The President Speaks on Principle, and a Cloud of Witnesses Surrounds Him

There's, of course, a lot of commentary rolling out now about the statements of President Obama yesterday in favor of marriage equality.  Most readers of this blog will probably have read much of the commentary.  But I thought it might be helpful if I gather a selection of pieces that seem to me to have made valuable points about yesterday's remarks.

Martha Kumar on Robert Gibbs: One Could Have Imagined Something Better

"One could have imagined something different, and better."

Martha Kumar, Towson University professor of political science, commenting on the departure of White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, and the missed opportunity of the Obama administration in crafting a new, healthier, better relationship between the White House and the press.  Kumar is cited in an article on Gibbs by Dan Froomkin at Huffington Post today.

David Korten on An Agenda for a New Economy: Insights for a New Catholic Reformation

Writing about the desperate need to create an agenda for a new economy in the U.S., David Korten notes,

I have abandoned my brief flirtation with the fantasy that Obama might be the exception and that contrary to what I have believed and taught for more than 20 years change might come from the top.

If change comes, the leadership will come from below through citizen action that originates from outside of the institutions that are failing us on so many fronts. Change from below can succeed only when a large number of people have a shared understanding of the roots of the problem and share a vision of the path to its resolution.

The Health Care Debacle and The Possibility of Hope: Fragments from One Spiritual Diary

Yesterday was a remarkable day. Quietly remarkable, in a way that wouldn’t be noticeable to anyone living outside my circle of experience.

I’ve felt lately the pull of a spiritual tide that I can’t quite identify. It’s an impulse—a leading might be a more accurate and traditional description—to create some space for what’s really important to come inside and live there. I have a strong tendency to fill every minute with busywork, a workaholic tendency that militates against the spiritual life.

Which requires a certain amount of emptiness. Because we can’t be filled with spirit unless we have some empty space inside for spirit to fill.

So, without being very intentional about it, I find myself slowing down lately, leaving some empty spaces in the day, letting mind and heart rest a bit. That’s not easy for me to do, because my mind whirs along all the time, jotting notes of articles to read or write, reminding me of birthday cards to send, the mint bed to check in these days of hot weather with no rain, household chores unfinished and supper menus to plan.

One reason, I feel sure, that this tide is running through my soul these days is that, due to the kindness of a number of friends, I have recently had, for the first time in several years, a number of nibbles for at least part-time work to carry us through a time of straitened circumstances to which I've alluded on this blog before. But the very opening to new possibilities provokes in me a need to listen more deeply—in part, because I'm intently aware that in places like Arkansas, which is one large overgrown neighborhood, those who wish to torpedo hopeful new possibilities for someone they regard as beyond the pale can do so very easily, with a phone call here and an insinuation there. And we who are openly and unapologetically gay do continue to be beyond the pale in places like Arkansas, as much in self-professed liberal circles as in reactionary ones.

Yesterday, I woke thinking that I’d simply use the day as a rare retreat day—listening, reading, waiting. And I did that, much of the day, without much systematic attention to doing “spiritual” things, all the while “hearing” a kind of refrain inside: Throw out what’s weighing you down; open space for the unpredictable new.

Nothing much happened as I listened to that refrain. And yet, as the day ended, I realized that something of importance had happened. And that it constituted a quiet lesson to me about the rhythm of emptying-receiving, of giving and being given to, that is at the heart of spiritual life.

First the doorbell rang. I opened the door, and a neighbor from across the street was standing there, holding in her hands a basket of vegetables. She had been to the farmers’ market on the weekend and wanted to share her finds with me—summer squash, cucumbers, new potatoes, and tomatoes.

I had cooked all the potatoes in the house on the weekend, and needed the new potatoes for a dish of goulash I had made for our friend Mary on Sunday as part of my ongoing soup-of-the-week birthday gift to her this year. And I enjoyed the opportunity to visit with a neighbor whom I ought to think about more often, since she has suffered a number of major losses in her family in the past several years.

As I washed the vegetables and put them away, cubing the potatoes for my goulash, the phone rang. It was my aunt, calling to tell me she had baked cranberry-nut bread on the weekend and wanted to bring Steve and me some of it. She takes the daily paper and we don’t, and I had intended to call and ask her for Sunday’s paper, since there was an article I needed to read in it. So her visit brought two gifts at once—the nut bread and the paper I needed to read.

A second surprise gift and a second surprise visit with someone whom Steve and I constantly challenge ourselves to keep in mind and heart, my feisty, independent aunt, who resists depending on anyone but who, like all of us, increasingly needs small favors and assistance as she ages.

