[FairfieldLife] Re: Change of Leadership

dhamiltony...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife] Sat, 02 Jul 2016 19:26:42 -0700

A narrative, of what happened and how it came to be..

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The University President was turned out based on performance. As it happened
he brought it on himself. Essentially, he undid himself.

In fact there was quite a lot of communal process involved in this. The
process began within the public meetings of the Fairfield Mental Health
Alliance [FMHA] early in the summer of 2014. Communal processes within the
meditating community, the University, and the TM Movement started then as
community meetings were called for in the meditating community in the wake of a
string of suicides by younger people of the meditating Fairfield community.

From that time working committees of meditators formed looking into conditions
of mental well-being in the meditating community. This came from an initial
call-to-meeting that went out as a memo sent around to licensed medical
clinical professionals of the meditating community.

In the initial e-mail came an enumerated problem-definition proposed as a
series of talking points to serve as a meeting agenda for a meeting of the
group. A meeting room was arranged for on campus. About 60 people came to the
first meetings. Right away this became a larger working group and the group
formed right away into working sub-committees. There then came a series of
advertised public meetings forming as the Fairfield Mental Health Alliance
(FMHA). Productive work continued from then in a number of areas related to
mental health and communal well-being in meditating Fairfield, Iowa.

The meetings of the group were open and public. Any interested persons who
were willing to work on areas related to community mental health were invited
and free to attend. It became a matter of interested people of goodwill
showing up and a number of people came along in the process to work on
different areas. A number of quite effective people came along into the
process.

The weekly FMHA meetings typically were opened on time, the meetings were
chaired and run by written agenda and consequently became very productive.
During the mid-week sub-committee meetings were held on different areas of
work. Reports then given every week in the larger general meetings. Quite a
lot practical direct work in the service of bettering communal mental health
was accomplished in the next couple of years.

One area of the several areas of work (eleven sub-committees working at one
point) was a sub-committee which looked at the role of the TM movement’s
‘culture’ in the mental well-being of the meditating community. At a point the
‘culture’ sub-committee of the FMHA became reconstituted in the fall of 2014
through a strategic planning process and this ‘culture’ sub-committee has met
weekly or more often since. The focused work of the ‘culture’ sub-committee of
the FMHA commenced from then.

From later in 2014 the ‘culture’ sub-committee set about in a process of
research gathering ‘cases’ of how cultural features peculiar to the ™ movement
affected people in their lives. People working on this sub-committee then set
out and went out collecting cases of how people’s well-being had been affected
by cultural aspects of the ™ movement. This work was not about collecting
opinions but instead a collecting of particular cases about what happened to
people by record of direct narrative. A growing case file of gathered cases
emerged in this process as a pool of ‘data’. Cases came in and gathered. As
direct narratives, they came from all alumni groups or pools of the ™ movement.
They came from alumni of MIU, MUM, old ™ teachers, old Governors, Re-certs,
Purusha, Mother Divine, MSAE, University faculty, staff, and from meditators in
the community.

A beauty to a process of collecting ‘case’ narratives is that as there comes
to be enough of them they become data. Data that can relate to particular
policy initiatives that could be taken to improve aspects of the cultural life
of the ™ movement.

Cases often grouped as data clusters and subsequently this allowed for the
generation of white papers which sought to clarify ways of thinking about
cultural features peculiar to the meditating movement relating to communal
well-being which could then be addressed by organizational policy of the
University and the TM movement at large. This work patiently continued in
cycle based on cases as data, not just by opinion about what was wrong in
policy or particular personnel but by case narratives of circumstance.
Evidently a lot of the problematic areas only needed some calm leadership to
acknowledge and attend to them for remedy of circumstance.

In an ongoing process from the collected cases then white papers were
circulated to people who likely were in positions and able to start to make
changes in University or TM movement policy and practices. The sub-committee
white papers provided ways of thinking and a cover in sequence to a number of
brave individual and groups of administrators, faculty, trustees and then
students too to work on their own series of proposals for changes to policy and
practices of the University and TM movement.

In [strategic] process the ‘culture’ FMHA sub-committee persisted forward with
executive summaries to the ongoing work. About a year and a half ago
[December 2014] in initially sharing these summaries with capable staff and
administrators of the University who could effect changes in their areas then
some problematic things began to be remediated from that time. From this as
time went along then small groups of faculty also subsequently began providing
their own proposals for remediation of circumstances within the University.

Within processes and a continuing dialog from the FMHA ‘culture’
sub-committee, white paper proposals written under moniker of an independent
“The Strategic Advisory Council” circulated at different levels this last Fall
[2015], Winter, and into this Spring [2016] as to providing frameworks for
thinking about problematic areas. This also provided a cover of safety for
responsive University administration and faculty thinking about remediating
problematic areas.

The White Paper SAC..
Dialog for Progress,

Summary: After 18 months of research and discussion,
the Strategy Advisory Council recommends an approach
to increasing undergraduate enrollment and retention,
improving academic excellence, raising Dome numbers,
and improving synergy between MUM, the TM organizations,
and the Fairfield community.

Proposal for Expansion
of MUM and the Fairfield
Super-Radiance Community:

About seven months ago [November 2015] a particular white paper was drafted to
engage the Trustees of the University corporation individually into problematic
areas of the University. As Trustees were being engaged individually through
the Spring of 2016 small subgroups of effective Trustees then grew and began to
come up with proposals of their own in remedy.

In the process what became apparent was that areas of change simply needed
calm leadership to speak to the problems and carry out evident remedy in
looking at problematic circumstances.

In a sequence through this Spring [2016] then groups of effective Trustees
came into line with their own proposals. More recently in a sequence of timing
[June 2016] the University students added their voices with a petition
reinforcing what thinking was already in process.

In the end it was apparent that the then current long serving University
President was not that person who could come forward with a leadership to deal
with all that was evidently needed to be done directly to facilitate a survival
of the place.

The University is a registered corporation of its own separate from TM
movement corporations otherwise except in cases of some inter-locking trustees.
The transition of the presidency was then arranged for. That is the story in a
nutshell of how this came about. The detail it seems is way more interesting.

The University as an organization and cultural institution had come too much
to reflect a personality of leadership characterized by 35 years of separating
people from the university and too many of the metrics of the University, the
community, and the movement were showing that it was now time and essential for
a fundamental change of leadership. Circumstances of performance had shown
that the leadership had become absolutely problematic and this was not the
leadership that it seems would be necessary for the place to survive and
thrive. It was time. Fortunately the metrics of the University situation and
the manifest reality of a need for change allowed for an acquiescing to this
and this did not have to come to a shouting match within a larger Board of
Trustees meeting to accomplish.

In fact there was quite a lot of [communal] process which brought this about.
In the end it was all clarified and accomplished by an exec committee of
Trustees and then ratified by all the Trustees at a corporation Board of
Trustees meeting in June of 2016. -JaiGuruDev