My written Faculty President’s Report for the Whitworth Board of Trustees meeting in Spring 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For this trip around the sun\u2014my 46th<\/sup>\u2014Psalm 46 has been my morning reading on days when I\u2019ve felt pressed for time or too pressed, all around, to settle into a less familiar morning devotion. I\u2019m going to place that psalm, which has been such a presence in this second and final year of my faculty presidency, at the center of this final report to the board. At its start, \u201c46\u201d pictures a cataclysm in which mountains tumble into the sea, and then a slightly less cataclysmic cataclysm in which the sea doesn\u2019t swallow but does shake the mountains something fierce. And then the water gets calm\u2014becomes a quiet river running through the city of God and representing God\u2019s presence among His people. So this passage envisions a God who takes a force that might destroy and redeems it, turning it to good use. It describes a God who can choose to dissolve the earth, but when He finally brings an end to war, it\u2019s through the disarming of fighters, not through their destruction. Bows\u2014the farthest out\u2014are shattered, and then spears\u2014closer in to the fighting\u2014are broken, and then shields\u2014on the arms of the fighters\u2014burn away. And I picture armies rushing into conflict but suddenly weaponless, be-stilled, and commanded to stop striving and know that the fight, the work, and the glory is God\u2019s, not theirs. Near the end, we get a well known command\u2014\u201cBe still, and know that I am God\u201d\u2014and that command is for the armies, and for the earth, and for us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s a poetic orderliness to this psalm that has hit me in an interesting way during this noisy year. From the ocean to the mountains to the city. From the bows to the spears to the shields. In this year that has so often challenged us to move messages from the administration to the faculty or from the faculty to the administration, that has had so many moments when we\u2019ve tried to make sure everyone up and down the line both hears the reasoning for decisions and is able to speak into decisions along the way, both of these metaphorical sequences keep overrunning their banks and getting into my thinking about communication. Get the raging waters into the peaceful canal; move that big energy toward good, calm, assured work. Lay down your arms, and now you do it, and now you, and now, we\u2019re not fighting. Especially in the bows-spears-shields sequence, I see a writer\u2019s imagination that has been shaped by knowledge of the battlefield as an organization\u2014of where and how contacts happen, where the messages need to go, as that big body of many parts tries to work together. And, of course, says \u201c46,\u201d none of this succeeds without God on our side, drawing our minds and hearts to calm waters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, for me, in this year, these metaphors fall together\u2014the stilled army bringing its energies to the stewarding of a quiet river that is itself full of the stilled energy of raging waters, redeemed for God\u2019s good work\u2014and I imagine messages flowing through the Whitworth community beautifully, so that we can work in harmony as one body of many parts to steward the peace and the river. And some days we get that right. Some days we don\u2019t. But that aim sticks with me: to see the shape and order of things, to steward big energies toward good work, to honor God and follow Christ as we endeavor to do so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And so, in this year of imperfect answers to impossible questions, it\u2019s been a pleasure to watch our new provost work, with his heart for finding good, mutually satisfying solutions and for understanding all sides in a complex conversation. That listening spirit will, I sense, be an incredible asset as he leads Whitworth\u2019s own version of the bows and the spears and the shields, from the new assistant prof to the chairs to the deans and on up to the president (and over to the rest of the organization). What is ahead for Dr. Thuswaldner, and for Whitworth as an increasingly comprehensive liberal arts university, is the tightening up of our governance structures, good attention to the ways faculty work is distributed and accounted for, and smart moves to keep the various parts of the organization talking beneficially with one another. I think the board should anticipate, in the next couple of years, hearing a lot from Dr. Thuswaldner and the faculty executive about efforts to shape faculty governance in ways that will help us to improve our work and communication, even as the nature of that work and communication continues to shift. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Over the last several months, faculty exec has helped steward to faculty approval the curriculum for Whitworth\u2019s first two doctoral program\u2014an important achievement that underscores the university\u2019s \u201cincreasingly comprehensive\u201d identity. Last fall, the faculty approved changes to some of our handbook language on service and scholarship as related to promotion, and this spring we hope to get to faculty approval for a new, sturdy, reliable process by which departments can assess and revise their department definitions of scholarship. Both the handbook fixes and the coming work on scholarship definitions will help us better acknowledge and cultivate the changing work of our departments and their faculty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We\u2019ve also proposed and received faculty approval to add \u201cchair elect\u201d positions to two of our major standing committees. This is especially important for the curriculum committee, which has one more year with Erica Salkin as its leader; the new chair-elect position will give Dr. Salkin a chance to train her successor, giving us continuity in this crucial area. The faculty has also voted to move our three different research approval committees underneath the umbrella of one standing committee (FRD), to streamline that work and make it easier for the members of those groups to be seen and heard by the exec and the administration. We\u2019ve spent a good deal of time talking about how to support, coordinate, and \u201cright size\u201d the work of all these important committees, and about how exec itself can leave helpful records for future leaders. Elise Leal, our current faculty secretary, is a historian by trade and training, and she\u2019s bringing that expertise to bear on improving our record keeping work, all around. It\u2019s clear, in short, that this is a time when Whitworth\u2019s leaders are thinking hard about the shared governance structures that support our work and about how to improve those structures. Dawn Keig, from the School of Business, will begin her term as faculty president this summer, and I don\u2019 t think we could place that coming organizational work into better hands. I\u2019m excited about what she\u2019ll do over the next couple of years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And I\u2019m running long in this report, but I should finish by acknowledging that, as I write, the faculty executive is in conversation about faculty nominations for the presidential search coming Whitworth\u2019s way next year. I\u2019m grateful for the board\u2019s wise choice of Scott McQuilkin to serve as our interim president; his sense of the organization, from top to bottom, and his good relationships within it, will be of incredible value in the coming months. But what a moment it is, when a president moves on. President Taylor has been a steady hand at the wheel over the past eleven years, and he\u2019ll be handing over a healthy organization that is chockablock with energy and potential\u2014new curriculum, new programs, new leaders rising through the faculty, and more. My thanks to the board for the hard work you are undertaking as you shape this search and help us to find a new leader who can steer us through the 2020s. I tend to open meetings of the faculty exec with a prayer for our wit, wisdom, and energy as we approach the tasks before us; that is my prayer for you all, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whitworth University My written Faculty President’s Report for the Whitworth Board of Trustees meeting in Spring 2021. For this trip around the sun\u2014my 46th\u2014Psalm 46 has been my morning reading on days when I\u2019ve felt pressed for time or too pressed, all around, to settle into a less familiar morning devotion. I\u2019m going to place that psalm, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"full-width-page-template.php","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-administration","category-faith-learning","missing-thumbnail"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":282,"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions\/282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
4\/2021<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"