Connections

Today’s academic world calls on professors at a university like Fresno Pacific to fill new roles, and to approach teaching and education differently than we have in the past.

Liberal arts institutions had at their center the development of students as they matured into adults, guiding in moral and spiritual development, exploring giftedness and educating for judgment. We retain this mission. It is inscribed in our motto: “Faithfulness, Wisdom, Service.” Liberal arts colleges fulfilled these traditional roles remarkably well. Research has consistently shown that students from such colleges are more likely to graduate, gain leadership experience and become executives and high-level managers. Most of us who have had the privilege over many years of working at FPU have former students who are now friends and who have gone on to careers and prestigious graduate schools. Many alumni come back and recount stories about the influence of particular professors on their lives and futures. This success was and is supported by residential, spiritual, athletic and student life programs that encourage that same development, and the creation of lasting friendships between students.

While all of this is still necessary, expectations of the public and the academy require a new approach. Students, families, churches, government and accrediting agencies expect colleges and universities to adopt new priorities and different approaches to teaching and mentoring. What used to be a characteristic of adult and graduate education has trickled down to the undergraduate experience.

Priorities have shifted to put career and professional preparation first and foremost, with professional mentoring followed in a Christian university by personal relationships and moral and spiritual development. The value of an education is measured by the ability of students to find jobs and enter professions. What used to be the first and foremost priority—the personal and spiritual development of students—is now an added benefit. With this shift have come demands for higher levels of technology, and more and better quality facilities in music, science, athletics and residence halls. The changes also brought increased competition between schools and scrutiny of tuition levels.

We might lament the loss of the older ways of teaching. We might conclude that the demands for careers and utilitarian academic majors are a lowering of purpose. I have done so. But then I remember that majors like contemporary Christian ministries, liberal studies for teachers, and social work, which have at times been our largest programs, are much needed in our world. These build on the goal of wisdom, and point to faithful service, but they do not hesitate to prepare the student for professional service in society, churches and schools.

For those of us in the humanities and social sciences—I teach history—this has been at times an unwelcome shift. We want to teach our subjects for their intrinsic worth. Sometimes l feel like the two professors in that great scene in the movie Chariots of Fire, when two students race the clock around the Caius College Quad. Looking out the windows, the old profs lament the loss of the days of the noble amateurs who would become leaders in government and business, but gain their professional training on the job. The college was for intellectual and personal development, not training. We who have been here a long time sometimes feel the same way.

But the new expectations are invigorating, and can also have lasting influence on our students. I hear examples from our professors, and feel the energy they bring to their teaching, scholarship and work with students. We are keeping the best of what we were, and adapting to the expectations of today.

So how have we changed our approach? By applying the essence of graduate education to undergraduate studies: more and more, mentoring now comes through professors and students collaborating on scholarship. The professor now guides the student, both undergraduate and graduate, into professional work. Some students have delivered papers to national conferences, written for investment journals or participated in cancer research. And we have done this not as a research institution, but as one dedicated to the teaching and preparation of students.

Professors are expected to be active scholars, researchers, writers, performers and at the forefront of our areas of expertise, whether in business, psychology, chemistry, music or biblical studies and church leadership. We cannot remain on campus, we must be actively engaged in the forward movement of our professional fields.

All is not entirely new. We continue to build upon the liberal arts and sciences. An FPU education is still grounded in, founded upon and building on this tradition of learning related to the small college experience of the past. But we start differently, recognize student demands and needs, and work from that newer direction.

Fortunately we are not alone—for the last 20 years, the academy has developed its understanding of scholarship with the teaching institution in mind. “Scholarship” is no longer limited to research, the “scholarship of discovery.” There is also the “scholarship of application,” where we apply research to meet needs; the “scholarship of integration,” where we bring together kinds of discovery into larger wholes; and the “scholarship of teaching,” where we develop more effective methods of instruction. The world of scholarship has opened up for the teaching institution.

