Christopher P. Long

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On June 14, 2025, I was invited to give the keynote address at the induction of the 2025 cohort of the Alpha of Oregon chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society at the University of Oregon. Here is the text of my remarks.

Good afternoon and thank you for that generous introduction, Kevin [Hatfield].

I am honored to be here with our guests and mentors, our esteemed alumni, our proud families, and most especially, the remarkable students who have just been inducted into this prestigious society.

Thank you also, Kevin and Julie [Hessler], for those illuminating reminders of the history of Phi Beta Kappa — and of our “first-in-the-state” Alpha of Oregon Chapter — and for the lessons about the enduring values this society has upheld for nearly 250 years.

Today, as we induct a new generation into the nation’s oldest academic honor society, we do more than confer a distinction, we affirm a commitment: a commitment to curiosity, to intellectual rigor, and to the hard-won joy of understanding. We mark not only personal achievement, but a shared faith in the university as a sacred place of transformation and of truth-seeking.

In a time when these ideals are under siege, such faith is no small thing.

Phi Beta Kappa has always stood for the life of the mind, for the belief that the liberal arts and sciences are not luxuries but necessities; that freedom of thought is not an abstraction, but the condition of our collective flourishing, that ideas, tested and challenged in open exchange, are the very engines of a vibrant democracy. Today, we celebrate students who have excelled within that tradition. And we also acknowledge the mounting pressures it now faces.

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.

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.

Yet, I believe, as did the founders of Phi Beta Kappa, as did the leaders of this nation throughout the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, that public universities serve the public good through research and education, by exploring and generating new ideas, and by teaching future citizens to discern how to live meaningful lives.

As the 1965 legislation that created the National Foundation for the Arts and the Humanities so succinctly puts it:

“Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens.”1

To make good on this demand of democracy itself, we must support, sustain, and defend the public research university as a sacred space of inquiry and learning.

The university is set apart as a space dedicated to the search for truth and the cultivation of the habits of dialogue and thinking that awaken us to the world and deepen our relationships with one another.

The university, however, can only be a catalyst for new and unexpected ideas if it is protected and sustained.

Despite the very real threats of the current moment, I want to conclude today on a note of hope and possibility.

This is not the first time our university has weathered mighty storms. And it will not be the last. Higher education has endured wars, recessions, cultural upheaval, swings in public opinion, and political backlash before.

And it has survived—not through complacency, but through principled resistance, the relentless belief that truth is a value worth defending, and the enduring commitment to imagine a more just and beautiful future.

We do well today to remember the words of poet Audre Lorde, who wrote:

“Within each one of us there is some piece of humanness that knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates crisis after crisis and is grinding all our futures into dust.”2

The university is not immune to change; it is the crucible through which we deepen our understanding of the world and one another so we might create together a future worth wanting.

As Audre Lorde reminds us:

“What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strength of our individual identities. And in order to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.”3

And as long as there are students willing to question, to wonder, to speak truth even when it is hard or unpopular, the university will remain the beating heart of a free society and a catalyst for a more just future.

To our new Phi Beta Kappa inductees: you inherit this legacy and commitment. You carry forward the work of keeping inquiry free, of ensuring that knowledge serves not power, but that piece of humanness that makes a better world possible. You have distinguished yourselves not only through achievement, but through the questions you have dared to ask.

Higher education, like democracy itself, is not static. It breathes through us. It survives when we defend it. And it thrives when we create and sustain it together.

Let this ceremony be more than an induction; let it be an invitation: to become not just scholars, but stewards; not just recipients of learning, but protectors of what learning makes possible.

Congratulations, and welcome to the fellowship of Phi Beta Kappa.

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The following essay is based on remarks I made at the first Symposium on Public Research Universities Futures sponsored by the Center for Higher and Adult Education at Michigan State University on March 12, 2025. The question to which I was asked to respond was:

How can the public research university fulfill its public good mission by being a platform for inquiry?

This question, posed in March 2025, arises at a moment when the very possibility of the public research university as a platform for inquiry has come under intense political threat in the United States. In reflecting on the importance of the practice of free inquiry for public life in a democracy, I was called back to Plato’s Apology, that compelling account of the trial of Socrates in which the citizens of Athens find him guilty of impiety and corrupting the youth…and sentence him to death. There is a moment in that dialogue that responds in a poignant way to the present question and to the context in which it is posed. It comes just after the Athenians have found Socrates guilty and his accusers have proposed death as the proper penalty. When Socrates is given the opportunity to propose a counter-penalty, he subversively suggests that the most fitting punishment for the life he has led, attempting to orient each citizen and the city itself toward what is true and just and beautiful, would be for the citizens to provide him with free meals in the Prytaneum, the most honored place in the city.4 This is Socrates at his most audacious, for the Prytaneum was the site of the hearth of Hestia, a powerful place of social integration where the practices of Socratic education would be woven into the fabric of the community.5 Of all the things Socrates says in his defense, this was perhaps the most provocative, and it likely cost him his life.

We might, however, trace the idea of the public research university to this very provocation; for it invites us to imagine what it might mean to situate the search for truth and the love of wisdom at the very heart of civic life so that the city and its citizens might cultivate the habits of dialogue and discovery that enrich our relationships with one another and deepen our understanding of the world we share.

In the late 18th and throughout the 19th century in the United States, citizens recognized the value of setting up public research universities to serve the public good in the twofold way Socrates served the city of Athens, through research and education, by exploring and generating new ideas and by teaching future citizens to discern how to live meaningful lives. In 1894, the vital importance of research was affirmed by the Regents of the University of Wisconsin when they insisted that the university “should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”6 And in 1862, during the Civil War, an enduring commitment to public higher education found its voice in the passage of the Morrill Land-Grant Act with its promise “to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.”7 Research and education have long animated and enriched the civic life of our democracy, for as the 1965 legislation that created the National Foundation for the Arts and the Humanities so succinctly puts it: “Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens.”8

A Sacred Space of Research and Learning To make good on this demand of democracy itself, we must support, sustain, and defend the public research university as a sacred space of inquiry and learning.

To call the university a “sacred” space is not to infuse it with a holiness founded upon religious dogma, but to recall the connotations of the Latin sacrare, which means “to set apart” and “to dedicate.”9 The university is set apart as a space dedicated to the search for truth and the cultivation of the habits of dialogue and thinking that awaken us to the world and deepen our relationships with one another.

The university is a sacred space for thinking in its most active voice. The activity of thinking is rooted in what Hannah Arendt calls the human condition of natality, the capacity to bring something new into the world.10 Thinking thus acts in unpredictable ways. This is one reason idealogues and demagogues find universities so dangerous and seek to control them. The university, however, can only be a catalyst for new and unexpected ideas if it is protected and sustained as a sphere of free inquiry, intellectual humility, and responsible dialogue.

If the activity of thinking shapes the research life of the university, the spiritual practice of learning shapes its educational life. Here, I use the term “spiritual” in the sense in which Parker Palmer speaks of “authentic spirituality” in his book To Know as We Are Known when he writes:

Authentic spirituality wants to open us to truth—whatever truth may be, wherever truth may take us. Such a spirituality does not dictate where we must go but trusts that any path walked with integrity will take us to a place of knowledge. Such a spirituality encourages us to welcome diversity and conflict, to tolerate ambiguity, and to embrace paradox.11

Fear of uncertainty, ambiguity, and difference destroys the space of learning and inquiry. Diversity of perspective, identity, and lived experience is a condition for the possibility of research and teaching excellence. Authentic spirituality is thus rooted in the courage to create and hold spaces of plurality, paradox, and ambiguity that are animated by a shared commitment to seek truth wherever it leads. To seek truth is not to presume to possess it. Truth is subverted whenever it is made into an instrument of power, for the power of truth lies in its capacity to draw us together in a common endeavor of searching and researching.

Danger from Two Directions In her book, Nihilistic Times, Wendy Brown recognizes the importance of protecting the university as a sacred space of thinking:

Preserving the scholarly realm for the relative autonomy and integrity of thought, indeed, for thinking itself, means resisting both hyper-politicization of knowledge and its structuration by relations of political economic dependence—state, economic, or philanthropic.12

Brown points here to dangers from two directions. First, the hyper-politicization of knowledge threatens to undermine the research and educational mission of the university. Partisan ideology has come to saturate every facet of civil society, but when it seeps into the classroom, the laboratory, or the studio, the creative play of thinking is hampered, the horizons of discovery constrained. To resist the politicization of knowledge against which Brown warns us, a different kind of space must be prepared and maintained—a space set apart and dedicated to thinking in its most active voice, to the fearless search for truth wherever it may lead. This requires curation, rooted in care, and a lived commitment to free inquiry and responsible dialogue. The university is not a place of neutrality but of restraint informed by intellectual humility.

A second danger to the public mission of the university announces itself here; for the university cannot be maintained as a sacred space of thinking and authentic spirituality if it is economically dependent upon a politics that imposes direction on its inquiry, limits the scope of its purview, or circumscribes its sphere of discovery. This returns us to that provocative suggestion Socrates makes in the Apology that puts education at the center of civic life. The well-being of the city depends upon its willingness to create, sustain, and support a space of free inquiry and responsible dialogue. But the idea that such places dedicated to the practices of research and education should be maintained in perpetuity by the city for the sake of civic life remains as unwelcome today as it was in ancient Athens. Then as now, the idea is unwelcome because the citizenry does not, as James Baldwin reminds us, “trust the independence of mind, which alone makes a genuine education possible.”13 Now as then, however, the idea is essential because the civic life of democracy itself depends upon independence of thought and integrity of judgment.

Between the unwelcome and the essential lies the difficult but possible—this is just the site the public research university must inhabit if it is to fulfill its public good mission by being a platform for inquiry, a place of fearless sifting and winnowing that cultivates in citizens the wisdom and vision democracy demands. If the space the university thus inhabits is political, it is political in the sense in which Socrates was political, serving the public good by cultivating habits of dialogue, by provoking citizens to think.14 In this sense, however, the public research university is no more divorced from partisan politics than was Socrates; like Socrates, the public research university is situated within and vulnerable to the factional fighting that seeks wealth, power, and control. Indeed, in the degree to which the university depends on such partisan politics, it too must be engaged with them. But the aim and extent of this engagement must be to protect and defend the university as a sacred place dedicated to inquiry and learning, for this is the ground upon which our politics will either enliven and enrich civic life or deaden and impoverish it.

Values-Enacted Leadership The ultimate direction taken in this regard depends on the culture of leadership we develop within and between our public research universities. To cultivate and maintain the university as a sacred space of research and authentic spirituality requires a values-enacted approach to leadership that intentionally aligns the values for which we say we care most deeply with the lived experiences of our students, staff, faculty, and community partners. Values-enacted leadership is as difficult as it is powerful.15 The difficulty lies in remaining always attentive to the deeper purpose of the university, to its core values of free inquiry, intellectual humility, and responsible dialogue even, and especially, when the dissonant noise of partisan politics seeks to deplete our energy and divert our attention. The values-enacted approach to leadership is powerful because it recognizes that values must be navigated anew each time they are invoked. Relationships deepen as values are identified as shared and put into intentional practice each day, in every decision we make and in every interaction we have. Trust takes root as we work together to weave these shared values into the intellectual life of the university. Ultimately, the power of values-enacted leadership in higher education lies in its capacity to sustain and nurture the habits of thinking and dialogue, rooted in trust, that cultivate the wisdom and vision democracy demands.

If, in these reflections, we are called back to the trial of Socrates, it is because his life has long stood as an enduring reminder that free inquiry, intellectual humility, and responsible dialogue have always been the greatest threat to demagoguery and the best hope for democracy.

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On a Friday in early May, I joined a group of leaders at the University of Oregon whose work focuses on advising. They had gathered in Eugene, down along the Willamette River, to identify the shared values that would shape their work together in the months and years to come. I had been looking forward to spending time with them, reflecting on the deeper purpose of their vital commitment to advising and thinking together about the values that we would need to practice to make good on our commitments to the success of our students.

