Dedicated students, distinguished colleagues and dear friends,

Happy Friday! Happy Valentine’s Day!

How do we go from indignation to stability to address the perception — or the reality — of what is broken? Given my station in life here at S&T, I have learned that it behooves us to fully understand why and how our predecessors established our institutions before attempting to dismantle them. What set of problems were our self-disciplined, intellectually rigorous predecessors trying to address? Do the same problems exist today, perhaps in a different form and configuration?  What unwanted, unintended consequences will we face if we uproot our institutions or weaken them to the point that they cannot properly function? Admittedly, we have made a few mistakes, and we have scars to show for them.

More broadly, on a daily basis we read about our broken systems of governance and remedies to fix the problems. The fear, of course, is that fast fixes could potentially make governance harder and a bad situation cataclysmically worse.

You see, in the engineering world, where I live in my fun times, giant technology blunders and product recalls due to simple-minded solutions are commonplace. GE’s horrendous refrigerator recall due to compressor failure was the talk of the engineering world in my early working years. Millions of refrigerators were recalled from Far East Asia and the Middle East due to unfit rotary compressors that had failed when installed in much lower demand air conditioning units 40 years earlier! Justification? The old engineering knowledge base of the time did not know how to properly integrate rotary compressors! Optimism of the youth! And, famous last words!

I know it is not the same but misreading the tea leaves on future needs, over-estimating our own abilities over those of our morally upright predecessors, and over-reliance on new approaches to address complex societal problems should serve as a warning to all of us that there are no easy solutions to complex problems.

Of course, that is not to say that institutions, just like technologies, cannot outlive their purpose and must be reformed if we are to efficiently address today’s needs. But while reform differs from one organization to the next, the key knowledge of why and how we got to this point is paramount to implement effective reform. Clearly, leadership is not about surrendering to what’s happening. Rather, it’s about what must change, no matter how difficult it is to put the past behind us.

So, to all who write to me about the uncertainty of the future in these times of change, I say, all we have to do is to think about other times of great transformation and uncertainty in the past few decades: the financial crisis, out-of-control inflation, the great recession, supply chain crisis, and pandemic health crisis, and realize that, in the end, we will emerge stronger. The lessons learned accumulate to guide us in moving forward. We always move forward.

May the spirit of Valentine’s Day fuel us forward in these times of global unrest, domestic uncertainty and unpredictable change. Today, more than ever, we need to encourage and celebrate brotherly and sisterly love way beyond romance!

Warmly,

-Mo.

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Mohammad Dehghani, PhD
Chancellor
mo@mst.edu | 573-341-4116

206 Parker Hall, 300 West 13th Street, Rolla, MO 65409-0910
chancellor.mst.edu