Colleagues,

For those of you who attended either the staff or the faculty retreat, you no doubt felt, as I did, the energy and optimism in the room. One of the facilitators in the staff retreat was impressed at how most of the ideas had an aspirational quality, which she found remarkable for a college as new as ours and one whose faculty and staff have gone through as much change as ours.

Both retreats also raised some similar ideas and issues. One concern raised by many was that we would not seize the moment and move the college and its various parts forward. The list of possible obstacles included our being split evenly on two campuses, our holding on too tightly to old ways of doing things, or our simply being unwilling to change. I appreciate the realism of those worries and I think they serve to remind us that change will come more quickly in some areas than in others, which is fine. But the very fact that so many us recognize the need to change and the opportunities that can come with change is itself a big step toward making it happen.

Another theme that kept coming up at both retreats had to do with the importance of interdisciplinary connections among us and with others outside the college. I didn't get a sense that any of this meant to detract from the centrality of strong departments, disciplines, and centers. Instead, it seemed to acknowledge that new knowledge, creative discoveries, and improved ways of doing things often occur at the edges of or between academic or institutional units. I see the encouragement and facilitation of such connections as a primary responsibility of the college, along with providing seed money to help the most promising new ideas and initiatives take root.

Some of this activity has already begun. Our associate deans, Marilyn DeLong and Kate Solomonson, have sent out the guidelines and next steps involved in the creation of communities of interest in the college, and they have started to meet with groups of faculty and staff who have already expressed a desire to work together in specific areas. Requests for seed money can be sent to the two of them beginning in February, and we will keep accepting proposals until the funding allocated this year runs out.

We also have set up a new initiatives fund to encourage and support the best ideas of individual faculty and staff that might not otherwise get funded through a compact request or the regular budget process. The application for this funding is due at the end of this month, and can be sent to either Marilyn or Kate. Our goal in all of this is to enable as many of us as possible to participate in as many ways as possible in weaving together the diverse threads of the college into a greater and stronger whole.

The retreats also revealed things people want to make sure we don't lose in the process of creating the new college: the strong identity of our units, the human scale of our interactions, and the quality of our programs. I completely agree. No one in the college wants to lose these things. As we create this college, we need to make sure that we strike the right balance between part and whole or the many and the one, as well as the right balance between acknowledging and respecting our differences and discovering and embracing our similarities. Like any balancing act, this will take constant adjustment and the input of everyone to make sure things don't tip too far in one direction or the other, but again, our recognizing the challenge moves us far along in achieving it.

A final recurring theme I want to talk about had to do with a worry that the college was becoming too bureaucratic, with too much paperwork. This has occurred, in part, because the University -- like all large-scale organizations these days -- has become more bureaucratic as a result of the ever-present threat of litigation. But we can still do quite a lot, as a college, to minimize the bureaucratic aspects of our work, as we evolve the operational side of the college. If you see some procedure that you think could be done more simply or in less time, we need to hear your suggestion. You can either forward your idea directly to me (fishe033@umn.edu) or to Kathy Witherow (kwithero@umn.edu), or get it to us -- anonymously if you would like -- via your head, director, supervisor, or colleagues. If we can simplify or streamline a procedure, we will, and if we can't because of Regents' policy or General Counsel requirement, we will explain why and do all we can to help make the process as painless as possible.

On the subject of improving the quality of service in the college, the University held its first "Quality Fair" on Thursday. Filling the main floor public space in the McNamara Alumni Center, and drawing a crowd of over 800 people, the poster sessions demonstrated the extent to which the institution has encouraged people at every level to be creative in finding better ways of doing things. Our college had two posters, one by Virajita Singh, describing the efforts she and others have been doing to "green" the college, and the other by Brad Hokanson, talking about the e-scholarship initiative he has led here. Both demonstrate the experimentation and innovation possible in this college, and both are ways of connecting us across disciplines and to larger transformations going on in the world. And Brad's program still has funding available to support those in the college who want to build their own e-scholarship skills or develop new online or technology-enhanced teaching or research efforts. Contact Brad at: brad@umn.edu.

Let me end with some thoughts about a talk that I heard at the Quality Fair, given by the author of Moral Intelligence, Doug Lennick. He spoke about leadership and how much everyone in an organization is both a leader and a follower, both someone who influences and is influenced by others. He also noted that while universities, especially, put a lot of emphasis on cognitive ability and intellectual capacity, our emotional intelligence and ethical capacity remain vitally important in achieving our goals as individuals and as an organization.

His comments made me think of the paradoxical nature of leadership, in which the best way to help ourselves is to help others, the best way to influence is to be influenced by others, and the best way to be heard is to listen. In the same light, the quickest way for us to achieve the University's aspiration of being among the top three public research universities is to not think about ratings at all, but to focus on what is most important and most needed in the world. This is all about our being not just smart, but also morally intelligent, to use Lennick's phrase -- something truly worth aspiring to.