[May 2, 2017] Leadership is difficult – senior leadership is very difficult – but our ability to handle those indomitable challenges that comes as a part of leadership is a measure of our strength of character. The University of California at Berkeley is both an organization that today faces great challenges and yet has historically been successful by sticking to its core values.
Some call it the soul of the university; the ability to overcome the fear that unavoidably comes with big challenges; those very things that distinguish the hero from the coward, the resilient from the fragile, and the great from the mediocre. Berkeley has been at the epicenter of freedom in the United States and produces some of the best educated in the world. A true honor. But its senior leaders have recently failed its mission and rejected its core values.
Berkeley does have core values, although they are not listed as such. Principles of community is their name for them and, as they note, each value is tied to their mission of teaching, research, and public service. There core values are1:
- Honesty and integrity
- Diversity and excellence are intrinsically tied
- Dignity of all individuals
- Freedom of expression
- Respect of differences and commonalities
- Leadership is central to education’s mission
- Embrace open and equitable access to learning and development
These are Berkeley’s published “principles of community;” a list that I simplified since they were far too verbose (see link below for their webpage). They have been rejected either by a small minority of students violently or by action and inaction of many of the university students, faculty, and administrators.2
Those who are in senior leadership positions, such as the Chancellor Nicholas Dirks, have voluntarily given away their honor and integrity … and thrown their lot in with those who would use violence to oppose any one who holds an opinion different from their own. This is indeed a sad day for Berkeley and for American universities in general and an example for us all when one’s core values are rejected.
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1. http://diversity.berkeley.edu/principles-community
2. I would wager that no one at UC Berkeley could list any of these principles nor could they tell us what they mean. Berkeley students, faculty, and administrators are leading a new revolution in student involvement. In the 1960s it was freedom of expression; today it’s freedom of repression.