Not quite a year ago, we held the inaugural retreat of the University of Oregon’s Provost’s Council. It was early in my first year as Provost, and I didn’t know what to expect when we gathered, Deans and Vice Provosts, to consider the values that would animate our leadership. As I wrote at the time, it was a pivotal moment of transition that led to the articulation of a purpose statement to which I have returned regularly during the past, very difficult, year. We agreed:
To put the academic mission at the heart of the University through values-enacted, authentic, coordinated leadership.
To this purpose statement, we added the core values of courage, accountability/transparency, joy, and shared responsibility/partnership.
At this year’s retreat on August 5th, 2025, we took time to reflect on how well we embodied this commitment, and we pressed ourselves to refine our approach. Should we be more specific about what we mean by “authentic,” emphasizing candor, clarity, and directness? Returning to the value of joy we embraced last year, we wondered if, given the current budget crises and the attacks that seek to narrow and diminish the transformative power of higher eduction, we ought to focus on finding ways to “invent hope,” as James Baldwin might put it, in our efforts to navigate the challenges of the weeks and months to come. Finally, we asked if “coordinated leadership” captured the spirit of our true aspiration.
Let me turn first to this last, before returning to joy, hope, authenticity, and candor.
From Coordination to Strategic Collaboration
Reading back over the Long Road, I have returned to the topic of collaboration many times, whether it was to emphasize the vitality of the liberal arts as a catalyst of collaboration, to outline the values that facilitate academic collaboration, or to trace the possibilities of collaborative writing and philosophy. In a 2017 article about the Big Ten Academic Alliance Less Commonly Taught Languages Partnerships grant, my colleagues and I even wrote about moving from collaboration to “strategic coordination.”
So when members of the Provost’s Council pressed for us to move beyond coordination to a deeper practice of collaboration, I was heartened; for I heard in this shift the desire for a more collective approach to strategic action. Reflecting back on it now, I take this desire as an indicator of deepening trust. As trust takes root and grows, new possibilities for more substantive collaboration emerge. Finding ways to nurture that trust by sharing information more broadly within the group and inviting more opportunities for the Provost’s Council to provide meaningful input on decisions will be a priority for me this year.
Joy and Hope, Authenticity and Candor
We also sought to lend more determination to our approach to joy by adopting the language of hope and to authenticity by speaking more specifically of candor. This effort to refine our values speaks to a shared commitment to return regularly to our values as the context in which we are situated shifts and as our relationships with each other develop.
I have tried to articulate the notion of joy in terms of purposeful action. Connecting purposeful action to practices of hope opens us to the possibility that strategic collaboration might not only nurture trust, but also become a source of both joy and hope in our work together. And in refining authenticity in terms of candor, honestly, and directness, we reaffirm a commitment to meaningful feedback in our efforts to continuously grow and improve.
Even as we continue to navigate this very difficult period, it is important to return our attention to the values we hope to enact with one another, refining and deepening our efforts over time, so we might cultivate the habits of leadership that themselves might become the wellspring for a future academy more aligned with the values it professes to advance.
