We opened this year's planning retreat the way I'd been turning it over in my head for weeks beforehand: not with the calendar, not with the budget, but with a question. Before we reviewed a single program or sketched out a single offering for next year, I asked everyone around the table to share one specific moment from the past year when they felt our mission was most present in their own corner of the work.
I'll admit I wasn't sure what I'd get. It's the kind of prompt that can produce a polite generality — I think we really lived the mission this year — and leave it there. But that isn't what happened. What came back were stories. Particular ones. A moment with a particular person, on a particular afternoon, that someone had clearly been carrying around for a while without quite having had the occasion to say it out loud.
I've been doing this work long enough that I didn't expect to be surprised by what I heard. And in a sense I wasn't. The three things I took away from that hour aren't new. I could have written them on a notecard two years ago. What was different was how clearly they came into focus when they arrived attached to real moments instead of stated as principles. So I want to set them down here, less as discoveries than as reminders.
The first is that we are a safe space. Our values statement has said as much since 2015: we commit to "a nonjudgmental, safe, collaborative, and supportive environment for faculty to think, experiment, work, and thrive." But hearing it in the stories reminded me how much of that safety is unglamorous. Sometimes the safety we offer is the safety to try a new assignment and have it flop. Sometimes it's the safety to admit you don't understand the new gradebook. And sometimes it's just the safety to close the door and vent for fifteen minutes before going back out to do the work. None of that shows up in an annual report. All of it matters.
The second is that this work is reciprocal. It's easy, in a center like ours, to slip into the posture of the people who know things helping the people who need to know them. The stories cut against that. We are not a one-way valve. The faculty member working through a teaching challenge with one of us is, at the same time, teaching us how teaching actually goes in their classroom. I find that worth holding onto, because it changes the spirit of the encounter. We're not dispensing. We're in it together.
The third is the one that points outward, and the one I keep coming back to. We can do more — and I think we should do more — to support educators across our region. Our mission is bound up in Xavier's larger commitment to a more just and humane society, and that commitment doesn't observe our building's walls. There are faculty at schools near us doing this work with far less support than we're fortunate to have, and the dissemination of what we learn is already written into our values. I don't have a fully formed plan yet. But I left the retreat convinced that the next chapter of our work is at least partly about the people we haven't met.
None of this required a retreat to know. But it did, apparently, require a room full of people willing to say here is the moment it felt real to me. I'm grateful they did. As we prepare for the coming year, I want to keep those three things close, not as a poster on the wall, but as a set of questions we keep asking ourselves: Are we still safe? Are we still learning? And are we reaching far enough?
(for thought)