As I thought about how I might frame my time with them during this difficult period of fear and uncertainty across higher education, I found myself returning to that compelling video, now almost fifteen years old, in which Brené Brown identifies courage with wholeheartedness and gives voice to the power of vulnerability.

Surveying the national political landscape makes it painfully clear that we have thus far failed to embody the lessons she teaches in this video.

In her research, Brown identifies the characteristics of those she found to be most capable of connection. She calls them “wholehearted,” and describes them as having a deep sense of love and belonging because they believe themselves to be worthy of love and belonging.

This sense of worthiness gives rise to wholehearted behavior, which is rooted, it turns out, in the courage to be vulnerable. Brown explicitly connects wholeheartedness with courage—the word “courage” derives from the Latin, cors, or heart. Those most capable of connection have the courage to be vulnerable, to open themselves authentically to others in ways that deepen relationships and build trust.

The great threat to higher education posed by the current actions of the federal administration lies in the pall of fear and uncertainty they cast over our core educational and research activities. Even so, a great opportunity for higher education presents itself here, if, in the face of this fear and uncertainty, we are able to cultivate practices of wholeheartedness rooted in the worthiness of our shared purpose.

The Value of Values WorkOver the years of working on values-enacted leadership with the HuMetricsHSS initiative, I have come to realize that one of the most important aspects of values-enacted work is the time we take in the beginning to identify the values we hope to enact in the work we are doing together. The conversations we have around the table about how the values we say we care about will be put into practice in our work together requires vulnerability, openness, and a willingness to explore the deeper commitments that draw us to one value over another.

The value of these conversations lies not only in the specific values identified, but also in the time we take together to learn more about each other and the values that emerge as important. Often there is laughter and a sense of playfulness in these conversations, gifts in and of themselves.

But it can also happen that a value will evoke a difficult truth, and a quieter, more serious tone will hover among those in dialogue together. I listen for those more hushed moments of meaningful connection when something true and real finds its voice. Such moments, however difficult, open us to deeper connection. This connectedness sustains us through the challenges we face.

The Joy of ConnectionThat Friday morning in the beautiful space overlooking the Willamette River, I had the privilege of listening to and participating in a preliminary discussion of values at one of the tables. I am always moved by the creativity and joy that emerges in these initial discussions of values as members of the group begin to consider what is most important to them. In the image above, the group adopted the metaphor of a tree—the solidarity tree! Rooted in trust, equity, and quality, the solidarity tree has branches of courage, leadership, service, and joy. It was a gift to be part of the conversation that led to this image, and I look forward to learning more about the values our advisors adopt as shared.

I was grateful for the opportunity to spend some time with such a wise and talented group of colleagues as they began to identify the values that will shape our approach to advising at the University of Oregon. In laughter and the quieter moments of connection, I heard a wholehearted commitment to each other that will nurture the growth and development of our students as they chart pathways to meaningful lives.

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Since beginning my role as Provost at the University of Oregon, I have tried to communicate in ways that build trust and cultivate connection. The more fraught and unsettling our civic life in these United States becomes, the more important it is to find ways to be present to one another that deepen relationships, foster solidarity, and create the space for meaningful dialogue.

I have always understood my administrative life as, among other things, a writing project, just as I think of my life as a kind of essay, that is, as an attempt to make meaning of my finite human experience.

The traditional genres of administrative writing—the memos, the policies, the evaluations, the welcome messages, the statements, and even the occasional op-ed pieces—leave little space for essaying: the textured grappling toward meaning in which one might discern, in the very messiness of it, something true or incisive or illuminating.

There has been, of course, pressure from a variety of quarters for higher education administrators to make statements that take a stand against the actions of the federal administration on behalf of the core values of the institution. However cathartic such statements may be to write and read, my experience has been that they do little to advance the research and educational purpose of the university itself. That work—our most important work—requires trust rooted in action aligned with the values about which we profess to care so deeply.

In my ten and a half months as Provost at the University of Oregon, I have learned that when I focus my attention on a specific community of colleagues in a particular moment for an identifiable purpose, a different way of communicating becomes possible. Words become catalysts for a gathering of energy and effort, not tools for implementing a strategy.

Today across higher education, we find ourselves in a very challenging position; one that calls for new ways of being together rooted in our core commitments to pursue truth and cultivate responsible practices of dialogue capable of deepening our understanding of the world and enriching our civic life.

In a recent gathering of researchers at the University of Oregon, I tried to give voice to the connection between the pursuit of truth and the life of democracy. I returned to the legislation that established the national foundation for the arts and humanities in which Congress reminds us that “democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens.”

The current administration has taken actions that could dismantle the research infrastructure that was created to meet this demand. As I said to our faculty and staff engaged with the vital research mission of this university, the current administration

…is abandoning the bold ideals Congress once upheld — ideals that made the United States a global beacon in science, technology, the humanities, and the arts. It is abandoning our shared commitment to a vibrant democracy. Research is at the heart of both our institution’s educational mission and its role as a public good for society. We are proud — fiercely proud — of the transformative power of the research we do here at the University of Oregon, and we understand the terrible implications of it being dismantled so haphazardly and irresponsibly.

In the face of increasing threats to higher education, we must continue to foster and cultivate ways of being present that hold us together as a community committed to the transformative power of education. This is how I put it then:

Even in this difficult period, let us remain true to our shared values, to our commitment to care deeply for one another, and to our common purpose.

This moment of shared anxiety can also be a moment of shared resolve — a chance to gather, to resist, and to protect this university as a sacred place for free inquiry, for intellectual humility, and for responsible dialogue. If democracy itself demands wisdom and vision from its citizens, the work you all do each day to advance the research mission of our university is the very work of preserving and enriching democracy itself.

For more than a decade, this blog has been a third space of essaying for me, situated between the private reflections of my daily writing practice and the polished prose of the public messages, statements, and other publications expected of me first as a scholar, then as a Dean, and now as Provost.

Perhaps in this difficult time, when the very purpose of higher education as a sacred place of inquiry and learning is under threat, this blog might continue to be a place of public reflection for me as Provost. Perhaps too, these practices of public writing might open us to new possibilities of connection that make university life so vibrant.

However challenging the current moment may be, the purpose of the university remains to pursue truth wherever it may lead and to cultivate the habits of dialogue that are vital to the life of a stressed democracy in urgent need of renewal.

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Toward a More Perfect Union—Reading Baldwin with Schürmann

Tracing a path opened by an enigmatic reference in Reiner Schürmann’s dissertation to the symbol of water in James Baldwin’s Another Country, this essay follows the thinking of Schürmann and Baldwin to the tragic denial that perverts the ideals of the United States from the moment of its founding. Drawing on Schürmann’s imperative hermeneutics, we attend to Baldwin’s essays from the 1960’s as they call white citizens of the United States to take on the “hideously difficult” task of achieving our identity as a nation by facing our history and transforming ourselves as human beings. The symbols of water, fire, and love point us to new ways of existing rooted in practices of love—sensual releasement, ethical candor, and ethical imagination—that just might enable us to create a more perfect union.

Long, Christopher P. “The Hideously Difficult Task Before Us: Toward a More Perfect Union—Reading Baldwin with Schürmann.” Philosophy Today 68, no. 4 (2024): 879–90. https://doi.org/10.5840/philtoday2024123558.

To read all the essays on Reiner Schürmann published in Philosophy Today, 68, no. 4, visit the Philosophy Documentation Center.

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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.

LeadershipWe 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.

Values AlignmentBefore 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:

If 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.

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.

Principles: Values into ActionThe 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 see images of the white boards 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.

Shared Purpose, Vigilant PracticeOn 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!

OtP at sorting valuesThe Provost’s Council practicing Joy!A values framework from the OtP workshop.A values framework from the Provost’s Council workshop.Chris, Jason, and Nicky on the roof at the Graduate Hotel.

To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings

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Some years back, my friend Leigh Graves Wolf gave me John O’Donohue’s book, To Bless the Space Between Us, when she left Michigan State University where we were working together at the time. Since then, I have returned to the poem “For a Leader” so often that I thought I should post it here so I could easily share it when asked.

For A LeaderMay 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 for 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.

From O’Donohue, John. To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings. First Edition. New York: Doubleday, 2008, .

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Dear Bill,

I visited the slime mold today. It was Lily’s suggestion. I was telling Leslie how empty the campus feels without you, and Lily said “why don’t you stop by that fungus my Dad loved so much.” She’s thoughtful like that—takes after her parents.

Remember when you first showed me the slime mold? We were walking from the Union back to Linton Hall soon after I first arrived on campus in 2015. I thought a student had been sick from too much drinking the night before. But you knew better. You always saw the deeper beauty of things. “This is one of the most amazing creatures on campus,” you said, “it’s a slime mold. They feed on decomposing nutrients, recycling them, and returning them to the food web. They even communicate to others of their kind through chemical signals.”

Today, the slime mold thrives, and as I stood there smiling, remembering you, I thought of the lilies you loved in your garden. So, I decided to visit the Jean and Alfred Goldner Daylily Collection over by the library. You told me once that you were partial to lilies because they are rhizomatic, building rich networks of connection beneath the soil, supporting one another year after year through an ever-thickening web interconnection. You can already see the shoots of the new lilies beginning to emerge from “out of the dead land.” When they blossom, I will think of you and of the vast network of relationships nurtured by your wisdom and care and creative imagination.

Oh Bill, beloved friend, your absence is so present to me now…I miss you so deeply, and yet somehow you are here.

In my wanderings, I came upon a buckeye tree, planted this very day, a life to honor your life; a tree whose roots grow long and deep, and whose fruit symbolizes abundance and resilience and positivity, as your life itself embodied.

And as I visited these places, something wonderful began to take root and grow from the emptiness that prompted Lily to send me to the slime mold you loved so much. Your love remains; it brings us together, calls us to our deeper purpose, creates a garden in which each of us, a flower, is nurtured by the nexus of meaning you cultivated.

Your work, your life, the spirit of your gifts are present all around us, they animate our relationships and illuminate a world broken without you and better because of you.

So, rest now, sweet Bill, and know your work endures in us. We will remain true to purpose, and practice every day, just as the way you lived your life taught us so well.

With love, a broken heart, and unfathomable joy for the time we had together, your friend,

Gallery of BillHDThe post A Letter to Bill Hart-Davidson first appeared on Christopher P. Long.

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As many of you know, I find joy in refining the system that shapes the way I work and in sharing my approach here on the Long Road blog. So let this be the latest in an ongoing series which I have tagged “Productivity,” but which I prefer to think about in terms of meaningful work, perhaps we can call it “meaningful productivity” to distinguish it from a mindless productivity that serves systems of extraction and exhaustion.

As I look back, it has been fifteen years since I wrote my first post on the topic at the request of a group of graduate students who were interested in learning how to best manage their time, and, strangely enough, it has been nine years to the day since I wrote A Few Notes on Productivity, a post that outlined my approach to productivity in academic and administrative life.

Over the past few years, I have referred to my 2021 post on moving from productivity to meaningful work in an annual Office of Faculty and Academic Staff Affairs workshop at Michigan State on Prioritizing Time/Email Management. Preparing for our 2024 workshop has prompted the reflections below.

Obsidian NotesWhile I would love to write more about how Obsidian, a powerful markdown writing application, has transformed the way I organize my academic, administrative, and personal life, here I am going to focus on a few specific elements related to how I manage my day-to-day activities as a dean of two colleges—the College of Arts & Letters and the Honors College. Obsidian is an application and a platform; its power lies in its community of users and in the plugins you can add to customize it to your specific needs.

In what follows, in addition to the core Obsidian application, which is free for personal use, the workflow I describe makes use of the Tasks plugin, the Calendar plugin, and the Periodic Notes plugin. I encourage you to explore the application and to join the vibrant Obsidian community, but fair warning: there are rabbit holes within rabbit holes waiting to swallow your time, so enter with intention and purpose!

