New Earlham leader at home in Wayne County

If you haven’t already seen him walking his dog, shopping downtown, attending sporting events or riding his bike in rural Wayne County, you might soon encounter a new local education leader exploring his community.  

Indiana native and former Earlham College parent Paul Sniegowski became president of Earlham and Earlham School of Religion on Aug. 1. 

He said Richmond feels like his native South Bend in many ways, which has overcome its own downtown challenges and enhanced its riverfront recreational attractions. He sees the same type of potential here.

Sniegowski is excited to be part of a unique opportunity to grow the relationship between the city and college. He joined Earlham a few months after the college successfully applied for a $25 million Lilly Endowment grant for community improvements. 

Those funds are being leveraged with other multimillion investments. The goal is to improve the city’s downtown and Whitewater Gorge recreation areas, making them appealing for students and current and potential residents. 

Sniegowski has toured downtown Richmond and sees its potential for shopping, dining and apartments that could appeal to various ages. 

He emphasized that he wants area residents to feel welcome to explore Earlham, whether that’s enjoying a collegiate sporting event, attending a concert, hearing a speaker or taking a walk, either around the academic and athletic facilities or further south on less traveled paths in what’s called back campus. 

“I really want to see our neighbors come in and enjoy this place and be here and interact with our students and others,” Sniegowski said. 

He also hopes the community will take pride in Earlham’s high reputation nationally and internationally. Sniegowski said he’s known about Earlham throughout his life, and that knowledge grew when he was earning his bachelor’s in music and master’s in biology at Indiana University Bloomington. 

During those years, he remembers attending a graduate-level symposium on birds at Earlham and discovering the campus’ beauty. He’s also nearly certain he came to Richmond with other IU music students to play his violin to fill in for Richmond Symphony Orchestra musicians. 

Almost 25 years later, after earning his doctorate from the University of Chicago and then tenure in biology at University of Pennsylvania, Sniegowski received a job offer to teach at Earlham. 

He was “so close” to moving to Richmond, but declined the opportunity for a combination of personal and professional reasons. Sniegowski stayed at Penn, later becoming dean of its arts and sciences.  

However, his admiration for Earlham remained. 

Another 20 years later, Sniegowski, now 65, said he believed the time was right for him to serve the Richmond college after learning Anne Houtman was retiring as president. 

Sniegowski has retired from Penn after 27 years of teaching. He enjoyed seeing Earlham from a parent’s perspective since son Ben graduated from Earlham in 2023. Daughter Emma graduated from Kenyon College in 2018. 

“I thought, ‘Well, that might be a great way to take what remains of my working career and dedicate it to a place I’ve known about and believe in,’” he said. 

Although he isn’t a Quaker, Sniegowski said his Quaker friends were delighted when his hire was announced. And, he heard from colleagues at Penn and other Ivy League schools, who shared their enthusiasm too. Some described Earlham as a wonderful place where their colleagues had studied, or they knew someone whose child attends Earlham and loves it. 

Sniegowski calls Earlham a fundamentally humane place, based on its Quaker principles and heritage.  

In recent years, some Earlham students and faculty have raised concerns about pay and benefits for campus staff such as food service and environmental services who are employed by an outside company. More recently, some Earlham faculty have shown interest in joining a union. 

Sniegowski said employers need to listen to workers’ concerns, and while the faculty unionization decision rests with Earlham’s board of trustees, he said he knows they’re actively thinking about it. 

“Wherever they land on it, what I do know is that all of us here, all of the faculty and staff, we will remain dedicated to our mission, which is providing the highest quality liberal arts education informed by our Quaker heritage and principles,” Sniegowski said. “I’m sure of that, and we’ll work our way through whatever outcome there is with the union.”

The main change Earlham needs, Sniegowski said, is to increase student enrollment, which dipped strongly in the pandemic’s aftermath. He’s pleased Earlham’s incoming class is the largest in five years, with a rebounding 22% international student population.

Sniegowski said one of his biggest responsibilities as president is to get out and say great things about the college and reach regional, national and international families to let them know they’d love it if their kids went there. 

“How do we, for lack of a better term, market Earlham to get it the students it deserves as a wonderful institution?” Sniegowski said. 

He’s also pleased to join Earlham just after its $118 million fundraising campaign concluded. Much of that funding benefits scholarships, recruitment and career internship/research opportunities through its Epic Advantage program. 

He hopes to recruit even more student-athletes to campus. About 45% of Earlham students are athletes, many from this region, and they’re skilled at managing their time, daily discipline and dealing with pressure.

Sniegowski tells the story of a man whose parents were vegetable pickers in northern Ohio. When he was born, his father wanted him to learn how to play baseball and the accordion. Music helped him earn money through a polka band playing weddings, but his baseball skills earned a Notre Dame scholarship, which led to him becoming a Rhodes Scholar and professor. That man was Sniegowski’s father.

“I tell that story to make it clear that it’s not a good idea to lump athletes into the category of non-scholars,” Sniegowski said. “They can be some of the best scholars we’ve had.” 

Sniegowski said he plans to print out a weekly sports schedule and fit some games and meets into his leisure time. 

He and his wife, Gail Kienitz, a former associate professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois, enjoy looking out their College Avenue windows onto campus and walking Willa, their golden retriever, each night around campus. 

Sniegowski walks or rides his bike daily to work and said he hopes that visibility contributes to a sense of community on campus. 

Beyond his neighborhood, he’s also enjoyed taking a couple of weekend rides to Cope Environmental Center in Centerville, which he called “a gem,” and to Abington Pike near Whitewater River, and has been on a portion of Cardinal Greenway. The family’s canoes went to his mom’s house during their move, but he’s eager to use them soon. 

He also looks forward to exploring the county’s cultural amenities such as concerts and theater. Richmond and Earlham are both very diverse, he’s observed, and he hopes that area residents will feel comfortable exploring the campus’ cultural offerings.

When he was interviewing for the first time at Earlham, he attended a convocation and was impressed that students felt empowered to ask tough questions of the speakers. 

“I’ve come to the very strong view from my years in higher education that diversity is a source of great enrichment for people’s lives,” Sniegowski said. “The heart of what we do in higher education is to bring together diverse voices because no one of us has a lock on the truth about the world, and we share our perspectives and we go back and forth and we come to a greater and more reliable view of the world and of our lives in that community. That’s what we do, and that’s what Earlham is about, and we would really love it if more people from Richmond would come and feel themselves a part of this community.”