Grant Cornwell on Liberal Education, Leadership, and Judgment in the Age of AI

Interview by Charlie Render

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dr. Grant Cornwell has spent his career thinking about the purpose of liberal education and the kind of leadership it can make possible. Before coming to Rollins College, he served as president of The College of Wooster and held faculty and academic leadership roles at St. Lawrence University. His work has moved across philosophy, global studies, higher education leadership, and the question of what makes multicultural democracies possible.

In this conversation, Cornwell reflects on his path into higher education leadership, the lessons he learned leading institutions through change, the philosophical traditions that shaped his judgment, and why The Rick Goings Institute has a timely opportunity to help leaders think more deeply in an AI-powered world.

From Philosophy to Higher Education Leadership

Charlie Render: Before we get into RGI, I wanted to start with your own path. You served as president at Wooster before coming to Rollins. What originally drew you to higher education leadership?

Grant Cornwell: This is a story that needs to be told, so I am going to go way back and do it quickly.

When I went to college, I knew I wanted to be a doctor because my mom told me I did. I went to St. Lawrence University as an undergraduate, majored in biology, and did well. But as I moved through the major, I started to feel that biology was not answering the questions I thought were most urgent, the questions I was most passionate about.

So I started shopping around in a true liberal arts way. I took courses in economics, Shakespeare, Buddhism, and art history. Then I came upon philosophy, and I thought, "No, these are the questions that are really important." I ended up graduating with majors in both philosophy and biology.

I still did not know whether I would go on in biology or philosophy, so I spent a year in Germany learning German, drinking German beer, smoking a pipe, and reading Nietzsche while trying to sort out my pathway. I was applying to all kinds of graduate programs. I had done a semester away from college working for the National Forest Service out of Ely, Minnesota, on a black bear project, and the principal investigator was trying to pull me into graduate school at the University of Minnesota in wildlife biology. I was thinking about that, medical school, and philosophy programs.

Then I found a program at the University of Chicago that was literally the place to study the philosophy of biology. I thought, "This is where I can bring my interests together." So I went to Chicago for graduate school.

It turned out that the questions in philosophy of biology were, for me, very boring analytical questions about the philosophy of science. Interesting, but not what I most wanted to pursue. But the University of Chicago was an amazing place to be a graduate student because it was so intellectually open. It had departments in philosophy, history, and political science, but it also had interdisciplinary committees like the Committee on Social Thought and the Committee on Ideas and Methods. You could do your Ph.D. in ideas and methods or social thought.

So I ranged widely in my coursework and studied with amazing professors. Eventually my advisers were saying, "Grant, if you are going to have a University of Chicago Ph.D. in philosophy, here are your prime opportunities for continued research." I said, "Thank you, but I am really committed to being a professor of philosophy teaching undergraduates." They said, "Really? You want to do that?" And I said, "Yes, I really want to do that."

I went on the job market and got a tenure-track job at my alma mater, St. Lawrence University.

I loved being a professor of philosophy at St. Lawrence. But what I loved even more was the mission of liberal education. As a professor, my sphere of influence was my courses and my research. But if I moved into leadership, my sphere of influence could become the department. So I became chair of the department, and suddenly I could help shape a whole philosophy curriculum for a liberal arts college. The palette was getting larger.

At St. Lawrence, there was also a lot of creative ferment among the faculty. Many of us thought students needed an immersion experience in the liberal arts as soon as they arrived at college, so they could understand and engage with the mission. That spoke my language.

With faculty from across the college, we created a required first-year program. It was inspired by John Dewey and built as a living-learning program. The core idea was to introduce students to the fundamental concepts, texts, and thinkers that make up the liberal arts, both from the Western canon and from global and contemporary traditions of thought.

But the deeper idea was that students would experience the real heart of liberal education, which is dialogue. These first-year courses were team-taught, interdisciplinary courses. Four faculty members from four disciplines would teach 40 students. Twice a week, we met as a larger group, where students could hear faculty from different disciplines approach questions in different ways. Then twice a week, each faculty member met with a smaller group of 10 students focused on research, analysis, writing, and speaking.

