University of Richmond President Kevin Hallock (Photo by Jay Paul)
Kevin Hallock arrived in Richmond in the middle of a storm.
In February 2021, the turbulence was both literal and figurative for the former Cornell University business school dean. He was holed up in a Richmond hotel on West Broad Street preparing for a marathon of interviews with administrators, deans and members of the University of Richmond’s board of trustees. The ice on the roads was thick and foreboding. “I was worried that I was going to actually still have to do all my interviews on Zoom because no one else could get to the hotel,” Hallock recalls. The ice melted soon enough, and by all accounts the interviews went well. Hallock was named UR’s 11th president just a few weeks later, on March 4.
A bigger storm, however, was gathering over UR’s bucolic West End campus. Just a week before Hallock’s hiring, the university’s outgoing president, Ronald Crutcher, announced that the board of trustees had decided to keep the names of the university’s slave-owning founder, Robert Ryland, and its former trustee and rector Douglas Southall Freeman, a newspaper editor who supported segregation, on two campus buildings. Amid a nationwide racial reckoning after the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020, UR’s board had decided that removing the names would be a disservice to the university’s “educational purpose.”
“I firmly believe that removing Ryland’s and Freeman’s names would not compel us to do the hard, necessary and uncomfortable work of grappling with the university’s ties to slavery and segregation,” Crutcher wrote in a statement to faculty and students. “It would instead lead to further cultural and institutional silence and, ultimately, forgetting.”
An Identity Crisis
“Forgetting,” it turns out, wouldn’t be a problem. Students and faculty locked arms in disapproval as protests erupted on campus that spring. On social media, some alumni threatened to withhold donations. Making matters worse, during a meeting with faculty senate members and the staff advisory council on March 26, 2021, UR’s former rector, Paul Queally, said that removing the names would equate to “cancel culture.” Queally questioned a staff member, a Black woman, commenting that she sounded “angry” and made an offhand reference to “Black, Brown and ‘regular students,’ ” according to a statement signed by seven members of the faculty senate who attended the meeting. The faculty senate would later censure Queally, but it did little to quell growing dissent on campus.
The clouds were still hovering when Hallock took over as UR president in mid-August 2021, but the challenge in front of him was clear: The elite liberal arts college was struggling with an identity crisis. The 192-year-old private university, located on a former plantation that used enslaved labor and is home to a recently identified slave burial ground, needed to change.
An acclaimed labor economist known for having a calm, approachable demeanor, Hallock decided to slow the process down and gather as much community feedback as possible. It was an academic approach — do the research, absorb and listen — that stretched on for months.
“We started a commission in August and … it had representatives from the students and staff and faculty, alumni, board — and that commission worked throughout the year,” Hallock says. In response to student and faculty protest, the new Naming Principles Commission was established last May and began holding meetings later that summer. There were 24 hours of “listening sessions,” Hallock recalls, and a survey of students, faculty and alumni that garnered 7,000 responses. “It was intentional to be open and deliberative, and inclusive of all kinds of voices. Not everybody agreed with these decisions, one way or the other, but I do think we had a fair and balanced and open process.”
The board of trustees ultimately agreed to rename six buildings on campus, including Ryland and Freeman halls, while adopting guidelines for determining how and for whom buildings should be named. Most significant is Naming Principle No. 6: “No building, program, professorship, or other entity at the University should be named for a person who directly engaged in the trafficking and/or enslavement of others or openly advocated for the enslavement of people.”
After two years of debate and protest, the University of Richmond got it right under Hallock’s leadership, says Stephen Long, a professor of political science and global studies, and current president of the faculty senate. “He came into a very difficult situation,” Long says. “I give him credit for learning what was going on and reading the room very quickly.” He adds that Hallock spent a lot of time listening to faculty and students. “He thinks very deliberatively about things, and he’s very levelheaded.”
