A narrative of a leadership change in the TM community... ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony...@yahoo.com> wrote :
"Maharishi University of Management has celebrated Sept. 12 as Founder’s Day ever since 1971 when it was founded in Santa Barbara, California, as Maharishi International University. The event this year was a particularly momentous one for the university as Bevan Morris, its president for 36 years, stepped down from his post and handed the reigns to John Hagelin (pictured) during a ceremony Monday Night in the Patanjali Dome. Hagelin was most recently a physics professor at the university, where he has worked since 1984. To commeorate the passing of the torch from Morris to Hagelin, the university put on a fire works display (pictured) at about 10 p.m." http://fairfield-ia.villagesoup.com/p/founders-day/1572283 http://fairfield-ia.villagesoup.com/p/founders-day/1572283 ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony...@yahoo.com> wrote : FW: August 26, 2016 In my new role as President-elect of Maharishi University of Management, I have been greatly impressed by the devoted and extremely competent leaders who have sustained our institution for so many years. These stalwart heroes have helped make my transition a thoroughly enjoyable and inspiring experience. Together, we are reshaping and expanding many dimensions of the University’s functioning. In particular, we are revamping and improving our marketing strategies, drawing upon the extensive experience and talents of our Maharishi Foundation marketing experts who have increased TM instructions in the U.S. by 25-fold in the past eight years. We are launching exciting new academic programs and upgrading many facets of the University’s functioning. And most important right now, we are upgrading the physical campus to a whole new level of excellence and beauty. We have already made great strides in this area. In the last several months we have invested nearly $1 million in donor-supported upgrades—including to Hildenbrand Hall, our largest women’s residence hall, which houses over 100 students. (See photos.) Likewise, our largest building for classrooms and offices—Verrill Hall, at 10,000 sq. ft.—has been transformed to a new level of dignity and functionality. A brand-new Maharishi Vedic Observatory now graces the exterior entry to the Argiro Student Center. We are renovating the interior and exterior of historic Henn Mansion, and just last year we replaced both roofs on our Golden Domes. All this has been possible through the great generosity and selfless support of our precious donors. Right now, we are focused on a crucial remodeling our five high-rise residence halls, home to over 250 men students. Two of these buildings were significantly upgraded several years ago, but the other three are in rather urgent need of renovation. We already have most of the funds needed for this major project from within the University’s operating budget and from donor support, but at present we are still $127,000 short. Therefore, we are reaching out once again to our greatest supporters, such as yourself, to help us bridge this financial gap and complete this vitally important and timely undertaking. This renovation is especially timely because our new marketing campaigns are bearing fruit: there is an upsurge in student inquiries, applications and visits to campus in these last 1-2 months. Our dormitories must be dignified and attractive to inspire these visiting students and their parents. With your support, we can easily make MUM far more irresistible for these prospective students. I have been so inspired and impressed by our newly arrived students, whom I’ve been meeting in my new capacity as President-elect. They are so fresh and intelligent and excited about the new direction they have taken with MUM. They are truly the bright future of the world. (Note that nearly half of the 51 young Americans now heading to Bali for their TM Teacher Training Course are from MUM!) I see an incredibly bright future for MUM—Maharishi’s precious, flagship university. The momentum is building very quickly. With your generous support for our most vitally important initiatives, we can quickly create a campus that fully reflects the limitless possibilities of Consciousness-Based education. Please join me in giving generously today http://portals.mum.edu/donations/highrise. With my deepest thanks, and with best wishes for your success and happiness, John Hagelin, Ph.D. President-elect ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony...@yahoo.com> wrote : September 12th—Founder’s Day We look forward to seeing everyone at the Maharishi Patanjali Golden Dome of Pure Knowledge on Monday evening at 8:00 pm. This evening marks the point of transition from one presidency of the University to the next one, so it is an historic event for all to share. Sunday, September 18th at 8:00 pm in Dalby Hall Slide and video presentation by Dr. Bevan Morris, Prime Minister of the Global Country of World Peace, before he leaves on a three-month speaking tour of the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Romania, and Moldova. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony...@yahoo.com> wrote : Actually the place is not without hope. There were a lot of good people of great character involved in this. The process was awesome to see happen as it unfolded in time and I hold a lot of admiration for what was the courageous bravery of a lot of people who were attending to it at the different levels. The formative values of our transcendental meditationist community here carried this change through. Principles in our deeper shared values as transcendentalists in community looked out for the place. There are yet a lot of good people inside the University community. The University is an ongoing institution. It is an academic institution with all the developed processes of faculty, administration, staff and standing facility of a mature established accredited program.. This change of leadership will bring a needed consequential change of personality to the institutional culture of the community. Culture does not change overnight but this change likely will grant to good people who do remain the cover to come forward in safety enough to proceed to allow the University to attract other good people into its programs going forward. Hagelin is at work now moving on trying to save the place with a hope in strategy to graduate classes of alumni who are well satisfied and enthused by their experience at the University. "Maharishi University of Management was founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to produce more fully developed individuals by developing the potential of consciousness within every student through a higher educational system of Consciousness-Based education giving traditional academic knowledge a foundation coupled with the study of consciousness through the practice of Transcendental Meditation and other scientifically validated practices taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi for developing consciousness." “We will count ourselves successful only when the problems of Today's world are substantially reduced and eventually eliminated and the educational institutions of every country are capable of producing fully developed citizens.” -Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, from the founding Catalog of Maharishi International University, 1974 -JaiGuruDev ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote : I just hope it is not too late. We have needed this change since the early 1990s, in my opinion, and perhaps even before. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : The University President was turned out based on performance. As it happened he brought it on himself. Essentially, he undid himself. A narrative, of what happened and how it came to be.. In fact there was quite a lot of communal process involved in this. The process began within public meetings of the Fairfield Mental Health Alliance [FMHA] early in the summer of 2014. Communal processes within the Fairfield meditating community, the University, and the TM Movement started then as community meetings were called for 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 into the process to work on different areas. Quite a number of 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. 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 and well-being 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 this ‘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. What became 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 by gathering ‘cases’ of how cultural features peculiar to the TM movement affected people in their lives. People working on this sub-committee then 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 TM movement. They came from alumni of MIU, MUM, old TM teachers, old Governors, Re-certs, Purusha, Mother Divine, MSAE, University faculty and staff, and from meditators in the community. A beauty to a process of collecting ‘case’ narratives is that as there comes to be enough cases collected they become data. Data, that in turn can be related to particular policy and initiatives that could be taken to improve aspects of the cultural life of the TM movement. The 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 students 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 [May 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 # Ref Index, https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/427487 https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/427487 ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : This change came out of communal processes in the meditating community. One can see the come-about chronicled going back into these posts.. 422273Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: FF Mental Health Alliance: Shifting Cultural Attitudes https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/422273 https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/422273?soc_src=mail&soc_trk=ma This chronicles work back to 2014, scroll down through the post and open the 'show more history'. 391963Mental Health in the Fairfield and Meditating Communities (August 2014) https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/391963 https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/391963 ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : Yes it is a new day for the University community now. There was quite a lot of process involved in moving Bevan out as the University President. By his own long affect Bevan effectively overthrew himself. Fortunately he acquiesced without there having to be a larger shouting match at a trustees’ meeting. It was performance metrics at the University and a lot of process that brought this about. The result of a lot of process, at the end this was deliberated and handled by exec committee of the trustees and Tony Nader. Bevan has been the leader of the place for 35 years and the organization well represented his personality of leadership. Of necessity it had come time to change his leadership out. In the end he undid himself by performance. It was time he be relieved of the Presidency and sent emeritus in some way to where the 24/7 running of the University does not have to report to him anymore. Jai Guru Dev May 2016 427373Re: Change of Leadership, Bevan Deposed https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/427373 https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/427373 You say "deposed" but he says he resigned, do you know something we don't? Bit of trouble at the top perhaps.. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : With Bevan out, while looking at fundamentals there is quite a lot of re-thinking that is descriptive about what (who) we are as a community and as to how and where we are going. A fresh start or re-fresh for the Fairfield meditationist community, a potential is great one way or another. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : FW: His letter sounded to me like a sincere attempt to make a gentile transition. The BOT was definitely involved, and it's SOP for the executive committee of a Board of Trustees to make decisions regarding senior personnel. Most of the Board, in most universities, have little to do with managing the institution, and are present mainly for their social status, their own financial support, or their ability to raise money. This kind of thing (selection process for key people) is rarely practical with a full board of 34 people, most of whom are far from Fairfield, although I'm sure they will all vote on it in June. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : FW: Bevan's letter makes it quite clear that he is technically nominating John as President, and that he is confident the Board will confirm that nomination. He also indicates that RajaRaam has also approved of these plans. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : It will be the start of a long process to correct so much damage that has been done in 35 years. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : by e-mail: It's certainly good news, and I don't doubt Raja Hagelin will do great things. But it is a little unprofessional [Bevan] to say it's pretty much going to happen - when that's not how things ought to happen in a professional academic setting governed by a board. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : Regime change In meditating Fairfield life. This spread as some earth-shaking news yesterday. Everywhere you’d go people were exclaiming. There is quite a lot of wonder and hope for this change. The Board of Trustee should make it effective immediately and not just let it wait until the fall to come in to effect. To move Bevan over so the day-today does not have to report to him anymore, this all needs to happen sooner than later to save things. Prepare yea the way for a new school year now. - Jai Guru Dev ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : FW: Dear Revered Friend of Maharishi University of Management: I am going to retire as President of Maharishi University of Management on Founder's Day, September 12th, after 36 years as President. I will be devoting my time to my duties as Prime Minister of the Global Country of World Peace, and as International President of Maharishi Universities of Management. I am proposing to the Board of Trustees that Raja John Hagelin be appointed as President of the University. He is tops in knowledge, both in science and Maharishi Vedic Science, a charismatic and inspiring figure, and has proven his administrative and marketing skills by increasing the number of people in the US learning Transcendental Meditation tenfold in just a few years. He has agreed that he is willing to do this, and I feel sure that the Board will support him in this role (he is already Honorary Chairman of the Board of Trustees, and the University's most senior faculty member, researcher, and public speaker). He has expressed his admiration for the existing faculty and administrative teams at the University who have vast experience, and feels with their help he will be able to manage everything well. He also says he already has ideas how to promote the University more, and attract more students, including building a closer relationship between Maharishi Foundation and Maharishi University of Management, and calling upon the skills and contacts of Dr. Bob Roth to raise the University's profile. This will also include greater promotion of the unique knowledge offered by the faculty of the University at special conferences Raja Hagelin will organize. He has also mentioned his desire to be able to consult with me on any issues that may come up, and I of course am very happy to do that. We will also bring out this change in the leadership during the Commencement ceremony on June 18th, without taking too much time. I do feel strongly that this is a great step of progress for Maharishi University of Management, and will lead to the faster expansion we all desire. Raja John Hagelin and I have had a chance to discuss this with Maharaja Adhiraj Rajaraam to gain his perspective, and he feels this is a very good move. Thank you all for your kindness and loving support through all the years! You have done and are doing so much for Maharishi University of Management and the whole world!!! Please continue your support and expand it if you can! With Best Wishes, Jai Guru Dev Bevan ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : News this morning, [ ..a quick summary of today's letter from Bevan to the Trustees and Faculty (and of course many others): In his continuing role as Prime Minister of the Global Country of World Peace, and as International President of Maharishi Universities of Management, Bevan is resigning from his presidency of MUM, effective this Sept 12 (Founder's Day). Raja (Message over 64 KB, truncated)