It was all about helping students take big ideas, make them their own, and give them voice through writing, speech, and research. What made it powerful and cutting-edge was that those 40 students also lived together in a living-learning community. We wanted the ideas not to be left in the classroom. We wanted students working on papers together, doing projects together, and experimenting with ideas in their lives together.

That became an incredibly rich program. I was not the founding dean, but I became the second dean of it. So my scope of leadership expanded again. Now I had the whole first-year program, with faculty from across the curriculum working together.

The one condition I set was that I would be dean not only of the academic dimension, but also of student life for first-year students. Because if it was truly a living-learning program, the student affairs staff needed to be aligned with a common philosophy of education. I did that, and it was awesome.

Wooster, Rollins, and the Liberal Arts

Charlie Render: How did that lead to the presidency at Wooster?

Grant Cornwell: After doing that work for a while, I took a research sabbatical. When I came back, a colleague had received a major grant to start a global studies program. It was not international studies. Global studies was a new paradigm then, and we were helping create it.

The program looked at global issues through two lenses: political economy and cultural studies. Usually those two do not mix very much, but this major asked students to study both, then bring them together in a senior research project.

By that point, I had become dean of the faculty and chief academic officer. Now the whole academic program was my palette for creativity and innovation. I thought that was the best job in the world. But after doing it for six years, I started getting calls about presidencies.

The College of Wooster is a very special place. It is singular in higher education, and it captured my imagination. What makes it singular is that for more than 50 years, every graduate has completed a three-semester mentored research project, one-on-one with a faculty member.

Every graduate takes the full curriculum, but then they also spend three semesters creating, pursuing, executing, and defending a research project. Mentored undergraduate research is one of the most powerful pedagogies out there. There is learning, and then there is deep learning. When you mentor a student for three semesters on a research project, they come out changed. It is a powerful program.

I was at Wooster for eight years. At that point, I had a whole college, with a powerful and distinctive educational philosophy. That was awesome.

Charlie Render: Why did you move from Wooster to Rollins?

Grant Cornwell: A lot of my work has been in globalization, and my driving research question has been: What makes multicultural democracies possible?

America is, and always has been, a multicultural democracy. But we often think we are the only one, and we are not. There are other interesting examples. India is one. Trinidad is another, and I did a lot of my research in Trinidad as a multicultural democracy.

I believe in my bones that liberal education happens through being in conversation with people who see the world differently. That means people with different life experiences, faith traditions, races, ethnicities, and gender identities.

I had always believed in that and worked toward it at St. Lawrence and Wooster. But frankly, I was tired of trying to pull off that mission in rural white America. St. Lawrence is in rural upstate New York. Wooster is in rural Ohio. In those places, you have to import all your diversity and export all your global engagement.

Then I saw Rollins: a liberal arts college in the middle of a global city, where tens of millions of tourists arrive each year from around the world, where the economy is already globalized, and where the society is already multicultural. Students can engage through research and internships in the kind of world they are going to lead when they graduate. I thought, "I have to go there."

Charlie Render: That explains some of the differences between Wooster and Rollins. From a leadership perspective, how were the two presidencies different?

Grant Cornwell: There were two big differences. First, Wooster was my first presidency. I made a lot of rookie mistakes. By the time I came to Rollins, I could make other mistakes instead of those mistakes.

I am a real maven of strategic planning, but when I did it first at Wooster, it totally crashed and burned. I almost lost my audience because of the way I went about it. I learned some hard lessons, went back at it, and learned how to do it. When we did it at Rollins, I knew how to do it, and it worked much better.

Your second presidency is different in that way. You are more seasoned. You have a vision, and you know better how to execute it.

The second difference is that Wooster is a liberal arts college full stop. Rollins has the College of Liberal Arts, the Crummer Graduate School of Business, and the Hamilton Holt School. It has three legs to its stool. In some ways, that makes it a sturdier organization, but also a more complicated and more interesting one.

Research, Race, and Multicultural Democracy

Charlie Render: You mentioned your sabbatical earlier. Tell me about that work.