As professors in all fields engage in these forms of scholarship, we draw in our students and mentor them for their entry into professions as they develop personally and spiritually. I suppose this is not so different from trends in other forms of education. My wife, who has taught kindergarten and the primary grades for many years, reminds me that when she first started, children learned to read in first grade. Now they are expected to be ready to learn to read when they enter kindergarten.

Our task today in this changing world of higher education—changing faster than it ever has—is to keep the best of what we have been as a liberal arts college while serving the new public good as a regional university. We continue to use the arts and sciences to educate and develop our students, but instead of just teaching subjects, we bring students into our professional worlds. We guide them into deep ways of understanding and knowing through professional practice.

Now more actively engaged in the ongoing development of their disciplines, professors model being students, seeking, applying and integrating knowledge and teaching it with the explicit purpose of preparation for service in the world. And the best of this kind of service comes when the student develops morally and spiritually, and is ready to begin to serve as a leader wherever they are. If something might be lost, much is gained as we strive to meld best of the past with the best of today. It works for our students. It meets their needs and demands, and we continue to accomplish our mission. We have a powerful and exciting way of working, as we launch our students into areas of service and leadership for Christ and his kingdom.

May you have many blessings in this season of “God with us.”

Steve Varvis

We are dedicated to learning. Our student learning outcomes (SLOs) are one of the chief ways we evaluate how well we are doing at our mission and core purposes and values. Learning means two related but separate things: gaining knowledge and gaining skill. Knowing something and knowing how to do something. Understanding and behaving. In the spiritual dimension of our lives, which is even deeper in our institutional soul, this concept expresses itself very naturally as what we often call faith and life. It recognizes that we can believe or say we believe something, but we may or may not act in concert with that belief. The Apostle James puts it very starkly: “Faith is dead and useless without corresponding good deeds.” You can know all the principles of entrepreneurship or peacemaking, but you will have no impact on your world until you take the risks of starting a new enterprise or stepping between two angry antagonists. Every Christian university or seminary is a creature of the church in some way, but the academic institutions of the church both teach and learn with the church. We help teach and lead the church and we humbly learn from the church and follow the church. Some faith-based academic institutions serve the church as a whole, and others, like Fresno Pacific University, are owned or controlled by a particular, formally organized part of the larger body of Christ on earth, such as a denomination. In either case, if this church-academy relationship actually matters and is healthy, it is a dynamic interaction of tensions and multiple influences that are mutually beneficial. The church and its university lead each other, follow each other, serve each other, trust each other and help each other do the kingdom work that God has entrusted to each partner. Fresno Pacific is Anabaptist, evangelical, pietistic and ecumenical in a wonderfully multicultural and multi-denominational amalgamation. We are legally, formally and spiritually under the Pacific District Conference of Mennonite Brethren, which is part of the U.S. Mennonite Brethren (USMB), which, of course, is part of the entire body of Jesus-followers worldwide. Currently about 40 USMB members are engaged in a process that seeks to produce a stronger and more effective conference of MB churches in America, a conference with a clear and unified mission and vision that are advanced by wise strategies and supported by effective organizational structures and adequate levels of people, prayer and resources. Several people who are connected in various ways with Fresno Pacific are part of this USMB advancement process. The hope is to reach consensus on a plan for the desired future of the USMB by March 2015, and be ready to move ahead soon thereafter to implement that plan. During this same time period, Fresno Pacific is working through its own process of assessment, reorganization, visioning and planning, including ongoing processes related to accreditation of various kinds. The two processes—that of the university and that of the church—must inform and benefit each other so both can succeed and so FPU can move ahead as an effective, Christ-centered, biblically guided university and seminary. The two efforts need to advance together. One of the key ways FPU depends on and follows its church is by following the USMB Confession of Faith. One of many significant challenges faced by both the university and all the varied churches we serve is expressing Christ-like love and kindness to people whose understandings, beliefs or behaviors do not align with what is expressed  in that carefully developed faith statement. A current major issue is properly demonstrating loving-kindness and Christian friendship to persons whose homosexual desires lead them to sexual activity outside the limits of the marriage of a man and a woman. To the maximum extent that is practically possible, Fresno Pacific remains firmly committed to lovingly but firmly requiring behavior that agrees with the articles of our confession of faith. We remain committed to the spiritual disciplines that express in our actions what we believe to be morally right. We must actively express love and extend grace to those among us who struggle with strong desires for behavior we believe is morally wrong. We must engage in authentic conversation with them. And we must hold ourselves and everyone in the Fresno Pacific community to behavior that aligns with what we believe. Our true evangelical faith cannot lie dormant. Our faith must inform and control our behavior. We can and must affirm the worth of each person and love and respect those who are culturally, emotionally, sexually, religiously or in any other way different from us. There can be no harassment, bullying or demeaning of others. We must love God above all and every neighbor as we love ourselves. Doing so includes not approving, encouraging or accepting behavior in our own life or theirs that contradicts what we believe is God’s truth, given to us for our good. Our faith must be sincere, alive and powerfully expressed in good deeds of righteous living. May God give us the wisdom and courage to do this well for his glory as lights in a world that does not understand or approve of what we are trying to be and do. Rich Kriegbaum

