At the start of this year, Integrity Ambassador Ingrid Heynderickx and Rector Magnificus Silvia Lenaerts launched what’s known as the Values Project. The goal of this project was to revise the university’s old core values: Curious, Open, Personal, and Engaged. An extensive participation program gave the people at TU/e the opportunity to provide input for the new core values. Today, at the opening of the academic year, Lenaerts officially announced them.

Two old ones, two new ones

Two out of the four ‘new’ core values have remained unchanged: Curious and Open. Personal and Engaged went the way of the dodo, making space for newbies Responsible and Respectful. “With the Values Project, we wanted to revise the core values and draw attention to them once more. We weren’t necessarily looking for new values; we thought it was more important they’d be widely recognized and supported,” Heynderickx explains. “This doesn’t constitute a major change. Which also means there won’t be any need for a real cultural shift, although it goes without saying we do hope the core values will contribute to an even nicer work and study environment.”

CORe

Together, the four new core values make up the acronym CORe. In an earlier interview, Heynderickx had already indicated she was looking for a catchy acronym to prevent the core values from being quickly forgotten by the people at TU/e. This quest didn’t influence the selection of the new core values, says Heynderickx. “This is really how things played out,” she assures us. “But it is very nice that it has worked out to CORe, given that we’re talking about core values.”

According to Heynderickx, an idea that was floating around at some point was for the final acronym to be CO(Re)². This would be partially intended to make clear that ‘Re’ stands for two core values (Responsible and Respectful), but mostly as a nod to technology, seeing how TU/e is a university of technology. “I would have really liked this myself, but the communication department was afraid the message wouldn’t get across.”

Spread

A number of things will be done to introduce the new core values to the entire TU/e community, including the placing of banners around the campus. “That immediate attention won’t be a problem, people will temporarily be aware. Long-term retention remains a challenge.” It’s not yet clear how Heynderickx plans to make sure CORe won’t be forgotten the same way the previous core values were. “There are ideas but they’re still a bit vague. One thing we want to get clarity on is which behavior goes with which values, and convey this to management so they can pay close attention to this within their departments,” she explains. “And it’s also very important that we simply keep putting the core values in the spotlight every now and then.”