Enduring Purpose, Writing PracticeEven as I continue to refine my process and the tools I use to manage my workflow, the enduring purpose of my efforts is to free my mind to be fully present to those with whom I meet every day. As I have discussed in the past, to facilitate this, I have a daily writing practice during which I return to the core values that animate my life—ethical candor, ethical imagination, attention, integrity—and reflect on how best to enact these values in the context in which I find myself.

The workflow I describe below combines this commitment to reflective practice with a contextual computing approach designed to give me direct access to the materials I need at the moment I need them most. The power of Obsidian in this context is its ability to make connections not only by linking notes to one another, but by allowing you to easily link to files and websites outside of your system of personal notes to create a broader ecosystem that enables meaningful productivity.

Preparing for the WeekAt the beginning of each week I carve out a little time to go through my calendar and, using the Periodic Notes plugin of Obsidian, I create a daily note for each day of the week with links to notes related to each meeting I have.

Here is what the note for Monday, January 8th, 2024, looks like:

Now there is a lot going on here, and I don’t want you to be overwhelmed, so focus on the center panel of the page where you will see the call-out box labelled “Focus” in which I have a bullet list of links to notes related to each meeting I have that day.

There you will see links to notes connected with people with whom I meet (Upenyu Majee, Thomas Jeitschko …), projects on which I am working (MSU Strategic Planning, NEH Pilcrow Grant…), and areas for which I am responsible (HC – MarComm, CAL – Development, CAL – Research…). Each of those links connects to a note that itself includes everything to which I need to refer in considering the topic at hand.

So, for example, when I click on the link to the Campball Hall Renovation note, I am taken to the following note:

This note has links to all the documents related to this project on Sharepoint. So I can, for example, look at the document we are using to track donors for the project, or link directly to the memo I am working on about our financial commitments to the project.

Contextual To Do ListsOne of the most powerful aspects of this approach is that when I have something that needs to be done related to the project, I can add it directly to the note and the Tasks plugin will enable me to view my tasks in a variety of ways, as indicated in image above of the daily note, which has call-out boxes on the left with my tasks organized in various ways—Due Today or Tomorrow, High Priority, etc. This allows me to write tasks in the context where they are most relevant and view them in the ways that are most meaningful to me. Having my tasks integrated into this ecosystem of notes where all relevant materials are readily available enables me to take and track actions in the context in which they have the most meaning.

More importantly, this daily note’s list of linked notes allows me to focus my full attention on the person with whom I am meeting because I know all the material I need to respond to questions or to work collaboratively is readily accessible.

ConnectionsThe daily note for January 8, 2024 connects to over twenty other notes, as this graph of the note’s connections indicates. By connecting my notes in this way, I can quickly and easily find the materials I need when I need them most.

Although it has taken time and experimentation with Obsidian to develop a system that works for me, now that I have notes connected to the range of things on which I am working, a liberating peace of mind that has settled upon me. Obsidian is remembering things that need to be done, holding the information in the context in which it is most relevant, and I am free to focus on those I encounter, imagine new possible projects and connections, and enjoy the purposeful work to which I am dedicated.

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The metaphors we use shape the future we create.

Upon entering the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, you are immediately confronted by four enormous Corinthian columns supporting a spacious atrium. There they stand, four strong individuals, each holding up their portion of the larger edifice.

Corinthian Columns in the National Building Museum, photo by cplong.I found myself in this amazing space one early November morning in 2023 to meet a group of beloved colleagues from the HuMetricsHSS team, the University of Washington’s Rethinking the Academy initiative, and Michigan State University’s MESH Research, to imagine what a more just and caring future academy might feel like. Thanks to our colleague Dianne Harris, we gathered for a two-day retreat that began at the National Building Museum and ended, most fittingly, with a restorative walk through the gardens of Dumbarton Oaks. Here was a gift—an expanse of time to be together, to talk and imagine and dream, and to begin to discern a pathway to a future Academy worth wanting.

In reflecting on our time together, I began to think about the spaces we inhabited and the course our conversations took as mile markers along a longer path toward a future Academy enriched by connection, collaboration, and care.

An Inflection PointHigher education in the United States finds itself at an inflection point. A failure to live out in practice the values higher education institutions profess to advance has not only led to a debilitating cynicism among faculty, students, and the wider public, but also uncovers a performative contradiction the system itself is unable to reconcile. Our policies and practices do not enact the values for which we say we stand: we do not walk our talk.

This performative contradiction is, however, the symptom of a deeper problem. Yes, we are false to our professed principles, but our principles themselves need to be re-imagined from a more ontologically responsible perspective. The systems of higher education in the United States are designed to legitimate and reinforce a conception of subjectivity rooted in the misguided ideology of liberal individualism that presumes independence and self-sufficiency while diminishing the existential importance of relational interdependence. The crisis we face in higher education in the United States is ontological. Our systems are built to support a subject that is thought to be, but is not, independent and self-sufficient. The illusion is not unlike those pillars in the National Building Museum: they seem to stand separate and independent, but without one another, the edifice will collapse.

Until we reckon with this deeper ontological crisis, higher education in the United States will remain incapable of living up to its promise to nurture and advance mutual flourishing in a complex, interconnected world.

In her essay, Higher Education and the Im/Possibility of Transformative Justice, Sharon Stein emphasizes the degree to which this promise has been perverted by conception of the subject that is independent of and separated from the ecological network of relationships that sustains us. Indeed, given the growing political attacks on higher education in contemporary politics, Stein points to an ethical imperative to reimagine higher education from a more relational, interdependent perspective.

As higher education increasingly becomes itself a target of accumulation, there is both an ethical imperative and a political opportunity to imagine futures that do not depend on dispossession. But this remains unthinkable for those who continue to center the modern subject as their primary concern.1

We gathered in DC last November to begin to imagine futures for higher education “that do not depend on dispossession.” This requires us, as Stein rightly emphasizes, to re-imagine the nature of the subjectivity the university has been designed to value and to serve. So long as it remains the modern liberal subject, separated from and elevated above the rich and diverse network of human and more-than-human relationships that sustain us, we will be unable to create a future academy that sustains and nurtures mutual flourishing.

Becoming Rhizomatic The course of our conversations in DC and the changing location of our gatherings map the possibility of another way of thinking about academic subjectivity. As we moved from the National Building Museum to the gardens of Dumbarton Oaks, we began to think together in more interconnected and dynamic ways. The gardens on the grounds of Dumbarton Oaks offered us another metaphor for thinking about the ontological ground of a re-imagined academy. Here in the gardens, the independent and separated pillars of the National Building Museum gave way to a complex, interconnected expression of beauty and flourishing.

We had entered the sphere of trees and roots and rhizomes. This latter, the rhizome, offers higher education another way to think about the subjectivity that gives it life. Rosi Braidotti has called this a “posthuman subjectivity” in order to emphasize how it points beyond anthropocentrism and the extractive practices of the modern, liberal subject. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s articulation of the rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus,2 Braidotti outlines the characteristics of such a posthuman subject in her book, Posthuman Knowledge.3 These characteristics offer us complex and sophisticated ways of thinking about the kind of subjectivity around which a re-imagined Academy might be organized.

In Posthuman Knowledge, Braidotti gives expression to the posthuman subject as relational, embodied, embedded, and embrained, vulnerable (aware of finitude), transversal (which is to say, intersectional), immanent (connected with the structures that sustain it), and, importantly, animated by joy.

If our metaphors shape the future we create, let the metaphor of the rhizome empower us to imagine and enact a future academy that does justice to interconnection, wholeness, flourishing, and joy.

As this Coalition for the Future Academy itself grows and develops, as it nurtures connections and fosters new collaborations, I will do my best to trace the progress of our evolution, and we invite you to join the effort to re-imagine and co-create the Academy anew.

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I am learning how to draw.

It started during the pandemic, but if I am being honest, my practice has languished.

Over the last few weeks, however, I have felt the need to redouble my efforts, so I turned to Google for suggestions about a book to help me in my practice.

I ordered the book that rose to the top, The Natural Way to Draw by Kimon Nicolaides, from our local library. When I picked it up and opened it, came across this line:

To understand theories is not enough. Much practice is necessary…

The Natural Way to Draw, xiv.

Now this is not a new book; in fact, it was published after Nicolaides died in 1938. But the book is serious about practice, and as I began to practice a few weekends ago, I started thinking: this is a year long curriculum, and I only have this book from the library for three weeks!

Even so, I took up my pencil and began to practice.

The week after I ordered the book and returned to my practice, I met Charles Ezra Ferrell, co-director of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center. He had opened the 2023 Ubuntu Gathering at MSU with a beautiful poem.

I was excited to meet Charles and to visit the Boggs center. So I went up to him afterward to thank him for his poem. During our conversation he asked me:

Do you have a creative practice?

Smiling, I was happy to report, “why yes I do! I am learning to draw.”

Oh how happy this made him—he is an artist and he went right into asking if I had pencils and paper, and what did I like to draw, and this is how you best draw a face…

We had a long conversation before we turned to Jimmy and Grace Lee Boggs in preparation for our visit to the center.

A PilgrimageI prepared for that visit as one prepares for a pilgramage in the sense that María Lugones uses the term in relation to her book, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions.1

There she writes:

The ‘pilgrimage’ that the title of the book calls forth moves through different levels of liberatory work in company forged through a practice of ‘tantear‘ for meaning, for the limits of possibility; putting our hands to our ears to hear better, to hear the meaning in the enclosures and openings of our praxis.2

The Spanish word, tantear, names a kind of groping, as in ‘tantear en la oscuridad‘, feeling one’s way in the dark. Practices of feeling, of listening, and of seeing differently are, I am learning, at the heart of drawing and of the liberatory praxis the Boggs Center embodies.

As I drove a van of colleagues to the Boggs Center two days after meeting Charles, I thought about a passage from Jimmy Boggs that Charles had shared with me:

It is only in relationship to other bodies, and many somebodies, that anybody is somebody.3

This is beautiful articulation of Ubuntu that we saw in practice when we arrived at the Boggs Center on the Eastside of Detroit.

As we were settling in, Charles took me aside and said, “I have something for you,” and he handed me a book.

Here it was The Natural Way to Draw by Kimon Nicolaides, a gift from Charles in the spirit of helping me learn how to draw—the very book I had ordered the week before!

Ubuntu connects us in mysterious ways.

Ubuntu in Theory and PracticeI tell you this story because it gives voice to the spirit of what we hope will be our next step in the work that began as a Mellon funded project to support Ubuntu Dialogues between MSU and Stellenbosch University in South Africa. The spirit of connection, of collaboration, of generosity, of co-creative practice animates the creation of the Institute for Ubuntu Thought and Practice.

We take this next step with more than a little trepidation. We turn to Ubuntu at MSU as a predominantly white institution in the United States that occupies the traditional lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples. We do so with the humility of beginners, with the openness and vulnerability of a community that is learning how to be human in a system of higher education the professes to value things it does not enact in practice.

As many of you know, I return every day in my own reflective practice to that passage from James Baldwin: “I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.”

We say we care about community engaged scholarship, diversity, equity, and inclusion, interdisciplinary research, belonging … but the lived experiences of our students and faculty tell a different story.

And this is one reason we need to co-create this Institute for Ubuntu Thought and Practice as a next step in our journey now that the Ubuntu Dialogues grant is coming to a close.

So please, think of the Institute as an invitation to practice, as an institutional space for co-creation, for dialogue transformed into action, as a welcoming space for the relationships we have established over the years we have been practicing Ubuntu Dialogues together.

