From the President: Matthew A. Scogin ʼ02

Dear Friends and Family of Hope College,

Spring is a time full of hope.

After a Michigan winter, spring is always welcome on Hope’s campus, and this year more than ever. From budding trees in the Pine Grove to students emerging from their dorms to study in hammocks, the hope of barrenness being brought back to life is visible all around. This mirrors the hope of Easter that we also celebrate each spring; the hope found in the resurrection of our Savior.

As you’ll read in this issue, our campus community has continued to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic with ingenuity and resolve, taking steps to minimize spread while seeking to share an on-campus living and learning experience as fully as possible. We have been through a lot together over the last 12 months. By almost any measure, Hope College is stronger today than it was before the pandemic. For that, we are grateful for God’s faithfulness and buoyed by the hope of emerging soon from the pandemic’s long shadow.

While we look ahead to the future with hope, we also mark endings. A total of 19 professors are retiring this year, their service to the college totaling more than 600 years. We wish them well as they enter a new phase of life, but cannot overstate the impact they’ve had or how deeply they’ll be missed. We are also mourning the tragic death of Dr. Jenny Hampton of the physics faculty in an automobile accident in March, and the passing — also chronicled later in these pages — of many other beloved members of the Hope family, including retirees Carolyn Bareman, Maxine DeBruyn, Myra Kohsel, Lloyd Meeuwsen and Robert Palma, and adjunct professor and former dean Dr. F. Sheldon Wettack.

There is of course much we can do ourselves to be agents of hope and change — and what an important and necessary role education plays in that process, especially education grounded in the Christian faith. Here at Hope our passion is to help students discern and hone their talents and passions so that they can be bright lights in their professions and communities informed by the knowledge that all of us have been created in God’s image and are loved by Him. I hope you will enjoy reading about ways that the college and people of Hope are engaging with such ideas, and perhaps even be inspired to join us in our commitment to transforming young lives, and through those lives the world, for the better.

Spera in Deo,
Matthew A. Scogin ʼ02
President