Gratitude

Thanksgiving sneaks up on you in Florida. Where I grew up, summer heat turns to fall chill sometime around mid-September. By Halloween you know the holidays are just around the corner. Here, Thanksgiving is part of a very long and gradual cool-down. Winter some years is just a Thursday.

At its core, Thanksgiving is about gratitude. It is about remembering the important people in your life, how they have helped you become who you are and thanking them for being part of your journey.  Turns out that expressing gratitude is good for you and according to my faculty can make you less of a jerk.

Yep, we study gratitude in the College of Business. More specifically, how keeping a gratitude journal can help change employee behavior for the better. Their recent research shows that just jotting down a few things daily about events and people for whom you are grateful can lower the likelihood you will be rude, gossipy or mean to coworkers.

“Gratitude exercises are becoming increasingly popular products to improve employee attitudes and well-being, and our study shows managers can also use them to foster more respectful behavior in their teams,” says Dr. Shannon Taylor.

Imagine what you can do with a whole day devoted to gratitude. This Thanksgiving week, tell people how grateful you are for the positive things in your life. It’s not just good for them, it’s good for you, too.

You can read more about our faculty’s work on gratitude by clicking here.

Ray Sturm

Professor Ray Sturm passed away on Friday night just before 9 pm, almost exactly a week after he suffered a cardiac arrest on the evening of November 5th around 8 pm. He never came out of the coma.

Ray was on the search committee that brought me to UCF. He was the coolest two-time grandfather I know. Ray could be seen in a T-shirt and jeans riding his skateboard on campus. He was a surfer, rock band member and faculty advisor to the investment club. Except for the hair, there were days I wanted to be just like him. He would have been a great member of the motorcycle gang I’ve always wanted to form. Ray was a teacher at heart, intellectually curious, and like all passionate people, hardheaded at times. Like a lot of us, he was a down-to earth Professor who believed in higher education’s promise of upward social mobility.

Life is precious and so short. We have buried too many colleagues and alums the last few years. Ray is yet another reminder that we should not waste a minute of it.

The Ultimate Homecoming Event?

We had graduation for the class of 2020 on Friday. It was a make-up graduation for students who didn’t get the opportunity to walk across the stage during the height of the pandemic. I’m told it is the first time since the 1990s that all the colleges came together for the ceremony. Since that time, we have become too big to have just one graduation per semester. Despite the rain, several hundred students walked across the stage. It was important enough for them to do so, that they came back on a Friday morning in November (it was homecoming weekend) to do it. It tells you something about the power of rituals.

It made me wonder if we should make this as an annual event. What would make homecoming more meaningful than to let graduates come back and walk across the stage again? We could announce when they graduated, their major and what they are doing now. It would be an opportunity for those who didn’t get the chance to attend their first graduation for whatever reason to claim the experience. For others, it might be a bit like renewing their vows, a chance to remember how important their education has been in their lives and who they are today. It just might make for the ultimate homecoming event. We could then march them all over to the reflecting pond for an alumni spirit splash and let them compete for a coveted duck. Hmm…. That might require the signing of liability waivers.

An Ending and A New Beginning

Rich has led by example for 20 years. I remember when he arrived in 2001: It put our college on the national and international stage as a place that builds innovative programs and cares about civil society. Professor Robin Roberts Pegasus Professor, Dixon School of Accounting.

The last couple of years have been calling Richard Lapchick. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the racial reckoning, Rich has decided to focus his life’s work on anti-racism issues. To do that, he is stepping down as the Director of the DeVos Graduate Program effective immediately.

Ron Piccolo, the chair of the Management department, has agreed to take on an interim role as Director of the program as we start a national search for a new leader. That search will start in earnest this spring. It is my goal to have this person in place by Fall 2022.

This will not be a search to replace Rich. There is no replacement for Richard Lapchick. In my many years in higher education, I have never met anyone like Rich. His many contacts in the sports industry, status as a social justice warrior, impact on the sports industry, and legacy in developing his students to be catalysts for social change through sports is unparalleled. His speech about the power of the huddle lingers in the ears of all who hear it. Heck, the dude has gotten an invite to speak from the Pope. Along the way, he has also done much to put UCF and the DeVos program on the map. The next director of DeVos will be charged with shaping the educational experience for the next generation of sports business executives, ensuring that they have the skills, perspective, and moral compass needed to navigate a quickly changing landscape both on and off the court, field, track, or pitch.

Rich is not going away.  Over the next 20 months, he will continue to be in his office, getting to know the DeVos students.  He will remain Director of The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES). TIDES will be the research component of his anti-racist work. He will also remain president of the Institute for Sports and Social Justice. 

Let me end this post, with Rich’s own words to the DeVos students last Friday:

This transition will mark both an ending and a new beginning where together we can continue to open horizons and make people understand that all of us -no matter what we look like, what we believe or where we come from, are cut from the same human cloth. 

Charge On Rich. We won’t forget what you taught us.