Then the mail arrived, and in it was a letter from a friend. With a check in an astonishing amount made out to me. The letter tells me my blogging makes a difference. I suppose the check is a statement of support for the blog.

There’s not a chance I would accept this gift, though I am deeply touched by it—and that’s an even better gift than the check itself. This is a friend who has been kind beyond all measure to Steve and me in the past. When we were forced to leave North Carolina after losing our jobs at the wretched right-wing Catholic school there that effectively ended our careers as theologians, he showed up on our doorstep the night before we moved, a check in hand—in the same amount that he sent yesterday.

On that occasion, we accepted the gift, since moving was stretching us beyond the limit, and those were the years when we had the added responsibility of taking care of my mother, with additional expenses I didn’t track in our budget, because who tracks the flow of money to and from family members at times in which caregiving is taking place?

We took the money on that occasion, that is, with the understanding that when we were able, we’d repay the gift in some way. And we were very happy a few years ago when, after our lives were turned upside down yet again by another faith-based university that also regards gay people as subhuman, we could bring our friend the furniture we’d bought to furnish a new house when we accepted an invitation to come to that Methodist institution, only to have the promises our friend made to lure us there broken within a year.

He had just moved into a new townhouse and had little furniture to fill the rooms. He gives. Constantly. He is a former Methodist who takes seriously John Wesley’s injunction to do all the good we can in all the ways and places we can for as long as we can, though he’d never dream of setting foot inside a Methodist church today, given what his childhood church is doing to gay people while claiming to follow Wesley’s example.

Because he gives without counting the cost, our friend has not set aside many things for himself. It did our hearts good—tremendous good—to be able to bring a truckload of new furniture, dishes, pots and pans, garden things, to him, to help him clean and set up the new place.

And now he is trying to give again, far more lavishly than he should be giving, and I can’t accept such a lavish gift, knowing his situation. But I am moved powerfully by this kindness, and by the vote of confidence in my blog.

And by that third confirmation, in a day of gifts, that life is, as I seem to be intuiting lately, all about giving and receiving, opening spaces inside us for spiritual energy—for love—to fill. This is a message I need to hear in these dark days in which people openly carry assault weapons to political rallies at which the president is appearing. We are in a bad place, as a nation. And things are going to get worse. I feel it in my bones.

When Bob Herbert notes the intent anxiety the health care debacle is causing American citizens, I know he’s right. Because I feel that anxiety in my own body and soul. It weighs me down these days, like some heavy stone appended to my heart.

I can’t think of a time in the recent past when I have felt less hopeful about the future of my country than I do now. When Mr. Obama was elected, an Irish friend of mine who is exceptionally wise—he has more than 90 years of living, studying, teaching, and gardening behind him to fund his wisdom—wrote to say that he and many other Irish people were delighted at what the new president symbolized. To my friend, Obama stands for the hope that the United States will one day awaken from the foolish adolescent dreams that sustained the Reagan and Bush presidencies, and damaged the whole world while Mr. Bush was in power.

But my friend cautioned me: don’t hope for too much. What Mr. Obama can change will be only what the real rulers of the U.S. (and of the world) permit him to change. What he can change will be only what the Wall Street executives, the bankers, the heads of major corporations, the insurance executives allow him to change. Nothing more.

I think about that letter a lot these days. Because it turns out that my Irish friend was right. And, as a result, I feel rather hopeless about the possibility of substantive, meaningful change in the U.S. The reins of power are not in the hands of the people who elected Mr. Obama and gave a Democratic majority to Congress. They are not in the hands of the 72% of Americans who want a public option in health care. They are in the hands of the men my Irish friend’s letter names as our real rulers. Firmly in those hands.

I continue to agree with thinkers including Paul Krugman who argue that the president’s lack of leadership is a serious obstacle to progressive change at this troubled point in our nation’s history. Krugman continues to lament Mr. Obama’s lack of passion for the moral imperatives he articulated so courageously and clearly during his campaign. And I share the lament.

But I’m also aware that the president is up against some serious obstacles (though his temerity about leading makes those obstacles more serious): he’s up against the treachery of members of his own party who belong lock, stock, and barrel to big business and the religious right; he has to face racism so endemic and toxic in this nation that we the people willingly permit gun-toting hooligans to dog his steps, when even a peep of protest at gatherings held by Mr. Bush was immediately and ruthlessly suppressed. He has also surrounded himself with soulless pragmatists who care more about playing cynical beltway political games that are all about winning, than they care about the mandate for progressive change this president (and Congress) was given in the last election.

