The transition in presidential leadership provides the University community with an opportunity to engage in collective conversation about our ideals and realities, and how to bring them closer. Join us for a series of Friday morning forums reflecting on the University’s mission, governance structure, and budget. These moderated discussions will generate ideas and suggestions to help inform President-designate Gabel’s understanding of the University and its possibilities.
Join the IAS for a forward-thinking conversation on University values in part one of this three-part series. Sumanth Gopinath (School of Music, Presidential Search Advisory Committee, Grand Challenges Research Collaborative Scholar) will introduce the session, followed by small group breakouts to discuss three key areas. We will then come back together as a large group to translate common themes across groups into ideas and opportunities to relay to President-designate Gabel. To learn more about the series, please click here. For more information about our next session on University Governance, please click here.
The University Values discussion will focus on:
- How does the University balance the needs of our diverse constituencies? How can we best embody our core educational and knowledge values in our local and global partnerships? What do such partnerships at their best look like?
- How do we imagine the role of ethics and integrity at the University beyond legal responsibilities?
- How can we best maintain our values and commitments to our educational, research, and outreach missions while navigating the contradictions inherent in the business of managing the University as a multi-billion dollar enterprise?
Here is a brief summary of some of the ideas and opportunities discussed in the March 1 forum on University Values (these will be more fully addressed in the final report to President-designate Gabel):
- We need to clearly articulate our values and use them to guide ethical decision making and to assess policies, performance, and relationships to focus on doing what’s right.
- We need to keep intellectual and other mission-driven values at the core of decision-making, not privileging market values and metrics.
- We can use storytelling (sharing stories) to reflect on important issues, such as economic inequities.
- To foster culture change and to combat complacency and cynicism, we need to engage in open communication—reciprocal dialogue, welcoming questions and suggestions—with generosity and without defensiveness.
- We need to cultivate hearts and minds to accomplish needed changes in our culture, not rely on legalistic approaches to our institutional responsibilities.
- We can reinforce and create structures that foster collaboration among units and constituencies and question structures that impede cooperation.
- We can approach our roles and institutional work with an ethics of care for all who work and study here.
- We can make outreach and community engagement everyone’s job.
- We can use our values to improve training for managers and leaders and to help us learn from and avoid repeating mistakes.
Please click here to see video of the introduction and large group discussion from this event.
We will open our online discussion page for public comments on Monday, March 4th, and close commenting on Friday, March 15th. If you would like to participate in the discussion or share your answers to the above questions, please visit the discussion page for this event.