President's Weekly Perspective, 3/4/2013

Earlier this year, Moody’s released a report, titled U.S. Higher Education Outlook Negative in 2013, in which it is stated that the senior leadership teams of universities need to be able to “produce competitive strategies, transparent policies, and effective oversight as well as decisive action on important subjects or in times of crisis.” Competitive, transparent, effective, decisive…a powerful combination of variables that drive success in an administration tuned to the processes they must routinely monitor to lead a complex university. This week I would like to focus on the latter, being decisive, as being critical to changing that outlook on higher education to being more positive. Decision-making at a public research university, especially one as distinctive as UNM, is a direct reflection of what we value as an institution. The ways in which we approach those decisions, from beginning to end, have lasting effects on our future. Albert Einstein sagely expressed that we cannot solve our problems by “using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” I believe that at UNM we can make decisions, from the fundamental to the complex, through bridging innovative ideas into action.The University of New Mexic