by G. Randy Boeglin
Dean of students, director of Residence Life
Recent campus events surrounding the departure of the president and the hiring of Health Sciences Center Communications Director have been seismic in nature.
These events, quite simply, are hiring and firing - activities that occur with some frequency in large, complex organizations. Even if these two tandem events are not seen as ground shaking, they certainly give rise to introspection about UNM as a workplace and an educational environment. These events rend the fabric of our community and test the boundary of comity within the institution.
One is left to ponder if the president's negotiated exit was warranted by the facts and a just decision. Due consideration must also be given to the substantial financial costs incurred. The creation of the Health Sciences Center position calls to question the value of a college degree, and appears to place it in juxtaposition to the adage that it is not who you know but who knows you when it comes to securing a lucrative position. This appointment also brings in question the fairness and uniform application of Human Resources' hiring practices.
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The unfolding of these events presented campus leadership with the challenge to help the campus understand what happened and give perspective to events. There was a need for a central spokesperson to craft and deliver a comprehensive campus message to guide us through the situation. Comments by various campus leaders fell short on this, and for the most part were parsed to fit the media-sound-bite mode.
All of this left me with a sense of silent resignation.
As the dean of students and a departmental leader, I consciously decided that silent resignation would not do for me. Absent a comprehensive statement of campus perspective, it falls to departmental leaders to define and give meaning to the recent events.
The responsibility to define for ourselves this topic was underscored for me by my reflections and a campus event that preceded, by several days, the hiring and firing events. That event was a press conference at which the governor announced his generous support of several major athletic capital outlay projects for UNM, and proclaimed athletics as the most visible institutional face to the public.
He may well be accurate in this declaration, but it reminded me as a student affairs professional that along with our institutional face comes an institutional soul, and that is our students. Students are the essence of the place, and no matter the tremors at specific institutional epicenters, they must remain the central mission of the University.
For myself, I found that I could move beyond muted resignation by re-examining the core departmental values that undergird our primary mission to serve students. That affirmation process immediately brought to the surface the central, core value that students are first. This means that in our daily dealings with students, we will decide in favor of students whenever we can, as long as the issues do not compromise institutional values or academic integrity.
Our departmental values were examined as well, and this process helped me get perspective on campus events. Departmental core values can be the organizational North Star that empowers us to be our own wayfinders through the present and provide us direction for the future.
I offer this process of taking time to affirm core departmental values as one way to give perspective to recent events. It was helpful to me, and I believe it might prove to be of benefit to others. If you wish to know more about this process, visit our Web site at www.unm.edu/~doso/ and click on the Values Affirmation window.
