President Calgaard's Values

Dr. Calgaard also was committed to creating a community environment where it could be a safe place for students to learn. He did this by creating the three year residential requirement where students have to live in on-campus dorms for their first three years at Trinity. According to the Trinitonian, this rule was instituted in 1992 but would not begin until the following year with the class of 1996 (Trinitionian, 1992). President Calgaard instituted this rule because he believed much of what you learn in undergrad you learn outside of the classroom.

Sharon Schweitzer, the Assistant Vice President for external relations and the University’s chief external communications officer, has worked at Trinity for 30 years now and was hired by President Calgaard. Her understanding was that President Calgaard wanted to provide students a safe environment to fail successfully and learn from these failures (Schweitzer, 2018). Because of this, he wanted to foster a safe environment where students could learn, network, and become involved with their university. To further improve this environment and increase the caliber of students, Dr. Calgaard realized you have to have a strong faculty to have the ability to recruit strong students to campus. So, the next step for him was to improve the faculty by hiring better professors, and through hiring full-time coaches in the athletic department. Several of these full-time coaches hired during the President Calgaard era continue to coach at Trinity University today. Through them, his legacy and values live on. Both of these decisions, increasing the caliber of the faculty and hiring the first full-time coaches, greatly improved the caliber of students and student-athletes Trinity could recruit to their campus.

President Calgaard also had 3 cornerstones he believed in for the university: have a strong and well-respected academic program, be well-endowed, and nationally competitive in athletics (King and Schweitzer, 2018).