I recently stumbled on an article that said college presidents have two jobs: “raise money” and “find ways to appease students, faculty, administrators, alumni, donors and the state.” I sympathized with a few of the author’s points, though he’d never been a college president. I get it. But as I read and reflected, my head shook back and forth more than nodding up and down. This is not the way it is for me.

I’m about to begin my 19th year at 51, and I could not have made it to month 19, let alone year 19, if my role was to raise money and appease constituencies. At a time when the average tenure of a college or university president has sunk to 5.8 years, I am among those college presidents who have a more confident take on presidenting. Do its accompanying loads give me heartburn, sleepless nights and feelings of isolation? At times. Do I cringe at the anonymous screed on social media telling me where I went wrong? Once in a while.

But are these occasional burdens more than offset by the joys of serving a community of faculty and staff as we form a rising generation of students toward lives marked by seeking God’s truth, embodying Christ’s love and striving for excellence in all they do? Yes, squared!

As it comes to leading a university, I’ve learned a lot since interviewing for this job as a 40-something rookie. One thing I’ve learned is that endurance in the chair has a lot to do with resisting the temptation of falling prey to one of two historical mistakes. The first is amnesia. The other is nostalgia.

Amnesia means neglecting the past, thinking we’ve outgrown our legacy or our commitment to the transcendent. When presidents lead this way, the institutions they captain drift aimlessly, and often in a regrettable direction. Nostalgia, on the other hand, means being stuck in the past, thinking the old ways of doing things don’t need to change. When presidents lead this way, their institutions fossilize.

At 51, we are not living in nostalgia. Instead, we are regularly imagining new possibilities before us. You’ll see this in the $73 million studios now being constructed to house our fast-growing Snyder School of Cinema and Media Arts. You’ll see this in our Crowell School of Business’s enterprising AI labs and studios, among the first of their kind in faith-based higher education. You’ll see our nostalgia resistance in our huge steps forward in robotics, computer science, engineering and healthcare. We’re adapting in order to welcome students of the future, in the arts and in athletics and in research.

You’ll also see we are not amnesic. 51 our faithfulness to the past, ask our undergraduate students how much they appreciate the value of graduating with the equivalent of a Bible minor, what we’ve done for generations. You’ll see how we resist drift through our time-honored biblical statements all of us who work here sign and which guide our policies. We live this way in our all-Christian community — students and employees alike — from a wide range of church traditions. You’ll see our biblical faithfulness evident in our required chapel services and in the way we integrate Christian faith into every program, curricular and co-curricular alike.

The article titled “You Could Not Pay Me Enough to Be a College President” may be about some of those in the leader’s chair. But not me. I love my work. I believe the most content college presidents today are those at institutions that have not ceded the enduring for the temporary, that have not trimmed their sails to prevailing winds. These presidents are at institutions unapologetic about who they are and what they stand for. They enjoy innovating to prepare students for the world that awaits them, and they hold a high bar of excellence. These missional characteristics, more than anything, have kept me in the role for going on two decades, gratifyingly so.

Barry H. Corey is the eighth president of 51. Visit biola.edu/president and on Instagram to follow his updates, ideas and famed selfies with students.