Living Shared Values

Annual Leadership Conference: "Living Our Values"
Greek Affairs
February 23, 2002

Good Morning. I am pleased to welcome all of you to your leadership conference for 2002—a conference whose theme you have designated as "Living Our Values."

As you know, I have tried to focus more intentionally this year on the values that animate us as a campus—as the UMass community…as the UMass family. So to be asked here this morning is particularly gratifying.

I needn’t tell this audience that the Panhellinic movement in the United States was founded on such values as friendship, loyalty to alma mater, academic excellence, service to others, the advancement of humanity, and good citizenship. Over the years there have been periods during which such values were evident more in the rhetoric than in the reality of one’s daily practice. Still, they continue to be viewed as worthy. Perhaps when we are pressed to explain what we mean when we use the term "value," we could say that a value represents that which we strive to acquire, or to achieve, and to maintain. It’s likely a broad enough definition to accommodate a range of values, from some we might call very beneficial and worthy and others we might regard as evil or corrupt.

At the beginning of the school year on the occasion of the community breakfast, I talked about the value of community, defining community as a place where there is a vital and constructive interdependency; where people matter; where there is a tacit agreement to create opportunities and seek solutions to challenges together; where growth in one part of the community enhances vitality in another; where together people commit and recommit to identifying and living shared values. I said that I wanted us together to revitalize the campus and our communities from a firm platform of shared values, common purposes, and cooperative and collaborative efforts. Among the values I believe this community holds dear are fairness; diligence; loyalty; a passion for continuing traditions of excellence; determination; perseverance; a harmony of parts; conscientiousness; integrity; respect; and cooperation (and this list is not definitive). While there have been times we were more successful than at others, we continue to strive to "get it right" for us as a community.

But these are words. The challenge is always to put flesh onto the words and to breathe into them a life that enables and ennobles us as human beings.

Sometimes learning by example can facilitate the practice of what we learn. To this point, you will recall that last year I invited Peter and Linda Biehl to campus so that all of us—students, faculty, and staff—might benefit from listening to and being in conversation with people whom I believe live values of the sort I would hope we might all strive to accomplish. The extreme circumstances of their situation constitute a more vivid example of people who live their values.

They are, you will recall, the parents of Amy Biehl. And you remember Amy’s story: throughout her adult life, Amy Biehl was an activist for democracy and human rights. She attended Stanford University and wrote an honors thesis on Namibian independence. After graduating, she worked for the National Democratic Institute, an organization supporting emerging democracies around the world. By the time she was 26, she had traveled to Namibia, Ivory Coast, Malawi, Burundi, and Kenya. She left the Institute in 1992 to study women's roles in the creation of a new South African constitution, supported by a Fulbright Scholarship.

South Africa was changing rapidly at that time, two years after the release of Nelson Mandela, and on the verge of democratic elections. The country's first all-race elections marked the end of apartheid, the policy of racial separation and oppression that had dominated South African life for nearly fifty years.

On August 25, 1993, Amy drove friends home to the black township of Guguletu. While in the township, she was stoned and stabbed to death by local youths that had just attended a Pan Africanist Congress rally condemning whites' involvement in perpetuating racial inequality.

Of Amy's death, Nelson Mandela said, "She made our aspirations her own and lost her life in the turmoil of our transition." (If you are interested in learning more about this remarkable young woman and the way she exercised her values, there is a link from my website to the Amy Biehl Foundation Trust, where this biographical and much more information can be obtained).

This example is dramatic. How many of you were able to hear and talk with Peter and Linda when they were on campus? If you know someone who did, talk with them about their experience of the Biehls and Amy'’ story. Her parents say that she prepared them for her death and the work that they then would undertake, as they have on behalf of the values she strove to accomplish and to have others accomplish. They say that every Sunday morning when Amy called from South Africa to her parents home in California, they listened to her excitement, her exasperation, and her resolve to continue her efforts to enable people—to encourage the probability of people learning whatever they needed to know to thrive, to grow, to contribute to the betterment of life and its living. The Biehls said that they believe Amy understood the most grievous transgression to be to disable another—to diminish, devalue, or demean another person and cause that person’s growth to be retarded or otherwise jeopardized. Amy believed that with knowledge and education would come the tools necessary to become a more confidant, contributing human being. Hence, when Amy was killed, Peter and Linda say that their lesson and work was clear: they would, in Amy’s name and on behalf of all her efforts of enablement, carry on and live the values she had taught them.

Following their testimony in support of the request for amnesty of the four young men sentenced and imprisoned for killing Amy, the Biehls moved to South Africa and established the Amy Biehl Foundation Trust (ABFT) to continue the work of empowering disadvantaged communities. There was never a question for them as to whether or not they would support the request for amnesty because they knew well of Amy’s belief in restorative rather than retributive justice. Two of the young men granted amnesty for their crime now work as employees of the Community Baking Trust in Cape Town, delivering loaves of Amy's Bread: The Bread of Hope and Peace. Living Values.

The ABFT administers community-based and primarily youth-oriented programs in 6 areas: education; health and safety; employment skills and microenterprise development; environment; arts and music; and recreation. The ABFT has expanded its programs to serve adults as well on the premise that healthy youth implies healthy families and communities. The Trust manages more than 20 programs now in collaboration with USAID, private donations from the USA and South Africa, and from a variety of South African governmental agencies and other non-profit organizations. People often refer to "Amy’s magic" as communities are revitalized and its members become more confident and better enabled.

I told you that I wanted to use an example that you would remember. I think this is such an example. I urge you now to pause a moment and reflect on those values you hold. (Hold the silence for several seconds). What do you do to live those values? What do you do to disallow the cynical, the jaded, the demeaning and dispirited comments? How do you encourage optimism and trust, hope and conviction…in yourself and in others? What do you do to enable rather than disable? What do you do to hold with certainty before you a firm sense of life as an imperative base for achievement? What do you do to encourage in others the growth necessary to sustain the vitality of life?