This is the spirit in which we hope to move forward together; it is the spirit of Grace Lee Boggs, when she writes in her Autobiography, Living for Change:

“To make a revolution, people must not only struggle against existing institutions. They must make a philosophical/spiritual leap and become more human human beings. In order to…transform the world, they must…transform themselves.”4

The practice of self-transformation was at the heart of the liberatory practice that Grace Lee and Jimmy Boggs sought to weave into the fabric of the communities they created. They never ceased feeling their way in the darkness, searching for the deeper purpose of our embodied relationships. Let our practice be enriched by theory, our theory enlivened by practice. Let the liberatory work of the Institute for Ubuntu Thought and Practice be an ongoing pilgrimage toward more just and beautiful ways of being together.

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I’ve been a little quiet here lately as this very difficult semester comes to a close. It was healing yesterday to spend some time with Dr. Fauci before our MSU doctoral convocation.

In his address he drew on lessons from the pandemic and encouraged graduates to expect the unexpected, to engage meaningfully with science, whatever their discipline may be, to resist the normalization of untruth, and, importantly, to find and prioritize joy in their lives.

This last resonated deeply with me – it reminded me of a passage from Robin Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass:

“We are showered everyday with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gifts and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.”1

This is such a beautiful expression of the faith that animates a life committed to education. And it has been a gift to be reminded of it as this semester comes to a close.

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The transformative power of values-enacted scholarship is only really felt in lived-experience. Just before spring break, and only two weeks after the mass shooting on the MSU campus, a small group of staff, directors, and chairs gathered in a conference room in Linton Hall to consider how we might begin to work together in the wake of significant changes to the budget model connected to summer teaching.

Over the next few years, MSU will be moving to an all-funds budget and to a hybrid model that will include elements of responsibility centered management (RCM). We convened the committee to help us discern how to put our values into practice as we determine how to distribute funds connected to summer teaching and learning.

The experience we have gained over the years in bringing the HuMetricsHSS initiative to life in the College of Arts & Letters shaped our approach to the difficult work this committee has to undertake at this difficult time. So, Sonja Fritzsche and I asked Penny Weber and Bonnie Russell from the HuMetricsHSS team to help us develop a process that might best be called a “values-enacted committee charge.” Our approach is rooted in the recognition that transformative change is only possible when values are intentionally woven into every aspect of university life. Each interaction, each encounter, offers a new opportunity to put shared values into intentional practice. Indeed, values are enacted in every action we undertake. Whether we recognize them or not, values express themselves in action. Yet, too often the values that implicitly shape our institutional practices are not aligned with those we say we care most deeply about.

So to begin our work together as a committee, we replaced the traditional “charge meeting” with a set of activities designed to identify the core values of the group and to open a meaningful dialogue about how these shared values would be put into practice both in their work together as a group and in the recommendations they were being asked to make.

Arriving Following adrienne maree brown’s advice in Holding Change, we began with a deep breath. “Use breath to cultivate patience in yourself and in the group,” brown writes, “Values get lost in haste.”1 We then went around the room with a one-word check-in to begin to establish trusting connections among the group. The prompt we used was: “In one word, what is the value that has been most helpful to you as you have navigated the last few weeks?”

This short practice of breathing together and checking in with one another opened a space of trust among the group and prepared us for the work of surfacing the values that would shape the work ahead.

Surfacing Values In preparing for the meeting, the leadership team identified three values that we thought would need to be activated in any successful work of a committee focused on reimagining the summer budget model: Equity, Inclusion, and Trust. So in framing the next phase of the meeting, we were explicit that these were the three values the leadership had identified. We invited the group then to consider other values that might be important to them in their work together. We asked: What values are missing and would you like to replace any of the proposed values.

We received a beautiful list of new values to consider, including: honesty, wholeness, responsibility, diversity, opportunity, listening, transparency, trust, consistency, humility, joy, and heart.

From this list, we reduced the values the group identified as shared to the following: Equity, Inclusion, Trust, Vulnerability/Patience, and Community.

Articulating Principles

With these values in hand, we took the last 35 minutes of the meeting to consider how we would enact these values 1) in our work together and 2) in the recommendations the committee would make. The HuMetricsHSS team has learned over time how important it is to be clear before the practical work begins about what these values mean in practice.

The conversation deepened as we moved into this phase of the discussion as colleagues began to imagine how they would activate these values in their work together and in the work they would produce. Let me provide two examples here, one for how the group agreed to put equity into practice and one for how they agreed to enact the value of trust.

Equity So, for example, we agreed that Equity in our work together means:

Acknowledging the range of expertise in the group regardless of rank/title/appointment type
Looking through each other’s lenses and listening to different positions without judgement;
Adding representation from non-tenure stream faculty.

We agreed that Equity in our recommendations would mean:

Taking into account Graduate Assistants, and always considering the needs of colleagues with the least economic resources;
Understanding the whole picture of who relies on summer funds for what purposes;
Recognizing and explaining inequities that are not able to be addressed;
Being honest about the different sources of funding and the relationship between them.

Trust We agreed that in relation to our work together, trust would mean:

Information will not be shared outside of the group unless the group agrees (including this blog post);
No weaponizing of information or withholding it;
Communicating about our inability to share information when that is necessary;
Checking in with one another rather than making assumptions.

In relation to our recommendations, we agreed that trust would mean:

Sharing data, explaining decision-making, educating around student needs;
Communicating the why of our recommendations.

Moving from the abstract practice of identifying values to a concrete account of how these values would be put into practice deepened the trust the group was committed to cultivating.

Checking Out We ended the meeting with one-word check-outs, asking each person to offer the values with which they were leaving the meeting. For me as Dean, my word was gratitude, both for the time our colleagues committed to this meeting, but also for the wholeheartedness they bring to the work we are doing together.

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On Thursday, March 2, 2023, I was honored to receive the 2023 MSU Institutional Champion Award for Community Engagement Scholarship. Below is the text of my remarks at the moving awards ceremony that took place in the Kellogg Center.

One of the great joys of being a dean is celebrating the accomplishments of our students, staff, and faculty. And while email can be the bane of a dean’s existence, there are moments when an email arrives announcing an award or an exciting achievement and my enthusiasm builds as I anticipate writing to celebrate the excellent work that our colleagues are doing every day.

So it was, one afternoon last December, when I received an email from Laurie Van Egeren about the 2023 MSU Institutional Champion Award for Community Engagement Scholarship. As I began scanning the message for the name of the colleague who had won this award, I was already beginning to compose the congratulatory message in my mind. So, it took me a beat or two to realize that it was Laurie who was congratulating me!

And as I read and re-read the email, I began to wonder precisely what it meant to be an institutional champion for community engaged scholarship. And this brought me back to early in my tenure as Dean of the College of Arts & Letters here at MSU.

Aligning Values and PracticesIn 2015, I was drawn to MSU because of the way the community spoke so eloquently about the value of the land-grant mission; our commitment “to advance knowledge and transform lives” made me feel immediately at home.

But it wasn’t long before the ideals I had about the vital importance of publicly engaged scholarship and participatory action research came into conflict with the traditional practices and policies of faculty evaluation.

We had hired and recruited a dynamic cohort of faculty from traditionally under-represented backgrounds to do the transdisciplinary, community engaged work they found so meaningful. Soon thereafter, however, our new colleagues were asking to meet with me to talk about how their work was being torn apart by the categories of the tenure and promotion process itself. They understood their teaching, research, and service as an integrated whole, yet, in their annual reviews they were being asked to segregate their teaching from their research and their research from their service, and they were rarely being asked at all about what they considered their most vital work–the mentoring of graduate and undergraduate students of color.

During this time, I also had one of the most transformative experiences of my academic career. I joined a small group of colleagues at the Scholarly Communications Institute in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. We had gathered there in the fall 2016 to reimagine the metrics that determine academic excellence from a more humanistic perspective. In dialogue over the course of three days, we began to think about how we might move the academy from valuing what it measures, to measuring what it says it values. The Mellon-funded HuMetricsHSS initiative designed to align indicators of academic excellence with core personal and institutional values was born from those conversations.

And as my MSU colleagues and I considered how we might support the faculty we had recruited to do the work we said we cared most deeply about, we began to realize that we needed to change what we did—how we evaluated and rewarded the interdisciplinary, community engaged scholarship at the heart of the land-grant mission.

Charting Pathways of Intellectual LeadershipThis led to the Charting Pathways of Intellectual Leadership initiative, which invites faculty to imagine how they might create a meaningful academic life by shifting the framework for advancement from teaching, research, and service to three higher order objectives that align more effectively with the purpose of the university. We now ask them how they will 1) share knowledge; 2) expand opportunity; and 3) participate in mentorship and stewardship activities. This shift opens the space for our faculty to put their values into practice through their teaching, research, and service by doing very traditional work or by pushing the boundaries of innovation in participatory action research, public scholarship, or new modes of digital engagement.

I’m proud to say that those faculty who came to the Deans Office feeling like their most important work was being torn apart have all been promoted as Associate Professors with tenure, having pursued a wide diversity of community engaged scholarship that aligns both with their personal purpose and with the purpose that animates the life of the university.

As you can hear, an interconnected web of relationships has shaped the work that is recognized today, for although I accept this award with gratitude and humility, I receive it on behalf of a dedicated, conscientious, and creative group of colleagues whose collaborative work made it possible. As Angela Davis put it when she visited campus earlier this semester: “We would not be who we are without relationality with others” (Angela Davis at MSU, February 9, 2023).

GratitudeSo let me end in gratitude, first for my wife Valerie, who is my truest partner and inspiration. Your commitment to living your values with integrity through your community service is a model to me and to our daughters, who were early on brought to the food bank in State College to begin their lives of service. To my colleagues on the HuMetricsHSS initiative, thank you for the wholeheartedness each of you brings to the work we do together—I am a better person because you have taught me how to be intentional about my values in everything I do. To my colleagues here at MSU—my leadership team in the College of Arts & Letters, and to our Chairs, Directors, staff, and faculty, thank you for creating a culture of care in which everyone can flourish. And to my colleagues in the Honors College—thank you for helping our honors students find meaningful pathways to their purpose. And to those who nominated me for this award, to my fellow awardees, and to all of you here today, thank you for your commitment to making good on the transformative promise of higher education.

Further ExplorationBelow you will find articles, websites, and stories about our community engagement scholarship efforts.

HuMetricsHSSFor more on HuMetricsHSS, please visit the HuMetricsHSS website.

Interviews with more than 120 administrators, faculty, and librarians across the Big 10 Academic Alliance led to the publication of the Walking the Talk white paper: The HuMetricsHSS Team, Nicky Agate, Christopher P. Long, Bonnie Russell, Rebecca Kennison, Penelope Weber, Simone Sacchi, Jason Rhody, and Bonnie Thornton Dill. “Walking the Talk: Toward a Values-Aligned Academy,” February 17, 2022. https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:44631/.
This article, co-authored by the HuMetricsHSS team, articulates the theory behind our values-enacted approach: Agate, Nicky, Rebecca Kennison, Stacy Konkiel, Christopher P. Long, Jason Rhody, Simone Sacchi, and Penelope Weber. “The Transformative Power of Values-Enacted Scholarship.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 7, no. 1 (December 7, 2020): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00647-z.

Charting Pathways of Intellectual Leadership This essay outlines the implementation of the Charting Pathways of Intellectual Leadership initiative in the College of Arts & Letters: Fritzsche, Sonja, William Hart-Davidson, and Christopher P. Long. “Charting Pathways of Intellectual Leadership: An Initiative for Transformative Personal and Institutional Change.” Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning 54, no. 3 (May 4, 2022): 19–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/00091383.2022.2054175. * Cilano, Cara, Sonja Fritsche, William Hart-Davidson, and Christopher P. Long. “Staying with the Trouble: Designing a Values-Enacted Academy.” Impact of Social Sciences (blog), April 23, 2020. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2020/04/23/staying-with-the-trouble-designing-a-values-enacted-academy/. * Long, Christopher P. “Reshaping the Tenure and Promotion Process so That It Becomes a Catalyst for Innovative and Invigorating Scholarship.” LSE Impact of Social Sciences* (blog), November 1, 2017. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2017/11/01/reshaping-the-tenure-and-promotion-process-so-that-it-becomes-a-catalyst-for-innovative-and-invigorating-scholarship/.

