Tonight, the HuMetricsHSS team kicked off the inaugural edition of VELI, the next phase of almost a decade of work developing and championing a values-enacted approach to evaluation, assessment, change management, and decision making in higher education. Over the next week, we will guide five institutional and cross-institutional teams, each of which comes to us with a specific change project, through the HuMetricsHSS process: identifying and agreeing upon their values; being explicit about what those values look like in practice; breaking their project into measurable milestones and stepping stones; mapping the power, procedures, and policies they can use to help them achieve it; and then building out an actionable and accountable plan to get the work done in a way that is holistically informed by and demonstrative of their values.
We asked Chris Long, U of Oregon provost, HuMetricsHSS co-PI, and all-around mensch, to welcome the project teams who have come to VELI with a commitment to leading values-enacted change at a time when we need it more than ever. He spoke with characteristic vulnerability, acknowledging “the precarious point of inflection” at which we in higher education find ourselves, while also recognizing it as “a pivotal moment of shared resolve” in which we have an opportunity to be “wholehearted enough to move beyond our fear and resilient enough to redirect our anger into the creative energy we will need to reimagine the university as a place where values are intentionally practiced, where our shared purpose animates our highest promise.”
Over the next five days, it is our goal to create a space for VELI participants to be resolute, wholehearted, and resilient together. They’ll also hear from others doing this work: folks with whom we’ve engaged over the past ten years, and who have taken what they did with us and implemented it in myriad ways. Our goal is that the teams here at VELI become part of this burgeoning community of practice that itself becomes a movement, a groundswell of not just support but action towards values-enacted change.
We have always believed in HuMetricsHSS as a spark, the beginning of something much bigger than any of us, an ethos aligned with others engaged in transformative changemaking in the academy.1 To that end, we’ve published a values sorter, a workshop toolkit2, and several papers and offered them up for others to use. We have several blog posts highlighting some applications of our workshop guide, and recently Erin McKiernan, Caitlin Carter, Michael Dougherty, and Greg Tananbaum published an article in which they describe building on our work, using our workshop model to “help turn theoretical frameworks into practical reforms.” This is exactly what we’re working on here at VELI, and we are thrilled that others are focusing in at a disciplinary level, engaging in the process, and building out new frameworks and opportunities for values-enacted change.
- Among the initiatives we admire and with whom we’ve worked in some capacity are CoARA, DORA, More Than Our Rank, Invest in Open Infrastructure, Breaking the M.O.L.D., and HELIOS—but there are so many others, including HERS and the Pullias Center, from whom we have learned so much. ↩︎
- A new version of which we’ll be releasing this summer. ↩︎