Whether it's civic involvement or board room decision-making, Barker says problem-solving doesn't vary by venue. "I look at just about everything like a puzzle," he says. "There's usually a solution to the puzzle that will come out of the process of examination, whether it's a company's capital structure, or a policy at CMC."

The mission

"It's a priori that CMC is a unique entity, and that our mission is also unique. In the strategic planning process, it became very clear that increasing the size of the College was not on the table for the life of the current strategic plan, and that our mission is sacred."

The Faculty

"The future of the College is very much going to be shaped by the faculty hired over the next 10 years. The departments by and large make the decisions on faculty hiring. I'm comforted by the fact that the people who are here now are going to be making the decisions. So clearly, those people who have a view on what kind of faculty should follow them will have an input. That's not going to be imposed on anybody by some outside agent."

Measuring Results

"Things like a new student center, athletics facilities, and academic buildings that may be on the horizon are easy to measure in the context of the Strategic Plan, that is, how they assist in reaching our overall goals. But the plan also sets as a goal a ranking among the top 10 liberal arts colleges in certain key areas, and ranking of the government and economics departments among the top three. Our progress will be assessed annually, using criteria that we developed, not criteria that somebody else imposes on us, to evaluate each one of those areas."

Investing for the Long Term

"Colleges across the nation are grappling with financial challenges to their endowments resulting from this current market. CMC's philosophy on the endowment has always been, to my knowledge, that equities will outperform fixed income instruments over a long period of time. If you look over any long period of time, 100 years, 50 years, 25 years, by and large equity will outperform fixed income. We had a roaring bull market up until March of 2000. The bottom then fell out of the market. During that bull market, certainly in the '90s, our endowment appreciated geometrically, in large part because we were 100 percent in equities. With the downturn of the market, we took it on the chin. But if you look at how we've done over a long period of time, indeed our philosophy has been borne out. By being in equities, our returns are higher than they would have been than by being in a combination of fixed income and equities, or, certainly, 100 percent fixed income. At the same time, we have looked carefully at the risk in the portfolio and have taken a number of steps to address this risk."