Universities are complex places—the largest can be like cities, with multiple communities and agendas, some of which have no contact with those outside of their own area of teaching or study. Smaller and mid-sized universities like FPU have the benefit of being one community, with a common mission, ideals and understandings. Our stated ideal and past experience has been that of a small tightly-knit community. It has great advantages, we think, for learning, and it is a deeply held theological and spiritual commitment of many of us here at FPU. We have become more and more aware that we are, in reality, working with very different groups of students, in different formats, with distinct needs and desires for their education, and in distinct regions. As we have grown from a small liberal arts college to a mid-sized regional university, we have slowly come to understand that we are more than we once were. While we have sometimes lost the feeling of that tightly-knit community, all working together toward a single educational ideal, we have gained an understanding of ourselves as overlapping communities with multiple related ideals and goals, multiple related student populations, an expanded Christian educational purpose and broader influence in the region. A good development! On the one hand we do not want to stop being a “Community of Learners,” as the FPU Idea says, thinking together how to apply knowledge to the needs of our time and balance the wisdom of the past with the hopes of the future. On the other hand our complex and growing university has not remained a single community. We have students, faculty and staff in five locations, and online. Students, staff and faculty in the regional centers often know those centers, not the main campus, as Fresno Pacific University. Our students have distinct needs. They come from multiple Christian and religious traditions; they represent the ethnic diversity of the Central Valley and other parts of the world; they bring different levels of educational attainment, and seek different goals for their education. How we work with the traditional students is not how we work with degree completion students who are older, most often have families and are working in a variety of occupations and professions. Our graduate students are different still. Their experiences are different, but the goal of an FPU education for each is the same. We as professors are almost as different from one another as our students. We come from research universities, traditional liberal arts colleges, church-related colleges and universities, international universities, and seminaries. We have served in Asia, South America, Africa, Europe, the Middle East and inner-city Fresno. We are specialists in different fields; we are researchers and practitioners. We teach the liberal arts and sciences, performance disciplines, and in professional fields. As we guide our students we connect with churches, with schools, with health care organizations, with businesses, government agencies, and community groups. We sometimes we do not understand each other’s professional language. Amongst ourselves we have become a community of communities. We strive to share a common vision. We represent every form of Christian tradition—Anabaptist, evangelical, high church, low church, orthodox, independent, internationally organized institutions, and home churches. Our traditions emphasize active service, evangelistic witness, philosophical theology, liturgical worship and spirit-filled assemblies. Our staff and administration represent this same breadth of Christian experience. Anabaptist and evangelical experience is predominant, but we want to hear the voices of all of these Christian traditions, and listen for them among our students as well. We learn to exercise a “gracious Christianity” as our Dean of the Seminary, Dr. Terry Brensinger says. We describe ourselves as “Anabaptist, Evangelical and Ecumenical.” Our Board of Trustees is comprised of women and men from many churches, professions and ethnic communities. Our staff bring specialized skill in finance, facilities, career services, information technology, institutional research, human resources, website development, student success and advising and much more. Our administration has specialists in finance, fundraising, higher education, athletics, libraries, student development, traditional and continuing education and industry, among other fields. We listen to and seek the insights of each with special knowledge and gifts. Our alumni, a very important part of our community, serve in the broadest range of professions, in California and around the world—from South America, to Africa, and to India. They work in professions, serve in churches and missions agencies, and have attended prestigious graduate institutions. They encourage us, represent us, support the university, send their friends and family to FPU, and know themselves as part of our extended university. It is our privilege here on our campuses to send them out for faithful and wise service, to represent and labor to see the in-breaking of the reign of God. If your head is spinning, you know my world. This complexity can be daunting, challenging, and energizing. It allows many groups to flourish, many needs to be met, and a rich experience for all who become a part of our community of communities. It requires effort and the ability to see the unity amidst the diversity, and the talents of those with differing skills, goals and theoretical positions. When we encourage both the common center and the distinguishing characteristics we allow our distinct communities to flourish, and our common purpose to keep us together. Our central constituencies, as well as our extended partners in bureaus, accrediting agencies, professional and academic societies, and national and international partnerships all find a welcome place and are all a part Fresno Pacific University. It is our commitment at FPU to pull all together in a common purpose and vision as expressed in the FPU Idea and in other places; it is our common responsibility to encourage each who has become a part of us; and it is our joy to celebrate each other’s successes. An extra note for the end of the semester. Performance is an essential part of a university education—whether we ourselves perform or share in the audience. Now is a good time to celebrate the performances of our students. If you have not gotten a chance to hear one of the FPU musical performances, there is still time to catch one. The Lessons and Carols service over the past weekend was deeply moving. The Brass Choir and Symphonic Bands have been exceptional. Next week there are more scheduled: the University String Quartet, Musica Pacifica Orchestra, Crosswind, Handbell Choir, the Women’s Chorale and Men’s Chorus, and the San Joaquin Chorale Christmas Concert.  Congratulations to our music faculty, students, and faculty. And a special congratulations to Dr. Walter Saul whose “Death be Not Proud“ was premiered by the Symphonic Band. Details on upcoming concerts can be found at the FPU events page. This last weekend also saw the end of the two-week run of the drama department’s production of Truth and Reconciliation. This complex play brought the opportunity for discussion throughout the main campus, and perhaps to our other centers, on immigration and political refugees, and how efforts toward reconciliation can heal in places torn by violence. Well done! The season is over for our fall athletic teams, all which represented FPU with excellence.  And Men’s and Women’s Basketball has begun. You can keep up with the teams on the FPU Athletics Website. To check out the academic accomplishments of FPU athletes, see the PacWest Website under “classroom.” Happy Thanksgiving to all, and may God continue to bless you richly, Steve Varvis Provost/Senior Vice President

