On Sunday, July 13, on the University of Oregon’s Portland campus, we welcomed the inaugural cohort of the Values Enacted Leadership Institute. Below are the remarks I made on to mark this important milestone in the evolution of HuMetricsHSS.
Welcome.
Welcome to Oregon.
Welcome to the University of Oregon, Portland Campus.
I’m Chris Long, Provost at the University of Oregon, and co-PI of the Value Enacted Leadership Institute. I have been looking forward to this day with great anticipation:
Welcome to the inaugural gathering of the Values Enacted Leadership Institute!
This initiative has been funded by both the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation—we are grateful for their willingness to put their commitment to collaboration in higher education into practice by coordinating their funding of this initiative.
The Evolution of a Movement
It is such a joy to have you all here; to be together in this space during what has been such a difficult time…
This gathering is not just the beginning of a conference; it is the evolution of a movement. It is the next step in our shared effort to create the academy anew by intentionally aligning the values we say we care most deeply about with the lived experiences of our students, staff, faculty, and broader community partners.
This movement to put values-enacted leadership at the heart of higher education is revolutionary in the sense that Audre Lorde speaks of revolution when she says:
“Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses…” 1
Over the course of my 20 years in positions of academic leadership, I have come to recognize the importance of values-enacted leadership in cultivating authentic and flourishing communities.
For each of us, this means embodying and more intentionally aligning our stated values with the policies and practices that shape our academic lives and the life of the university. When we become vigilant, looking for the smallest opportunity to make genuine change in outgrown responses, when we put our values at the center of every encounter we have, every decision we make, every action we undertake, in a deliberate and intentional way, we begin to build a level of trust opens us to the possibility of truly transformative growth and change.
For our communities, “values-enacted leadership” creates environments in which every person, no matter their role or title, is empowered to put the values that animate their purpose into meaningful practice in ways that make good on the promise of higher education to deepen connections, enrich society, and create more justice, more beauty, more meaning in the world.
To begin our work together this week, let me return to a poem on leadership that has become, for me, a kind of invocation for this work; a touchstone text that came to me first as a gift from a colleague, Leigh Wolf, with whom I worked for a number of years at Michigan State University. When Leigh left MSU to follow her leadership pathway, she gave me this book by John O’Donohue, entitled, To Bless the Space Between Us. In it, you will find this poem, to which I regularly return as a reminder. Let it be an invocation for and an invitation to our work together this week:
For A Leader
May you have the grace and wisdom
To act kindly, learning
To distinguish between what is
Personal and what is not.
May you be hospitable to criticism.
May you never put yourself at the center of things.
May you act not from arrogance but out of service.
May you work on yourself,
Building up and refining the ways of your mind.
May those who work [with] you know
You see and respect them.
May you learn to cultivate the art of presence
In order to engage with those who meet you.
When someone fails or disappoints you,
May the graciousness with which you engage
Be their stairway to renewal and refinement.
May you treasure the gifts of the mind
Through reading and creative thinking
So that you continue as a servant of the frontier
Where the new will draw its enrichment from the old,
And may you never become a functionary.
May you know the wisdom of deep listening,
The healing of wholesome words,
The encouragement of the appreciative gaze,
The decorum of held dignity,
The springtime edge of the bleak question.
May you have a mind that loves frontiers
So that you can evoke the bright fields
That lie beyond the view of the regular eye.
May you have good friends
To mirror your blind spots.
May leadership be for you
A true adventure of growth.
Precarious Point of Inflection
My great hope is that that our time together this week will be – a true adventure of growth for each of you, for your teams, and for the emerging community of values-enacted practice that we hope to cultivate and nurture during our time together.
We cannot deny, however, that we stand at precarious point of inflection for higher education, O’Donohue might call it a frontier, although it feels very much like a precipice. It is impossible to talk about leadership and higher education today, without acknowledging the mounting pressures we now face.
The threats are no longer veiled. In recent years, and with escalating force under the current federal administration, we have seen policies that seek to narrow, censor, and constrict the mission of higher education.
Federal funding for basic and applied research — the fuel of human progress — has been haphazardly cut or reallocated to serve partisan aims. Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have been vilified and dismantled, ignoring that diversity of backgrounds, diversity of thought, and diversity of experiences are what make research and teaching excellence possible. International students and faculty — whose ideas and presence have enriched our campuses and communities for generations — now face unjust restrictions on visas, work permits, and legal status.
We know these are not isolated skirmishes. They are symptoms of a deeper, organized effort to redefine what education should be and who it should serve, to discredit expertise, to replace complexity with control, and to transform the university from a place of inquiry into a place of indoctrination.
Shared Resolve to Refine and Remake Higher Education
And yet, this moment of disruption can also be a pivotal moment of shared resolve to refine and remake higher education anew … but only if we have the courage to open ourselves to one another, even in the midst of uncertainty, only if we are wholehearted enough to move beyond our fear and resilient enough to redirect our anger into the creative energy we will need to reimagine the university as a place where values are intentionally practiced, where our shared purpose animates our highest promise.
We have been, as O’Donohue enjoins us to be, “hospitable to criticism”—we are here because we recognize that the values for which higher education professes to stand have not historically been lived out in practice. And even if we did not seek and do not support the regressive forces that are disrupting higher education today, we find ourselves at a liminal inflection point in which meaningful change in higher education is more possible now than it has been in my lifetime.
Let us find the “springtime’s edge” of this bleak moment, let us “evoke the bright fields/That lie beyond the view of the regular eye.” This is why we have gathered here this week: to respond to the call to align our actions more fully with the values we hold most dear.
To begin to build a network of communities of practice at institutions across the globe that will embrace and advance the habits of “values-enacted leadership” — grounded in shared values, mutual accountability, and the courage to lead with integrity.
We have gathered here this week to build leadership capacity, learn from each other, and to be fully present to the challenges we face, even as we imagine a future of higher education worth wanting.
The promise of higher education is precious.
It is not a static inheritance but a living responsibility.
It breathes through us.
It survives when we defend it.
It thrives when we dare to reimagine and recreate it — together.
Turning to Bonnie Thornton Dill
And to help us begin this work, I am so grateful to be able to introduce my dear colleague and friend, Bonnie Thornton Dill. Bonnie saw the promise of this work early on when I began talking about values-enacted leadership and Humetrics when we were both deans on the Big Ten Academic Alliance’s Arts and Sciences Deans council. She has brought her wisdom and grace and gifts to the HuMetrics team in ways that have deepened and expanded and enriched our work.
Please join me in welcoming, Bonnie Thornton Dill.
