By Shaquille Blackstock, Staff Writer

Published in print Apr. 15, 2015

The UNC-Greensboro Values committee recently finalized its year-long project evaluating UNCG’s institutional values, and in doing so it completed an important part of UNCG’s strategic planning process.

UNCG community members argue that the university has a diverse history, which calls for careful attention to the evolving values of the institution.

The Values Committee came about based on interdepartmental conversations about the most important “superordinate” values that drive and energize the university community.

Communications department head Dr. Christopher Poulos served on the Values Committee, and he provided some insight to The Carolinian on the process of evaluating said values.

Poulos elaborated, telling The Carolinian in an email, “We talked about a wide range of possible values. For now, we’ve come up with: integrity, empathy, excellence, sustainability and intercultural competence. We think that without these values driving what we do, we cannot survive as a community in the coming years.”

He continued, providing rationale for the decisions: “Integrity encompasses many values, including the ones in our Academic Integrity Code (honesty, trust, fairness, respect and responsibility). Empathy is a truly important driver of human relationships; without it, we will not be able to live together. Striving for excellence is what a university education is all about! Sustainability speaks for itself; without it, we’re sunk! And intercultural competence is vitally important for survival in global society.”

The “UNCG-Three” scandal of last semester caused a new interest in determining the values of the university, with many criticizing UNCG for not having an identity. Poulos responded, saying, “We began our conversation on the heels of this situation, and so we did take it into account.”

Poulos further elaborated, saying, “Provost Dunn undertook the Values Forum, which generated a lot of feedback, which we added to letters from the community regarding the UNCG Three situation, and tried to glean value-related themes from those documents.”

“From our point of view,” Poulos asserted, “how we treat each other in matters of integrity and empathy primarily should drive our actions as we move forward, working together to make UNCG the best institution of higher learning that it can possibly be.”

The university’s beginnings as a women’s college also had an impact on the direction that the committee wanted the school to head in, mostly because of its roots in tradition.

“The [Woman’s] College was a place of tradition and grace, and we wanted to draw on our roots as a place where high quality teaching and very high quality faculty-student relationships are nurtured and cherished. In our conversation, the importance of trust—driven by integrity—was extraordinarily important,” said the Communications department head.

Poulos also introduced a concept to describe both where core values are headed, and to connect the school’s past to the school’s future.

“The weaving metaphor came out of our discussions of our history as the [Woman’s] College of the University of North Carolina, where the study of textiles and consumer apparel were very important. The idea for a “warp” represented by our values and a “weft” represented by ways of interacting with people emerged from these conversations,” he explained.

When asked to speak more on intercultural competence and its implications for the future, Poulos offered this: “We felt that it was urgent that, in an era of cosmopolitanism and global engagement, we all need some level of intercultural competence. The globe is shrinking, and intercultural interaction is commonplace.”