And he’s up against Republicans that mumble about morality and scream about religion while belying everything the major religions stand for at their core, in their most cherished convictions. Above all, he’s up against powerful economic interests that simply will not relent, will not relinquish the control they have gained in several decades of neoconservative dominance that were, in the final analysis, all about consolidating that control.

And it may simply be too late to change things, when the mechanisms of that control are now so firmly in place and so omnipresent, especially in the mainstream media. And not just in the United States, but around the globe.

Barack Obama's Character: Pragmatism As the Compulsive Propititation of Unnecessary Partners

Illuminating commentary on Barack Obama's character (and the implications of his character traits for his leadership and thus for the nation) by David Bromwich of Yale today, at Huffington Post. Some significant quotes:

His instinct is to have all the establishments on his side: Wall Street, the military, the mainstream media; the most profitable corporations in all but the most signally failing industries; and that movable establishment (which disappears and reconstitutes itself), the quick-take pulse of popular opinion on any given issue.

And,

"His pragmatism is what is overwhelming him," said Obama's Chicago doctor about his approach to health care. A surprising and accurate insight. Pragmatism is supposed to trim; but taken to the circuitous lengths Obama allows, pragmatism is another word for the compulsive propitiation of unnecessary partners. It expands the work and blunts the achievement of reform.

Accurate analysis, it seems to me, and analysis that portends real problems for an administration that will not make the hard decisions necessary to implement the changes for which a popular majority provided a clear mandate in the last election. As Bromwich points out, Obama claims to follow Saul Alinsky's notion of community reform, which moves from identifying a problem that needs to be solved, through the conflictual stages of analyzing and coping with that problem, to a final stage of resolution in which attempts are made to those who have been engaged in conflict back together.

Yet (again Bromwich), Obama appears eager to move from the identification of the problem to the resolution stage without the conflict--and the choice--stage. This is, in my view, a recipe for stasis. It is akin to Rowan Williams's proposal for futher study and endless discussion of the gay issue in the Anglican communion.

Eventually, the "paralysis of analysis" must be broken (as Martin Luther King, Jr., noted), and hard decisions must be made about where moral imperatives point--about the action to which they point. That's what leadership is about, in the final analysis. And Obama's unwillingness to engage in this kind of hard decision-making represents a tremendously disappointing abdication of leadership to many of us who hoped for so much more from this administration.

The Revolving-Door Syndrome: More on the Hazards of The Corporate CEO Model of Educational Leadership

I said earlier that I had made my final post for the day--but I should know better than to say that anything I plan or do is ever final. I'm logging in now to share some thoughts provoked by a Huffington Post article today linking to a story by Christian Rexrode at the McClatchy website, which announces that three more of Bank of America's board of directors have just quit. That brings the total of those who have resigned from the 2009-2010 class of directors to nine--half of the board.

This story of pronounced organizational instability jogs my memory to post something that I intended to say in a story about the sociopathic CEO and the application of that concept to leaders in higher education.

One of the negative consequences that those who study leadership in higher education are tracking in colleges and universities which adopt the corporate CEO style of leadership is the destruction of collegiality by presidents acting like CEOs on many college campuses. The corporte CEO style of leadership in universities is corrosive to the ties that bind a college community together--and, in this respect, it's corrosive to everything that colleges and universities are supposed to be about.

The concept of "collegiality" stresses the calling of a community of scholars and students to "bind together" in the pursuit of truth. The word "collegiality" comes from Latin roots meaning "bind" and "with."

The corporate CEO style of leadership disrupts collegiality, by imposing on institutions that are meant to employ a model of shared governance a top-down, and often autocratic, governance model. In the corporate world, CEOs are by their nature top dogs, the ones who make the decisions and hand them down to those "beneath" the CEO, who are expected to implement the decisions without questioning.

This model of leadership is a bad fit for higher education because higher education depends, at its most fundamental level, on a concept of leadership that values collaborative decision making involving the whole university community. This model of leadership sees decision-making as a shared venture, in which a community of scholars and students collaborate to generate ideas, discuss them, and then craft institutions to facilitate the implementation of those ideas.

At its worst--when a university president-as-corporate CEO moves toward that sociopathic edge described by Hartmann in the posting I discussed yesterday--an autocratic university president who views herself or himself as a CEO can create total insability throughout an entire institution. When his or her power is unchecked by governing boards who see no incompatibility between the corporate CEO style of management and university leadership, an autocratic university president can produce a revolving-door syndrome in the institution she or he leads, such that key offices see one person after another moving through them, causing serious instability in the whole organization.

