Mission

Being Smarter Together

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Last week, we hosted two important planning events within the college. First, the Leadership Team (including cabinet and the Director/Chair team) had a planning retreat, followed by the Animal Sciences Summit on Tuesday. I appreciate when people are willing to invest time in reflecting on our work and planning for the future. I especially appreciate our ability to come together and think as a team. We really are stronger together.

Scott London refers to this as the “Power of Dialogue” and that it is through dialogue that we can overcome differences, find common ground, build meaning and purpose, and set directions. The Greeks believed that if you are unsure about a question, by working together, we can solve almost anything.

Physicist, David Bohm believed dialogue was critical for intelligence and that in the past, individual intelligence may have been enough, but the nature and complexity of today’s problems requires collective thinking. Dialogue is not the same as decision-making or problem-solving.  It requires listening, searching for common ground, exploring assumptions and ideas. It requires that we build relationships with one another. Let’s be smarter together. See you there.

http://scott.london/articles/ondialogue.html

 

The Land Grant Revolution

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A week or so ago, we hosted the University Board of Trustees on our CFAES Wooster Campus. We appreciate their interest and support for our work. Besides welcoming them, President Drake asked me to comment on our land grant mission. I think most of us are familiar with the two general purposes which drove the creation of the land grants:

  1. Meeting the needs of the people through translational and applied research as well as through applied and “practical” education AND
  2. Equal access to that education for Americans.

The creators of the land grants knew that our country, and its citizens, needed scientific and technical knowledge. At first, this knowledge was focused on agriculture and engineering, as most of our citizens were rural and engaged in farming for basic subsistence. The impact of our land grant universities over the past 150 years has been profound, not only successfully addressing the challenges of our young nation in being able to feed itself but growing into a wide spectrum of world-wide impact and technological advancements. Many of those changes began with agriculture but led a revolution in our nation’s technology transfer and our economic and scientific successes.

Now, 150 years later we face a vastly different world with new educational and research needs. We face a world where the interdependency of a global society and the complexity of issues have magnified. We also face a world where innovation, discovery, and creativity contribute to an accelerated tempo of change unlikely to slow. To manage that, takes balancing specialized scientific preparation for students with a broad education engaging humanities, and the arts. It takes depth in research expertise with breadth of disciplines.

In research, it’s no longer enough to have a single discovery to enhance yield, create greater mechanical efficiencies, or vaccinate a population. Now, research must blend bench science with applied approaches and its tandem collections of economic and social adjustments – and yet, find that balance point that still frees bench science to take us to ideas that today we cannot even fathom.

For example, about 80% of cancers are based not in genetics but lifestyle, making the food we consume, the exercise we manage to squeeze into our day, our environment, and the ways we manage stress – all critical tools. Our food alone is critical not just for nutrition, but for benefits which go beyond nutrition to prevent and even treat some cancers and other metabolic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, dementia, and heart disease.

The ability of our comprehensive university with our depth and breadth across multiple complex systems both internally- such as our microbiome and metabolomics, to the larger local and global systems such as food supply chains and economics—are critical to finding solutions. It will be the integration of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches that will lead to the greatest innovations, the most powerful solutions, sustainable models, and revolutionary cures. Not just from medicine and within food, agriculture and environmental sciences—but information technology, data science, social sciences, engineering, and public policy.

Our university –and our college– is uniquely positioned to lead nationally and globally. Our comprehensiveness and our commitment to engage across disciplines creates the conditions for the next land grant revolution. See you there.

 

 

Moving Forward

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One thing I’ve learned over the years, is that the complexity in large organizations can become a huge obstacle to doing compelling work, OR the people who inhabit these organizations can provide structure and show up in a way that helps move things forward. Rob Bell says that is a great litmus test for whether the work you’re doing is work that the world needs: does it move things forward?

Because some work doesn’t. Some work takes things in the wrong direction. Every day, we have choices- small, incremental ones- rarely the big life-changing ones. It becomes easy to think that choices define us, like “You are what you eat” “You are what you do” but that’s not true.  You are the person who makes those choices.

How we decide, how we respond to what happens to us, is what gets at who we are as a person, and as an organization. I had the good fortune of growing up in several countries and cultures before landing in the Midwest. One of those countries was Israel. While there I learned about Tikkun Olam. The most broadly understood notion is that of “repairing the world” through human actions. That each of us has a responsibility to change, improve, and fix our surroundings. That the way we repair the world is not by taking on the whole world, but through behaving and acting constructively and beneficially where we are. As a child, I found that powerful. As a middle-aged person, I find that powerful.

It implies that each of us has a hand in working towards the betterment of not just our own existence but that we have responsibility for our community, our state, our world and importantly, the lives of future generations. Essentially, our world is unfinished and we can participate in the ongoing creation of what it will be. Tikkun olam implies that we take responsibility for our world. That we are the stewards of our communities. Like our CFAES community. See you there.

Why Are We Here?

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For this post, I went back to the comments I made during my first weeks at OSU. It is my hope, that this might remind you why I came and what this work means to me. I encourage you to consider why you’re here and what this work means to you too.

What do I care about?

My early childhood was overseas as part of a military family until I came to the USA as an early teen and lived with my Mennonite family in rural Iowa. While those environments seem extreme and there was some culture shock in coming from Brazil to Iowa (in February). Both families were defined by a strong belief in the importance of service, and that it is through service that we co-create the world.

A second thing you will discover about me is that I’m curious. I’m a question-asker. I have great comfort with “Beginners Mind,” which is that place you are whenever you start something new. I have great appreciation for diversity or conflicting ideas, and I can separate ideas from who I am. That also translates to a deep value for discovery, research, and education. In Extension, there is a creed which is meaningful to me, especially this line:

“I believe that education is basic in stimulating individual initiative, self ­determination, and leadership; that these are the keys to democracy and that people when given facts they understand, will act not only in their self ­interest, but also in the interest of society.”

No matter what topic of human interest, our work likely connects. We are one degree from nearly everything: food, ecosystems, trade, health, manufacturing, foreign policy, and I would argue even the arts. There can be no chance of nearly anything else if we don’t have food. We don’t have food without viable and productive agriculture. And we don’t have productive agriculture if we don’t sustainably manage our resources and preserve biodiversity. I simply can’t think of anything more important than that.

Why am I here?

I’d answer that with questions like why are we here? What can we uniquely contribute? I believe we have the capacity to have profound impact on the world. I believe we can be a place where people can be rewarded and valued for investing themselves in work that is meaningful. I believe there is no better place for a curious question-asker, committed to creating conditions for a better world. See you there.