Grant Cornwell: I was studying multicultural, multiracial democracies and what makes them work or fail. I took an early interest in what became known as critical race theory, and I became very interested in racial dynamics and the formation of nationhood throughout the Caribbean.

The Caribbean islands are independent nations, but they all have colonial legacies, and those legacies are different. It is very interesting to see how islands with Spanish colonial histories understand race, racial dynamics, and racial identity in relation to nationhood, compared with former British, French, or Dutch colonies.

I was about two-thirds of the way through a book that was a comparative study of race and nation in the postcolonial Caribbean, especially in light of the different legacies of sugar and slavery. My sabbatical was in St. Kitts, which was the most prosperous sugar island during the colonial era.

As a lens, I was studying how different island nations treated the former architecture of sugar plantations. Some places have stone structures that obviously used to be something, but people do not want to talk about them. Others have made monuments to that history and narrate the whole history. Still others have turned former sugar plantations, sites of incredible colonial brutality, into luxury inns and hotels.

The people who go there, whether they know it or not, are participating in a kind of colonial desire. It is creepy and interesting. That is what I was studying in St. Kitts.

Charlie Render: You mentioned British, Spanish, French, and Dutch colonial legacies. Could you give an example of how those differed philosophically?

Grant Cornwell: They are complicated, but the French example is especially interesting. The French were, in some ways, among the first to understand the complexity of the social construction of race. They treated their colonies in the Caribbean differently than the British or Spanish did. Each colonial legacy produced different ways of understanding race, nation, and identity.

Leadership, Change, and Patience

Charlie Render: We talked about Wooster, Rollins, and what motivated you to be in higher education leadership. When an institution is under pressure or going through major change, where do leaders most often get challenged? Is it setting direction, making tough decisions, or something else?

Grant Cornwell: I think there are more leaders who have a compelling vision than there are leaders who are able to have followers.

The real challenge is building leadership capital so that people will work with you, join the vision, and move an organization. The worst leaders are the private geniuses who have a vision and may even be right, but have no emotional intelligence, no relational intelligence, or are arrogant. Nobody wants to work with them.

One of the maxims I developed is this: any time I had to use my positional authority as a leader to accomplish a goal, I had failed as a leader. If I had to say, "No, this is the way we are going to do it," using my authority, then I had failed to persuade the community that it was the way to go.

Charlie Render: Do you think that is something leaders either have or do not have, or is it a trained muscle? Not everyone is charismatic or good at persuasion. Or is that not even what it is really about?

Grant Cornwell: I think it is a trained muscle. I learned it in two ways: through my own failures and by watching leaders fail.

I have had leadership mentors I aspired to be like, but some of my most influential teachers were leaders who had critical flaws in their leadership. I learned by watching and thinking, "That is not the way. That is not working."

The most challenging thing in leadership is inspiring people to want to follow and work with you. The number one failure of leadership is hubris. It is the leader who walks into a room already sure they are the smartest person in it.

Charlie Render: The cliche is that you want to be surrounded by people who are smarter than you.

Grant Cornwell: Exactly. And it is true.

Charlie Render: What do you understand about leadership now that you probably would not have said earlier in your career?

Grant Cornwell: That real institutional change requires far more patience than I understood earlier in my career. When I was younger, I was more impatient. I thought, "Let's go." But deeper change requires giving people time to understand, buy in, own it, and move together. That takes a lot of patience.

Another thing I understand now is that I used to think, naively, that once you successfully executed a change and put it on the ground, it was done. But change requires constant stewardship. If you do not tend to that change, as soon as you turn around, it starts moving back toward what it was. The pull of inertia back to the status quo is unbelievable.

Charlie Render: Even going back to the Civil War, Lincoln tried to implement changes, and then he died and so much crept back.

Grant Cornwell: That is an excellent example. Change is not fixed in place just because you secure it. It has to be stewarded.

Philosophy as a Practical Discipline

Charlie Render: Your training is in philosophy, but your career has involved making real institutional decisions with pragmatic consequences. How has philosophy shaped the way you think about judgment?

