10/18/2026
This past Friday, I had the honor of delivering the evening keynote address for Prescott College’s 60th Anniversary, a place that has shaped me as a student, scholar, and public servant. Over 400 Prescott College alumni from all over the world came back for the celebration.
I have an MBA and an undergraduate in Business Management and I deeply believe that institutions and small liberal arts colleges, like Prescott College, are critically important, now more than ever.
The challenges before us do not arrive one at a time or fit neatly within a single discipline, institution, or political perspective.
Climate change. Economic insecurity. Social inequity. Rapid technological change. The increasing difficulty of talking, listening, and working across our differences.
Meeting these challenges requires more than technical knowledge or professional credentials. It requires people who can see complexity, ask better questions, listen carefully, challenge their own assumptions, and understand how one decision can ripple outward into the lives of others.
The liberal arts cultivate capacities that no single credential can capture: curiosity, empathy, adaptability, and the ability to connect ideas across disciplines. That is why small liberal arts colleges matter. They create something increasingly precious: places where students are known, where education is deeply human, where ideas are tested alongside lived experience, and where learning is not separated from the communities and the world around us.
Prescott College taught me to see the connections between knowledge and action, between individual responsibility and collective well-being, and between the challenges we study and the communities in which we live.
That understanding followed me beyond the classroom.
It informed my leadership as Mayor of Flagstaff. It shaped my work in public policy. It became central to my doctoral research. And today, as a trustee, it informs my responsibility to help ensure that others have the opportunity to experience this kind of education.
At a moment when higher education is too often reduced to cost, credentials, and immediate economic return, we should be willing to ask a larger question:
What kind of people, leaders, citizens, and communities do we need for the future we are building?
We need people who know how to think, not simply what to think.
People who can hold complexity without retreating into certainty.
People willing to listen across differences.
People who can connect knowledge to action and individual choices to collective consequences. People with the courage to imagine that the world as it is does not have to be the world as it will always be. That is the enduring power of a liberal arts education.
And that is why institutions like Prescott College remain so important.
The liberal arts matter. Especially now.
Happy 60th Anniversary, Prescott College ♥️
