I fully believe that adherence to values need never be compromised for want of financial resources. It is this belief that I carry forward in the discussion on tuition revenue.

And if any member of the college chastises me for taking a firm position, they must necessarily indict the institution which has before and continues to praise me for a fiercely independent and highly ambitious drive. Did anyone think that an increase in “academic excellence” over the last ten years would equate to a wave of pleasant passivity among students and faculty?

Did anyone think at all about what real demands would be placed on a college that attempted a coup d’Ètat of the nation’s elite liberal arts colleges while still clinging to a highly individual socially-conscious ideology?

In 1992, when the Board of Trustees refined the current incarnation of the college’s mission—“Macalester is committed to being a preeminent liberal arts college with an educational program known for its high standards for scholarship and its special emphasis on internationalism, multiculturalism, and service to society,”—did it occur to anyone that “preeminent” was synonymous with “wealth,” while the “special emphasis” on internationalism, multiculturalism, and service to society, best embodied by access to often excluded groups, necessarily required a tolerance for less ambitious financial growth?

I hope there were some voices of reason that warned against the current state of fiscal over-commitment. But I fear that those voices were drowned out by the excitement incurred by national news coverage that portrayed Macalester as the new kid on the elite-college block.

And unlike a student who over-commits beyond their capacity, Macalester cannot so easily withdraw from its current commitments, nor should it attempt to.

According to a careful analysis of the Resource Planning Committee report on tuition revenue, as well as my patient discourse with Prof. Danny Kaplan, it seems that Macalester College is a rare gem, an operational paradox.

Any education with a $30,000 sticker price, no matter how enticing the rebate, must target a wealthier demographic. The admissions office is host to several marketing surveys which reveal that for prospective students, elite private colleges are synonymous with wealthy colleges.

However, given that Macalester offers financial aid to 70% of enrolled students, has a 45% discount rate (both of which are benchmarks for our 40-peer comparison group), and offers a more generous balance of grants to loans than our competition, we are resisting the fundamental nature of the institutions we are trying to compete with.

Both ideologically and financially, our serious commitment to economic diversity (though obscured in campus discourse) marks Macalester as the liberal arts college “not like the others.”

Even those schools in the public domain, whose social objectives elicit state and federal support, fail to match Macalester’s success in balancing access and quality. The average student at the University of Minnesota, for example, has a higher family income than the average student enrolled at this private college.

And while for the sake of consistency I use the term ‘quality and access’ with regularity, I believe it is commonly understood that a diverse student body endows a college with a valuable form of quality.

So then, in the debate concerning ‘quality and quality,’ a question arises which is familiar to a great many seniors who will soon embark on the next stage of their lives: Can we create a balance between basic needs and basic beliefs that is honest, sustainable, and commensurate with our desire to positively impact the world?

Whether we like it or not, as members of the college that I love to call home, we are all participating in an unusually successful, though apparently unsustainable, experiment in balance.

But to restate, I fully believe that adherence to values need never be compromised for want of financial resources. And the financial stewards should agree. For what is money but a denotation of value, a placeholder marking the commonly accepted worth of a good or service? And what is the worth of Macalester College without a sacred commitment to core values?

At this time, I care far less about how the trustees vote on the immediate question of whether to adopt a financial aid budget than I do about their dedication to taking advantage of an educational opportunity.

This is the primary reason why I endorse the request by the Legislative Body of Macalester College Student Government to delay their decision on need-blind admissions until May.

With the attention of so many disparate members of the Macalester community trained on the institution, and with the general curriculum under review, our approach to educating global citizens up for discussion, the nature and purpose of residential life and student affairs undergoing a collaborative change process, there is no better time than now to develop a more sustainable vision for this small, urban Midwestern college.

I am still waiting for this larger discussion to commence, and I am growing steadily more impatient.