The Supreme Leadership Wants to Join Our Team as Part of Their Strategic Plan
The Supreme Leadership Wants to Join Our Team as Part of Their Strategic Plan
Did we discover a hidden satirical talent? Or the new Judith Butler?
As we look to expand our Flickering Beacon team, we solicited samples of satirical or nonsensical writing from the community. To our surprise, the Supreme Leaders went out of their way and provided us with a full 17-page document, titled “For the Times: UMass Boston Ten-Year Strategic Plan”1. We have to admit that while our Leaders are somewhat punctuation-mark challenged, the whole thing is brilliant. We had a hard time selecting the best pieces for your judgment but after long deliberations, we bring you the best of their effort, unaltered. Take a very deep breath (you will need it):
Conduct research that enhances knowledge, action, and impact that supports anti-racism and health promotion at UMass Boston and beyond
Build capacity to ensure that all researchers on campus have ongoing training in justice, equity, inclusion and diversity best practices for engaging with collaborators, students, and staff in all research activities in order to promote the diversification of all disciplines
Increase recognition of and support for community engaged scholarship that promotes anti-racism and health promotion
“We see anti-racism and health promotion as a commitment that happens in tandem with this work, intentional and embedded, explicit in expression in some places, such as the wide variety of courses and research that embrace this perspective formally, and implicit in enactment in others, such as deliberate and supportive research opportunities for students, the advancement of transdisciplinary scholarship, and the integration of community-university partnerships in the fabric of the university.”
But the gem that ultimately won us over is this one:
[W]e believe that health promoting and anti-racism is an integrative theme that can connect our strategic priorities and help our community fulfill its mission and realize its vision. Such a belief understands that we must embed health and wellness into all aspects of our campus culture, from everyday operations to our academic standards and measurements of success and promotion to accountability processes for campus interactions and outcomes. It reflects a desire to create and nurture a campus culture whose commitment to compassion, well-being, equity, restorative justice, and non-Eurocentric multicultural academic norms will improve both the overall health as well as the academic and scholarly rigor of our campus. An aspiration to be health-promoting and anti-racist, believes in an expansive and holistic view of that sees historical structures of oppression and domination, institutional racism and historical inequities, as urgent and dire problems for the health and wellbeing of all of our faculty, staff, and students, for our society, and for our earth as well.
What do you all think? Did we just find our next great satirical writers? Did we just discover Judith Butler’s heirs? Are they ready for a career change, since they proved that they no longer care about running a serious University?
