Looking Back, Looking Ahead — Sense-making in Turbulent Times

By Scott Fritzen

Looking back over my first nine months as Dean at CIS, it is tempting to try to impose an order on my own, and the college’s, experience that isn’t necessarily there. Perhaps after the many months of slow-moving crisis we have lived through, we will all have this need, amid much unprocessed suffering, dislocation and general bewilderment.

While any “sense-making” will necessarily be provisional and personal, allow me to share three insights that I take away from the stories I have read in this year’s edition of the Compass, and from our evolving context.

First, the reality of global interdependence — taught every day in our seminars — has been brought powerfully home to us all. Through the pandemic — yes — but also in countless other ways: the regulatory environment that has affected international students; the painful confrontations with institutional racism that have defined these months; the accumulated political and economic dysfunctions we have witnessed . . . While such systemic stresses have been dramatic, they have taken their toll on us as individuals too, in ways both shared and particular. Looking around me, I can agree with Paul Simon (in “An American Tune”) that “I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered, I don’t have a friend who feels at ease.”

A second insight is that the people of CIS have been resilient and resourceful through this turmoil. You can see this in some extraordinary achievements recounted in this Compass. Evacuating study abroad students. Adapting to online teaching and advising. Helping international students through regulatory mazes. And for the entire college, adapting so positively and productively (I must honestly say) to a whole new modality and rhythm of work, with a new dean (the fourth within two years), in the blur of zoom-land — while so many dealt with weighty personal and family challenges and misfortunes, sometimes in silence.

The third insight is more forward-looking. As I write in April 2021, many of us in the U.S. are beginning to enjoy the first weeks of certain regained liberties post-vaccination. Yet is clear there is no “going back home” for us collectively. The virus in its new variants is presently burning uncontrollably through India and Brazil, among other places, causing unfathomable suffering. And the obscene inequities surrounding vaccine distribution globally will lock in this global threat for years longer than it otherwise would. In looking at the impact of the pandemic on international education (and much else), we must prepare for a long tail of pandemic-related impacts and contingencies.

Organizations, just like individuals, attempt to make sense of an uncertain world too, and one way they do so is through strategic planning. So perhaps it is no coincidence that this season finds the University of Oklahoma deep into such planning, both for the Norman campus as a whole and for different colleges and departments. At CIS, we are at present engaged in extensive consultations, both internally and across the university, to inform our own evolving strategic plan, which we hope to have completed in first draft form by mid-year.*

For this to be a meaningful exercise in sensemaking, we need to make the strategic planning process, the plan itself, and what we do with that plan come to life. It can’t remain a box-ticking exercise. Our goal is to further build out an organizational culture at CIS — of which the plan is just one part — that is resilient, adaptive and even “‘antifragile”’** — thriving on the complexity that will certainly be with us going forward. It is a culture centered on our mission, our people, and on innovation:

Being mission-centered means creatively articulating the directions we need to move in as a university in order to put “global fluency” at the core of what it means to be educated in the 21st century. And it means tracking our progress systematically — including in multifaceted areas such as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) — so that our stakeholders can hold us accountable for all that we do.

Being people- and partnership-centered is the essential strategy, because we can truly accomplish nothing through some bureaucratic blueprint — and nothing alone. We create value in the world when we tap into those initiatives that a beautiful diversity of stakeholders feel passionate about doing throughout the university.

Being innovation-centered starts with recognizing how quickly the field of international education, and the universities in which it is embedded, are changing, and rethinking our models and methods accordingly. We must constantly anticipate and adapt within this landscape.

Despite the many trials we have faced, and traps that surely lie in wait for us, my “sense-making” leaves me both excited and surprisingly optimistic. The college has a proud record on which to build. We have tremendous people and partnerships. And we are ready to channel the goodwill that exists throughout our university towards global engagements of all kinds. Our mission is noble, the challenges complex, and we have room to run. What more could we ask for?

Scott Fritzen is Dean of CIS and Associate Provost for Global Engagement.

*Please check https://ou.edu/cis/strategicplanning2021 for updates on both the process and outputs of this planning.

**A term popularized by N. Taleb in his 2014 book,Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.