My take on all this is that we have entered a new era, one with its own set of challenges and opportunities. It is also a period very different from the past two years where our focus was necessarily on managing the consequences of faculty loss and re-scaling our activities to fit the available resources. Now we have the more difficult task of managing success. We must ensure that with this extraordinary opportunity to create something new and different from a cloth that is old and venerable, we do not shrink from the task by trying to revert to a form that was unsuccessful in the past, and that now is creating difficulties for many other schools in our community and the nation. In this spirit, I want to share with you a few guiding principles that I propose as north star values for what will be an amazing period of development for this school.
Education is our core mission.
The students are the only people who pay to be a part of this enterprise. No one is above teaching a student. All of our actions as faculty and leaders should be considered in the context of our responsibility as role models of our profession. Each of us shares in the stewardship of the school. There are no islands and no silos.