When the concept of the learning organization emerged with the publication of The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge (1990), a learning organization was distinguished from a traditional authoritarian organization. A traditional organization relies on a hierarchical structure of power and control to achieve desired results. People in positions with more organizational power over people make decisions that control the behavior of people in positions with less organizational power. By 1997, the year that I completed my first tenure as president of Fresno Pacific University, Harvard Business Review identified The Fifth Discipline as one of the most influential management books of the previous 75 years. Other important leadership concepts and frameworks have been developed since then, but nothing has replaced its core principles. Successful organizations must master and practice all five disciplines of the learning organization:

1. Systems thinking. A focus on the dynamic interaction of complex patterns and relationships within organizations as the organization responds to external forces. Given that leadership is about change, everyone in a learning organization must always remember that you can never change just one thing.

 

2. Personal mastery. A special level of proficiency that is viewed as the “spiritual foundation” of a true learning organization. The learning organization is characterized by individual members who are constantly learning and improving.

 

3. Mental models. Stable understandings of the nature of the organization and of its purpose, place and potential in the world. In a learning organization, mental models are always open to modification in the search for wisdom.

 

4. Building shared vision. A shared picture of the current reality of the organization and of its desired future. A learning organization knows what it wants to become and effectively orchestrates its efforts to make it happen.

 

5. Team learning. An intentional culture of information flow sufficient to ensure that everyone in every position knows what they need to know to be successful. A learning organization turns fragmented information into useful knowledge that it synthesizes it into significant meanings that become corporate wisdom. The best learning organizations do this faster than the less competent learning organizations.

Looked at in this way, organizational success does not start with leadership. It starts with followership. Too many organizations are preoccupied with the search for the great leader who can move people to change. In this model, the well-documented natural resistance to change sooner or later wins the battle and slows the rate of change to a pace that makes it impossible for the organization to win in its competitive context. None of this means that leadership is not important for organizational success. Effective leadership throughout the organization is essential, but just as leadership and management are learned skills, followership is a learned competence also. In the same way that a leader is defined as a person who has followers, a follower is a person who is committed to the success of the leader they have chosen to follow. In this critical sense leaders do not make followers. Followers make leaders when they decide whom they are willing to proactively follow. If no one chooses to really follow, then no one is really leading. Our most important responsibility as followers is to choose our leaders, and then to do the necessary work to ensure their success for the good of the whole organization. A big part of good followership is speaking the truth to keep the leader fully informed and accountable. This is a countercultural perspective; it can feel unnatural to work for some other person’s success instead of your own. But it is what great teachers and coaches do every day as they help their students set challenging goals and work hard to reach them. It is what great organizations do. It is how the kingdom of God on earth functions, where the first shall be last and the leader is servant of all. Great teams always live by this principle, which is a large reason why we have athletics, music, theater, missions and all the other student performance programs that we sponsor. They help students learn to choose and follow the right leader, and to help one another improve under constantly changing situations. It is why we all must constantly learn to be wise and highly skilled followers, first of Jesus Christ, but also of each other. Learning to follow well is hard and sometimes humbling work, but it produces great alumni who can change their worlds. And it is what great learning organizations do exceedingly well. Rich Kriegbaum

