HuMetricsHSS’ New Leadership Institute Receives Second Grant

Funding from the Hewlett Foundation supports the VELI program to transform the culture of higher education leadership.

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 $650,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to support the Values-Enacted Leadership Institute (VELI), a program designed to transform leadership culture in higher education. The grant was made in coordination with a $650,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation announced in October.  

VELI brings teams together to articulate shared values and draw up concrete plans for change that are firmly rooted in those values to foster institutional transformation.

Bonnie Thornton Dill, former dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, is a founding member and a principal investigator for the project, working with co-principal investigator colleagues and team members from the University of Oregon, Michigan State University, Carnegie Mellon University, the Modern Language Association and the European University Institute. 

The new grant from the Hewlett Foundation will allow the HuMetricsHSS team to host teams from additional institutions at VELI, thereby expanding the community of academic leaders engaged in values-enacted changemaking.  

It will also allow the HuMetricsHSS team to add additional facilitators from aligned initiatives such as Breaking the M.O.L.D at the University of Maryland and the University of Washington’s Futurist fellows. Finally, it will deepen engagement between the HuMetricsHSS team and the broader academic community, facilitating targeted collaboration with select partners from scholarly societies and universities already involved in transformational leadership work. 

“Incorporating HuMetrics into the Breaking the M.O.L.D. leadership development program helped prepare our participants to define and enact values as a basis for creating a coherent strategy for change,” said Thornton Dill. “It also helped broaden our thinking about leadership beyond specific positions to the many ways in which faculty lead, strengthening our work in affirming diverse identities, perspectives and knowledge as a basis for assessing and enriching academic life.” 

Christopher P. Long, provost of the University of Oregon, said the two grants, made in coordination to support values-enacted leadership and foster transformation across higher education, “signals both the importance of these efforts and the power of the values-enacted approach.”

Michigan State University will also receive a subaward supporting Knowledge Commons, an open access, academy-owned platform that will support collaboration and knowledge sharing among VELI participants and with the greater community of practice in educational research and leadership, as well as the University First Movers program, which identifies and supports individuals already making transformational, values-enacted leadership decisions to shift policy and practice. 

For more on VELI and to apply, see the HuMetricsHSS website. Applications are due February 12, 2025.