CPIL Graphic posted in the Humanities Commons.Supporting Less Commonly Taught and Indigenous LanguagesThe Mellon-Funded Less Commonly Taught Languages Partnership grant fosters collaboration across the Big 10 Academic Alliance in the teaching and learning of less commonly taught languages with a
focus on indigenous languages.

Fritsche, Sonja, Luca Giupponi, Emily Heidrich Uebel, Felix Kronenberg, Christopher P. Long, and Koen van Gorp. “Languages as Drivers of Institutional Diversity: The Case of Less Commonly Taught Languages.” The Language Educator, Winter 2022, 45–47.
Long, Christopher P., Sue Gass, and Koen van Gorp. “From Collaboration to Strategic Coordination: Creating LCTL Partnerships Across the Big 10 Academic Alliance.” Accessed June 10, 2017. http://www.europenowjournal.org/2017/06/05/from-collaboration-to-strategic-coordination-creating-lctl-partnerships-across-the-big-10-academic-alliance/.
The National Less Commonly Taught Languages Resource Center is a Department of Education/Title VI-funded national language resource center housed in the Center for Language Teaching Advancement at Michigan State University.

The Public Philosophy JournalThe Public Philosophy Journal is an innovative online publication for accessible scholarship that deepens our understanding of publicly relevant issues.

Long, Christopher P. “Practicing Public Scholarship.” Public Philosophy Journal 1, no. 1 (2018). https://doi.org/10.25335/m5/ppj.1.1-1.
Avillez, André Rosenbaum de, Mark Fisher, Kris Klotz, and Christopher P. Long. “Public Philosophy and Philosophical Publics: Performative Publishing and the Cultivation of Community.” The Good Society 24, no. 2 (2015): 118–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.5325/goodsociety.24.2.0118.

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On Tuesday morning when I made my way to the sacred circle, past the resilient tree, to Linton Hall there was a silence such as I had never heard before. It was not the silence of a holiday break or of freshly fallen snow…it was the silence of a broken world. It was the presence of an absence—Arielle, Alexandria, Brian. It was the sound of grief and loss and emptiness.

It took my breath away.

The Resilient Tree, February 14, 2023.So I paused to find a way back to my breath, to settle there and listen, to bring my heart and mind close to absence and to quietude, so I might begin to mourn and grieve.

“Breath is a practice of presence.”

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned, 21.

Let me resist the urge to make sense of what makes no sense. What is given us to learn, perhaps, is absence—the withdrawal of being.

A Gift AppearsA gift appears from my friend and colleague Ruth Nicole Brown, Chair of the Department of African American and African Studies: A poem by Howard Thurman. It points a way and I follow.

For a Time of Sorrow
I share with you the agony of your grief,
The anguish of your heart finds echo in my own.
I know I cannot enter all you feel
Nor bear with you the burden of your pain;
I can but offer what my love does give:
The strength of caring,
The warmth of one who seeks to understand
The silent storm-swept barrenness of so great a loss.
This I do in quiet ways,
That on your lonely path
You may not walk alone.

In the “silent storm-swept barreness of so great a loss” there are no words … and yet here the words find me, press me to find more words, not so much as to make sense, but so we might find a way more deeply into the absence and to the connections that somehow make it bearable.

FragmentsSo just fragments here … words that have found me and images captured as we make a way.

Tulips and Five Pennies on the pedestal of the Spartan Statue, February 17, 2023.

The source of wisdom is whatever is happening to us right at this instant.

Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart, 144.

The MSU community gathers for a vigil on February 15, 2023.“This Uncontainable Night”Another gift finds me, this one from Tani Hartman, Chair of Department of Art, Art History, and Design— a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke: “II, 29” [“Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower”]:

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

The Spartan Statue with flowers to honor Alexandria Verner, Arielle Anderson, and Brian Fraser on February 17, 2023.I flow, I am; or at least I try to be—try to find a way toward meaning at this crossroads…

The MSU Rock, February 17, 2023.MSU ShadowsMSU, we love thy shadows
When twilight silence falls.
Flushing deep, and softly paling
O’er ivy covered halls.

Beneath the pines we’ll gather
To give our faith so true.
Sing our love for alma mater
And thy praises MSU.

Beneath the pines we’ll gather.

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A week that began with a nightmare, ended with a dream.

The NightmareOn Tuesday morning, I received the call from my wife I’ve long dreaded—she said there was a 911 call about an active shooter in the high school and that our daughter was on lockdown in her classroom. The next few hours were consumed with determining precisely what was happening and if our daughter was safe. It turned out to be a hoax perpetrated on a series of Michigan communities by someone who called 911 purporting to be a teacher in the building where the shooting was actively unfolding.

Meanwhile, the actual teachers in Okemos High School were bravely protecting our children, pushing bookcases in front of doors, moving students into closets, and putting their bodies between danger and the lives of our kids.

Such is the diseased life of education in these United States in this, the twenty-third year of the 21st century.

I am grateful for the teachers and staff and police who moved so quickly to protect our students; I am heartsick that to be an educator in this country means to put your life at risk every single day.

The DreamContrast this dystopian reality with the joy and possibility embodied in Angela Davis’s visit to MSU on Thursday as a speaker in the 2023 William G. Anderson Lecture Series: From Slavery to Freedom.

Prompted by Dr. Marita Gilbert‘s beautiful invitation to reflect upon those who influenced her, Davis began with her parents and their love of learning. They instilled in her a deep commitment to social justice and a sophisticated understanding of the transformative power of ideas. Both were reinforced by her encounter with Herbert Marcuse, the German-American philosopher, social-critic, and member of the Frankfurt School, who taught her that “philosophy could be a tool for revolutionary change.”

InterconnectednessOver the course to almost two hours on Thursday, Davis focused our attention on the conditions that make such revolutionary change both urgent and necessary. She reminded us that the corrosive individualism that pervades contemporary culture is a delusion that must give way—that is beginning to give way—to a deeper recognition of our human interconnectedness with one another and the natural world. She put it this way:

“We would not be who we are without relationality with others.”

This deep existential truth awakens us to the profound responsibilities we have to one another and to the earth we share, responsibilities to which Davis called us when she emphasized that environmental justice is “ground zero of all social justice.” To recognize environmental justice as the root of all social justice is to expand the scope and complexity of how we think about justice and who we consider when we seek it. This requires an intersectional approach to our ways of being in the world. For Davis, intersectionality is a “habit of thinking things together,” a habit she practiced with us throughout the evening.

FreedomIn reflection on the struggle for freedom, Davis pressed us not to think of freedom as a discrete goal, but as a journey. The tendency to think of freedom as a destination pulls us away from the vitality of freedom as a project, as a task that animates our lives.

Here again she emphasized complexity, and specifically, the “growing complexity of what it means to be free.” This complexity is felt, for example, in the ways contemporary culture is beginning to move beyond the gender binary, a shift that has brought with it a vociferous backlash intent on reinforcing the status quo.

IdeologyIndeed, I was moved most by what Davis said about the political function of ideology to reinforce the status quo. “Racism,” she recognized, “is an ideology, a system.”

“The work of ideology is to persuade us that what exists must exist.”

To be conscious of the ways ideology operates on us is already to begin to initiate meaningful change. This was the great hope that emerged during our two hours with Davis on Thursday evening. That hope was, for me, reinforced by her remarks that when future generations look back upon this period of history, they will recognize it as a time of significant cultural transformation.

The Transformative Power of EducationYoung people, Davis emphasized, increasingly understand that racism is structural; they recognize the fluidity of gender and the complexity of our interconnected lives. The role of education here is vital, for education has an unparalleled ability to disrupt the status quo and to move us toward more just and sustainable ways of being together.

In emphasizing the transformative change through which we are living, Davis perhaps would agree with Angel Kyoto Williams, who said:

“There is something dying in our society, in our culture, and there’s something dying in us individually. And what is dying, I think, is the willingness to be in denial. And that is extraordinary. It’s always been happening, and when it happens in enough of us, in a short enough period of time at the same time, then you have a tipping point, and the culture begins to shift.”

Let eduction advance the dying of denial and cultivate the intersectional habits of thinking and acting we need to nurture and sustain a more just interconnected world.

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Thirty years ago, Parker Palmer wrote a new preface for the paperback edition of his book, To Know as We are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey.1 Reporting there on his experience traveling the country to explore the issues raised by the book, he writes:

Everywhere I go, I meet faculty who feel disconnected from their colleagues, from their students, from their own hearts.2

Thirty years later, that sense of disconnection has calcified into alienation.

Personal and Institutional AlienationThe processes and practices that shape our academic lives are badly out of joint with the purposes that give our lives meaning.

Palmer puts it this way:

Most of us go into teaching not for fame or fortune but because of a passion to connect. We feel deep kinship with some subject; we want to bring students into that relationship, to link them with the knowledge that is so life-giving to us; we want to work in community with colleagues who share our values and our vocation. But when institutional conditions create more combat than community, when the life of the mind alienates more than it connects, the heart goes out of things, and there is little left to sustain us.3

It’s not just that institutional conditions have an alienating effect on the communities that give them life, but our institutions themselves are disconnected from the mission they profess to advance. As we put it in the HuMetricsHSS white paper:

The values that institutions of higher education profess to care most deeply about — articulated through university mission statements, promotional materials, and talking points — are often not the values enacted in the policies and practices that shape academic life. This disparity has led to a growing sense of alienation among faculty who entered higher education with a deep commitment to certain core values, values that are themselves very often articulated in the founding documents of institutions of higher education.4

Practices of WholenessPalmer’s book looks to spiritual traditions for a path forward in the face of such pervasive personal and institutional alienation. He writes:

In the midst of such pain, the spiritual traditions offer hope that is hard to find elsewhere, for all of them are ultimately concerned with getting us reconnected. These traditions build on the great truth that beneath the broken surface of our lives there remains — in the words of Thomas Merton — “a hidden wholeness.” The hope of every wisdom tradition is to recall us to that wholeness in the midst of our torn world, to reweave us into the community that is so threadbare today.5

To cultivate the wholeness to which Palmer points requires discipline and intentional practice. To reweave ourselves into community, reconnect ourselves with our purpose, and realign university values with institutional practice, we need to create structures and cultivate habits that reinforce the work that gives our personal and institutional lives meaning.

Authentic SpiritualityIn this effort, it is helpful to have examples. I am grateful to work with imaginative colleagues who have managed to create a few. The appointment of Morgan Shipley as the inaugural Foglio Chair of Spirituality is a tangible effort to integrate what Palmer called “authentic spirituality” into the life of the University. “Authentic spirituality,” writes Palmer,

wants to open us to truth—whatever truth may be, wherever truth may take us. Such a spirituality does not dictate where we must go, but trusts that any path walked with integrity will take us to a place of knowledge. Such a spirituality encourages us to welcome diversity and conflict, to tolerate ambiguity, and to embrace paradox.6

This fall, a trusted path led us to a place of wholeness where we celebrated the Ascension of the new Department of African American and African Studies. This event marked the opening not only of a new Department, but also of new possibilities for deepening our connections with one another and with the reciprocal, community engaged work our torn world needs most urgently.

At the heart of these efforts to put the heart back into things beats the Charting Pathways of Intellectual Leadership initiative, a framework and a process designed to elevate the quality of teaching, research, and engagement by integrating practices of wholeness into the life of the university. We have tried to capture something of the spirit of this initiative in the video below.

Beneath the din of anxiety that animates our public conversations about the future of education, concrete steps are being taken to reconnect higher education with the “hidden wholeness” that gives it life and purpose and transformative power.

