Good afternoon colleagues,
Thank you, President Mason and Senator Gill for your updates. Last week, I spoke at our Officers of Administration’s Spring Symposium about the considerable uncertainty with which we, as a community, are living.
Next fall’s enrollment, our budget, the future actions of the federal administration...We all feel it.
Yet I pointed them to what philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes, in his recent book The Spirit of Hope, about what happens to us when our collective mood is shaped by uncertainty and, more deeply, by fear.
It closes us off to one another. It narrows our attention to self-protection and survival. And it turns the future into a threat to be managed, walling us off from the possible and the new. Hope, Han insists, is the counter-mood of fear.
Hope “provides meaning and orientation,” he writes. It opens us outward, toward one another, toward futures we cannot yet see clearly. Whereas fear is “incapable of speech”, “hope,” he writes, “is eloquent. It narrates.” Hope empowers us to imagine, to tell compelling stories. It “unites and forms communities...(It) leans forward in order to listen.”
Strangely enough, this kind of openness is precisely what links hope to trust.
Han writes: “Like hope, trust presupposes an open horizon. To trust someone means to build a positive relationship with that person despite a lack of knowledge of the future” (36).
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In this season of disruption for higher education, I have been reflecting on three dimensions of a theory of change that I hope will empower us to chart a path forward together.
In March, I spoke about values-enacted leadership. Today, I want to focus on shared purpose and solidarity between faculty and administrative leaders. And later in May, I hope to talk more about creating an honest, holistic culture of performance review.
The word “solidarity” is, of course, loaded with connotations, but to me at its core it carries a sense of mutual obligation and joint responsibility.
In the current context, solidarity between administrators and faculty must be rooted in trust. And it must be rooted in the joint responsibility we carry to protect, sustain, and advance the critical purpose of the public research university as the beating heart of a free society and a catalyst for a more just future.
Now, I know my predilection for quoting notable philosophers and authors is well-established, but I want to return today to the words of our wise — and tie-dyed — Senator Gildea. At our last meeting, Spike said that “the Senate’s power does not lie in legislation or in ‘Shalls.’ It lies in our brains and our moral clarity — in saying (to the administration), you've got to talk to us, we're smart, we will help you make good decisions.”
I agree with Spike that shared leadership begins by recognizing that wisdom, expertise, and creativity exist all across this community. Our senior leaders, including President Scholz and myself, are keenly aware that we do not have all the answers. We need to be able to draw on local knowledge and ideas both when it comes to navigating challenging times and, perhaps more importantly, for charting a hopeful future for our institution.
But shared leadership also requires shared responsibility. A willingness to confront things as they are, not as we might wish them to be. That requires openness — the common root of both trust and hope — and a willingness to engage in difficult conversations about our future, even when that dialogue is uncomfortable.
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This brings me to the work that we have been engaging in with Senate Vice President Davis and the rest of the Oversight and Shared Governance Committee since the start of the academic year.
There has been a good faith effort on both sides to reckon with some of the challenges of last summer’s budget reduction process.
We all recognize the frustrations that many people in our community experienced. A key issue, I’d argue, was that we lacked the structures and habits to do this difficult work in a meaningful and collaborative way.
The proposed Academic Modification Advisory Committee is an attempt to create those structures and to cultivate the habits that we hope, over time, to weave into the very fabric of the Senate and the university.
Is the proposal perfect? No. We believe that the new process has to allow us to move through deliberation to action. Consultation must be substantive and real but cannot be prolonged indefinitely.
This is a valuable effort to create a new structure that will support institutional habits of solidarity where, as Spike put it, “we talk about changes and figure out, as a team, how we're going to do the best thing for our community.”
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Let me conclude with some recognitions.
I know Ben Cannon, executive director of the Higher Education Coordinating Commission, is here.
I’m grateful that he has given time to talk to our senators.
I have valued the opportunity to serve on the HECC’s Transfer Council as we work to improve the transfer experience for our Oregon students.
And I also appreciate the spirit of collaboration the HECC demonstrated earlier this year in working in dialogue with the Transfer Council to adapt their proposal for a uniform core education block across all Oregon public universities. Welcome, Ben, I look forward to our conversation today.
Finally, I cannot pass up this opportunity to publicly congratulate Dr. Kate McLaughlin, Executive Director of the Ballmer Institute, and Dr. Lynn Stephen, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, for their elections to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences last week. This recognition is one of the oldest and most prestigious honors in American intellectual life and it reflects a career of genuinely distinguished work. We are very proud to count Lynn and Kate as our colleagues.
We are also honored to have three faculty members who have received Fulbright teaching awards this year, Nancy Cheng in Architecture, Megan Kunze from the Center on Brain Injury Research, and Reza Rejae in Computer Science.
In addition, computer science major Armaan Hajar was named a Goldwater Scholar earlier this month, and the University of Oregon continues to be a top producer nationally of Benjamin Gilman Scholars, the federal study-abroad program for Pell-eligible students.
Even in times of great uncertainty, we find hope in the excellent work happening all over this campus, every day.
Thank you.