What have we been up to the last couple of years, along with our regular cycle of classes, scholarship, performances and business? We have been involved in one of the most important exercises an institution like ours engages in—reaccreditation. Let me outline what we do, and why we do it. You will see why we invest so much of our energy, and how it helps us to be better at what we do. It is our job in the administration and faculty leadership to focus our work on this process. The last stage of our reaccreditation is rapidly coming to a conclusion. Every university goes through this about once every seven to 10 years. It takes an enormous amount of energy, but it is a healthy exercise, reminding us of our purpose and sharpening our commitment. Our accrediting agency is WSCUC (formerly WASC) or WASC Senior College and University Commission. This final stage is called the “educational effectiveness review,” or EER. We have already demonstrated our “capacity” to carry out our mission and work. Now we will demonstrate two things: first that our students are learning what we say they learn, and second that we as an institution are learning how we can be better at educating students and sending them on into their futures. The purpose of accreditation is “continuous improvement”—our WSCUC working group is the “Continuous Improvement Committee.” For the last several years we have been gathering data on student learning. The university faculty established 10 “university student learning outcomes.” We gather data on these from across the university, at each level and at each campus. The results of last year’s assessment are posted for the public. We will demonstrate student learning through academic program reviews (evaluations of departments like psychology, biology or business, for instance) and in our co-curricular activities. Our Student Development Division will demonstrate how well students learn leadership and stewardship, for example. For our EER we established “Inquiry Circles” composed of faculty, staff and administration, with student representatives as well, which researched how well we are accomplishing our mission in six major areas: writing, critical thinking, the “rigor of degrees,” diversity, assessment, and finance and resources.  Each of the circles gathered data, interviewed those on campus working in pertinent areas and interpreted the evidence to measure both student learning (writing, critical thinking, rigor of degrees) and institutional learning (diversity, assessment systems, and finance and resources). We continue the effort each year. Each evaluation gives priority to how we teach and where we invest our resources and time. The assessment of learning outcomes is linked to how we teach, plan and budget. We invest time and resources for greater learning, and assess again—“continuous improvement” in action. The entire campus has been involved and has contributed to the process. In the future we will want to assess how well our students learn those outcomes that are unique to FPU—service, faith and its implications, cross cultural understanding, ethical understanding and action. And we will want to ask how “community” contributes to learning. We believe deeply in these desired outcomes and characteristics or qualities of FPU. We will set out to demonstrate how and why they are important and effective for student learning. It is relatively easy to measure basic or specialized knowledge: how to complete a process, etc. Some disciplines can use national exams, for instance. It gets more difficult when we try to measure deeper understanding or judgment, and more difficult still to assess the effect the university has on students at their deepest level, their hearts. We are in the process of assessing our international experiences, how students learn about reconciliation and how they have learned to establish healthy relationships. This is all being assembled into a relatively brief document—40 pages (with hundreds of exhibits, pages of evidence and supplementary documents). A team of four educators, volunteers with WSCUC, will visit us at the end of February to interview us, see how we function, verify what we have written and help us understand ourselves better. When it is all done, we will be certified as a university that meets all of the accreditation standards and “criteria for review,” and which educates students for faithfulness, wisdom and service. If you want to know what we do as educators and as a university, accreditation explains it. We are dedicated to the education of students, and to improving in our pursuit of that education. The WSCUC standards and our assessment of learning help ensure that we accomplish our mission as a university. American higher education is unique for the variety of its institutions, and its peer-accrediting process. Accreditation helps us to be a better Christ-centered university. It requires us to focus on our mission and the education of students. It may not seem very exciting, but when you see students walk across the stage at commencement, you can be assured that they are graduates fully prepared to take their place in the professions, service organizations, churches, schools or businesses that they have aspired to. Steve Varvis

