Liberal Arts Colleges and Teaching Leadership

The Washington Post has a blog called "On Leadership" (I guess it's a blog, it feels like one). Today there is a guest column about "Why colleges should teach leadership." The author is a recent (2005) graduate of Harvard. While there, he established a leadership institute, to address what he saw as a gap in the education at Harvard.

He nails the problem:

Education is a college's reason for being, and leadership needs to be a part of the classroom experience. For that to happen successfully, the definition of the classroom must evolve. It should not simply be a place where students hear lectures, but rather an interactive environment that extends beyond the confines of the room itself. Experiential learning emphasizes discussions, projects and team work rather than problem-set solving or textbook-reading.

I completely agree. I went to Swarthmore, a classic liberal arts college, with a strong liberal/progressive tradition. Every administrator, every faculty member, every board member, will tell you that the College teaches leadership, and believes very strongly in doing so.

My experience was completely different. I was the "treasurer" of the Amnesty International chapter on campus. I was effectively president, but you couldn't call yourself president of a student political organization. There wasn't any official prohibition - the College does, after all, have a president - but it just wasn't done. There was an unwritten and unspoken rule that you did not impose a hierarchy on a student political group, because it was supposed to operate by consensus, according to the Quaker tradition (Swarthmore was founded by the Society of Friends, and still hews to some of the traditions of the Quakers, but is officially non-sectarian). It was basically taboo to call proclaim yourself a figure of authority. This was but one example of political correctness.

I was co-president of the campus science fiction club, the Swarthmore Warders of Imaginative Literature. My co-president and I called ourselves "The Presidents Who Go 'Ping!'" after the hopsital scene in Monty Python's the Meaning of Life . But it was, as should be obvious, not a terribly serious organization, so no one minded if we called ourselves president. Besides, one of our predecessors had referred to himself as "Lord God Emperor" or something like that. We were modest in comparison.

The lack of title was the least of my problems learning leadership at Swarthmore. There is one key to teaching leadership that was missing at Swarthmore. Someone has to actually do it. At a college, there has to be someone who makes a commitment to teaching students how to lead. Ideally, each student organization should have a faculty advisor, a mentor who provides guidance by virtue of setting an example, answering questions, and empowering students to make decisions.

I did not have a faculty advisor when I was treasurer of Swarthmore. It never occurred to me to try to find one. I don't know of any student organization that had a faculty advisor, although it's possible that I missed something. The faculty at Swarthmore, were, to their great credit, committed to teaching undergraduates. Many of them were also committed to teaching students about issues of social justice and social criticism - I minored in Sociology specifically so that I could study Critical Theory. They were great at talking the talk.

But they had no idea how to walk the walk. Some of them were personally active in politics. But a professor providing guidance to students on how to be a leader of a political organization just was not part of the social fabric of the college. The College had other means of encouraging students to be politically active - one of the most prestigious scholarships was the Lang scholarship, provided by Eugene Lang, chairman of the board of managers. It required the recipient to take on an off-campus social change project. The college also provided grants to some students who engaged in social change projects - I got $400 to support my internship when I went to Washington to intern for the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. That was great. The College also provided Amnesty International with some money out of the student activities budget, which was good. But I also had an internship with Amnesty's Mid-Atlantic regional office in Washington, and didn't get any financial support for that.

Over the course of a couple of years running Amnesty International on campus, and two internships in Washington fighting the death penalty, I had a grand total of two conversations with faculty/staff about my political activities: once, when someone told me that they were sending me a check for $400 for the grant, and once about a parking ticket (I drove a college van to an Amnesty event).

I never had a single conversation with any Swarthmore faculty about my personal political activism. Never got any guidance about how to make decisions as a leader. Never got any advice about what to do when someone in the organization is doing something wrong.

I had lots of conversations, and wrote many papers, about what is wrong with capitalism. This, of course, was a time when my real-world economic experience consisted of summer jobs as a dishwasher. But no conversations about what I personally could actually do to make a difference.
I went to Washington for my internships because I was so sick of theory that I just had to find some way of getting some hands-on practical experience. I arranged my own internships, again with no help whatsoever from anyone at the college. I had two great mentors in Washington: a guy named Jim O'Dea at Amnesty, and a woman named Leigh Dingerson at the NCADP. They both gave me good projects to work on. They were both excellent managers, with real passion for their causes. I am, all these years later, still grateful to both of them. But both of those experiences were completely removed from my college education.

