Our Guiding Principles
What principles guide our work with colleges and universities?
Brigata Camaru offers academic consulting and leadership advisory services rooted in core commitments to:
the liberal arts, and to making liberal education accessible to and compelling for students from historically excluded communities,
deep engagement with the whole person, and
academic freedom and faculty governance in consultation with the communities they serve.
Deep Learning and Deep Engagement
We are commited to deep learning driven by a desire to find meaning and address the critical challenges facing our civilization and to deep engagement with the whole person. Liberal education should inform our key life decisions regarding not only work and politics but also spirituality and questions like whether or not marry and have children.
The Liberal Arts
We are commited to building colleges and universities which cultivate free human beings whose life work is an authentic expression of both their humanity and their distinctive calling and engaged citizens with a mature spirituality. This presupposes the ability to decide for oneself what it means to be human and thus to make and evaluate arguments across disciplines, as well as to build and exercise power in service to the common good.
Academic Freedom and Faculty Governance
Higher Education faces profound challenges in the present period. Unfortunately these challenges are often assumed, even by many faculty, to require concessions regarding academic freedom and faculty governance. We don’t believe that this true. Fidelity to the historic mission of the academy requires that we uphold and strengthen these principles, while extending them to students, who are our apprentices, and creating structures of respectful engagement of and consultation with the communities we serve.
What principles guide our work with civic, community, and social justice organizations?
We will work with any organization which opposes authoritarianism (including, especially, racism and patriarchy), but we are especially interested in helping organizations which are struggling to conserve and advance
the integrity of the ecosystem and the social fabric,
the ability of people to do creative work which is an expression of their underlying way of being and of their unique talents and interests,
the right to participate in deliberation regarding our lives together and to hold accountable those entrusted with leadership, and
the right and ability of individuals and communities to decide for themselves what it means to be human and to live in accord with those convictions so long as their way of life does not conflict with the comparable freedom of others.