I recently spent a noon hour with six young Fresno Pacific students and their teacher. The teacher was a staff member, Lisa Alvey, who is not formally a professor, and that was a powerful example of why every FPU employee must be a skillful, dedicated and thoughtful follower of Jesus, whose thoughts, language and behavior provide a living lesson of our core Christian beliefs and values. Every employee and every student is both teacher and a learner. The student learners were there voluntarily; it was not part of a formal course and they were not getting credit toward their degrees. They were just there to learn and contribute to the effectiveness of FPU. We were all there to teach and learn from each other. Lisa was our leader, and we were following her energetic and insightful instruction. Our challenge was to translate the life, culture and language of one person—me—into the language of another culture in order to connect my life as president of FPU with the lives of people who do not know me or my culture or the culture of Fresno Pacific University. We were trying to figure out how to condense who I am into a message that would carry across all the barriers between our 18-year-old prospective students and a 73-year-old-grandfather with a Ph.D. who likes Dairy Queen ice cream, Bach, reading, running, writing, laughing, praying and subverting systems to make them work better for the Kingdom of God. We needed to “brand” the president on social media to help people understand Fresno Pacific and want to be part of what God is doing here. Lisa and the students are my teachers. We are learning to learn together. It is hard but important work. From infancy through third grade we learn to read. From fourth grade on we read to learn. And throughout our lives we continue learning to learn. We learn new ways to see things, new ways to understand people who did not grow up in the same culture that we did and new ways to think about and enjoy our God, who is ultimately beyond our knowing, but who reveals himself to us so we can enjoy him, respond to his love for us and do the work of his kingdom on earth—learning and working together through our differences. To succeed at the job God has given all of us at FPU, we must be a learning organization. All of us includes students and donors, professors and prayer partners, staff and supporters, light-skinned and dark-skinned, younger and older, richer and poorer, stronger and weaker, fearful and confident, loud and quiet—all of us. We must each contribute to a culture of incessant assessment in which we measure everything we do by the outcomes we are hoping for and by the outcomes that are actually happening. We do this in every course and every program of student, faculty or staff development. We do it by learning biology and baseball and Genesis and generosity. We practice a culture of evidence and effectiveness by setting and evaluating student learning outcomes that all roll up into the desired program and institutional outcomes, and ultimately into the effects that our alumni, faculty and staff have on the world in the name of Christ. It contributes to being an accredited university, but it is equally an expression of who we really want to be. A learning organization is full of individual learners and teachers who rigorously hold themselves and everyone else accountable for seeing what can be learned in every situation and finding ways to make progress together. Criticizing, blaming, belittling, the stingy hoarding of information or other resources, demanding our own way without listening and caring for others—none of these is noble or helpful in a learning organization, especially one that seeks to be founded and centered on Jesus Christ. Instead, we seek always to speak the truth with each other, but to speak that truth in love. Love for God above all, and love for our neighbor as ourselves. FPU wants to be a community of learners who seek the mind of Christ, who came among us