Grant Cornwell: I have a handful of philosophers and thinkers I have taught for 40 years, and there is not a day or a decision I make where I could not trace the lineage of my reasoning back to some fundamental ideas, principles, or values.

Philosophy has been very practical for me. It is a practical discipline because, at its core, it is a decision-making discipline. It is about cultivating reflection and judgment. I have used philosophy every day in the office.

Charlie Render: Are there particular philosophers or philosophies you find yourself returning to in those pragmatic decisions?

Grant Cornwell: I am a big fan of Immanuel Kant. If I were to tell the origin story of the idea of human rights, the idea that every person is imbued by their humanity with dignity and therefore deserves to be treated in certain ways, that is anchored in Kant for me.

I go back there all the time. It shapes how I try to treat people, even when I disagree with them. It does not matter how someone is behaving. They are a human being, and therefore they have dignity. I have to behave toward them as a being with dignity.

A lot of what I think education is about, especially liberal education, is how to live well. That is a fundamentally Greek approach. Plato and Aristotle, and I did my dissertation on Aristotle, are concerned with how a human being flourishes. What are the qualities that enable a person to fulfill their purpose?

The Greek word is eudaimonia, often translated as happiness. But real happiness is fulfilling all of your potentialities as a human being. That is what liberal education equips people to do. That is right out of Aristotle.

The last one I would mention is existential philosophy, especially Jean-Paul Sartre. Existential philosophy brings us face to face with the implications of freedom. Meaning is not given; it is created. It is created by the choices you make and the life you create.

That existential confrontation with the profundity of freedom, and the anxiety and dread it can produce, but also how empowering that freedom is, has been a fundamental school of thought for me.

RGI and Leadership in the Age of AI

Charlie Render: Let us talk about RGI. You are now going to be leading the advisory board for the Rick Goings Institute. What made RGI feel like the right next chapter for you?

Grant Cornwell: It is really my partnership with Anil Menon.

When we were searching for the dean of Crummer, I did something very uncharacteristic for me. I intervened. The three finalists were fine, but we needed something much more than fine. I always respect the work of a search committee and the process, and the finalists all belonged at the table. But they were all fine.

Then Rodney Adkins, who was on the search committee, said, "Grant, I think you need to talk to this guy. I used to work for him at IBM. I think you might find him very interesting."

It was supposed to be a 20-minute meet and greet by phone, and it turned into a two-hour phone call with Anil. We immediately started talking about what business education needed to look like going forward: grounded in the liberal arts, involving judgment.

Even though we did not have a particular vision of RGI when Anil came, we both agreed that we needed to shore up the MBA programs in Crummer, because Crummer was languishing. Anil knew how to do that. I did not.

But we also saw that a real growth opportunity was in executive education and leadership education grounded in the liberal arts. That is where the idea of leadership education for judgment came from.

At the time, that vision was not yet inflected by AI. Now the value proposition of RGI has been redoubled by the advent of AI, because judgment, context, and understanding are exactly what is needed to drive the ship in the age of AI.

Charlie Render: We are trying to use the phrasing "AI-powered, human-led." There are a lot of places talking about leadership, and there are many executive education programs with transformational leadership classes. What does RGI need to do differently if it wants to stand out in a meaningful way, especially when every school is going to try to write AI into its programs?

Grant Cornwell: I think our core value proposition is helping business leaders understand that judgment comes from more than knowledge of finance, marketing, and accounting.

Judgment comes from understanding the social, political, and economic context of your business: its implications, where the levers are, who it is serving, and what kind of world it is operating in. Literature, art, history, economics, and politics have to round out a leader's understanding of the context of their business.

That is what I think we are going to do that I do not see out there.

Charlie Render: In that spirit, when you look five or 10 years ahead, what do you hope RGI becomes known for?

Grant Cornwell: I hope it becomes known as a boutique, very sophisticated center of leadership thought.

Maybe a pragmatic Davos in Winter Park, on a small scale. We are not looking to compete with Davos or become Davos. But I like the idea of an institute where those kinds of ideas are in play with the people who come through our programs.

Charlie Render: The American Davos in Winter Park.

Grant Cornwell: That would be very cool.