Being Here, Now.

Ateneo de Davao University is entering a crossroads when its mission must meet the complexity of its context. The demands we face, educational, social, cultural, environmental, require more than incremental adjustments. They require a fundamental strengthening of the relationships that allow the University to think, act, and serve as one. This is the purpose of the proposed reconfiguration: to reorganize the University’s leadership, research, formation, and community-engagement systems into a network capable of coherence, collaboration, and greater fidelity to the mission.

A useful way to understand this transformation is through a perspective from anthropology known as Actor–Network Theory, or ANT.

Actor–Network Theory, associated with scholars Bruno Latour, John Law, and Michel Callon, is not a theory of actors in the theatrical sense. Instead, it proposes that an institution is made up of many kinds of “actors,” not only people, but also documents, policies, technologies, offices, buildings, routines, and even ideas. These actors form networks, and it is their interactions and alignments that create what we experience as “the institution.” A university, in this view, is not merely an organizational chart but a network of relationships. When these relationships are strong, the institution acts with clarity. When they are fragmented, even the most committed individuals struggle to move the institution forward.

From this perspective, the creation of six Vice Presidencies is not simply a reshuffling of supervision of offices and units; it is the creation of six strategic nodes in a strengthened institutional network. These roles are not merely administrative posts; they are the anchors of a new institutional network. Each Vice President becomes a strategic node that brings together actors previously scattered across units and sectors. ANT helps us see why this matters: each Vice Presidency acts as an obligatory passage point—a stabilizing node through which actors, decisions, and initiatives must pass. This gives the network clarity, reduces duplication, and strengthens accountability.

Together, they reorganize the University into six coherent domains:

1. Administration – integrating human resources, facilities, security, ICT, partnerships, and campus operations into one coordinated system. This role ensures that the “backbone” of the University—its daily operations—supports mission and strategy rather than operating in separate silos.
2. Continuing and Higher Education – bringing undergraduate, graduate, and lifelong learning into alignment, while coordinating faculty development, student services, curriculum innovation, and social formation. This alignment addresses the fragmentation between academic quality, formation, and student experience.
3. Basic Education – ensuring that grade school, junior high, and senior high function as a vertically aligned Ignatian formation ecosystem. Under this Vice Presidency, the University finally gains a unified developmental trajectory from childhood to adolescence.
4. Finance and Treasury – integrating budgeting, treasury, compliance, investment strategy, and resource stewardship into a single domain. With the creation of the Office of Compliance and Institutional Integrity and the Office of Strategic Financial Insights, the University builds a financially intelligent network capable of long-term sustainability.
5. Research, Innovations, and Community Engagement (RICE) – consolidating centers, institutes, the Davao Museum, the Publications Office, CESDO, and the new RICWO. This is a breakthrough: the University’s knowledge creation and social engagement functions finally operate within one coordinated network, aligned with SDGs and Mindanao’s needs.
6. Mission and Identity – giving mission the institutional weight it deserves by creating the Office for Mission Integration, strengthening campus ministry, supporting formation offices, and ensuring that Ignatian spirituality shapes decisions, evaluation, and leadership development.

These six domains bring order, clarity, and coherence to areas that have long been fragmented. They become the new “super-nodes” of the University’s network, enabling faster coordination, clearer accountability, and deeper collaboration.

The proposed creation of new governance councils reinforces this network. The University Administrative Coordination Council, the Continuing and Higher Education Council, the Basic Education Council, the Finance and Resource Stewardship Council, the RICE Council, and the University Mission and Formation Council serve as translation sites—spaces where the diverse interests of faculty, staff, administrators, students, and external partners are aligned into shared action. These councils also give non-human actors—data, policies, evaluation tools, accreditation requirements—their rightful influence in decision-making. In ANT terms, they are mediators that enable alignment rather than leaving coordination to chance.

Just as importantly, the redesign activates new non-human actors. Documents such as the reconfiguration guidelines, partnership protocols, and financial compliance systems shape how work gets done. Digital tools for planning, budgeting, research management, and monitoring reinforce alignment. Buildings like the Community Center of the First Companions and Martin Hall become hubs of coordinated activity under unified oversight. The University’s mission itself becomes an actor through the Office for Mission Integration, ensuring that every policy and program is evaluated against who we say we are.

The reconfiguration also elevates mission, transforming it from a value into an actor that participates directly in shaping institutional life. The Office for Mission Integration ensures that mission becomes structurally embedded—informing planning, guiding evaluation, and shaping strategy. This allows mission to act through policies, protocols, retreats, formation programs, performance frameworks, and leadership development initiatives. It creates a network where decisions cannot drift from identity.

Meanwhile, the reorganization under RICE strengthens the University’s capacity for knowledge creation and social transformation. Centers, institutes, CESDO, RICWO, the Davao Museum, and the Publications Office—all of which previously operated as separate actors in different “super councils”—are assembled into a coherent network capable of addressing complex issues such as peacebuilding, governance, indigenous rights, and sustainability. This integration reflects a fundamental ANT insight: networks become powerful when formerly dispersed actors are brought into meaningful relationship.

ANT also helps us appreciate the significance of non-human actors in the redesign. Documents—such as the reconfiguration guidelines, partnership templates, compliance frameworks—and digital systems for planning, budgeting, and monitoring shape everyday practices. Buildings like the Community Center of the First Companions and Martin Hall become sites where coordinated activity unfolds under unified oversight. These objects and processes stabilize the network, reducing friction and enabling smoother collaboration.

The multi-year implementation timeline—discernment, transition, alignment, evaluation—shows an understanding that networks must be maintained, not merely created. In ANT, networks endure only through consistent upkeep. The involvement of OSMQA and HRMDO in monitoring and evaluation ensures that relationships do not fray and that new practices become stable features of institutional life.

Without this redesign, the University remains vulnerable to fragmented coordination, competing priorities, and disjointed decision-making. With it, Ateneo de Davao becomes a more coherent network—one capable of thinking together, acting together, and responding to Mindanao’s challenges with greater clarity and courage. The six Vice Presidencies, the newly constituted councils, the unified research and community engagement ecosystem, and the strengthened mission and administrative infrastructures together build a system that replaces fragmentation with unity, and inertia with intentionality.

This is why the reconfiguration is not simply desirable.

It is essential.

It builds the conditions under which Ateneo de Davao University can truly act as one—clear in its mission, coherent in its structure, and effective in its service to Mindanao.