and learned the ways of being human. He could have remained separate from us. He could have retained his rightful supremacy of “equality with God,” but he gave it up to learn among us and to let us learn from him. He is God’s gift to us. And in similar fashion, who you are as part of Fresno Pacific is God’s gift to all the rest of us. If you share yourself generously we will all become richer together. If we learn together we can all become wiser and more effective together in this glorious and beautiful work God has entrusted to us. Along with my six student friends and their teacher, all of us together can learn to translate the beauty of Jesus into new life and hope for the world where God has put us. Let’s listen to each others hearts and learn together how to be more and more beautiful together. Rich Kriegbaum

Two weeks ago in this newsletter I outlined some of the immediate issues facing FPU. Today I’d like to get beyond what we’re working on and take a look at what we’re working toward. Integration of Faith and Learning. The work of a university is scholarship, teaching and learning.  We form a community of scholars and students, with the special task, much needed in our world, of gaining, applying and creating knowledge. This takes time, energy, patience, the willingness to take risks—it is never very efficient. While we go through this transition, we will keep focusing on the work we love, the students we teach and the communities, schools, churches, business and other organizations we serve. Our work includes worship and the integration of faith and learning. Karen Crozier, Ph.D., director of faculty development (among other efforts), has scheduled six seminars on the integration of faith and learning using the Christian spiritual traditions identified by Richard Foster in his Streams of Living Waters. I attempted to outline what these traditions might look like in the classroom on my FPU blog page. This is just one way to think about how we as a university might address the multiple denominational, theological and spiritual traditions represented by our students and faculty. Shared Governance. In times of change, and especially the drastic change the FPU community has experienced, the question of “governance” comes up. Governance is different from both leadership and management, though these feed into it. Shared governance is the pattern by which the bodies within the university—the faculty or the board, for instance—with particular responsibilities, knowledge and competence recognize the responsibilities, knowledge and competence of other bodies. In that recognition they share the authority to speak, develop policy, deliberate and recommend or act on particular questions or initiatives. Some think shared governance is a democratic process, but this is not how it is usually practiced, except perhaps within bodies (the Senate votes, for instance). Some think of shared governance as occasionally asking advice, but that doesn’t get to the depth of it. Shared governance is difficult, time consuming, costly, requires trust and good will, and is extraordinarily effective when it works well. As we work through a time of dramatic change, our understanding and practice of shared governance is tested and by some found wanting; calls are made to reexamine how we work. In some cases, shared responsibility is suspended for particular decisions that must be made in decisive and timely ways. Sometimes those responsible for the decisions can not disclose all the information surrounding their action. This is not comfortable. As stability returns our normal pattern of shared governance returns. Strong institutions weather these periods, often with some turmoil. But graciousness returns as we recognize the need for and the positive effect of those decisions. I describe shared governance more fully on my blog, Shared Governance: Start Here, with some notes on how it has been practiced at FPU. October Board Meeting Highlights.

