Introduction

Part I: Women's Leadership in the Millennium

Part II: Transformative Leadership toward Success and Significance

References

INTRODUCTION

First, I wish to thank your president, Dr. Kyungsook Lee, for inviting me as one of the special lecturers for this Global Conference on Leadership in celebration of the centenary of Sookmyung University. I consider this a privilege and a most gracious recognition from a global educational partner in e-learning and Women’s eBiz and honorary doctoral alumna of the Philippine Women’s University, which granted her a Doctorate in Humanities, honoris causa, last April 2006.

Many speakers have come before me, and you may almost have a surfeit of definitions, perspectives, and guidelines on Leadership.  However, I ask you to make room for these four key concepts that I will discuss to contextualize the role of a women’s university in today’s globalizing world: Success, Significance, Faith and Transformative Leadership.

Reaffirmation of the PWU's Vision-Mission

Three years have passed since I was installed as the 8^th President of the Philippine Women’s University, the 4^th alumna to steer the helm of this university.  Before we embarked on our journey, our first major task was to set our course.

We redefined the PWU Vision—A proactive, nurturing faith community rooted in spirituality, which develops transformative leadership to meet national and global challenges.  Thus have we articulated our enduring belief in a Supreme Being, whose Spirit guides our directions, and in whose Divine Providence we trust daily.  With Jesus and His Mother as models, we strive to reach out as servant leaders not only to each member of the PWU faith community of students, faculty, non-teaching personnel and administrators, but also to parents and alumni, institutional partners, and all our other stakeholders.

Having agreed that we would continue to set our sights keeping faith with our founders’ vision of an educated citizenry, we restated in 2003 the PWU Mission—An enduring commitment to prepare the learner as a role model for useful citizenship through a holistic education which treasures cultural heritage and is imbued with the core values of personal integrity, family solidarity, community participation, and leadership in the profession.

As a result of the appreciative inquiry process that we have started to apply this year, we in the university are Collectively Creating the University’s Future Today. We are enhancing the PWU Vision statement to include leadership in women’s education, as articulated by our seven founding mothers, who saw a need to prepare women not only as housewives but also as women leaders in their chosen profession and in the communities they serve.

Thus, as our founding mothers prepared Filipino women for useful women’s roles in the new republic of the twentieth century, the PWU today must gear up its entire educational program to respond to global needs, in keeping with its visionary role in the 21^st century. We reaffirm this by maintaining the PWU’s leadership in women’s education as primordial; and responding to globalization by giving birth to transformative leaders within the perspective of gender education, which addresses both women and men.

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