Provost Chris Long is unique among his peers at the Big 10 Academic Alliance—he’s the only provost from a humanities background. But Long says that his years as a professor of philosophy have prepared him well to lead a major research university, and in particular by drawing on his research in values-enacted leadership.
Long recently co-founded the Values-Enacted Leadership Institute (VELI) at the UO, funded by the Mellon Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
VELI aims to align the articulated values of the university with meaningful indicators of academic success like research impact, student experience, and community engagement. And equally important is VELI’s collaborative approach to institutional change that puts values at the center of decision-making, policy creation, and daily practice.
We recently sat down with Long for a conversation about the future of the university, the place of AI in the human experience, and what’s next for the humanities.
Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation: The academy is likely headed for a reinvention in the coming years. How do you envision values-enacted leadership playing a role in this transition?
Chris Long: A commitment to identifying and orienting ourselves toward our core values is going to be critical as we continue to navigate the changes we see in store. The power of a values-enacted approach to leadership is the opportunity to identify shared values and to talk in concrete terms about how we put those values into practice in our relationships with each other and in the work we’re doing.
In recent years, higher education has increasingly been understood as a private as opposed to a public good. This fails to appreciate the central purpose of the university to educate the next generation of self-reflective and discerning citizens and to deepen our understanding of one another and the world we inhabit. Values-enacted leadership in higher education is rooted in the recognition that the university is a public good and that the well-being of the individual is intimately interconnected with the well-being of society and the natural world. Humanistic ways of knowing and leading reinforce our connections with one another as whole human beings who are working to lead purposeful lives. This approach to leadership is about what we owe one another as a community both for the individual growth of students, faculty, staff, and in terms of the ideas we explore, the discoveries we make, and the contributions to society that emerge from this special space that is a university.
Does this mean there is a specific set of values universities should adhere to?
Values-enacted leadership is not about a single set of values. It is about the transformative power of paying attention to how values shape our decisions and, this is critical at the current moment, how a failure to be intentional about values can lead to decisions that are out of alignment with our mission.
When there is uncertainty and change in the system, reinforcing our shared connections around values allows us to ensure the changes we’re making are aligned with what we care most deeply about.
How should the university community come together to set values?
VELI is not about dictating, “Here is a prescribed set of values, now you put them into practice.” It is about teaching people how to activate the values that animate the life of an organization in a given context. Values-enacted leadership involves beginning by identifying the values we share and actualizing those values by putting them into practice in our work together. It’s not as if there’s a single set of values that we just enact.
When hard decisions must be made, if you haven’t had values conversations before you’re faced with those decisions, it is more difficult to remain aligned with the mission of the university or of your unit or the area that you’re leading.
Where do you see the humanities going in the future?
The humanities is a name for a wide variety of human ways of knowing. The wide-ranging disciplines that fit under this title are rich and diverse in nature. There is a unifying commitment at their core to settle into and understand the finite nature of human existence, and with that comes a certain kind of intellectual humility. It comes with a capacity to see the longer arc of history and to recognize complexity. Humanists understand the importance of story and narrative. The way in which identity in its multiple expressions plays out in specific contexts. Humanist ways of thinking help to imagine a future that is better, more just, more beautiful.
Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to grow in its influence. How do you think AI affects us as humans?
It’s a deep and longstanding humanistic question to consider how our technologies both extend our humanity and reach beyond it. Writing itself is a technology; it’s a way of extending our memory. To what degree is writing as a technology distorting our capacity to memorize and remember? This question goes back to the writings of Plato, particularly in his dialogue, the Phaedrus, in which Socrates questions the affordances and limitations of writing as a new technology.
AI is uncovering all sorts of new questions. It has given us new capacities that are powerful, but powerful for what? To enhance our relationships with each other and the world? Or impoverish and polarize and alienate us from one another?
Returning to the previous example, writing has never simply been a way to convey information. Writing is also a process human beings use to understand how they think and feel. You can’t offload that process onto a machine. You can enter into dialogue with chat bots, large language models, and other AI tools. I know faculty who are using chatbots to essentially think out loud. But writing is itself not just about producing a document. It’s a process that has value in and of itself.
The key is that we need to be intentional about how we use the technology. We need to approach it from our values. As a humanist, I approach AI as another iteration of the question of human finitude. We’re limited and yet powerful enough to create things that extend beyond our limits as finite individuals.
Why is research rooted in the humanities essential to the liberal arts education of tomorrow?
The research endeavor is about pushing the bounds of what we know. This is at the heart of a liberal arts education. Research in all its forms, humanistic and scientific, is a deeply human activity. I go back to the opening lines of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, where he writes that “all humans by nature stretch out toward knowing;” as human beings, we desire to know who we are, what are we doing here, what is the nature of this place we inhabit, the nature of the beings here with us?
The university is a very special place: A place of ideas, of exploration, and of discovery. It is separate from and prior to the noise of partisanship, a place where you can explore and play and discover new things that you wouldn’t have otherwise recognized if you’re too caught up in the transactional play of partisan politics. Society, to its great credit and everlasting benefit, has created the university as a sacred place of learning and discovery because it recognizes its well-being, and its future depends on the conscientious habits and creativity cultivated here.