The Character of a College

At Skidmore, the question wasn’t only what students should learn, but what kind of place learning should happen in.

On a fall afternoon in Saratoga Springs, the paths across Skidmore’s campus fill with a familiar choreography: students crossing between science labs and sculpture studios, someone carrying a cello past a molecular model, a group debating politics outside the library steps.

 It is the kind of scene colleges use in brochures, but at Skidmore the image has long functioned as something closer to a theory. The college has spent more than a century trying to stage encounters like these — moments when knowledge slips its categories and education begins to look less like instruction than like formation.

Institutions rarely think of themselves as characters. They describe missions, enrollments, strategic plans. But Skidmore has always cultivated something more like a personality: part craft school, part liberal-arts enclave, part experiment in what a campus can make possible. During Philip Glotzbach’s presidency, that personality came into sharper relief, not because he invented it, but because the pressures facing higher education forced the college to explain itself aloud.

What emerged was less a portrait of a president than of a college wrestling with its own nature.

A College Born Between Hand and Mind

Skidmore’s origin story resists the usual categories. Founded in 1903 by Lucy Skidmore Scribner, it was never purely classical nor purely vocational. Its earliest students learned literature and chemistry alongside design, bookkeeping, and industrial skills — a hybrid curriculum meant to give women intellectual authority and economic independence at once.

That dual commitment, linking the life of the mind to the realities of work, became the college’s genetic code. It shaped the move in the 1960s from cramped downtown buildings to the open Jonsson Campus, where trustee Josephine Young Case issued her famous “Charge to the Architects,” insisting that the campus should express the unity of knowledge and offer “freedom in the mind and horizon in the spirit.”

The buildings that followed were meant to make that idea visible: departments placed near one another, libraries at the center, spaces meant for accidental encounters. Skidmore’s motto, Creative Thought Matters, wasn’t meant as branding. It was meant as operating instructions.

By the time Philip Glotzbach arrived decades later, the institution already carried that inheritance — along with the question of whether it could survive in a more transactional age.

The Problem With the Diploma

By the early twenty-first century, colleges were increasingly judged by outcomes that could be quantified: salaries, rankings, job placements. At Skidmore, that shift produced a subtle anxiety about whether the institution’s character still made sense.

Glotzbach’s answer was to name the problem bluntly. Higher education, he argued, was drifting toward what he called the “ATM model”: students deposit tuition for four years and withdraw a credential at the end. It was a metaphor that caught on not because it was clever, but because it felt accurate.

The challenge for Skidmore was not simply to reject that model rhetorically but to demonstrate an alternative in practice. The college began to frame the undergraduate years less as a transaction and more as a developmental space — a period in which students could test identities, commitments, and intellectual habits before adulthood hardened into routine.

In that sense, the institution’s self-understanding shifted from providing instruction to providing conditions. The question was no longer only what students should learn, but what sort of environment could help them become.

A Campus That Tries to Teach Without Speaking

Walk the campus and the argument appears in material form. The Tang Teaching Museum sits not on the periphery but at the intellectual crossroads, meant to pull art into academic inquiry rather than confine it to aesthetic appreciation. Scribner Library has been reshaped into a hub that houses writing support, media production, and research tools under one roof, an acknowledgment that knowledge now travels through many channels at once.

The Center for Integrated Sciences, with its shared project spaces and open labs, was built to dissolve departmental borders physically, forcing biologists, chemists, and environmental scientists into proximity.

These decisions weren’t only about facilities. They were attempts to make the campus itself a teacher — to create an environment where interdisciplinary thinking happens not as a slogan but as a daily inconvenience.

Even the older Tisch Learning Center, with its more rigid layout, functions as a kind of cautionary artifact: a reminder that architecture can lock pedagogy into past assumptions. At Skidmore, buildings have become arguments about how knowledge should move.

Friction as a Form of Education

If the campus expresses the unity of knowledge, the student body expresses the diversity of experience — and that diversity has not always been comfortable.

Like many colleges, Skidmore saw its demographic diversity increase over the past decades. But internal surveys suggested that the lived experience of inclusion lagged behind the numbers. The institution’s response was not only administrative but philosophical. Diversity, in Skidmore’s vocabulary, came to be framed less as representation and more as friction — the productive tension created when students encounter lives unlike their own.

Programs such as Intergroup Relations courses and experiential initiatives were meant to stage encounters where difference could become learning rather than avoidance. The aim was not harmony but maturity: the ability to live with disagreement without retreating into certainty.

In that sense, the college’s civic ambition grew clearer. It was trying, in its small way, to teach people how to inhabit a pluralistic society.

Education in the Age of Automation

By the time artificial intelligence began reshaping public conversation about the future of work, Skidmore’s emphasis on integrative thinking took on new urgency. If technical skills could be automated, the value of education might lie elsewhere — in judgment, interpretation, and the capacity to connect domains of knowledge that machines process separately.

Glotzbach often warned that outsourcing thinking to technology risked eroding intellectual agency. The point was not to reject new tools but to ensure that students retained the capacity to evaluate them. In this framing, a liberal education became less about mastering information than about maintaining ownership of one’s own mind.

That concern pushed the college to double down on what it already valued: writing, discussion, interdisciplinary inquiry, and the messy human work of forming ideas in conversation with others.

The Personality of a College

Seen this way, Skidmore’s story is not simply about programs or presidents but about an institution trying to remain legible to itself. Its personality — restless, interdisciplinary, slightly stubborn about its ideals — has been shaped by more than a century of choices about what education should mean.

During the Glotzbach years, that personality had to speak more clearly than before. Rising costs, technological change, and political skepticism about higher education forced the college to articulate its purpose in public terms.

What it ultimately claimed was simple and difficult at once: that college is not merely preparation for work, but preparation for judgment — the ability to live responsibly among others in a complicated world.

In that sense, Skidmore’s story is not exceptional. It is emblematic. The questions it has wrestled with are the questions facing higher education everywhere:

At Skidmore, those questions remain open, embedded in classrooms, buildings, and conversations that continue long after any single presidency ends. The institution moves forward as colleges always do — through successive generations trying, in different ways, to build an architecture in which freedom might still be learned.