Faculty Highlights: Dr. Anu Mitra

Every month I want to highlight faculty members who live out the core values of Union Institute & University on a day-to-day basis. I am especially impressed with how these individuals integrate the principle of social responsibility into their lives and work. Dr. Anu Mitra is one of the individuals that I want to showcase this month.

Dr. Anu Mitra has achieved a prominent position as an academic, a local Cincinnati community leader and educator, and as a global visionary in non-profit and social network development. Union Institute & University has been her academic home since 1988, but her influence has reached to more than 50 countries, on at least three continents. In addition to being a full-time faculty member in UI&U’s EdD program, she is a donor to Union Institute & University, contributing to student scholarships.

Yale University, Antioch College, Empire State College, and Sichuan University in China have all benefited from Dr. Mitra’s expertise as she has led courses in social justice theory, literature, media, visual culture, and cognitive approaches to design.    

She continues to be active on a number of community organization boards, including the Cincinnati Art  Museum, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, the YWCA, and the National Docent Symposium . She is also on the communications committee of Leadership Cincinnati's alumni publication, The Leading Edge. It is published six times per year and distributed to the leadership cadre of Cincinnati.  

She has published widely in journals and newspapers all over the world and is an active, international conference and seminar presenter.  

When asked about how she has integrated the value of social responsibility in her life, Dr. Mitra said:  

“Social justice and social responsibility is all about us awakening—someone awakens us. Either it’s a good teacher, a good educator, or something that we read or something that we hear, and if we can do that process more intentionally, then the work of bringing about justice will become much more systematic, much more intentional. Even though my work varies from day to day in different organizations, it’s all about bringing us to awareness of who we are, of what we believe in, of how some of these big problems can be solved. One of the things that I’ve really come to understand is that the big problems can be broken up into smaller component parts and that they can be addressed. And the big problem does not need to be addressed all at once and does not need to overwhelm us and to make us go away in desperation because we can’t handle a big situation. It can be broken down, and it can be handled one component at a time.   

I want to stress the fact that I’m very much a practitioner as well as a thinker. I just don’t see the value of the thinking parts and putting them into a book, which is very important—it’s an important process—but that alone should not be the descriptor of a person’s work and a person’s life work. Taking this work out into the community and bringing about change is also my desired way of having some impact, of contributing something, to waking people up.” 

Art, interdisciplinarity, and leadership development are central to Dr. Mitra’s research. Watch a sample below of Dr. Mitra’s philosophy of social responsibility in action at the Cincinnati Art Museum!