Notes

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This question, What does religion sound like?, inspired the creation of a remarkable collaborative project on Religious Sounds between Amy Derogatis of Michigan State University and Isaac Weiner at The Ohio State University. Yesterday, I had the privilege of making welcoming remarks at the opening of the Sounds of Religion exhibition at the MSU Museum.

In thinking about what I would say, I returned to my own experience of religious sounds. Here are my welcoming remarks:

When I think of religious sounds, the first thing that comes to mind is silence …

Pause – Breathe – Allow the silence enter the room and focus us.

Growing up in Philadelphia where I attended a Quaker school gave me a deep respect for what comes to presence when we quiet ourselves and listen.

The second thing that comes to mind when I think of religious sounds is the resonant timbre of my stepfather’s voice. As Amy knows, my stepfather was Ted Loder, the longtime minister at the First United Methodist Church in Germantown. Ted preached the art of listening, which, if I am not mistaken, is at the heart of the religious sounds project.

In fact, Ted has a prayer in his book Guerillas of Grace entitled: Help Me Listen 1.

O Holy One,

I hear and say so many words,

Yet yours is the word I need.

Speak now,

and help me listen;

And, if what I hear is silence

let it quiet me,

let it disturb me,

let it touch my need,

let it break my pride,

let it shrink my certainties,

let it enlarge my wonder.

As I have followed this project over the years, I have come to appreciate the power of listening to shrink our certainties and enlarge our wonder. By focusing on sound, Isaac and Amy have expanded the discipline of Religious Studies, moving us from words and ideas to the world of sound and the transformative power of listening.

This research embodies many of the core values the College of Arts & Letters is trying to advance. It is a robust collaboration between two major public research universities, rooted in a trusting relationship between Isaac and Amy. That relationship has also allowed the team to work across appointment types within each university to draw in staff members, academic specialists, IT experts, and of course many students and community partners. The project invites us to bring our whole selves into the research, moving us beyond a purely intellectual approach and into our bodies where sound and silence reveal the deepest truths of religious experience. In so doing, the research team uncovers how people physically enact religious practices not only in formal worship spaces but also in everyday life.

And finally, let me also say here what is difficult to hear; that this project unfolded during a very painful period in the history of MSU as the Nassar sexual abuse case demonstrated what can happen when we fail to listen. In the wake of these institutional failures, this project gained depth and integrity because Amy and Isaac and all those involved in the project redoubled their effort to listen with intentionality and humility and care.

I would like to thank Dr. Amy DeRogatis and Dr. Isaac Weiner for their incredible research on display here today. I would also like to thank the co-curators Vicki Brennan, Ely Lyonblum, Alison Furlong, and Lauren Pond for all their tireless efforts in making this exhibition so beautiful.

Welcome!

Guerrillas of Grace: Prayers for the Battle, 20th Anniversary Edition

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When Stephanie Shonekan, Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities (ARHU) at the University of Maryland (UMD), asked about the origins of the HuMetricsHSS initiative at lunch after our workshop this week, I was transported back in time to October 2016 when a group of us met at the Rizzo Center in Chapel Hill, NC, for the Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute (TriangleSCI). We had gathered to reconsider the question of academic metrics with an eye toward making indicators of quality more humane.

The original HuMetricsHSS Team at the Rizzo Center in Chapel Hill, NC, 2016.Now, over six years later, when we begin our HuMetricsHSS workshops by asking colleagues to consider their most rewarding academic experiences, I often return to that time we had together at the TriangleSCI to think and walk and imagine how we might make meaningful change by aligning our core values with the practices that shape academic life.

That experience changed the trajectory of my own academic career as I began to recognize the transformative power of values-enacted leadership.

This pathway led me to the Washington, DC area this third week of January 2023 to continue the work of putting values into intentional practice as we reimagine the future of the Academy. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I joined a group of academic leaders at the Association of American Universities (AAU) for a workshop co-sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to consider how we might redesign institutions to support equity minded graduate education.

Equity-Minded Graduate MentoringThe workshop was organized around Dean Kimberly Griffin‘s work on equity-oriented graduate mentoring practices, which emphasizes the importance of creating institutional structures that recognize and reward supportive mentoring that attends to the well-being of the whole person. As she writes:

“equity-minded administrative leaders must take care to ensure that mentoring responsibilities are fairly shared across professionals and that engagement in mentoring is recognized in substantive ways that translate to meaningful rewards and recognition.”1

The work we have been doing in the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State through the Charting Pathways of Intellectual Leadership initiative is animated by a commitment to recognize mentoring in substantive ways, so it was heartening to hear Dean Griffin reinforce the importance of this approach. Her emphasis on institutional structures shaped the design of the workshop, which focused on existing successful practices—for example, the Guidelines for Successful Graduate Student Mentoring at the University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign and the Toolkit for Cultivating a Culture of Mentoring at Duke University. We were invited to consider how we could integrate these practices into the structures of our institutions, from universities to scholarly societies and associations.

At the AAU/NASEM workshop on Taking Doctoral Mentorship Seriously in January 2023.I was grateful to have an opportunity to engage in substantive conversations with colleagues from the AAU, NASEM, the American Council for Education (ACE), and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), about the important role these organizations must play in making meaningful change across the U.S. Higher Education ecosystem. As we have increasingly emphasized in our HuMetricsHSS workshops, the only way to ensure that transformative culture change takes root and grows across higher education is to build coalitions within and across institutions and organizations with colleagues who are structurally positioned and values-oriented and who have an extreme prejudice toward action.

Values-Enacted ChangeAfter the Graduate Mentoring workshop, I made my way to the University of Maryland where my HuMetricsHSS colleagues and I led a workshop on values-enacted leadership and institutional transformation.

Members of the HuMetricsHSS team at UMD in January 2023.At UMD, we continued to refine the contours of the workshop we did at the University of Washington in December 2022. I tried to capture the trajectory of the workshop in this Mastodon post, written as I was returning from Seattle. It outlines the transition from identifying values to mapping positionality, power relations, and allies in an effort to make meaningful change.

As Dianne Harris, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, wrote in a blog post, entitled Continuing to Rethink the Academy in 2023, that workshop resulted in the identification of four concrete changes we hope to make:

Facilitating collaboration across disciplines;
Improving and making more meaningful the experience of serving as department chair;
Centering DEIA in everything we do across the College and campus;
Addressing rewards systems and structures — including fair and equitable pay to the extent possible — to better reflect what we value.

Dianne is following up on the workshop by establishing a cohort of Dean’s Academy Fellows to continue to build coalitions and do sustainable, intentional work on these four important issues. We on the HuMetricsHSS team are thrilled to be, as Dianne puts it, “partners in the creation of a community of practice that is committed to productive, thoughtful institutional transformation.”

Tree Values Framework at the University of Washington in December 2022.Following so closely on the work we did at UW, I arrived at the University of Maryland curious to see if the areas of focus for meaningful change that emerged here would resonate with those the groups identified at UW.

Sunflower Values Framework at the University of Maryland in January 2023.The three areas on which the group at UMD ultimately decided to focus on at the workshop were the following:

Professional Track (PTK) Faculty 2.0 – reimagine the experience of professional track faculty by creating a culture of belonging, pay equity, respect, and purposeful work;
Reverse Negative Enrollment Trends in ARHU – ARHU will become a destination for adaptable students committed to transformative change in an environment of wholeness;
Undergraduate Curriculum Reform – DEI will be placed at the heart of the undergraduate experience – a purposeful general education program will be rooted in a core curriculum oriented toward wholeness, meaning, and purpose.

It was fascinating to see how the results of the two workshops brought forward such resonant themes. At both universities, there emerged a deep commitment to creating academic spaces of wholeness in which students, staff, and faculty can be their best selves and do their best work. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Access, and Belonging were identified at UW and UMD as values of central importance to achieving the purpose of both universities. The equitable pay question that became a theme at UW found expression in the PTK 2.0 initiative at UMD as both universities spent time mapping power relationships and identifying allies who could help them redress issues of structural inequity.

The themes that emerged at the UW and UMD HuMetricsHSS workshops should be seen together with the equity-minded workshop on graduate mentoring sponsored by the AAU and NASEM as part of a growing movement across higher education toward intentional, values-enacted transformative change.

By the time we sat down for our debriefing lunch with Dean Shonekan, we were able to highlight these connections and talk further about the next steps she plans to take in ARHU at UMD.

The existing work being done in ARHU around faculty workload offers an exciting opportunity to integrate the values-enacted approach and advance the PTK 2.0 initiative, which dovetails well with the existing Provost-level Task Force on Non-Tenure Track Faculty at UMD. We also discussed how ARHU can tie the themes they identified into the strategic planning work they are doing. Finally, we in HuMetricsHSS talked about connecting Dean Shonekan with Dean Harris to continue to build a sustainable coalition of partners committed to transforming the Academy through values-enacted leadership.

So when Stephanie asked for the origin story of the HuMetricsHSS initiative, it was heartening to realize that the coalition we began to build around a commitment to put values into intentional practice at the TriangleSCI in October 2016 continues to grow and evolve in ways I don’t think any of us there at the time could have imagined.

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Since Thursday, I have been reflecting on the powerful keynote address Professor LeConté Dill gave at the 43rd Annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Unity Dinner. Drawing on King’s insistence that “[p]ower, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose,”1 Professor Dill offered presentation that embodied the purpose we are trying to achieve in the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University.

Although I can’t do justice to the full richness of her address, I thought I would highlight here her practice of gratitude and how it connects to and amplifies the aspirations to which we in the College of Arts & Letters are committed.

Hymn of ThanksLeConté began with what she called a “hymn of thanks” to all those who contributed to the work she was presenting, from her partner, Umberto Rodriguez, to colleagues who offered feedback on her writing, to those who helped prepare her spectacular appearance at the event. This practice of thanksgiving was an instructive reminder to us all that our purpose is never achieved alone. We are part of a textured network of interdependences that enrich our work and deepen the meaning of our lives.

In the passage with which LeConté began, King goes on to say: “Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice.”2 To begin with gratitude is to do justice to those who make our success possible; it is a powerful practice of love. LeConté herself characterized her “hymn of thanks” as an ethical citation practice. Perhaps we might begin to think of our habits of citation as ways of putting our power in the service of love for the sake of justice.

Charting Pathways of Intellectual LeadershipIt was at once heartening and inspiring to hear LeConté affirm the work we are doing in the College of Arts & Letters to imagine and enact more generous, caring, and joyful ways of academic life. Her own work exemplifies this in how she brings public health scholarship together with arts-based research methods to support wellbeing for Black girls and other youth of color. She writes:

Being situated in the College of Arts & Letters is aiding me to go even further as I integrate my public health background, the tenants of health, and the possibilities of wellness.

LeConté Dill, Faculty Voice: Envisioning Wellness and Justice for All

The work LeConté finds most meaningful is precisely the work we in the College of Arts & Letters hope to advance. To do this, however, we have had to develop a new way of thinking about how we evaluate and reward transdisciplinary, community-accountable scholarship. The Charting Pathways of Intellectual Leadership initiative offers a framework and a process that supports faculty and staff in their efforts to align their core values with the processes of promotion and advancement that shape their academic lives.

The video below describes our approach. Before you watch it, however, I’d like to frame it with a “hymn of thanks” of my own. First, the video was supported by an Imagining America – Leading and Learning Initiative – Stories of Change grant led by Erica Kohl-Arenas, Kal Alston, and Christina Preston. As you will see at the end of the video, I co-created the video with Cara Cilano, Sonja Fritsche, Bill Hart-Davidson, Ryan Kilcoyne, and Ryan Frederick, who did the videography and animation. The wonderful voiceover was performed by Emily Sutton-Smith. While these colleagues helped create the work, my colleagues on the HuMetricsHSS team both provided valuable feedback on the video and inspired the approach, which is designed to align values with the practices that animate a meaningful scholarly life.

