Students have the opportunity to help update university values this week.
President Martha Burger created an ad hoc committee to revitalize the university’s core values, which have not been updated since 2002. The ad hoc committee came about through meetings in leadership, said Joey Croslin, vice president for human resources and chief human resources officer.
“Through a couple of collaborative sessions with President Burger and leadership, it was identified that, as an institution, we needed to codify our core values as an organization,” she said. “Leadership came together to collaborate about priorities and challenges for the institution, and this is what we came up with.”
Croslin said faculty were chosen from each school to help develop these new core values. The method was based on research from other organizations who have worked through establishing core values. Trustees, students and alumni also are involved, making the committee 40 people.
“We decided to ensure we had faculty and staff representation from each school and each non-academic unit,” she said. “We had a kickoff meeting Feb. 25. We reviewed a plan of attack on how we would get information to develop core values.”
The committee is divided into three teams—communications/marketing, data and composition. The communications/marketing team and the data team are working to conduct focus groups to collect information.
Sammi Bronow, economics senior, was one of the students chosen for the committee. She will lead a focus group for students so they can state what they would like the new core values to be. Faculty members also were trained to lead focus groups by Kelly Williams, director for institutional research.
“Basically, we have a script we will be reading from, and we will be asking different questions about campus culture,” Williams said. “The student reps will be running the student ones, while the faculty will be running their own.”
After information is collected from the focus groups, the data team will analyze the results and create a survey, Croslin said. The survey will be distributed to the campus community, alumni and trustees. The composition team will use the information to create a new draft of the university core values.
“I think that everyone in the OCU community has a shared sense of values, but the people might articulate them differently,” Croslin said. “This will be a unifying process to decide what these values are and how we engage with each other through them.”
Bronow said the focus groups are important because they will help determine what questions to ask in the survey.
“These focus groups are the initial step to guide us to asking the right questions,” she said.
Focus groups will be from 12:15-1:15 p.m. today, 7:30-8:30 p.m. Thursday and 2:30-3:30 p.m. Friday in Room 214 in Dulaney-Browne Library. Pizza will be provided.
President Burger was unavailable for comment at presstime.
Leave a Reply