HuMetricsHSS Initiative to Establish New Leadership Institute

The Values-Enacted Leadership Institute will work to train academic leaders to ‘put values into action.’

By University of Oregon/ARHU Staff

The Humane Metrics for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HuMetricsHSS) Initiative, which has been developing values-based frameworks for scholars in these fields since 2016, has received a three-year, $650,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation. This grant will support the creation of the Values-Enacted Leadership Institute (VELI), a program designed to transform leadership culture in higher education. The first VELI will be held in July 2025.

Led by Bonnie Thornton Dill, former dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, and an international team of co-principal investigators (PIs) from academia and nonprofits, HuMetricsHSS runs workshops for faculty, administrators and staff at institutions of all types. These workshops encourage participants to rethink their values and reconsider how they evaluate the work within their departments, colleges and universities. VELI takes this mission further by bringing teams together to articulate shared values and draw up concrete plans for change that are firmly rooted in those values to foster institutional transformation.

“To collaboratively create the university of the future—one characterized by and rooted in an ethos of justice, equity, access and joy—new sustainable communities of practice are required,” said Thornton Dill, professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

HuMetricsHSS will lead the new institute, which will host summer workshops in Oregon over the next three years. Each year, five teams, each with four members from the same institution, will participate. Teams will include humanities faculty, administrators and staff, working together to identify and implement values that can reshape institutional relationships and practices.

Over three years, 60 individuals from 15 institutions—including research universities, community colleges and liberal arts colleges—will take part in these workshops. The initiative will also target historically Black colleges and universities, minority-serving institutions and other access-oriented schools to ensure diverse participation.

The co-PIs—who also come from the University of Oregon, Michigan State University, Carnegie Mellon University, the Modern Language Association and the European University Institute—will collaborate on VELI. According to Christopher P. Long, provost of the University of Oregon, “Change, like leadership, is collective, driven by understanding and engaging the connections, positionalities, and agencies of those who identify shared values and put them into coordinated action to shape a better future.”

Photo courtesy of the University of Oregon.