Remodeling Our Lives

I have a friend who is constantly engaged in one rehab project or another around her house: repainting or wallpapering, landscaping her yard, or upgrading a room. It's not that anything is wrong with the current state as much as she is seeking to improve her home environment.

I look around my neighborhood as spring has arrived, and I see many of us enjoying the outdoors while raking, planting, and engaging in house cleaning of all sorts.

Perhaps the same holds true with our lives. There are times when it just makes sense to examine, take inventory, and commit to becoming a better version of ourselves. The times of Lent and Easter are good for honest soul-searching and committing to new ways of being.

This spring at Avila, we have four teams examining all of Avila with particular emphasis on how we might enhance our learning environment, our relationships with the community, the measures we use to define and track success, and the processes we follow to align resources to match our commitments. As is true with my friend, it's not that anything's wrong, it's just that it's important for the university to continually strive to be a better version of itself. What gives the greatest hope in this process is the fact that this is a community undertaking with over half of our faculty engaged in one or more of these teams.

Together we are remodeling the university.