I believe that one of the ways we can instill in ourselves the habit of living values is to be intentional and insistent about identifying what we believe to be our values, and then probing with unrelenting interrogation what we do to carry out or to fulfil those values. It is also quite instructive, I have found, to ask ourselves whether the things that have become our unquestioned habits are things that promote those values we have identified or whether they undermine our values.

Allow me to be uncharacteristically personal for a moment to tell you about a powerful lesson I learned from our son about the ultimate value—LIFE." Over a 4 month period some 10 years ago, 6 separate accidents affected the lives of a group of 6 young people who had started kindergarten together and were then about to graduate from high school. Of the six, our son is the only one still alive–his was the third of the 6 accidents. He said to us some time during those traumatizing months that followed that he knew he needed to find a purpose to his life if he were to go on living. He described having lain in his bed in the dark for more than a day, going over in chronological order and in minute detail each moment of his life from his earliest recollections, searching for purpose. He said he found it in the recalled moments that had given him the most joy. He said those were the moments when he was either doing something to improve his own life or the lives of those around him. Purpose. The rather recent (and accident-related) occurrence of the complete loss of sight in one eye, after nearly a decade of efforts of trying to repair and maintain his body as well as his spirit, has necessitated a reaffirmation of purpose: he said, "It is a loss, Mom, and it needs to be grieved as losses must, but I have already passed that test...I have already learned to live life again and to love living it. Sure there will be difficult times and dark moments, but I will not allow those moments to overcome the accomplishment of learning to love living again." Lessons from a son.

This lesson brought into clearer relief several earlier and very poignant experiences that have continued to affect me fundamentally. During the 1980's while traveling and working in many places in Asia, I had a series of unusual experiences, which served to heighten my sensitivities about LIFE:

Meeting and listening to the first-hand experiences of Rear Admiral Al Maier, the senior surviving officer of the USS Thompson, which sank in Sunda Straits in 1942, taking the lives of nearly 1400 sailors (he was instrumental in starting our Prisoners of War office); and, later, remembering what it felt like standing on the Arizona War Memorial and seeing the still-leaking oil from below; and being in the Punch Bowl that June after the Challenger accident and seeing on the grave of Astronaut Ellison Onizuka the little bouquets and drawings that his children had brought to wish him "Happy Birthday;"

Going to the US cemetery in Manila–the second largest US cemetery–with its acres of crosses and stars of David...and the two black marble hemispheres on which are etched the names of all those whose bodies were lost at sea;

Motoring across the South China Sea in a lawn mower-engine-powered banca boat from Manila Bay to Corregidor with its overgrown battlements still in evidence...once there, going a few feet into Malinta Tunnel and into the "mile-long barracks" on whose outer walls are etched the names and serial numbers of the men who knew they were going to die...and walking the length of that barracks, letting my fingertips be instructed by their lives, I felt connected to lives lost, yet living still;

Following the route of the Bataan Death March from Mount Sumat to the dense perimeter of Clark Air Base, where the Negritos, who had assisted the Allies so reliably, still lived...all, in the 1990's, destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Pinatuba;

Walking through the Asin Wood-carving village isolated in the mountains near Baguio in the Philippines... talking to the little children–some attached to mothers by a swaddling cloth, others playing in the dirt–while their parents freed exquisite figures from the wood they chiseled–all to be destroyed in the earth quake of the following year;

Walking a short distance onto the bridge over the River Kwai...behind me a small preserved Quonset hut of the "Joeth" (Death) Camp containing memorabilia of the prisoners who struggled and died there and the three small cemeteries where they rest...and in front of me in the distance, the hills of, then, Burma, now Kalimantan, though I didn’t know at the time that civil war had just broken out there.

Life and its living can be fragile. I believe our awareness of its power also to instruct and inform augments our ability to achieve generally. Intentional living.

Life and its living can be fragile; I believe our awareness of its power also to instruct and inform augments our ability to achieve generally. Intentional living.

I challenge you to securing a firm sense of life (an enabled life) as an imperative base for achievement. Amy did, her parents do, and so can we.

One more notion I wish to insert here: we must come to understand service as an essential element in one's lifelong learning and growth. At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, we believe that service is not just giving back to society--though it is that, too; rather we believe it is an essential element of our campus mission of the discovery, application, and dissemination of knowledge--whether that knowledge pertains to something outside ourselves, or specifically to ourselves. We also believe that the lived-through experience of bestows to our persons the full currency of the human phenomenon.

We are a caring community…people matter. This may sound odd to some of you who know about some of the recent tough decisions we have had to make due to the budget cuts from the state. However, I have made living values and human enablement a special theme of my term as Chancellor. On the surface, such concerns may seem contradictory or disingenuous at a time when we also must speak of budget and program cuts and lay-offs. But I believe we can make the decisions we must make and do what we need to do, in a way that respects our values, that speaks to our care for each other.

For people who will be laid-off, that may mean job counseling and support in ways we can provide it. Every bridge we can help build, from here to the next job, we will help build. When we speak of lay-offs and difficult choices, our commitment to "living values" has not ended; this is the time when our commitments to each other, and to the institution, are made all the more urgent - all the more visible. We must continue to renew our commitments to living shared values.

So, my challenge to you is this: undertake an audit of your values, then interrogate thoroughly how, specifically, you live each of those values. Ask, too, what you do to impede those values. Then, resolve to be more intentional about why you do what you do to live your values, and disallow the habit formation of those behaviors and practices that undermine your values. Affirm those values that advance life and enable its living both in your lives as members of fraternities and sororities as well as in your general daily habits and practices.