A Campus Revolution

This book calls for a revolution on today’s campus in curriculum (more humanities), in teaching methods (more independence for students), and in extracurricular activities (more opportunities for leadership). This chapter makes six recommendations to colleges, and one to college parents. First, bring the goals of students and faculty into alignment. Second, recognize that every teacher teaches ethics. Third, stop teaching altogether if your teaching style makes students passive. Fourth, replace professionally coached teams as much as possible with student sports clubs, and let the students hire their own coaches. Fifth, give students time for extra-curricular activities. Groups that discriminate by race or sex should be discouraged. Sixth (which sums up the first five), trust students to make good decisions for themselves. Finally, parents should let their college-age children grow up.

Tyrant Teaching

None of us professors is as bad as Ionesco’s professor in The Lesson. He kills his students, literally, and gets away with it, thanks to his housekeeper. We, at our worst, merely kill a student’s desire to learn. Administrations tolerate tyrant teachers because of their excellent research, and students put up with them in order to garner A’s. But a tyrannical classroom is no place to develop leadership unless students band together to rebel against it. Professors need to relax their authority; they also need to pull back from trying to cover assigned material. The goal is not for the professor to cover the subject, but for students to learn it.

Finding Courage

Courage appears to be the ability not to be deterred by fear or danger from doing what you ought to do, but this definition leaves many questions unanswered. No one at the human level has perfect courage. For human beings, courage is mainly a commitment to keep developing this sort of ability in a variety of contexts. You cannot develop this or any other virtue entirely on your own. To develop courage, you should have good examples among older people and a community that supports courage. You also need to be immune to false ideas about courage, such as equating it with fearlessness (a quality that is simply stupid). You should also avoid being taken in by false thoughts of cowardice, when others dare you to do bad or stupid things. It is not cowardice to hold back from action for fear of doing wrong.

Facing Complexity

A moral dilemma is a situation from which you cannot escape without doing yourself some moral damage or injury. Human life is fraught with the moral complexity that gives rise to dilemmas. War and other warlike conflicts generate tangles of moral complexity. Leaders in particular face dilemmas when their obligations to their followers conflict with their more general ethical obligations, but anyone trying to stay alive under Stalin’s tyranny had to tell lies, as Nadezhda Mandelstam explains. Machiavelli gives strong reasons for a prince to lie and make false promises, but we must take his advice with caution. Leaders must be trusted, and lying undermines trust. Still, some lies may be justified, and others may be excused; justification and excuse are not the same. This chapter focuses on situations in which it appears that one must tell a lie; it concludes with a discussion of the reasons that count against lying.

Educating Billy

What sort of education would overcome the ignorance that is fatal to Billy Budd? He needs job training, of course, but also knowledge of evil in the real world. He needs to come to a better self-understanding. He needs to cultivate his independence as a counter to his obedience. He also needs to learn to communicate effectively under stress, and for that he will have to master the proper uses of guile. For the Billys in our classroom, I recommend wide experience outside the classroom, as well as training appropriate to their ambitions. Inside the classroom, I recommend classic readings about evil, such as can be found in Thucydides and Machiavelli. I also recommend the most important texts in the history of ethics, especially by Plato and Kant.

Alexander the Great Had Aristotle

Leaders can emerge only under certain conditions; they need opportunities, experience, and education. Some famous leaders from the past have developed without formal education, but Alexander the Great studied with Aristotle. We should look at examples of leaders who changed the world without armies, however. Today, institutions of higher education can provide the necessary education, as well as opportunities and experience; they should do so intentionally in order to make good on their promise to students and parents. Opportunities arise inside and outside the classroom. Students should make the most of these opportunities in order to gain experience as leaders. Freedom is an essential component of opportunity for leadership, since leadership does not flourish in a strict hierarchical community. Education for leadership suits all students; there are many ways of being a leader, and in a healthy organization, every member is prepared to show leadership. Leaders need followers, of course, but good followers develop the same abilities as good leaders. This chapter outlines the main topics that the book will cover.

Summary of Recommendations for Change

This book makes three basic recommendations. First, all degree programs should make room for a curriculum that deals with leadership—both in skills such as communication and in the understanding of the human situation. This curriculum will be especially heavy in the humanities: writing, speaking, history, literature, philosophy. Second, teaching methods in all courses should foster independence and creativity. Any course can be modified to include an element of leadership experience if students are organized in teams with rotating leadership. Third, students everywhere in higher education should be allowed time to flourish outside the classroom in existing clubs or in organizations that they start themselves. At the same time, older organizations that segregate by sex or race should be phased out as quickly as possible.

Facing Evil in Ourselves

Leaders must know themselves in order to measure their limitations as well as their capacity for evil. Such knowledge can be a corrective for leaders’ behavior, as it appears to have been in the case of George Washington’s treatment of prisoners of war. It can also be grounds for compassion over the wrongdoing of others, as illustrated (by its absence) in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Compassion is compatible with justice; it differs from clemency and pity and consists in an understanding of other people’s feelings. Compassion is easily lost by people in authority. And it is easily blocked toward a group’s outsiders. Leaders are responsible for failures of compassion in their teams (as occurred at Abu Ghraib). Socrates dedicated his life to the pursuit of self-knowledge and helped others along the way to realizing their own ignorance.

Teaching Ethical Failure

All teachers teach ethics by the examples they set, so professors must make sure they set good examples. In preparing people for business or war, teachers may fall into the trap of teaching people to take moral holidays, as Sophocles shows in his play, the Philoctetes. Teachers must also realize that they communicate values to their students in more subtle ways. The topics they avoid are significant; shunting ethics to one side or leaving it to the end of a course sends a message. “Gorgias syndrome” means the kind of teaching that puts the focus on winning while ignoring moral values. Placing emphasis on quantitative goals can also eclipse true values. On all topics, professors should believe in the value of what they teach for their students and the community.

Becoming Magnetic

Leaders are magnetic when their good qualities are evident in their action, or, as Socrates would say, when they have beautiful souls. Then they can bring their followers into alignment, as the Earth’s magnetism draws compass pointers everywhere. Beauty of soul comes from commitment to the qualities we look for in leaders and followers: justice, reverence, courage, self-control, wisdom, loyalty, and so on. But commitment is not enough; successful leaders make their qualities shine out. You can develop such commitments and make them shine with the help of a supportive community. According to the ancient Chinese ideal, the perfect leader need only shine, like a star, to give guidance to the people.