At this time of year, I receive many presidential out of office messages. My favorites are those that offer a glimpse into a summer adventure. There are college presidents walking the Camino de Santiago trail this summer, meeting the Pope in Rome, taking a fiction writing workshop, regrouping on a silent retreat, and musing by a lake.

These are the wise summer plans of those who have learned that resilient leadership requires refreshment of mind, body, and spirit. Such presidents are visibly making time for rest, for deep thinking, and for the kind of lifelong learning our mission statements celebrate. They are living fully even in the midst of a stressful job. And they are sharing their vibrancy with everyone who sends an email.

I admire such courage and conviction. My own presidential OOO messages were not like these. They were more like the worrisome ones I also receive now. The ones that go overboard to reassure that the president is not only away on legitimate campus business but that a team of substitute professionals stands by ready to respond to even the most minor concern. The message is clear: the president never slumbers or rests. A strong defensive position, but not one conducive to longevity in the job.

A lot changed for me when I recognized that renewal is an essential aspect of leadership. I began to make time for and even share the parts of my life that supported my work but were not equivalent to it: my experiences with psychoanalysis, the performance art workshops my husband taught and I often attended, my creative nonfiction writing, my religious practices. Making time for serious—and even not-so-serious—“play” builds the inner strength I need to tackle weighty work challenges. Surprisingly, the skills I sharpen during my off time often come in very handy on the job. Overall, time to nurture my mind, body, and spirit helps me approach my work with less ego and more wisdom. I am happier and more present to the people around me.

The more stress you are under, the harder it can be to make time to break from its grasp. And yet, what could be a more important focus for your summer? If you have been looking for permission to take time off, consider giving it to yourself. You have my profound blessing. I can’t wait to see your OOO.

Questions for reflection: How comfortable are you with taking real time away from the office? What happens when you make visible the various ways you refresh your mind? Your body? Your spirit? How would your work thrive after meaningful time away? Who can support your need for renewal? Bonus for longer serving presidents: Check out CIC’s annual Presidential Renewal Program.

At CIC, we are always looking for ways to increase the value of membership by expanding benefits and opportunities. This week I was delighted to announce that we would no longer charge an additional fee for participation in the CIC Tuition Exchange Program (CIC-TEP). Building this into our general membership package will save money for our institutions, encourage wider participation, and save CIC the time and expense of running a separate invoice process. 

CIC-TEP is an example of one of the earliest and best loved “network effects” that CIC makes possible. Participating institutions guarantee full tuition scholarships for at least three dependents of faculty and staff at other CIC-TEP member institutions in each new class. In return, CIC-TEP provides a cost-effective, highly valuable employee benefit allowing access to these scholarships at hundreds of institutions across the country and the world. For institutions that have some extra space in courses and dorms, the imported students are a source of direct revenue (e.g., room and board, student fees).

Both of my children were awarded CIC-TEP scholarships that covered their full four years of tuition—one at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA, and one at St. Edwards University in Austin, TX. Eligibility for these scholarships was a benefit offered by the CIC member colleges at which I worked when they were students. We are among the thousands of higher ed families who benefitted from the CIC-TEP network. And over the years, I have seen dozens of colleagues—including those who work in operations and housekeeping—send their children to college tuition-free. It’s estimated that CIC-TEP has yielded approximately 67,000 awards over the past 35 years. It gives me special pleasure to expand this opportunity by waiving the annual CIC-TEP membership fee for CIC institutions that choose to participate.

A Spark of Inspiration

The National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, DC, holds a collection of ancient Chinese bi (“bee”) discs. These circular, jade carvings—thin, perfectly round with a round central hole—date from as far back as the Neolithic period. A large collection of them was discovered in grave sites created by the Liangzhu culture (3400-2250 BCE).

These discs are beautiful and deeply mysterious. The culture that first created them left no written records to explain their indigenous meaning nor do archeologists fully understand how a stone age people could have created such delicate and seemingly perfect carvings. At the museum we learn that the current best archeological theory is that the discs symbolize the heavens (as they clearly do in later Chinese symbolic systems), served as signs of status and protection, and were created through a time-consuming process of rubbing and polishing with abrasive powders. That’s not much to go on and even it is far from certain.

I was deeply drawn to these discs. I am enamored with circular forms and their myriad meanings in culture and design. And the unsolvable mystery of their meaning to the people who made them drew me in even deeper. On the one hand, it was a reminder of the wild multiplicity of human creativity. And on the other hand, I was in the presence of an immediate reminder of the sameness of our deepest human desires for beauty and meaning.

Regular readers may recall that my word for 2023 is “Awe” and that I am spending this year on the hunt for experiences of the type of vastness that induces it. In this exhibit I was able to experience two forms of awe: one sparked by the astounding length of archeological time and the other by the ubiquity of our shared human compacities for symbolic communication and material transformation. We are unimaginably different from the makers of these discs and yet also unimaginably just like them. How much better might we treat each other if we could hold onto the parallax view of sameness and difference at the same time?

Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life

by Jason Blakely

Embodying the principle of charity, Blakely gives a tour of contemporary ideologies designed to help us understand—from inside—the thinking of those from whom we differ and to better articulate the ideals that shape what we ourselves think. Covering a range of positions, including liberalism, white supremacy, conservatism, libertarianism, feminism, ecological politics, socialism, and fascism, Blakely provides insight into the motivations and often surprising consequences of adopting various value systems and conceptual frames. While careful to lay out positions with a generous hand, Blakely nonetheless finds ways to evaluate these positions based not on a universally agreed upon ideology but on the grounds of internal contradiction, paradox, and by the revelation of hidden assumptions often intolerable even to the supposed proponents of a position.

Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think

by Helen De Cruz

De Cruz’s work focuses on human activities that appear to go beyond what is strictly needed for survival purposes, such as art, philosophy, and religion. She sees wonder as, in some sense, their common ancestor. Defining wonder as “the emotion that arises from a glimpse of the unknown terrain which lies just beyond our current understanding,” De Cruz shows us its many forms and the way that it goes beyond necessity to make our lives joyful and worth living. And a bonus that I discovered only as I read: She references my husband Larry’s writing on the philosophy of magic and thanks him for helpful conversations in the acknowledgements.

The Other Valley

by Scott Alexander Howard

This is an unusual time travel novel—one in which a visit to the past or future is as easy as a hike but deeply perilous in other ways. The plot follows first a girl’s coming of age as she makes a future preserving decision and then the ways that choice shapes her adult life. Themes include the mystery of lost youth, the sacrifices we make and don’t make for love, and the vagaries of time in which both the past and the future are inscrutable.

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