On January 16, 2025, President Hinton kicked off the Batten Leadership Institute’s Leading Together Speaker Series. Her talk, “Where Love Leads,” explores why and how love can be an effective leadership strategy and how to apply that strategy in your daily life. Below is an excerpt from that talk.

Love and the Liberal Arts

President Hinton filming an interview in the Wyndham Robertson Library’s Hollins Room about the importance of access and affordability for the future of Hollins.

A liberal arts environment—which nurtures freedom and belonging—compels a need for love. Education, at its core, is about freeing minds to ensure the freedom of people. Freedom to act as a citizen; freedom to live a life of consequence; freedom to determine one’s own future. That is the very purpose of education. Therefore, to lead within or adjacent to the liberal arts sparks a compelling need for love as an institutional value. Not only must we reflect love, but we must also teach it. Our institutions must have a curriculum that demands love. Here, I am not talking about gen ed or a major. But the soul of who we are in higher education.

This sense of care and nurture, in the service of human freedom, as a product of education, matters even more now than before and is, I believe, mandatory for those of us who proclaim the value of the liberal arts. Let’s go to Paulo Freire, who wrote, “Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is a commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause—the cause of liberation.” Here we see the connection between love and liberation. If the liberal arts are about liberation, then it’s easy to see why love is essential for education.

In this age of technology, social media, and AI, humanity and love are even more critical. To be honest, students don’t need us to collect sheer information. They can find facts (and falsehoods) on their phone. But while they don’t need us to generate information any longer, they desperately need us for knowledge and for wisdom. They need to be willing to connect with us to convert volumes of information to an education.

In January, President Hinton made a surprise visit to students on their J-Term trip to Greece to officially kick off Hollins’ 70th year of study abroad.

For learning to happen, and to excel in the tradition of the liberal arts, students, faculty, and staff all need to be able to open their minds and their hearts to one another. We have to trust one another enough to listen, to take in, and to engage. To convert knowledge to wisdom, we need to be able to be vulnerable to our humanity and to love. This is the kind of thinking that technology cannot yet master in ways that humans can.

As I consider this, a model for learning and leadership begins to emerge. A model that calls us beyond our hermeneutics of suspicion. Beyond academic dog-whistle politics. Beyond legislative intervention in curricula. If what we want is a society that lives up to its grandest aspirations, we must invest our hearts in education. We know that education frees the mind; that is its core tenet. But we know that being truly free exacts a cost. It requires that a human being feel seen, honored, and valued. It demands that curricula and spaces are created wherein that human is willing to open not only their mind but their heart.

This vulnerability compels us to act in ways that are compassionate, expansive, and inviting. When our students feel that, they are open to love and to learning.

As William Cronon has written, those of us educated in the liberal arts tradition reflect qualities achieved only through connection and love:

• They listen and they hear.
  They read and they understand.
  They can talk with anyone.
  They can write clearly and persuasively and movingly.
  They can solve a wide variety of puzzles and problems.
  They respect rigor not so much for its own sake but as a way of seeking truth.
  They practice humility, tolerance, and self-criticism.
  They understand how to get things done in the world.
  They nurture and empower the people around them.

Most of all, we choose to connect with one another, recognizing that the purpose of the freedom we achieve through education is not merely to meet our own ends and needs, but to facilitate a common good that can only be found through connection. A common good built on love.

Love is the imperative of our missions. The key to our success. The hope of our culture and the soul of our curriculum.

Love as an Institutional Priority

Wether you choose to frame love as compassionate leadership, or even servant leadership, love is a compelling and demanding leadership choice. I can certainly understand that many people think if you are the leader, you need not concern yourself with love. That, in fact, you have the unique authority to not have to worry about love. You have the power to do what you want. But I believe this bifurcation of love and power is artificial and harmful.

I think it is important to understand the power of leading from and with love. The power is both positive in how one leads, but it also demands that difficult ideas, topics, people, and situations be approached with love.

Long ago, Martin Luther King wrote, “And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites—polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” Love implementing the demands of justice; power correcting everything that stands against love.

In these challenging times, leaders must elevate love, forgiveness, integrity, and trust, for ourselves and for others. We must live these practices not merely in words but in the environments we create, in our posture in the world.

For these reasons, it is because, not despite, all of the many problems we face in higher education that I—and I am encouraging you to—choose love. King also referred to love as the moral cosmos, the highest good. I simply believe it is what will save our collective spirits. And our institutions.