From Power to JoyThe power of this approach, we hope, lies in the way it connects power to purpose. But as King notes, “…power without love is reckless and abusive and love without power is sentimental and anemic.”3 So the Charting Pathways of Intellectual Leadership initiative is also about putting love into academic practice. And power with love is joy.

In connecting power to love, justice, and joy, I return to the work Ruth Nicole Brown, Inaugural Chair of the Department of African American and African Studies at MSU, and I are doing in an NEH/SSRC grant we received entitled Pathways of Presencing — Toward Wholeness. That grant allowed us to bring an amazing group of students to the National Gathering of Imagining America in October of 2022 to give a panel presentation on Rethinking the Graduate Experience, Prioritizing Joy.

In that presentation, I returned to a passage from Spinoza’s Ethics that I have carried with me since first encountering it in graduate school. Here is a slide with the passage about joy from our presentation:

In identifying joy with the experience of achieving greater perfection, Spinoza connects joy with what King calls the proper understanding of power, namely, the ability to achieve purpose.

If “power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice” and if our highest purpose as human beings is to do justice to the world we encounter, then, following Spinoza and King, we might say that power operating with love for the sake of justice is joy.

Committing to JoyProfessor Dill’s keynote address on Thursday modeled the practice of joy we hope to cultivate in the College of Arts & Letters. In the Ascension of the Department of African American and African Studies this past November, we experienced it; in the new aspirational statement of the College, we commit to it:

“We will become an irresistible destination for those who imagine and work for a more just and beautiful future.”

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A new year brings new calls for a return to personal blogging as an antidote to the toxic and extractive systems of social media. Giving our attention and creative content to major social media corporations has always been a dubious undertaking, although for a long time, that didn’t stop me from adopting Facebook and Twitter early as possible places to build community.

In the early days, my hope was to leverage social media as a space to “cultivate the practices of dialogue in a digital age,” as I used to put it in the introduction to the Digital Dialogues podcast. Over time, however, it became clear that the major social media corporations had other interests. They wanted to leverage my identity and the community I hoped to create to sell our attention to advertisers. Although I was never naïve about their intentions, at some point the balance tips and the values you hope to embody are undermined by the values shaping the platforms that make communication possible.

I deleted my Facebook account about two years ago, and I moved my microblogging from Twitter to Mastodon in November 2022.

From the beginning of my engagement with digital media, however, I have sought to embody the principles and values of the indie web, curating and collecting all of my online activity here on cplong.org, where I control the content I create and the platform that makes it public. My colleagues and I in the College of Arts & Letters at MSU have long sought to empower scholars to own their own content by creating domains of their own and by joining scholar-led and -governed community platforms like the Humanities Commons and the MSU Commons.

Practices of WritingSo, as the new year dawns perhaps it is time for me to return to more routine practices of public writing here on the Long Road Blog. Back in 2015, when I started as Dean of the College of Arts & Letters, I undertook an experiment in public writing designed to share and refine my thinking about issues arising along the way. In some ways, that experiment continues, although my writing here and on the College’s Long View Blog as become less frequent and more formal. The Writing Along the Way tag provides the thread. I’ve lost it a bit along the way in part because I began to focus on a more private writing practice that has proven to be transformative for me.

In October of 2017, I assigned myself a goal to write in my journal every day for a month. As many of you know, I love fountain pens. The tactile experience of writing each day with a fountain pen filled with new and beautiful inks on paper that feels good under the nib has become a quotidian joy. The agreement I made with myself in October 2017, was that if, after a month of daily writing, I began to think of it more as a chore than a pleasure, I would stop. Five and a half years later, my daily writing practice has become a habit that keeps me grounded.

Without diminishing that grounding habit, might I be able to return to blogging in a more intentional, perhaps less formal way this year as the world of digital communication seems to be returning to blogs and RSS feeds? Perhaps I can endeavor to write a post a week—collecting thoughts and ideas along the way in my Obsidian vault of notes, and posting them here to share with you.

Let me return, then, to a practice I never quite relinquished, if only to experience it again as a site of renewal.

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There are times when your life seems to be telling you a story. When this happens, it is wise to listen. In October 2022, my life began to speak the language of Ubuntu, the powerful African practice rooted in the idea that “a human being is human because of other human beings.”1

In his book, No Future Without Forgiveness, Desmond Tutu introduces Ubuntu as a characteristic a person can embody:

“A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they were less than who they are.”2

Although I have told this story now many times, and have experienced its power, personally and with colleagues, sharing it here in writing has proven more daunting than I anticipated—but if you accept this effort as an offering, however inadequate to the lived experience it may be, I will be grateful.

ResignationThe video dropped just as we were preparing to leave for the National Gathering of Imagining America in New Orleans. Five graduate students and I were to fly out to the gathering that afternoon to give a panel presentation on “Reimagining the Graduate Student Experience: Prioritizing Joy.” In the video, Michigan State University President Samuel L. Stanley, Jr. announced his resignation. In the wake of the Nassar scandal, the COVID-19 pandemic, and leaked reports from the MSU Board of Trustees about attempts to oust the President, here again a leadership transition was upon us at Michigan State University. So as I processed the implications of the changes to come, I was grateful for an opportunity to travel with Jessica Reed, Sharieka Botex, Marquis Taylor, Ural Grant, and Toni Gordon, to the National Gathering of Imagining America.

AshéThe theme of the National Gathering was “Rituals of Repair and Renewal”—I knew I needed both. The opening keynote of the gathering was offered by Carol Babelle, retired executive director and co-founder of the Ashé Cultural Arts Center. Her approach was powerful—as she wove together a story about her life’s work, she invited artists who had worked with her to build the Ashé Cultural Arts Center to perform on stage with her. Her voice was thus amplified by the voices of her colleagues, enriched by the powerful performance of their art. What she said was powerful, how she said it was transformative. By lending her voice to those with whom she worked, Babelle’s keynote demonstrated the meaning of “Ashé” itself, a Yoruba word that means “the power to make things happen and produce change.”

ChasmsSuddenly, there was Asali Devan Ecclesiastes on stage next to Carol Babelle, performing her poem Chasms. Listen.

Asali’s poem touched on something I needed to hear at the moment I needed to hear it most.

“That space between who we are and who we want to be, the gaps between our high ideals and our base realities. … But somewhere in our midst, there’s been a paradigm shift. Justice is getting restless in its chains. Our youth find it useless to separate their souls from their brains, their truth is ingrained, their integrity sustained.”

Sitting there listening, I sensed something shift and settle, a deeper recognition that the leadership path I was on needed to be further refined, intentionally developed in a direction that was not yet fully discernible to me. I knew, however, that I needed to meet Asali to learn more about her and her poem.

By the time Babelle’s keynote address ended that first morning at the Ashé center, however, we were already late for the buses to return to Tulane University, where the gathering was being held. The crowd was moving fast and Asali was surrounded by people, so I thought I would seek her out later in the week as the gathering unfolded.

Yet, as too often happens, our obligations divert us from our best intentions. So I found myself on the flight back to Michigan having missed an opportunity to meet Asali Devan Ecclesiastes …

Ubuntu DialoguesLess than a week later I was on my way to South Africa as part of a delegation from Michigan State University participating in the 2022 Ubuntu Dialogues Conference at Stellenbosch University just outside of Cape Town. On the long flight from Amsterdam to Cape Town—eleven hours straight south within a single time zone, I began to review the program, including members of the MSU delegation. In addition to colleagues from the MSU community, our group included graduate students from the University of Memphis and the University of Wisconsin – Madison, faculty from Brandeis and South Florida, and activists from Trenton to Lansing … and then I saw her name … Asali Devan Ecclesiastes from the Ashé Cultural Arts Center in New Orleans. Having missed Asali in New Orleans, I would meet her in South Africa!

Workineh Kelbessa, Professor of Philosophy at Addis Ababa in Ethopia, writes:

“Ubuntu is the idea that the self is defined in terms of relationships to others, and that happiness and fulfillment are to be found within these relations. So, on this thinking, a person cannot be recognized alone outside other persons.”3

ConnectionWhen I finally met Asali in Stellenbosch, we delighted in the way our pathways had conspired to bring us together for the Ubuntu Dialogues conference. As we talked, I quickly realized that I had much to learn from her. She could draw people into meaningful connection by the integrity of her words and the grace of her presence. Here I had met, to use Tutu’s language, a person with ubuntu.

New Ways of LeadingSoon after we landed in South Africa, we received word that our colleague, Jabbar Bennett, Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer at MSU, would not be able to join us. It was determined that I would need to take on some of his duties. This meant, first, that I would need to do the greeting on the first day, and second, that I would somehow need to facilitate the final session of the conference in which the lessons of the week where shared.

For the first task, I took a risk. Although I regularly begin meetings at home by asking those gathered to join me in taking a deep breath together, I did not know how such an approach would be received at Stellenbosch. In New Orleans, however, I had experienced the power of ritual to connect people, so I decided to begin by inviting the group to take a deep breath with me so we could pause and reflect on the time we were prepared to have together.

This is what I said:

As you slowly let out your breath … I invite you to settle into this beautiful space—becoming open and present to all we will experience together this week; I ask you to send positive energy and love to Jabbar Bennett and his family; and, I ask you to pause here for a moment of gratitude to all our loved ones who are not here with us but who make our presence here with one another possible.

There is a passage in the book Holding Change by adrienne maree brown to which I keep returning. It is written by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. She writes: “…it is not easy to face the death of how things have been and to open up to the vulnerability of how things could be. But we must.”4

I begin my Greeting here with this ritual of breathing and with this passage—for the imperative to face the death of how things have been requires embodied practices of vulnerability so that our deepest interconnection might be activated.

The response I received to this way of beginning was moving. Participants came up to me afterwards to tell me how refreshing it was for an administrative official to begin this way, to open a space in which we could breathe together. And I began to experience the lesson I was being given to learn – that your position and power can be deployed to create spaces of meaning, connection, and wholeness if you are willing to “open to the vulnerability of how things could be,” as Alexis Pauline Gumbs put it.

Creating SpaceBut even as I was beginning to learn this lesson, I was anxious about the final session, for I knew that a space of wholeness and openness could not be created for that final session without help. So, I turned to Asali, and she suggested that we find ways to include more voices, to privilege the voices of graduate students and others, who could share their experiences, however difficult, with the group. I then asked Unifier Dyer, a Healer-practitioner and PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Sinethemba Makanya, a Traditional Healer and Post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender, and Class at the University of Johannesburg if they would facilitate the gathering. Their generous agreement to do this was a gift. After spending the week in one of the old classrooms in the Faculty of Theology building, a room with desks and chairs literally bolted to the floor. We agreed to convene everyone in a large circle outside the main entrance to the Faculty of Theology, in the fresh air outside of the stultifying colonial building where many of the architects of Apartheid had been educated.

There we gathered in a circle under one of the tallest trees in Stellenbosch. It was a beautiful early summer day in late October, and the participants, beginning with the students, brought forth the lessons they had learned during the week, the challenges they faced in practicing Ubuntu in the fraught spaces of Stellenbosch University, the joys they experienced in the connections they made.

And then, as our time together was coming to a close, Unifer turned to Asali, and Asali came into the middle of that circle and recited “Chasms” to the group gathered under the azure sky in the late afternoon sun.

Asali Devan Ecclesiastes recites her poem “Chasms.”

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Last week we celebrated the Ascension of the Department of African American and African Studies in the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. What follows are my remarks emphasizing the hope that the department will be a place of wholeness.

This space, this place – all of us here together is a dream made real.

It has me thinking about Minnie Ransom, the healer and main character of Toni Cade Bambara’s novel, The Salt Eaters. At very beginning of the novel, Minnie asks Velma Henry, who had just attempted suicide:

“Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?”

And later …

“Just so your’re sure sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.”

That this place now exists, that this department is a reality after so much effort by so many people … this is the strongest sign I have seen in my time at MSU that, yes, we are serious about being whole; and that we will take on the responsibility that comes with being healthy.

