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Announcements

Director of Moral Courage Project to Speak at Values Day on Sept. 26

Stetson University’s Values Day will take place on Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2017, according to the Values Day Committee.

Irshad Manji will be the speaker at Stetson’s 2017 Values Day on Sept. 26. Photo by Jimmy Jeong/courtesy of Simon & Schuster.

The 2017 Values Day speaker is Irshad Manji. She is the Founder and Director of the Moral Courage Project, which equips students to make values-based decisions. She has turned her journey as a Muslim feminist reformer and lesbian activist into teachings about professional leadership, informed by cutting-edge research that connects across the disciplines.

The New York Society for Ethical Culture has given Manji the Ethical Humanist Award. And Oprah Winfrey awarded Manji the first annual Chutzpah Award for “audacity, nerve, boldness and conviction.” Manji has also produced a PBS documentary in the America at a Crossroads series titled “Faith Without Fear” and the documentary was nominated for a 2008 Emmy Award.

To learn more about Manji and her work, please visit her personal website and her NYU project.
 This year’s R.E.A.D. (Reflect Engage & Affirm Diversity) book, “Allah, Liberty and Love” (2011), is written by Manji. Manji describes the book as an effort to “reconcile faith and freedom in a world seething with repressive dogmas.” One of the key teachings of Manji’s work and a universal theme in her book is “moral courage” or the willingness to question, speak up, and be a courageous global citizen in a world filled with inequities. To check out a description of her book, visit the following site or Amazon.

For faculty, staff and students eager to read the book prior to Values Day and for faculty/staff members interested in integrating the book in 2017-2018 courses, the Office of Diversity and Inclusion has generously ordered books and should have copies available for pick-up Aug. 7, 2017. Additionally, copies will be made available at Convocation and during the R.E.A.D. session at Values Day.

For any inquiries or questions regarding Values Day, please contact Dr. Chris Bell ([email protected]), Savannah-Jane Griffin ([email protected]), or me ([email protected]).

In community,

Rajni Shankar-Brown, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Jessie Ball duPont Chair of Social Justice Education
Director of Education Graduate Programs
Stetson University

Adapted from Stetson Today. August 27, 2017

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Announcements

Supporting UVA

To the Stetson University community,

Thousands of University of Virginia students and faculty attended a candlelight vigil Wednesday night to “take back” their university after last weekend’s violence by neo-Nazi and white supremacist protestors. Photo/Sanjay Suchak, UVA Communications

Last night at the University of Virginia, thousands of students and faculty gathered together on the lawn of the university rotunda for a candlelight vigil to “take back” their university. It was clearly a moving moment as UVA attempts to heal itself. My remembrances of the courage and conviction of the civil rights marchers over 50 years ago came flooding back to me last night. Have we as a country and citizenry really made so little progress?

The vigil came just hours after a memorial service for Heather Heyer, the young woman killed this past weekend during the violence and clashes that have shocked and saddened the nation. We mourn with Charlottesville and Virginia for Heather’s death and the accident that killed two state troopers that same tragic day.

Today I express my support for Teresa Sullivan, president of the University of Virginia, and the entire UVA community during this difficult time. Stetson University stands with her and those all across our country in support of First Amendment rights, while condemning hate speech, bigotry and violence. I congratulate the Stetson University Student Government Association for its public support for the students of UVA and their solidarity with their counterparts.

In times of such national turmoil, it is important for individuals and institutions to stand up for their beliefs, speak up and speak out. Stetson University cannot remain silent in the face of public sentiments supporting racism, anti-Semitism, prejudice and intolerance.

Stetson’s mission is to provide a creative community where learning and values meet and there is no place at Stetson University for the hatred recently expressed in Virginia. Instead we choose to embrace the very best of America’s hard-won values, freedom, equality, justice and liberty for all.

Today I reaffirm for you, the Stetson Community, my commitment to continue our work toward our foundational goal to “Be a Diverse Community of Inclusive Excellence.”

Every day we have an opportunity to choose equity, to stand up for equity. Let no day pass without such affirmation.

Sincerely,
Wendy B. Libby, Ph.D.
President

Categories
Equity and Inclusion

What Leadership Means To Me


Research demonstrates that new tensions to traditional models of leadership exist. Technologies are catalyzing faster change and the marketplace is now a global one. And, our workforce is becoming more team-centric, diverse, and younger and older at the same time. As a result, an urgent challenge of the 21st century is the definition of leadership, the value of leadership, and what fundamental skills, capabilities, and dispositions are critical to fostering nimble leaders. 

The word “leader” implies followers and traditional models of leadership have buckled under the weight of this implication. Access to real-time information has stripped traditional leaders of implied “authority”. Diversity has pushed against the notion of the “suit”, replacing it with people from every demographic profile. 

In higher education, hierarchical models of leadership have relied historically on the positional leader – coordinator, director, chair, dean, provost, president, chancellor, and others. Given the demand for novel leadership approaches, positional leaders must rely on distributed models of leadership.

In other words, our role as positional leaders is to build leadership competencies in all people, ensuring institutional capacity for change as well as robust succession planning in all facets of the academy. My gazelle focus is to spawn new faculty leaders in teaching and learning, in scholarship, research and creative inquiry, and in citizenship, thereby ensuring a healthy, nimble, and viable learning organization now and in the future.


Meet the Blogger

Rosalie A. Richards, Ph.D. is associate provost for faculty development and professor of chemistry and education at Stetson University. Her interest in distributed leadership—how the work of leadership takes place among the people and in context of a complex organization—aims at making excellence in higher education inclusive.  

Adapted from Stetson Magazine article, What is Leadership?, October 2016