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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.
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.
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.
In 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.
This 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).
So 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.
Below you will find articles, websites, and stories about our community engagement scholarship efforts.
For more on HuMetricsHSS, please visit the HuMetricsHSS website.
The 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.
The Public Philosophy Journal is an innovative online publication for accessible scholarship that deepens our understanding of publicly relevant issues.
When I talk to honors students at graduation, they often identify the Honors College Impact program, an annual service week focused on areas of social inequity and inequality in the greater Lansing region, as one of the most transformative experiences of their MSU careers. Last year, the team recorded over 800 hours of service in our local communities.
In addition, HC Impact connects incoming first-year students with faculty and mentors, creating a network that will last throughout their college experience. These students begin their journey at MSU with an open mind and a passion for helping others.
As an extension of HC Impact, the same students participate in an Honors seminar course focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Here, students each complete 24 hours of volunteer service dedicated to their choice of organization, totaling up to over 1,000 hours of service collectively as a class.
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.
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.
Let me be present to this absence here, so I might find a way to be present for others.
A 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.
So just fragments here … words that have found me and images captured as we make a way.
The source of wisdom is whatever is happening to us right at this instant.
Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart, 144.
Another gift finds me, this one from my friend and colleague Tani Hartman, Chair of the 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.
I flow, I am; or at least I try to be—try to find a way toward meaning at this crossroads…
MSU, 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.
Welcoming MSU students back to campus.
A week that began with a nightmare, ended with a dream.
On 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.
Contrast 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.”
Over 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.
In 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.
Indeed, 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.
Young 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.
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.
The 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
Palmer’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.
In 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.
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!
FreshRSS 
