Steering a school of tradition through a time of transition

Traditions and timeless features are hallmarks of Linfield University.

Pioneer Hall, Streak Street, the Paul Durham statue, the Murdock Hall sundial, the acorn ceremony, to name a few.

But this is a school in transition, encountering AI-era challenges, including budget and staff cuts and attracting and retaining students.

Into the picture comes Dr. Mark Blegen, who began work as Linfield president on July 1. We welcome him to the community. His evident understanding and respect for Linfield’s history will serve him well. There is pithy wisdom in Blegen’s remark, about student retention, “It is way less expensive to retain a student than go get a new one.”

There’s pragmatism in his thoughts on phasing out some programs and potentially adding others.

“Higher education loves to build things; we have a harder time sunsetting them,” he said in a Wednesday interview. “So, we do need to take a look at which programs we need to say goodbye to.”

Credit Blegen for earning a welcome to the community.

“I am very relationship centered,” he said. “There is the saying that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’: If we’re not on the same page, any strategy is not going to go anywhere. How do you do it? You develop a network and get to know people.”

Blegen places high value on “the Linfield experience” — what he calls the unique sense that students and alumni have about their time at the university and their continuing relationship with it.

“It’s a recurring theme,” said Blegen in the Aug. 9 interview in the News-Register.

Opportunities are in the works, including a partnership with this newspaper, to meet the new president, and welcome him to McMinnville. Blegen, the institution’s 12th full-time president, considers his first months in the community a full learning opportunity.

He won’t need reminding that the 425 new students arriving for class this fall are, like him, forging their Linfield experiences. And the hundreds of returning students will see wrinkles and obstacles in the new school year, part of myriad life changes taking hold between the ages of 18 and 22.

As he starts his own Wildcat journey, it seems clear Blegen is also attuned to what the institution is experiencing.

Blegen credited former interim president Rebecca Johnson, who served in 2024-25, and the rest of the administrative team for helping him with the complex task of onboarding.

The first order is to apply his own experiences while developing an understanding of others’: he’s meeting faculty one-on-one and connecting as much as possible with students and members of the community.

Blegen’s emphasis on collaboration will stand him in good stead as he finds his ground at Linfield. He brings a diverse background that includes overseeing budgets, fundraising and employing inclusive hiring practices, as well as creating and expanding undergraduate and graduate programs.

These credentials will help him with a goal he stated Wednesday: institute new programs in engineering and medicine.

Blegen’s wheelhouse should help a healing process nurtured by Johnson and others after the frankly tumultuous six years under Dr. Miles K. Davis, the previous full-time president. Davis departed under, if not a cloud, a heavy mist.

Now, seven weeks into Blegen’s tenure, impending challenges include the mid-September rollout of budget cuts that have been the talk of campus for months. Layoffs have already happened and more are to come. The institutional and personal impacts of those decisions cannot be fully known until they occur.

There’s encouraging enrollment news: 425 new first-time undergraduates, and about 84% of last year’s freshmen are returning for their sophomore year, a 5% jump in retention compared to the previous year.

The new president places a heavy emphasis on retention and notes how many of his colleagues would wish for such a retention rate. “Whatever is going on at Linfield, students are buying into it, and we’ll get through these challenges. We’ll get our budget balanced. There are challenges — and I wouldn’t be here if there weren’t significant opportunities.”

Ultimately, Blegen regards himself as “a student of Linfield.”

Two final welcome-to-McMinnville pieces of advice for Blegen:

The new president’s commute is a short one — a two-minute walk across the historic oak grove — but we recommend the old “go to work by a different route” idea. Check out the historic plaques, including the one placed by the Class of 1922, all but hidden under a tree just west of the president’s residence. And while it’s still dry in Cozine Creek ravine, take in the bucolic surroundings that have long served as an Environmental Studies outdoor classroom. These are forms of welcome and acclimatization as valuable as handshakes and talks over wine or coffee.

On Blegen’s bookshelf is Marvin Henberg’s 2006 Linfield history “Inspired Pragmatism” — an essential read for anyone wanting to learn about the Linfield path.

It tells what college leaders and faculty did, over the years, to create and sustain the vibrant place that is Linfield. But another reading matter Blegen would do well to find is more recent: “When Life Gives You Lemons,” aka “The Linfield Poem.” Guided by the student staff of Camas journal, and the Linfield English department, several hundred people — students, faculty, staff and friends of the university — in 2024 contributed single lines which a panel then turned into a semi-epic poem.

There’s also humor in it (“The squirrel jumped on my head,/Dug its claws in my hair”), but mostly it is a collective statement of Linfield’s past, present and future: aspirations and frustrations, longing and loss, celebrations and salutations.

“Oak leaves, students chatting; chatting hope, chatting promise”: the line exudes the oak-filled milieu of its authors, but other lines almost plead for a wider context. “As the leaves are changing, the people are too…Ever so attentively I bear witness/To the cacophony of the curiosities /That eagerly surround …