Note from the Head of School
We are an intentional community—our faculty, students, parents, trustees, alumni, and staff are all quite adept at imagining, reflecting, planning, analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating.
I’ve always remarked that one of the things I love best about UHS is that nothing on this campus goes unexamined. We are an intentional community—our faculty, students, parents, trustees, alumni, and staff are all quite adept at imagining, reflecting, planning, analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating. When you Google the term “intentional community,” links to communes and retirement communities pop up; and while we are neither of those things, we are a place that thrives on connection and teamwork, holding certain values in common. Our work on values alignment is currently very much alive. Three years after our strategic design process began, we continue to launch a variety of exciting projects that position us as a leader in curriculum development, student wellness, faculty recruitment and support, and assessment, to name a few. We are committed to being a school that continually operates in a strategic stance and that mirrors growth and learning at all levels. Most important, these efforts are built along the spine of our core values of INQUIRY, CARE, INTERCONNECTION, INTEGRITY, and AGENCY. Our strategic design gives us the opportunity to think about all the things we evaluate and examine in a values-based context. According to Jim Collins1, “There is a big difference between being an organization with a vision statement and becoming a truly visionary organization.The difference lies in creating alignment—alignment to preserve an organization’s core values, to reinforce its purpose, and to stimulate continued progress towards its aspirations.When you have superb alignment, a visitor could drop into your organization from another planet and infer the vision without having to read it on paper.” While other-worldly visitors may not yet infer UHS’s vision and values from an intergalactic visit, we are getting closer to making them visible in every corner of our campus and community. This year at our opening faculty and staff meeting, we examined three different scenarios and considered how we would respond to each of them through the unique lens of each of our core values. We found (of course) that there can be great alignment, as our values informed our thinking; while at other times, these same guiding principles can collide. This exercise not only provided a kind of stickiness that gives our values voice in our teaching and learning community, it also showed us a way to use this framework for future decision-making at our school. In this issue of the Journal, we are profiling student, faculty, and alumni activists, including Monique Morris ’90, who is also a current parent (Ebony ’19); and Andrew Williams ’00, director of the community engagement program, who returned to campus four years ago to join our faculty. I’d like to thank Mal Singer, a member of our founding faculty who retired in 2009, for providing historical perspective and personal insight for the story about activism on campus. We know there are many, many more of you out there doing this important work and we look forward to telling more of your stories in future issues. The UHS community is no stranger to activism, and the world is not wanting for issues that need our attention. Engaging in activism in a school setting can support our values, but it can also shed light on areas where our values are in active conflict. At UHS, we are intentionally embracing these intersections, engaging in brave conversations, while continuing to prize connection and community. To me, this is the difference between a school that does excellent things and an excellent school. This letter will appear in an annual report issue of the Journal, and I would be remiss if I didn’t express my very deep gratitude on behalf of our faculty, staff, and students, to those volunteers and donors who provide the hours of support and significant resources that make all of this important work possible.
Julia Russell Eells 1 2
U H S J O U R N A L | FA L L 2 0 1 7
Jim Collins is an expert in business leadership and is the author of many best-selling titles including Good to Great and Great by Choice.