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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 and through our Pathways of Presencing grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Social Science Research Council 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.
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.
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.
So, for example, we agreed that Equity in our work together means:
We agreed that Equity in our recommendations would mean:
We agreed that in relation to our work together, trust would mean:
In relation to our recommendations, we agreed that trust would mean:
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.
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.
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!
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