Last week marked a pivotal moment in my transition to the role of Provost at the University of Oregon. We held two retreats, one early in the week for the Office of the Provost (OtP) staff, and one later in the week for the Provost’s Council, which includes the Deans and Vice-Provosts. My dear colleagues, Nicky Agate (Carnegie Mellon University) and Jason Rhody (Modern Languages Association) from the HuMetricsHSS initiative, facilitated the two retreats which were designed to identify the values that will shape the work we do together and the principles that bring those values to life.

We began each retreat with John O’Donohue’s poem, “For a Leader,” which has become a touchstone for me ever since my friend and colleague, Leigh Graves Wolf, gave me O’Donohue’s book, To Bless the Space Between Us, when she left Michigan State some years ago.

Here is one of the beautiful passages of the poem that resonates with me:

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.

Last week was heartening to me because it was filled with all that O’Donohue invites us to know in this passage. Everyone brought their full selves to our time together—and for this I am deeply grateful.

As the week unfolded, a set of values emerged in the two separate retreats that are powerfully aligned with each other and deeply resonant with my own aspirations and commitments. Although a few Vice Provosts participated in both retreats, Nicky, Jason, and I were careful to ensure that the processes by which each group identified, sorted, and operationalized their values arose organically from their conversations.

Before the week began, if you had asked me what success would look like, I would have been happy to have had each group identify a set of shared values that we could draw upon as we worked together to build trust within the Provost’s Office and across the Provost’s Council. What I did not anticipate, but am encouraged to see, was that the two groups independently identified the same values with only slight variations.

The workshops in the retreats were designed in a two-step process, first to help each group identify the values that will animate our work together, and second to articulate the specific ways those values will be put into daily practice.

The day after the Provost’s Office retreat, Katy Krieger, Interim Director of Faculty Personnel and Policy, painted cards for everyone with the shared values we had identified (below, left). And we take the values the Office of the Provost identified during their retreat and map them against the values the Provost’s Council identified, we can see that with a few differences, the values are largely the same.

 

Office of the Provost	Provost's Council
Courage to Act	Courage
Intentionality
Joy	Joy
Candor	Accountability/Transparency
Partnership
Equity	Shared Responsibility
Stewardship

Where OtP had Courage to Act, the Council had Courage; where OtP had Candor, the Council had Accountability and Transparency; and where OtP had Partnership, Equity, and Stewardship, the Council spoke of Shared Responsibility / Partnership. They both named Joy as a value to be embodied in their work together, a core commitment connected to achieving purpose, as I have written about here before. That leaves only Intentionality as a value that appears on the OtP list and not on that of the Council, but it was clear from the way the Council articulated the principles by which we would live out our values that intentionality runs throughout.

The second step of the workshop involved translating these values into action by articulating a set of principles that express how we will put them into practice. Below you can read the points that the Provost’s Council developed to flesh out the meaning of the values we identified as shared:

Intentionality is at play here in the ways the members of the Council express our commitment to put our values into meaningful practice. Although these articulations are the result of a brainstorming activity at a retreat, they provide rich soil for further refinement as we continue our work together.In reflecting further on these principles and on how the two values sets reinforce one another, perhaps we can begin to imagine how they might animate the life of the Provost’s Office more broadly as we engage with partners across the University.

On the final day of the Provost’s Council retreat, our own Judy Kanavle, Director of Program and Project Management in the OtP, led us through an exercise to identify our purpose. From a robust and honest conversation emerged this articulation of our shared purpose:

To put the academic mission at the heart of the University through values-enacted, authentic, coordinated leadership.

If we are to make good on the promise of this shared purpose, the OtP and the Council, together with the Schools and Colleges of the University of Oregon, will need to follow the wisdom of Audre Lorde when, in her essay, “Learning from the ’60s,”[1] she writes about revolution:

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….

I don’t shy away from speaking of the values-enacted approach to higher education as revolutionary in this sense.

May we become vigilant as Lorde advises.

May we take courage, as Brené Brown emphasizes when she connects courage to wholeheartedness.

And may we become attentive to what we practice, as adrienne maree brown teaches when she speaks2 about building trust in a group and across an organization:

We need to pay attention to what we practice. Each practice of an organization is a small scale way to grow or shrink its own realization of its espoused mission and values.

Last week was a pivotal period in the life of the Provost’s Office at the University of Oregon, because we took time together to create a shared set of values and a common purpose to which to be vigilant in our daily leadership practice.

Special thanks to Caitlin Caldwell, Sarah Allen, and Allison Blade for the intentional work they put into organizing the week’s retreats!