Iopened a fortune cookie a couple of weeks ago, and the slip of paper read, “The time is always right to do what is right.”
It seems obvious that we should always do what is right, regardless of the season, but in this time of New Year’s resolutions, this statement gave me a lot to think about. We begin a new year with lots of commitments to ourselves and one another; sometimes we stick to them, but often we do not. Is it because we no longer think something is “right” or is it just a matter of discipline and personal/professional priorities?
Is the right time for me the right time for others? As I work with our UH-Hilo community to plan for the future, I am always anxious to get started. Our students need us to bring our best personal, professional and institutional selves to the work of their education, and there is so much we can do to improve.
So why aren’t we doing everything right now? Well, we all keep doing what we need to do, and after a while adding more things is just not possible. Thus, we turn the discussion to “what are we going to stop doing?” That is actually a much harder question to answer! We have become attached to routines, and we find it hard to imagine not doing some things even if we do not have compelling evidence that they are working. We spend a lot of time in higher education in discussion and analysis. We’re extraordinarily good at those things, so they come easy to us. We are in our comfort zone studying problems. Creating a sense of urgency around change, however, is part of my job, and it entails convincing others that the time is now.
Urgency around change also depends on us agreeing on what the right thing is. I may think, for example, that we need a particular academic program, but developing academic programs is not my job, but that of the faculty. If we do not have the faculty in a particular area, we then have to make the case internally and to the Legislature that we need to hire some experts to help us launch the program. Sometimes, such as was the case with the founding of our Daniel K. Inouye College of Pharmacy, we enlist support from throughout our entire community to do something new and ambitious.
Often people assume leaders want change merely for the sake of change. Certainly some are interested more in leaving a personal legacy than doing what is right, but most people I know who take on these jobs just want to leave things better than they found them, much like our New Year’s resolutions to eat healthier, exercise more, volunteer in the community and generally better oneself.
Competing priorities also sometimes hamper our doing the right thing. As a former boss of mine said in reference to my taking on too many projects, “None of this is the devil’s work,” meaning all the things I wanted to do were good things, but working myself so hard that I burned out or started becoming less effective was not going to help.
After many years of watching universities try to put every good thing in their strategic plans, I urged the UH-Hilo community to make our plan a little leaner. We do not want to start things we cannot finish or start something that works but that we cannot continue. Thus, there are things missing from the Action Plan we have developed.
Are these things not the “right” things? Are they not important? The answer to both those questions, of course, is “no.” We have chosen things to work on this year that will make those other right things easier to accomplish down the road. One of those things is bringing back the community advisory board, about which more information will be announced soon.
I look forward to sitting down with alumni and other community supporters as we navigate the future. Getting input from our community is always the right thing, no matter what the season.
Happy New Year!
Bonnie D. Irwin is chancellor of the University of Hawaii at Hilo. Her column appears monthly in the Tribune-Herald.
