Custodians and faculty, for example, could jointly decide on how classroom furniture should be arranged at the end of the day. The present policy of requiring chairs to be lined up in front-facing rows is an example of decision-making occurring at the wrong level and in a way that excludes the perspectives both of those doing the work and of those on whose behalf the work is being done. Faculty request classrooms with movable chairs because of a shift in pedagogical practice that requires flexible seating possibilities, whether in a circle, in small groups, or in some other arrangement. Having the chairs returned each night to front-facing rows re-enforces the problematic idea that such an arrangement is the norm, and that others are deviations from it. It would clearly be wrong for such a norm to be enforced by, say, departmental or collegiate authority; and it hardly seems appropriate for it to be enforced by Facilities Management administration.

As the people who encounter classrooms at the end of the day, and engage in frequent conversation with faculty, many custodians are well aware of the foolishness of arranging the chairs in rows at night, only to have them rearranged by the first class in the morning, and are frustrated by their inability to provide the service of arranging the chairs as the next morning's class would like to have them. If they don't know what arrangement is wanted, it's better that the chairs be left in whatever arrangement best facilitates cleaning the room, so that the first class of the day encounters, not a rigid idea of what a proper classroom should look like, but rather, the evidence of someone's labor, labor they ought to think about and respect--by, for example, not littering.

1. A common university culture includes a commitment to accessibility, which allows people to live up to their potential and to participate fully in university life. We urge the adoption of the principles of universal design as a tangible expression of such a commitment.

2. The University's commitment to civic engagement needs to begin with the recognition of the university itself as a civic space and of the need for responsible engagement across lines of power and privilege, with the aim of empowering all members of the university community to bring critical and creative thinking to bear on the work they do and on the relationship of their work to the work of others.

3. Part of a common culture specifically for a research university should be a shared commitment to regarding problems less as obstacles than as opportunities, and as always potentially interesting. In some cases, making a problem interesting will involve finding someone somewhere in the university for whom it already is interesting; sometimes it will involve empowering the person charged with solving it to approach it in innovative ways; sometimes it will require imaginatively redefining the problem. For example, problems of heating and cooling, waste disposal and re-cycling, food purchasing, preparation, and service, and buildings and grounds maintenance all have environmental implications, and ought to be thought about holistically and collaboratively. Such issues provide especially apt sites, for example, for undergraduate civic engagement projects, aimed at bringing together the practical knowledge of staff with faculty and graduate student research, in order to approach complex problems in ways that engage people across institutional lines and require sharing knowledge and clarifying values. When decisions in these areas are made piecemeal and only by administrative staff, the solutions are likely to be less informed about the full scope of complexity and by the range of relevant expertise. Equally importantly, we miss out on an opportunity to explore and to model the ways in which research and academic expertise can function in a democratic society and in relation to other forms of knowledge and ways of problem-solving.

4. The creation of a common culture, along with the implementation of sound management principles, is undercut by out-sourcing, which ought, therefore, to be used sparingly and only for truly compelling reasons. The sort of cooperative problem-solving discussed above, for example, requires that all the participants are, and feel themselves to be, respected members of the University community, and answerable directly to it. A general exception to this presumption against out-sourcing might, however, appropriately include developing thoughtful, values-driven relationships with local, especially minority-owned, businesses.

5. All members of the University community are also residents of neighborhoods and cities or towns, hence members of the public to which, as a public (and land-grant) university, we are accountable. Thus, for example, as taxpayers, administrative services employees and faculty are helping to pay, not only their own salaries, but each other's salaries as well. But while faculty probably have a fairly good idea of what administrative services employees are getting paid to do, the reverse is far less likely to be the case. The people who perform administrative services at the University ought to be able to explain to their families, friends, and neighbors why their tax dollars are well-spent in paying for the faculty to do what they do, and, in particular, why faculty research is worth supporting. For this and other reasons, University employees ought to have opportunities to engage in critical discussion with researchers about, especially, research that involves the communities in which they live or that otherwise bears on their lives.