Do I sound a bitter? Maybe just a little. This is one reason that I do not donate money as an alumni to Swarthmore (there are several reasons for that). After I left, the College started paying more attention to this issue: they created a position for someone to provide this guidance. I applied for that job, but didn't get it (the person who was hired was a friend, and an excellent choice). I understand that the College has spent money on building facilities to support student activism. That's all well and good, but too late for me.

I was thrilled to read this column in the WaPo, because the need is urgent.

Just like cars from Detroit, our existing educational models works, but significant advances have taken place in the field, and these models haven't always kept up.

Liberal arts advocates argue that the purpose of a liberal arts education is to teach students "how to think." That's great. For me, however, it was not necessary. I had a fantastic high school education (in suburban Detroit) that taught me how to think. Swarthmore did not teach me how to think - I already knew that. I got some good practice on how to argue, but Swarthmore did not teach me how to think.

What Swarthmore also did not teach me, and what I desperately needed, was how to make decisions. That is an essential duty of leadership - it's what leaders do. The problem wasn't just the lack of mentors, but my particular curriculum. I majored in philosophy, and minored in English and Sociology & Anthropology (S&A is one department at Swat). Philosophers make decisions about theory, but they do not make decisions that affect other people. There weren't a lot of role models for leadership among contemporary women poets or in Joyce's Ulysses. Sociologists may argue about what leadership is, but there aren't many opportunities to practice it in the classroom.

The problem with lack of mentors was particular to Swarthmore in the late 1980's, but there is a general porblem teaching leadership on American campuses. One thing leaders have to do is evaluate risk. But professors with tenure are insulated from risk. Leaders take risks in the hopes of reaping rewards. Any good leader is going to have their share of failures, just by virtue of being human. But any good leader is also going to be someone who learns from their failures.

Professors, however, being insulated from failure by tenure, do not have the same opportunity to learn from risks taken that do not work out. So professors, at least those with tenure, will probably be poor teachers of leadership. Tenure grants them permission to create impregnable, and very intellectually sophisticated, defense mechanisms justifying why their ideas don't match reality. My favorite joke about economists is that an economist is someone who sees something working in practice, and wonders if it will work in theory.

I would love to see more efforts at teaching leadership on American college campuses. What any effort to do so, however, must take into account one thing: there are already many high-profile people at colleges who teach students how to lead, how to make difficult decisions, and how to motivate others to achieve a common goal. These people take risks, and are held accountable when they fail.

These people are called "coaches."

Stanley Fish on the Problem of Tenure, Academic Freedom, and Free Speech

Stanley Fish is a blogger at the NY Times who is a distinguished professor of law. I like his stuff occasionally, but can't say I'm a huge fan. But I respect an academic who's very engaged with the public. This week he has a fascinating post about tenure and academic freedom. He explored this theme in his previous week's post, about a guy named Denis Rancourt (remember that name), a professor of physics at the University of Ottawa who has taken the cause of academic pretty to its logical extreme; he has not only been fired, but banned from the campus (read Fish's post for the graphic details).

The issue at hand is what responsibilities professors have to the university that pays them, and what to do when those responsibilities conflict with academic freedom. Rancourt, the guy in Ottawa takes the position that his responsibility is to undermine the university in the name of answering to a higher truth. Having worked in the real world ever since graduating from college, I find this a bizarre idea, but, having gone to a college that was a training ground for academics (Swarthmore), I'm not unfamiliar with the logic.

Most academics realize that they have responsibilities to their instiutions, to their departments, their colleagues, and their students. But a fair number also subscribe to what Fish calls "academic exceptionalism," the idea that, as academics, they are somehow better than the mere mortals who do not have advanced degrees. I am, again, familiar with this concept, largely because I have been on both sides of it. Swarthmore was very much a training ground for academics. Many of my friends went on to careers in academia (and a fair number started down that path, then diverged away from it). I majored in philosophy. Swarthmore had such a good track record of training philosophy professors that a professor there told me that there were more professors of philosophy with undergrad degrees from Swat than from any other college or university. And that was absolute numbers, not a percentage.

I once asked that same professor what the purpose of philosophy is. I figured that if there is one group of professionals who will be able to answer deep questions about the meaning of their occupation, it would be philosophy professors. This professor answered that I had a talent for asking difficult questions in an innocent tone of voice (when a philosophy professor tells you that you are asking him a difficult question, that means he is very impressed). But then he told me that, for him, the purpose of philosophy was to offer a critique of society.

