When I was teaching history of science, I often wondered what it must have been like for those scientists who were living through a scientific revolution. Did they know they were in a time of change? Did they consciously try to think creatively when confronted by stubborn facts or disquieting discoveries? Or did they persist in the old ways of thinking and become an exemplary dead-end story for historians to tell?

Today, as we are all living through a global financial cataclysm, I have those thoughts again, and I am more sympathetic to those folks in the past! For example, we know we are living through something, all right, but we don’t know if we are at the beginning, the middle or the end, and we don’t know how it will all come out. (Suppose it is the end of the beginning? Suppose it isn’t? Do we know, and does it make any difference?)

What if, for instance, the stimulus package works? What if the financial fix we are in leads us to make lots of needed changes on the state, local, national and international levels? Can entrenched habits and attitudes change fast enough so that we can take advantage of the crisis, or are we going to be stiff instead of supple? Will politicians stop arguing about irrelevancies? Will leaders of higher education think of new ways to organize? Will we be in a straitjacket of habits and expectations, or will we be able to be flexible, creative thinkers?

History is written by the winners. And the survivors. Even in the midst of all the financial flux, we at UMF are making plans that I believe will result in surviving and winning.

This planning requires a strange combination of conservative and out-of-the-box thinking. As I said to some legislators who were here on campus earlier this winter, we have to tear up the box and make a toboggan out of it.

Why conservative? In planning in the midst of major change, we have to make some assumptions. These days, they’d better not be rosy. I just hope that our assumptions about finances, demographics, revenues and expenses are conservative enough.

But at the same time, we have to be positive, flexible and creative.

And then, the most important thing we have to do is to have trust—in ourselves, our leadership teams and our organizations. We have to live through the problem-solving process, and be full partners in facing the challenges before us.

At UMF, for instance, our leadership team produced a large change agenda in January and let people stew over it. Many were then able to move from feelings of concern to creativity, producing new and better ideas. In our many conversations in January and thereafter, we noticed which features of our plan caused apprehension and which were less controversial than we had thought. We listened sincerely to complaints and ideas. Then we compromised in the areas where we had less stake in the exact outcome. In fact, we got better results in some areas than what we had proposed, and people felt they had had a say, which they really did.

When ownership of problems and solutions is shared, the outcome is something better than surviving. It’s winning—for all involved.

Based on my experience with confronting change at UMF, here are my change principles for today (subject to change!):

Go slow to go fast. But go fast enough.

The institution has to come first.

Stick to your mission.

Recognize reality.

Be conservative in projections.

Think about the future, not the past.

As you cut, also invest.

And finally, don’t waste a good crisis. We don’t get many opportunities in our lives when world circumstances align to encourage us to be radically creative.

And also, finally, be brave.

And finally, finally, hope to be lucky.


Sincerely yours,
Theodora J. Kalikow, President