Students relax in a courtyard near UR’s Humanities Building, formerly Ryland Hall. (Photo by Jamie Betts courtesy University of Richmond)
A Sense of Belonging
For Hallock, the naming controversy offered an important lesson. College campuses need to do a better job cultivating inclusivity, he says, while making higher education welcoming and accessible. For the University of Richmond, which has a reputation as an exclusive, mostly white prep school, Hallock has issued five “guiding lights” of strategic importance as he enters year two of his presidency. The first two are “access and affordability” and “belonging.”
“I think it’s hugely important. I actually think that there are a couple of huge issues in American higher education, and one of them is sense of belonging for people on campus,” he says, adding that the real work is only just beginning. “Creating a sense of belonging where everyone feels welcome and comfortable [on campus] will be a signature part of my time here.”
UR’s academic reputation is well entrenched (it’s ranked No. 22 among liberal arts colleges nationally, according to U.S. News & World Report), but it’s also one of the most expensive. Tuition, room and board is $75,000 a year. While the university has a “need-blind” admission policy and promises to meet 100% of an undergraduate student’s demonstrated need — for some students from lower-income families, this equates to almost full tuition — UR’s high cost is seen by many as a barrier, especially for students from middle class families and minority students. It’s grown more diverse over the years by attracting a growing number of international students, but it remains 59% white. Only 6% of students were Black in the fall 2021 enrollment count.
The university has done a good job of attracting and helping students from low-income families, Hallock says, along with students from wealthy families who can afford the full tuition, but he worries most about those in the middle. “I think there are people who don’t think about coming here because they think it’s too expensive, when in fact it may not be if they apply and see what they get,” Hallock says. “It’s cheaper to go here for some families than it is to go to a state university.”
UR’s campus is also somewhat hidden. Routinely named one of the most beautiful campuses in the country (Princeton Review ranked the University of Richmond campus No. 1 in 2021), its rolling, tree-lined terrain and Collegiate Gothic-style architecture are befitting of the “eternal values” distilled by the founders of the university, which dates to 1830 as a Baptist seminary. Hallock wants to grow the university’s connections with the surrounding community. A year after closing its downtown campus on East Broad Street due to the pandemic, Hallock is exploring expanding its reach into the city. He’d like students to spend a semester living downtown in the near future.
“A possibility would be to have a group of students living in the city, not just going down for a few hours,” he says. It’s a rough concept, one that he says needs to be well planned and wrapped around “academic content” in perhaps a multipurpose facility. The former downtown campus was more of a meeting space, an outpost for students to engage with the community.
Hallock rarely makes hasty decisions. Economists, he says, work in the margins. “If you move one little part of one thing, what might happen?” he explains, relating it to increasing tuition or increasing salaries. His life, in some respects, follows a similar deliberate pattern. From a small town in western Massachusetts, he met his future wife, Tina, when they were both 4 years old, and they started dating in high school. They’ve been together ever since.
After graduating from Princeton University with master’s and doctoral degrees in economics, he spent 10 years teaching at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before moving on to Cornell, where he worked his way into administrative roles over the next 16 years, most recently as dean of the SC Johnson College of Business. Throughout his career, Hallock has published more than 100 academic articles and 11 books, most in the field of labor economics.
“He works 15 hours a day, at least. He has boundless energy,” says R. Lewis “Lew” Boggs, who took over as rector of UR’s board of trustees after Queally stepped down at the end of June. Boggs says Hallock does his homework and moves with purpose. “I think we made a wise choice, and time will show that.”
Hallock will also have plenty to work with. Despite the pandemic, the university has seen its investment portfolio expand considerably in the last two years. During fiscal year 2021, UR’s endowment grew 39% to $3.3 billion. Hallock says that this considerable cushion will allow the university to grow its financial aid offerings and expand its academic programs.
“I think the university’s trajectory is at a very positive inflection point,” Hallock says. “The future is super bright. I’m delighted that I made the choice to come here.”