Yet again, I've been on both sides of that perspective. I struggled with this idea of philosophy providing a "critique of society" because I wanted to buy into it. I wanted to believe that I could make the world a better place just by sitting around and thinking.

But there is a deep arrogance in the idea that your profession bestows upon you the right to "critique society." First, it implies that you understand society well enough to critique it. That may or may not be true. But there is, of course, a moral element to "critiquing society." To do so is to grant yourself the right to dictate to other people how they should act. To assume that you have the right to tell other people how to behave because of your job seems to me extraordinarily arrogant.

Of course, in a democracy we are all social critics. But we also respect each other's right to engage in the practice of arguing about politics.

This arrogance is part of what Fish is writing about when he describes "academic exceptionalism." He explores where this leads, and doesn't like where it takes him. Neither do I. One place it leads to is a denial of responsibility. Fish doesn't mention this, but it occurs to me that if you set up a situation where people are not responsible to other people, you will attract people who are irresponsible. I think that explains, in part, the phenomenon of people like this idiot Rancourt. They don't want to be responsible, and they are enabled by an environment in which they are allowed to develop highly intellectually sophisticated justifications for not being held responsible for the impact that their ideas have on other people. There's another term for this. It's called being a jerk.

One other aspect that Fish doesn't get into is that even if individuals in colleges are not held accountable for their ideas, the institutions ultimately will be. I was very disillusioned by my education, for a number of reasons. I have a love/hate relationship with my undergraduate alma mater. It was the perfect place for me when I started there, but I outgrew it quickly, without realizing it. So I wasn't happy by the time I graduated.

I have been the recipient of many requests for donations from Swarthmore since graduating. I have answered almost none of them. This is one way that accountability works its slow, slow way through the system; students are affected by the ideas of their professors. Then those students become alumni. And just about every college and university in this country depends on alumni donations for support. If the disillusionment that I experienced ever reaches critical mass, we will have an accountability moment for colleges and universities of catastrophic proportions. And professors will yell and scream and bitch and moan and protest and issue demands and be angry and confused because they will have no idea what hit them.

I am a strong proponent of academic freedom, but I am a strong opponent of tenure. I do not think academic freedom requires tenure; I think it requires strong leadership from each institution's managers. Of course, it also helps to have strong endowments.

There may have been a time when tenure was necessary. I'm sure there are still many professors who benefit from it. But those with tenure pay a high cost, and that is in respect. There's a reason professors are stereotyped as living in ivory towers; because many are not held accountable for their ideas, as the rest of us are. I make a key distinction between professors in the hard sciences and those in the social sciences and humanities. I have a great deal of respect for physicists, biologists, chemists, etc., because they are held accountable for their ideas by reality; they are answerable to their experiments. Some social scientists are good enough scientists that they are also answerable to their experiments. But many are not. Philosophy professors, of course, are very much in this latter camp. They are intellectually disciplined by the logic of their arguments.

There was a time when colleges and universities were bastions of enlightened and progressive thinking in a world where those qualities were not common. That is no longer the case. Colleges and universities have been extraordinarily successful at educating generations of students to be intellectually curious, to ask questions, to debate great ideas. Professors have, in a sense, created their own competition. Swarthmore generally ranks very high among liberal arts colleges in the U.S. News and World Report rankings; I don't think it has ever dropped lower than three. Williams and Amherst are usually the other top two. But Swarthmore's competition is no longer Williams, or Amherst, or Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. It isn't Michigan, Berkeley, or UVA.

The great reason that academic exceptionalism is increasingly an anachronistic idea is that the centers of englightened and progressive thinking are no longer places like Harvard and Berkeley, but Google, McKinsey, and the NY Times. Great ideas are now debated in places like the ACLU; Skadden, Arps; Brookings; Kleiner, Perkins; and DreamWorks.

At some point the idea of academic exceptionalism is going to collide with the limitations of how much we, as a society, are willing to pay for college education. When that happens, the arrogance of the people who responded to Stanley Fish with eloquent articulations of their own unique responsibilities towards truth is going to be a poor defense against society's demands for accountability.

Obama and Swarthmore: Rejection city

Just found out a bit of Obama trivia that is relevant to me: he was rejected from Swarthmore. It's a bummer that I can't claim that Obama went to Swarthmore, but I have a feeling it might have been good for him.