The Open Thinker Meets the Open Curriculum

Imagining a Different Future

A self-described Smithsonian baby, Tepper grew up in the Maryland suburbs with a mother who put him in the middle of every cultural experience on the Washington Mall. 

“I can remember walking from the art museum into the space museum and just being amazed at the variety of ideas and innovations that make up our world. That glorious mix of science and art and music and history — all in the shadow of democracy — with its monuments and grand public buildings and politics, I think Washington, D.C., the way I experienced it, was a liberal arts city,” he said.

During high school, he was an exchange student in Uruguay. Then Tar Heels basketball and barbecue pulled him to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Graduate studies carried him to Harvard and Princeton and propelled him to faculty and leadership positions at Vanderbilt and Arizona State University. Along the way, Tepper invented the Creative Campus leadership model and showed the world how to put it into practice. His is a curated life that a screenwriter might assign to a liberal arts superhero character, a bow-tied seeker incapable of suppressing curiosity, a polycultural figure shaped by folklore, global travel, federal arts, Ivy League scholarship, Nashville music, the energy of a boundless Arizona campus, and Carolina accents.

Tepper describes the Creative Campus as a framework for “designing and evaluating the extent to which a campus is organized around maximizing creative exchange, the development of creative capacities among its faculty and students, and the use of creativity in its approach to building community, advancing equity, engaging across cultures, and bridging divides.”

The Creative Campus emerged as an alternative to the decision-making models that the social sector borrowed from the industrial revolution’s manufacturing miracles, which depend on unwavering implementation of top-down orders and place a premium on efficiency. The Creative Campus undoes all of this and, in its place, invites individuals to dream up new ways to make decisions and to talk about and test ideas. When this occurs, effectiveness becomes more important than efficiency. The Creative Campus reflects Tepper’s unshakeable belief in the power of the human imagination and, ultimately, on what philosophers describe as “public imagination,” which materializes when individuals who share a mental picture of a desired future self-organize in order to create the future they all imagine. 

As Tepper wrote in a 2023 book chapter, “Cultural change demands the ability to imagine a different future. It requires powerful stories to move people to action. It requires making the invisible visible so that we can address issues of equity and injustice that undermine our communities. Cultural change requires play, even when the issues and challenges are urgent and serious. Perhaps most importantly, cultural change requires reappropriating or reassembling symbols and narratives that perpetuate the dominant view of gender, sex, and power. Imagination, storytelling, play, and symbolic reassembly: These are the tools of the artist and designer. It is hard to imagine culture change without the arts at the center.”

Pure liberal arts with a side of green dumplings

Tepper’s groundbreaking work on the Creative Campus, of course, was prelude to his move to Hamilton, a place Life Magazine singled out in 1953 as the exemplar for “pure liberal arts.” It seems inevitable that Tepper and Hamilton would find each other, the open thinker and the college with the open curriculum. Writing about Alexander Hamilton and his peers, the biographer Ron Chernow observed that “the Revolution produced an insatiable need for thinkers who could generate ideas and wordsmiths who could lucidly expound them. The immediate utility of ideas was an incalculable tonic for the founding generation.” Today, at a moment when the world can feel heavy with uncertainty about the future, Tepper’s Creative Campus is the tonic for a new generation of restless students.

“Creativity and innovation are in the DNA of Hamilton College,” Tepper said. “Our namesake and original trustee, Alexander Hamilton, was our nation’s creative founding father. He was a designer. Other founding fathers were content with borrowed models or sticking to the old agrarian order. Hamilton knew that a new nation needed new ideas. Ever since, the College’s history has been punctuated by moments of innovation and creativity and invention.”

Tepper’s own choices reflect the expanse of a liberal arts adventure. His playlist includes Bill Withers, Earth Wind and Fire, Daddy Yankee, Talking Heads, The Chicks, and the California rock band Cake, whose 1998 album cover features the image of a hog that is a near twin for the logo of Crook’s Corner, a legendary Chapel Hill restaurant that was serving up pork barbecue when Tepper was an undergraduate there. It’s a reminder that Tepper grew up loving his grandmother’s comfort food, namely kasha varnishkes, before finding collards and cornbread and smoke pits in North Carolina. Now, wouldn’t you know it, he’s a sushi fan.

“I love to cook. I cook on instinct. Whatever is in the fridge. Grilled fish is probably my go-to, and I make a mean chicken and green dumplings,” he said.

He turns to tennis and daily stretching for physical activity. He’s a loyal consumer of This American Life podcasts. Recent reads include Richard Powers’ The Overstory, Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, and, he said, “I’ve become obsessed with the Octavia Butler books, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.”

Books always mattered. From his youth, important reads included Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Tepper’s movie picks stretch across seven decades, from the 1967 classics The Graduate and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, to the 2021 films King Richard and CODA.

He owns about five dozen bow ties and says he needs more. In Nashville, Tepper discovered Otis James’ original bow tie designs and bought every item in the line. He possesses one of the only Hamilton bow ties in existence, thanks to the quick work of an artisan who turned a Hamilton necktie into a bow tie just in time for Tepper’s first speech on campus “Welcome Failure Alongside Success”.

Comfortable being uncomfortable

At Arizona State, Tepper appeared in three seasons of the YouTube series Crafts With Tepper. In each of the 18 episodes, he holds conversations with students while they take on arts projects. The series opens with Tepper chatting with a music student as they make a kalimba. In the series blooper reel, Tepper stumbles over his own name and fumbles the introduction to his own show. It’s not slapstick. He’s clearly trying to nail it. Instead, it is the type of reveal that is rare among high-profile leaders: evidence that Tepper, when it comes to creative pursuits, derives as much joy from the polished moments as the clumsy ones.

