Assume Good Intent

Over the last few months I have been thinking a lot about the wisdom I’ve picked up to help cope with stress and uncertainty, a feeling I’m sure a lot of us are experiencing right now. While I’ve never been a ‘successories’ type of person, I have found a good amount of help and solace in a few accumulated bits. A cherished colleage from my time at Minnesota, who I knew I could always trust to be honest with me, even when (or especially when) it was pointing out that I was being kind of a jerk, shared a printout of John Perry Barlow’s ‘Principles of Adult Behavior,’ which I still have in my office and look at every day. It both tickled my Deadhead funnybone and resonated with me in a golden rule sort of way. My dad always told me to watch out for people whose motivating purpose in life seemed to be ‘hooray for me and to hell with everyone else,’ and also told me that it is the job of leaders to grow and support the new leaders that will follow them.

On the more academic, or research-grounded side of things, I am pretty fond of the Ladder of Inference. If it’s new to you, you can find it in several places throughout our collections, including in the Sage Encyclopedia of Action Research, which we have online. It is helpful both in understanding why human beings sometimes seem to theorize in the absence of facts, so to speak, or use the partial information that they have to try to understand the world around them, AND in helping to build an instinct to interrupt the process of making incorrect assumptions based on our existing mental models and incomplete information. I find it particularly useful in interrupting my own tendencies, and I have found myself sharing it with others lately as we try to collectively cope with budget limitations and a confusing whirlwind of information coming from our federal government. Another one of my favorites is ‘Assume Good Intent’ – usually a reminder to try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt until more is known.

Assuming Good Intent is hard these days. Much of what we are experiencing feels arbitrary, and some of it deliberately cruel. But closer to home, at our university and in our Library, I am much more confident that we can assume good intent. I hope to not lose sight of that, and I’m grateful to all of you every day for the efforts you make to give each other (and me) grace, to offer a friendly ear, to offer to be a safe space or a sympathetic friend.

Normally by this time in the spring semester we are very intensively in the thick of things, with an eager eye on the breather that we get with spring break in a few weeks. You are all incredibly busy and doing great stuff – some highlights for me have included the celebrations and educational events celebrating Black History Month, including the fantastic exhibit on the first floor of the Main Library on the Harlem Renaissance. I also loved revisiting, in a more leisurely manner, the exhibit on the third floor of Grainger Engineering Library Information Center remarking on the many contributions scholars here in our Library have made to library automation. Thanks to everyone who contributed to all of these educational efforts, and to the dozens and hundreds of others that I am not mentioning but which are valued just the same. Thanks for helping to keep my belief in good intent alive.

Have a good month, and I hope you are able to take time for yourself. We all need rest and recuperation time, particularly now.

Claire Stewart
The Juanita J. and Robert E. Simpson Dean of Libraries and University Librarian