• Approved tuition and fees for 2015-2016 (specifics forthcoming).
• Approved acquisition of homes and condominiums in select sections of the immediate neighborhood and capital renewal spending, subject to certain financial conditions, in partnership with the FPU Foundation and the Mennonite Brethren Foundation.
• Approved a B.S. in pharmaceutical science and an M.A. in STEM education, pending Faculty Senate approval.
• Accepted the 2014 fiscal year audit, and authorized a search for an auditor with extensive higher education experience.
• Instructed the administration to establish a broadly representative taskforce on campus security.
• Approved the creation of a Campus Master Planning committee (buildings, use of interior and exterior space, etc.) with specific composition including members of the board, administration, faculty, staff, student body, advancement, and the seminary.
• Received training for WSCUC (WASC) accreditation report and visit, and NCAA compliance.

Concluding Thoughts. We are blessed in so many ways—by our students and their energy, the commitment and experience of our staff and administration, the thoughtfulness and engagement of our faculty, the support of our alumni and donors and the prayers of friends near and around the world. It is hard not to be to be encouraged as we move forward! And thank you to all for your support of the university at the installation of President Richard Kriegbaum on October 24. You can see it on the FPU website: Installation. (The ceremony starts after the video has run for two and a half minutes—please be patient.) There’s a lot coming up at Fresno Pacific. Check out all the events at events.fresno.edu/ Steve Varvis

Our tagline at Fresno Pacific these days focuses on two large concepts: leaders and transformation. Leadership and change are inseparable. You do not need leadership to stay where you are, remain who you are, keep doing what you are doing and get the same results you have been getting. You need leadership to change. A healthy, growing person, like a healthy learning organization, understands that if you want a different future you must do something different to make it happen. Unhealthy organizations and people ignore reality and cling to the comfort of the present that they know. They keep doing the same things, hoping for different results. Healthy learning organizations are quick to admit when something is not going right and make a corrective change. Leadership is the process of making that desired change happen, whether that is leadership in your own life or leadership in the life of your organization, your church or your family. Organizational change involves changing leaders. Most of the time that means the person in the leadership role is learning and changing, and all the followers are part of the process that helps the leader, and the organization, succeed. However, periodically, changing leaders means placing a different person in the leadership role. In 1944 Fresno Pacific set out on the pilgrimage from being a small denominational Bible institute with fewer than 100 students to becoming an accredited Christ-centered university with 3,700 degree-seeking students throughout the Valley and over 10,000 professional development students all across America. During these 70 years we have had 11 presidencies, including my first try that lasted 12 years. Four of those presidencies lasted two years, including the most recent tenure of President Menjares. The longest was 15 years by Arthur Wiebe who died recently at age 94. Each president responded to a call from God from a group of God’s people seeking someone to fill the role of presidential leader bringing needed change. Each one was important in the life of Fresno Pacific, and every one of them was flawed and inadequate. The last two days I spent with a group of church and educational leaders from across North America who gathered on our campus to help plan a dramatic new way of preparing future church leaders worldwide. One of those leaders is the senior pastor of a church of over 6,000 in Toronto, Canada. His church will play a major role in the development of this alternative educational model. At our closing meal we shared personal stories of how God got us into our leadership roles. He recounted trying to convince the Lord that he should not take on the leadership of this church because he was inadequate for the vision. Finally God spoke powerfully and simply to him: I know, but you are the best I’ve got. And the rest of that message is: I have things to teach you. Remember that truth every time you correct a computer glitch or write a report or step in front of a class or clean a restroom or ask someone to give a million dollars or lift up a confused and fallen student. You are not adequate, but God has put you there because at this point in his kingdom work, you are the best he’s got. Rich Kriegbaum