Tepper, it turns out, is comfortable being uncomfortable, and he operates in a manner free of cynicism. Without sneer and snark, there is no room for embarrassment, nothing to crimp creative ventures. Crafts With Tepper is compelling viewing because it offers a glimpse into the way he engages as a professor, a dean, a friend, and a family member — and now as a college president. Conversation and creativity are what you get from Tepper, whether the camera is rolling or not.


 

Chasing fun questions has helped him disrupt the usual structure of course offerings. At ASU, for example, Tepper stitched together a program on Water Narratives and Societal Change. For anyone accustomed to choosing stand-alone courses from a catalogue — biology or sociology, art or geology — take note that Tepper’s Creative Campus model unlocks learning opportunities that defy easy description. And that’s the point: the Creative Campus encourages — requires, really — faculty and students to dream up the most compelling learning experiences, prioritizing purpose over task. This means disallowing any version of “that’s not how we do things here” as a response to ideas.

For Water Narratives and Societal Change, ASU mixed core curricula with complimentary lines of study. The blend enabled students to examine water issues through scientific, political, economic, Indigenous, and aesthetic lenses. Instructors offered a suite of five or six learning tracks — depending on how you count them — that engaged students in multiple storytelling modes, including audio, visual art, music, and creative writing. 

“Asking a group of faculty to each build an entire course related to a single theme is nearly impossible,” Tepper said in a 2023 ASU article. “But asking 10 faculty to find a week or two and an assignment on a theme within the context of something they are already doing, to help students see and connect their ideas with other students across the college and the university? That’s a much easier lift, allowing faculty and students to adapt their classes in ways that make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. It’s infinitely scalable, and there are many important themes that would fit this model.”

Hamilton is the model

Tepper’s Creative Campus makes these opportunities the norm, not the exception. The approach embraces complexity and turns away from the faux precision of templates. Tepper has figured out that it’s from uncertainty that enlightenment emerges. And the road trip to enlightenment, for Tepper, is the greatest adventure imaginable. To paraphrase the singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen, the road goes on forever, and the learning never ends. It’s the combination of Tepper’s imagination and his personal touch that enables him to bring others along.

“I love Steven. We will miss him deeply. He was an incredible inspiration,” said Nonny de la Peña, the journalist and virtual-reality pioneer Tepper hired as founding director of ASU’s Narrative and Emerging Media program.

“Steven’s colleagues want to follow his lead because he has an exciting vision, collaborates well with others, has a terrific sense of humor and genuinely cares about his mission, the institution, the students, the faculty, and making a difference,” said Hamilton Trustee Dan Nye ’88, P’24, who served as a member of the presidential search committee.

Bill Ivey, who hired Tepper at Vanderbilt’s Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy, believes Tepper’s “lively, disciplined imagination” helps set him apart. “Steve is willing to put himself in challenging situations and then work his way out with some kind of larger consensus. He’s great at that,” Ivey said.

Quentin Messer ’26, a student representative on the presidential search committee, recognizes that Tepper “is talented at getting people to answer deep-rooted questions naturally, pushing one’s thinking. Even in his question-asking, he pushes the creative campus ethos and gets you to think across academic contexts.”

For Tepper, the key to higher education is removing rules and customs that suppress learning. The Creative Campus trusts the human imagination and knows curiosity is humanity’s pilot light. Tepper sees the fire burning in the students.

“Hamilton students — they are remarkable and unlike any students I have ever worked with or taught. Our open curriculum, an exploratory mindset, our orientation programs, the way faculty design the learning environment, the fact that 25 percent of our students every year serve in some official role mentoring or advising other students — these things combine to create this extraordinary place, to create motivated learners, open and engaged, without the arrogance and the ‘means to an end’ mentality that exists at a lot of other highly selective colleges,” Tepper said. “I don’t think there is another institution that has created a better environment, so Hamilton College is the model.”

Tapping our feet

Tepper’s Creative Campus is marked by abundance, not scarcity. This is a critical distinction for Tepper. In a culture that celebrates rarities and oddities and superlatives that set individuals apart from the rest — Warren Buffett for his stock picking, for example, and whoever is named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” — Tepper’s Creative Campus is predicated on the belief that everyone is possessed of curiosity, creativity, and imagination.

In the Creative Campus, the many do not wait on the few to hand down a solution. Instead, everyone engages in the work of leveraging culture for the public good. Further, there is no zero-sum game. That is, one student’s success does not come at the cost of another’s. Mind you, this belief in abundance does not translate to a dumbing down, everybody-gets-a-trophy mindset. Instead, the Creative Campus takes on a kind of Buddhist view, one where we first acknowledge that the universe has supplied us with what we need to flourish, and then we take on the job of using the gifts to create the futures we imagine.

Tepper is aware that he has arrived at a campus where imaginations have been whirring for centuries. “Creativity emerges from a unique culture and the constellation of people, place, history, and opportunity. So, I need to understand that culture first. That means meeting lots of people and asking lots of questions,” he said.

In sociology, the field in which Tepper holds a Ph.D., there is a body of literature describing a utopian society as one filled with experimentation and learning, where there is a bias toward action. Tepper shares this view.

“I do want us to begin tapping our collective feet — the motion that happens around the edge of the dance floor before anyone jumps in, the build-up of some positive energy, feeling the beat, watching other people begin to move. In this first year we are launching a program to support ‘what if’ ideas — experimentation and pilots — to build positive momentum, to begin tapping our feet. The campus is alive with ideas.”

About the Author

John Bare is a writer and photographer based in North Carolina and the author of the 2024 novel My Biscuit Baby. He serves as the Charles Shaffer Distinguished Fellow and Professor of Practice in Philanthropy at the University of North Carolina.