And this brings me to another line from The Salt Eaters, one that Bettina Aptheker calls to our attention in her essay, “Toni Cade Bambara: A Political Life of the Spirit,” Velma’s godmother, Mrs. Sophie Heywood, insists: “Have to be whole to see whole” (The Salt Eaters, 92).

Aptheker writes:

“And in those seven words Bambara gives us an extraordinary gift of understanding. Healing is a continual process, and must be continually reinforced in the course of the struggle itself.”

May this place be an irresistible destination for generations of students, staff, and faculty who are serious about being whole.

And may we at MSU learn the practices of wholeness this department has to teach … so that together we may be whole to see whole.

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This week we celebrated the Ascension of the Department of African American and African Studies in the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. What follows are my remarks emphasizing the hope that...

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As my eighth year at Michigan State University begins, I have been reflecting on the work we have done and the work that lies ahead. In many ways, the last semester and the next mark...

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The news came early on July 5 in a text message from my friend Rick Lee: Richard J. Bernstein, our beloved teacher, died on July 4, 2022. In life, Bernstein taught and embodied a commitment...

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The themes of the 2022 Honors Leadership Conference were: Building Community, Being a Scholar, and Presenting Yourself. In my opening remarks to our first-year honors students, I focused on values-enacted leadership and the importance of...

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The publication of the "Walking the Talk" report required intentional practices of co-authoring to enact the values of the HuMetricsHSS team.

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A few weeks ago, I was asked to speak to an amazing group of new deans at Michigan State University about the role of the dean in higher education during a period of intense transformation....

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Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Penguin Vitae)

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On September 12, 2021, we remembered the life and legacy of Ted Loder, my stepfather, and long-time Senior Minister at First United Methodist Church of Germantown. In collaboration with my step-siblings, we created the montage of slides presented here. The text of the remarks I made at the Memorial Service are below.

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Wrestling the Light: Ache and Awe in the Human-Divine Struggle : Prayers and Stories

Tracks in the Straw: Tales Spun from the Manger

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To the Class of 2025, Welcome to Michigan State University, to the College of Arts & Letters, and to the MSU Honors College! You begin your MSU journey at a time like no other. As...

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Ted Loder, eloquent preacher, fierce advocate for justice, long-time minister of the First United Methodist Church in Germantown, and my beloved stepfather, died on Thursday, April 1, 2021. Ted always encouraged us to watch for the "sneakiness of God," to notice how the mysterious presence of holiness encounters us in our everyday life with one another.

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Six years have past since I wrote A Few Notes on Productivity, a post that outlined my approach to productivity in academic and administrative life. More than 11 years have somehow passed since I wrote...

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What follows was crafted for an MSU Honors College panel discussion entitled “Sharper Focus/Wider Lens” on March 8, 2021 focusing on culture change in higher education and at Michigan State University. A video of the...

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Below is a message I sent to my colleagues in the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University in the wake of the first turbulent days of 2021. Dear College of Arts &...

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Agate, Nicky, Rebecca Kennison, Stacy Konkiel, Christopher P. Long, Jason Rhody, Simone Sacchi, and Penelope Weber. “The Transformative Power of Values-Enacted Scholarship.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 7, no. 1 (December 7, 2020): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00647-z...

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There is a line from Seinfeld that cuts to the heart of the distinction between sincerity and ethical candor. In a desperate attempt to beat a polygraph machine, Jerry turns to George, a practiced liar, for advice. As Jerry gets up to leave, George offers this:

“Jerry, just remember … it’s not a lie, if you believe it.”

From Seinfeld – here is a link to the clip.

The humor in this lies, I think, in the gap it establishes between sincerity and ethical candor.

Sincerity requires earnest belief, even if what is believed is untrue. One can actively assent to a lie one tells oneself. Ethical candor, however, is conscience bound to truth. Self-deception is the opposite of ethical candor, the cultivated disposition to be honest with yourself. At the depth of human conscience is an inviolable connection with truth. We can deceive ourselves in the face of that truth, we can chose to believe the lies we tell ourselves, and we can affect the deepest sincerity as we convey the lie we have decided to believe. But duplicity of conscience is impossible. Truth has a quiet insistence, and quietude is required to hear it.

Contemporary life, however, is harried, filled with distractions that allow self-deception to take root and grow. The human capacity for self-deception is as debilitating as it is dangerous; debilitating because it hinders us from living in alignment with our deepest selves, dangerous because it corrodes our capacity to love.

In the Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky emphasizes the connection between self-deception and love when he has Father Zosima tell Fyodor Karamazov:

Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect, he ceases to love…1

There is an inverse relationship between our capacity for self-deception and our capacity to love: The more we deceive ourselves, the less capable we are of loving ourselves and others.

This diminished capacity to love has hindered our ability in these United States to respond to a debilitating pandemic and the reckoning with systemic racism we are called to undertake.

Under the din of our derisive politics, one can hear sincere calls to reckon with the racism and violence at the heart of the American story. But James Baldwin warns of the pernicious character of American sincerity:

Americans are always sincere, it is their most striking and appalling attribute … Nixon was perfectly sincere when lying about Watergate, the military were perfectly sincere when lying about Vietnam and Cambodia, Helms is perfectly sincere when he says that he is not a racist, and the late J. Edgar Hoover was sincere when he called the late Martin Luther King, Jr. the biggest liar in America. This sincerity covers and pardons all, [and] is the very substance of American panic.2

Our contemporary political landscape is littered with the same appalling sincerity of which Baldwin speaks. Eddie Glaude, Jr. fleshes Baldwin’s position out further in his own language:

Our sincere commitments to democracy have always been shadowed by the lie evident in our practices. Sincerity, ostensibly, requires that we not mislead or deceive ourselves or others – that we at least, seek to be true to ourselves … Panic ensues when crises reveal the truth, because we are snatched from our fantasies and forced to confront who we are.3

The COVID-19 pandemic is a crisis that reveals the deepest truths about who we are as a nation. It is an apocalypse, that is to say, an uncovering that has forced us into a space of quietude in which we might pause, reflect, and begin to consider how, for all our American sincerity, we have failed to confront the racism, oppression, and violence that haunts our democracy.

As Brittany Cooper insists:

We can neither heal nor fix that which we will not confront.4

Confronting the incoherence between the values of liberty and justice for which we say we stand and the unjust realities the current pandemic has rendered undeniable is the work white Americans specifically are called upon to undertake in this period of reckoning. We must confront with ethical candor our own racism and the racism operating in the systems that privilege us.

In undertaking this reckoning now, we cannot succumb to the panic of which Baldwin speaks. It is necessary, rather, to cultivate ethical candor with courage and intention, to engage in practices of critical self-reflection, and to hold our actions accountable to the insistent truth we encounter in intimate dialogue with our conscience in our deepest moments of quietude.

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On National Voter Registration Day, I sent the following message to students, staff, and faculty in the College of Arts & Letters.

Dear College of Arts & Letters Students, Staff, and Faculty,

As we navigate this challenging period of remote learning, it is important to find ways to remain connected. One of the most enduring ways we are connected as a society is through the vital practice of voting that sustains our democracy. For generations, Americans have fought, struggled, and died, to establish and preserve our right to vote.

Their sacrifices make voting our sacred responsibility.

Today, September 22, is National Voter Registration Day. The information below has been gathered to facilitate your participation in this year’s election, and I encourage you to take the necessary steps now to ensure that your voice shapes the future of our democracy.

CAMPUS AND COMMUNITY INFORMATION – MSUvote
To help inform our community this election season, Michigan State University has created MSUvote, a non-partisan campus committee whose mission it is to increase the number of registered student voters, to inform and educate students on candidates and issues, and to bolster student participation on Election Day.

IF YOU ARE A REGISTERED VOTER IN MICHIGAN
You should have received a Michigan 2020 Absentee Voting Application in the mail. If you filled it out, signed it, and mailed or delivered it to your city or township clerk, you will get an absentee ballot for the November 2020 presidential election. Otherwise, you can apply online for a November absentee ballot (on or after 8/20/2020) at: https://mvic.sos.state.mi.us/avapplication

IF YOU ARE A VOTER REGISTERED OUTSIDE MICHIGAN
You have the option of registering to vote here or staying with your previous registration. If you want to register here, you can do so online at: https://mvic.sos.state.mi.us/RegisterVoter (requires a valid Michigan driver’s license or state ID AND knowledge of your Social Security Number)

IF YOU ARE NOT REGISTERED TO VOTE
You can do so online at: https://mvic.sos.state.mi.us/RegisterVoter (requires a valid Michigan driver’s license or state ID AND knowledge of your Social Security Number)

IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A MICHIGAN DRIVER’S LICENSE, BUT WANT TO REGISTER
Download a National Voter Registration Form: https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/eac_assets/1/6/Federal_Voter_Registration_ENG.pdf

IF YOU DO NOT KNOW WHETHER YOU ARE REGISTERED TO VOTE
You can check online at: https://www.nass.org/can-I-vote/voter-registration-status

Please take the time today to ensure that you can participate in this year’s election and encourage your student, staff, and faculty colleagues to do the same.

Go Green, Go White, Go Vote!

Sincerely,

Christopher P. Long
Dean, College of Arts & Letters

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The following reflections are offered in the context of the opening colloquium of the College and Beyond II: Liberal Arts & Life series. #collegeandbeyondii

The current pandemic is an apocalypse — an uncovering. It reveals at once our irreducible interconnectedness and the deep disparities that demonstrate our complete failure to live up to the ideal of justice to which we profess to aspire.

Whether or not this apocalypse becomes a catastrophe — a down turning, a diminution of human potentiality — will depend in no small part on our ability to transform the education we offer into a catalyst for the creation of fulfilling lives within the context of a more just world.

An education in the arts of liberty, that is, a liberal arts eduction is designed to be just such a catalyst of personal fulfillment and communal well-being. It recognizes freedom not as a right bestowed, but as an activity undertaken. And like every activity, freedom can be practiced well or poorly. When practiced well, individuals and the commonweal thrive. When practiced poorly, societies collapse under the weight of vested interests and oppression.

Excellence in the arts of liberty involves the cultivation of certain ethical and civic virtues: the ability to communicate with eloquence, embrace diversity with grace, perceive globally with imagination, and respond to complexity with nuance. These virtues, in turn, depend upon the cultivation of a set of habits that empower individuals to chart a meaningful course of life and nurture civic structures that support the happiness of citizens. Among the core habits of the arts of liberty are attentive listening, critical discernment, and ethical imagination.

This last, ethical imagination, depends upon the cultivation of a capacity to listen to those whose experiences are different from our own; it requires an ability to discern how to create the just conditions under which freedom first become possible; thus, ethical imagination is the signature virtue of a liberal arts education for it empowers us to create the conditions under which citizens might pursue happiness.

“Happiness,” here, is no mere sentiment of contentment, but an expression of what the Greeks called “eudaimonia,” a life-well lived in community with others.

Any attempt, to measure the success of an education in the arts of liberty must consider both personal and civic indicators of excellence. On a personal level, excellence manifests itself in those cultivated habits that empower us to lead a life well-lived. But as Brittany Cooper reminds us, “‘empowerment’ is a tricky word,” because it “places the responsibility for combating systems on individuals.”1

Individual achievement cannot be the main touchstone by which we measure the effectiveness of a liberal arts education.

We must rather measure up to a higher standard by holding ourselves accountable for the societies we create together. The civic indicators of an excellent liberal arts education express themselves in the structures of society created to establish justice so that everyone, in practicing the arts of liberty, might enact a life of happiness.

The apocalypse through which we are currently living uncovers the pernicious effects of the prevailing vision of education as a private good measured by individual accomplishment. It reveals the extent to which our lives are intimately interconnected, our happiness dependent on the communities we create together. In the wake of such a revelation, the true measure of a liberal arts education lies in its capacity to create the just conditions of a flourishing world.

A video recording of our discussion is available here:

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Christopher P. Long: Recent Episodes

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