing offerings in Native & Indigenous Studies. Thanks to the broad campus interest and commitment, and the incredibly tireless and creative work of Brianna Burke, our faculty fellow, and Nathan Goodale, today we have a program offering a minor and a three-year Mellon Grant (https://www.hamilton.edu/news/story/mellon-foundation-native-indigenous-oneida-nation) to support program-building in partnership with the Oneida Indian Nation. For me, this initiative stands as a true testament of what is possible with broad cross-campus commitment, collaboration, and creative curricular-visioning.

Beyond the addition of new programs, we have also come together for broader visioning and idea generation around our curriculum. This started in spring 2024 with an invitation to faculty (in groups of no more than 16 faculty at a time) to After Works Drinks at the Dean’s House organized around four broad prompts about our curriculum: what we value, but may need tweaking?; what directions do we want our curriculum to move in over the next 5 to 15 years?; exciting areas in your fields, among other prompts. Over two-thirds of the faculty came to the house over the course of that spring, generating many compelling ideas to advance our curriculum looking to the future. To help move these ideas forward and begin the work of identifying areas of convergence and intense interest, in spring 2025 we came together for an all-faculty curricular retreat, the first in a long while at Hamilton. Over 90 colleagues participated in this half-day retreat, clarifying further the areas of the curriculum around which faculty have a collective interest in exploring. These two rounds of curricular discussions among us as faculty, in my mind, meant that we entered the Aspirational Design process launched this fall with many concrete ideas of things we would like to see. It has been heartening to witness Aspirational Design surfacing many of the directions discussed at the Dean’s House in spring 2024 and affirmed at the faculty retreat in May 2025. I am excited for the work ahead to center these faculty-generated ideas into Open Curriculum 2.0 and the Aspirational Design process.

At the wider and broader institutional level, I arrived in July 2022 as the College was completing its responses to the two recommendations that resulted from the Middle States accreditation process. With direction from Dean Keen and leadership by Nathan Goodale, the College successfully responded to these recommendations, building curricular and institutional assessment structures. Seeing all the work and labor that went into these responses and coming from a different accreditation context, I asked then President Wippman to consider a different accreditor for Hamilton. With the greenlight from President Wippman, Nathan Goodale and I led the process to switch from Middle States to NECHE. As we wrote then, our rationale for the move was straightforward: “Hamilton College is in good standing with MSCHE, and we maintain a positive working relationship with its leadership and management. However, the recent reaccreditation process highlighted dimensions of our institutional structure and organization that would benefit from an approach to accreditation more aligned with NECHE, including a focus on peer institutions similar to Hamilton and an emphasis on presenting ideas, providing feedback on draft documents, and building relationships through an iterative process.” We are now accredited with NECHE–along with many of our peer institutions–and are poised to benefit from their deep experience supporting liberal arts colleges.

Also at the broader institutional level, I was honored to collaborate with colleagues and students to develop Crossroads: Elections and Practicing the Liberal Arts (https://www.hamilton.edu/events/crossroads-2024-elections) in fall 2024. The initiative focused on developing an array of integrated programming around the 2024 elections that spanned the full range of disciplines, departments, and spaces on our campus. Our goal was to create opportunities for the engaged creativity, open conversation, and critical thinking that are the hallmarks of a liberal arts college. I shared then that Hamilton was the perfect space for engaging with and practicing democracy in action that election season, and every day. Given the success of the crossroads initiative, I am eager to explore with colleagues how we can use similar approaches and programming to engage other topics, recognizing the power that lies in drawing upon all the components of a liberal arts campus.

I hope that the selected review of some of the work since becoming Dean of Faculty makes clear my unwavering investment in the liberal arts project as the best way to educate students for the known and unknown futures they will encounter. My love and passion for the liberal arts was sparked by a serendipitous opportunity to study at Bard College as an exchange student from the University of Zimbabwe. The experience at Bard transformed me and forever changed my path. Each day I am spurred on by a deep commitment to pay that experience forward, in the firm belief of the transformative capacity of a liberal arts education.

As we have labored in advancing each of the initiatives and programs discussed above, I have been guided by the principle of collaboration, born from a commitment to shared governance and a core belief that collective decision-making produces better, more enduring results. I believe that all that we have done is a testament to that. Alongside collaboration, listening to emergent faculty needs has also been key. A prime example of this for me are the conversations and exchanges that revealed the incredible additional work faculty supporting students with documented accommodations were doing. Through creative repurposing of FTE under the division, I worked with faculty and staff colleagues to establish our Accommodated Testing Services office and hire Michael Stratton as its inaugural coordinator. The center opened this fall.

I concluded my Community Presentation on May 2, 2022 with the following words: “The dean position at Hamilton is an opportunity of a lifetime, one that would allow me to directly advance academic affairs issues … I am thoroughly excited by the possibility of taking this step in my career and at the prospect of joining this community and advancing Hamilton’s mission. I am invigorated by the prospect of collaborating with faculty, staff, and students in helping Hamilton continue to offer a stellar liberal arts education.” I am confident that in my record as Dean to date and how I have approached that work, you see that those words were not just lip-service, but ideals I aspire to lead by.

I am re-invigorated by the possibilities and the prospect of where we can take Hamilton together should I continue as Dean of Faculty.

Thank you for your thoughtful review,

Ngonidzashe Munemo

Provost and Dean of Faculty, Professor of Government

[1] I do remember a slight panic setting in as I came perilously close to losing my voice half-way through the Community Presentation. I am grateful to whoever it was who was kind enough to get me some water

[2] Penny Yee, Tina Hall, Nathan Goodale, Natalie Nannas, Nicolas De la Riva, Jeff Ritchie, Stacey Manley, Linda Michels, Kelly Walton, and Kim Reale.

Hamilton College is an affirmative action, equal opportunity employer and is committed to diversity in all areas of the campus community.