The HuMetricsHSS team is excited to announce the teams attending the inaugural 2025 Values-Enacted Leadership Institute (VELI)! These teams represent exciting, transformational projects across a range of themes and institutions.
Louisiana State University
Building a Framework for Change: Leveraging a New Library Building to Identify Transformational Values-Driven Opportunities
Team Members: Hayley Johnson, Gina Costello, Sarah Simms, Elissa Plank
LSU Libraries is set to undergo a significant period of change with the construction of a new main library building and the inevitable challenges and strategic opportunities the project brings. Participation in VELI will better position the team to recognize, advocate for, and carry out both the routine and the transformational changes the LSU Libraries will face during the planning and construction of the new Library & Learning Commons (LLC). Our team wishes to develop a roadmap for navigating leadership and organizational transformation, that focuses on developing staff, enhancing collaboration, and positioning the Libraries for future growth. This project aligns with all three VELI categories since the resulting plan will identify leadership pathways through possible organizational restructuring, recommend programmatic staff development, and develop strategies for navigating change and weathering the increasingly uncertain higher education funding landscape. By the end of the institute, the team aims to establish a strategic framework to position LSU Libraries to be adaptive, connected, and well-positioned to meet the evolving needs of our community.
University of Dayton
Shifting from Silos to Collaboration Through Values-Enacted Leadership
Team Members: Nancy McHugh, Natalie Hudson, Umesh Haritashya, Emily McWilliams
A team of four units from the University of Dayton’s College of Arts and Sciences—the Ethics and Leadership Initiative, the Fitz Center for Leadership in Community, the Hanley Sustainability Institute, and the Human Rights Center—is participating in the Values-Enacted Leadership Institute (VELI). Despite having separate funding and facing different budget challenges, our units actively engage the broader public and community and offer related academic programs. In the past, sufficient resources meant less need for collaboration. Now, with new directors leading the units, and staffing and budget realities, we are driven to share resources strategically, establish shared values-based priorities, and build collaborative processes. Our VELI project will produce an action plan for this collaboration. This includes defining our shared values, creating agreements for how we will work together, making our budgets and staffing more transparent, aligning our public work, exploring joint curriculum options, and developing a unified approach to institutional impact. Because our four units are interdisciplinary and connected across the university, we envision this project as a value-driven model for wider institutional change that strengthens the university’s commitment to holistic education and service-oriented leadership. We anticipate developing this plan throughout the 2025-2026 academic year.
Northwestern University
Building a value-driven culture: strategic alignment, leadership development, and transformation in multi-level organizations
Team Members: Kristi Holmes, Veronica Hoyo, Keith Herzog, Amelia Bucek
At this time, this team has chosen not to share an abstract. If you have questions about this project, please reach out to Kristi Holmes.
TEval
Developing the NextGen TEval Alliance
Team Members: Ann Austin, Noah Finkelstein, Andrea Follmer Greenhoot, Emily Miller
The overall goal of this project is to establish a national alliance of higher education institutions, the NextGen TEval Alliance, united by a common goal to transform teaching evaluation toward more holistic, scholarly, transparent, multisource approaches. This proposal builds on work done over the past seven years through the national TEval Project (www.teval.net). There is a pressing need to advance, scale and institutionalize more robust and equitable models of teaching evaluation to better support learning in students with unique aspirations and diverse backgrounds and needs and to prepare them to lead meaningful and impactful lives as citizens, members of the workforce, and contributors to a rapidly changing world. This collective effort to create a community of diverse higher education institutions – including community colleges, minority-serving institutions, and under-resourced institutions– will focus on teaching evaluation as a powerful lever for strengthening undergraduate STEM teaching and learning while also supporting faculty success and retention. Our proposed work for the VELI Institute (VELI category: assessment and reward structures) is two-fold: (1) Enhance our leadership team’s capacities as values-based change leaders; and (2) Develop an approach for a national convening to advance plans for building a values-based alliance to reform teaching evaluation.
Breaking the M.O.L.D.
Curriculum & Programming for Arts and Humanities Leadership In Transforming the Academy
Team Members: Kimberly Moffitt, Psyche Williams-Forson, Patricia Williams Dockery, Carolyn Foresterie, Stephanie Shonekan, Bonnie Thornton Dill*
Entering its final program year, the Breaking the M.0.L.D. ( Mellon//Maryland Opportunities for Leadership Development) team will convert the program’s activities into a curriculum guide and plan for its dissemination. The curriculum will illustrate the program’s application of values-enacted leadership in creating a pipeline to senior leadership in higher education for faculty in the Arts, Humanities and humanistic Social Sciences who have been historically underrepresented in senior leadership positions. With attention to the special challenges facing faculty of color and women, it facilitates their capacities to make meaningful contributions in transforming the academy. As part of this discussion, we will also develop a plan for project sustainability and expansion beyond this final year.
*Bonnie Thornton Dill is a PI on the Breaking the M.O.L.D. project as well as on the HuMetricsHSS Initiative. She will primarily be serving in a facilitation capacity at VELI rather than as a member of the project team.