ver my 30 years at Manchester, I have gotten very good at asking others open-ended questions to start a conversation: What are you most looking forward to about college? What campus experiences are you most enjoying? What has your journey been since leaving Manchester?

Since announcing our impending retirement in October, Renée and I have been on the receiving end of similar questions. What have you most enjoyed about your time at Manchester? What are you planning to do in retirement?

The first question is easy for us to answer: We’ve most enjoyed the people we’ve met, stories we’ve shared and relationships we’ve developed. We cherish hearing from alumni about how they met their future partners at Manchester.

ollowing a comprehensive national search, the Manchester University Board of Trustees on Monday, May 1 unanimously approved the appointment of Stacy Horner ’96 Young, Ph.D., as the 16th president of Manchester University, effective July 1.

Serving students in higher education for more than 24 years, with a broad array of experiences, Young is president of Montcalm Community College in Sidney, Michigan.

“I feel like I’m being called back home to serve,” Young said before being introduced to students and employees in North Manchester and Fort Wayne.

he legacy of peace studies at Manchester is long-standing. As the first undergraduate program of its kind in the world, it is an integral part of Manchester’s academic and extracurricular programming and activities, and it continues to reflect the University’s commitment to bettering the world.

Dan West, a Brethren farmer and conscientious objector, graduated from Manchester in 1917. The founder of Heifer International, a nonprofit organization dedicated to relieving poverty globally, and a key player in the founding of Brethren Volunteer Service, West returned to Manchester in 1947 to teach the first course – Bases for an Enduring Peace – in what would become the peace studies curriculum.

mbarking on my peace studies major at Manchester over 30 years ago, I couldn’t have foreseen the transformative journey that lay ahead. The legendary peace studies Professor Ken Brown played a vital role in guiding my career path toward peacebuilding. In 1991, Ken, other graduates, and around 20 students, including myself, traveled by car to Nicaragua for a Jan term class to assist with rebuilding efforts following a hurricane that had devastated the “Mosquito Coast.” As my first time venturing beyond the United States, this experience served as a powerful eye-opener to the outside world.

This journey unveiled fresh viewpoints on the world and, during my early days in the peacebuilding field, witnessing pain, suffering and trauma often left me overwhelmed. This feeling was particularly strong as I observed the onset of wars in the former Yugoslavia during a year off in Europe between my junior and senior years of college.

ach year, Manchester’s Peace Studies Institute hires a student who has recently graduated to fill the role of peace studies coordinator. This one-year, full-time position is responsible for coordinating extracurricular activities of the peace studies program. While not always the case, the coordinator is generally a freshly graduated peace studies student.

The position, first known as the “peace studies intern,” became “peace studies coordinator” in 2009 when the program began paying half the wages. In 2019, an endowment to peace studies allowed the program to begin paying full wages.

n 1970, Manchester switched from a quarter system of three 12-week terms to a 4-1-4 calendar with a three-week January interim. This provided an ideal opportunity for off-campus immersive study and travel. That shift also changed the life of Manchester Professor Kenneth Brown, a national peace studies pioneer who directed the peace studies program at Manchester.

He went on to lead study trips on 32 of those interim January sessions, traveling with small groups of students. The goal, he said, was expanding global awareness through involvement in service, peace and justice issues.

“We sought activities that drew us away from a tourism perspective,” he said in a 2010 speech in Japan. “We witnessed the deep poverty of Haiti, living in an orphanage in Port au Prince. We picked coffee beans on the steep mountainsides of struggling growers in Chiapas, Mexico. We listened to the agony of widows, nearly deaf from shelling and heartbroken from losing husbands and children to U.S.-sponsored Contra attacks in Nicaragua, where we helped build cooperatives and houses during four Januarys in the 1980s.”

think peace studies is ultimately a study in how to be in community with one another. The peace studies program gave me a community to grow with, to celebrate with, and to grieve with,” said Caraline Feairheller, a 2019 graduate with a degree in peace studies and political science.

Feairheller has spent the past several years since graduation working for Manchester’s peace studies department, engaging in faith-based advocacy and nonprofit work in Washington, D.C., and attending Kent State University for political science and peace and conflict studies.

Immediately after graduating from Manchester, Feairheller stayed on as the peace studies coordinator, a one-year, full-time position responsible for coordinating extracurricular activities of the peace studies program. During that year, they collaborated with Director Katy Gray Brown ’91 to plan both on- and off-campus events for students and the community and assessed program activities in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Academic programs at Manchester, not limited to peace studies, continue to align with the SDGs; during the Fall 2022 semester, a series of Values, Ideas and the Arts presentations focused on various goals, including improving food security on campus and eradicating extreme poverty.

anchester University is streamlining and improving operations, telling our story, and making sure that students are central to all we do.

In October 2022, the Board of Trustees adopted a new five-year strategic plan. It drives Manchester University priorities today and offers clear guidance as we move forward and transition from one president to the next.

Given its importance for the future, the administration outlined the plan at an all-colleague meeting and followed up with small-group sessions. Whole departments are setting aside times to examine what they do, how it fits the plan, and figure out what works and should be amplified or what doesn’t work and needs to change.