That kind of instability, especially when it occurs in key university positions, undermines continuity, leading to institutional chaos, since the rules are constantly shifting, the chain of command is new every day, and no one knows to whom to report or what the expectations of the new supervisor might be. Such organizational chaos, induced from the top by autocratic leaders employing a corporate CEO style of management antithetical to the core values of higher education, seriously impedes a college or university's mission. It siphons off precious energy the college community needs to devote to the pursuit of its mission, since that energy has to be devoted, instead, to constantly adapting to new supervisors and new ways of doing business.

The loss of energy for the university's mission, in turn, causes misssteps that can lead to problems with accrediting bodies, whose primary function is to assure that universities have a clear mission, pursue that mission with integrity, and have strong processes of self-correction when the mission is not being pursued successfully. And when accrediting bodies begin to look askance at a university that is faltering in its pursuit of its mission due to autocratic leadership, donations from granting bodies and the university's stakeholders begins to dip, as well, since donors are hesitant to give funds to a university that seems to be spinning out of control with organizational chaos, a revolving-door syndrome in key offices, and loss of energy and focus for its mission.

It is the responsibility of a governing board, of course, to rein in leaders whose leadership style induces constant organizational instability and chaos, a revolving door in key offices, and a loss of energy for a university's mission, with consequent loss of credibility by the university. Unfortunately, in some institutions, the governing board is the source of these problems, in that it deliberately enables the out-of-control, or even sociopathic, autocratic university leader because she or he appears to be a tough, decisive CEO in the corporate style.

To the extent that the governing boards of American colleges and universities continue to refashion institutions of higher education around ideals and models drawn from corporate experience, which are ill-suited to the mission of higher education, and to the extent that boards choose and keep empowering leaders who employ those corporate models even when strong evidence suggests that such leadership is harming colleges and universities, we're in trouble, as a culture. We're in trouble because we depend, all of us, on the ability of our institutions of higher learning to produce leaders with values and skills necessary to keep democracy alive.

And that's not the goal of corporate culture, in most of its embodiments--not in any shape, form, or fashion. As the "Spiritual Autobiography" of a significant leader of higher education in the 20th century, Mary McLeod Bethune, who founded Bethune-Cookman University, repeatedly notes, higher education has a crucial role to play in sustaining democratic institutions, by inculcating in students the core values necessary to keep participatory democracy alive. When we allow the values of corporate culture to dominate our institutions of higher learning, we court trouble for our culture as a whole.

Thom Hartmann on the CEO as Sociopath: Applications for Higher Education

Thom Hartmann posted an interesting piece at the Alternet site a few days ago. He suggests that, to be a successful CEO—particularly in the corporate, for-profit sector—one needs to have sociopathic tendencies.

Hartmann is a trained psychotherapist as well as a journalist. In this piece, he argues that to make decisions on an ongoing basis that ruin the lives of other human beings, and to be willing to reap rewards for doing that as a “leader,” one has to have sociopathic tendencies. How otherwise to put your head on the pillow at night (and take the big paycheck to the bank), without ever wondering about the lives of those you destroy?

The heart of Hartmann’s argument:

CEOs of community-based businesses are typically responsive to their communities and decent people. But the CEOs of most of the world's largest corporations daily make decisions that destroy the lives of many other human beings.

Only about 1 to 3 percent of us are sociopaths -- people who don't have normal human feelings and can easily go to sleep at night after having done horrific things. And of that 1 percent of sociopaths, there's probably only a fraction of a percent with a college education. And of that tiny fraction, there's an even tinier fraction that understands how business works, particularly within any specific industry.

Thus there is such a shortage of people who can run modern monopolistic, destructive corporations that stockholders have to pay millions to get them to work. And being sociopaths, they gladly take the money without any thought to its social consequences.

I think Thom Hartmann is onto something. As I’ve noted in previous postings, I’ve found this pattern of academic-leader-as-sociopathic-CEO on the rise in institutions of higher learning, and I believe that it’s a pattern that ought to concern everyone in American society, due to the trend-setting influence of higher education in our culture.

As university boards of trustees are dominated more and more by those with ties to the corporate world (corporate attorneys, business leaders, church leaders who run big church corporations, etc.), boards of trustees look more and more for presidents who think like CEOs, who act like CEOs, who proudly profess to be CEOs rather than academic leaders. And the consequences for the institutions such CEO-presidents lead could not be more dismal.

Academic inquiry and academic excellence suffer in these institutions, because faculty are exploited and know they’re exploited. Some academic CEO-presidents gleefully undermine faculty governance and faculty rights, ignore due process in firing faculty, threaten faculty members with reprisal if faculty ask critical questions: they reduce faculty to the level of dispensable workers-cum-things in a labor pool without the protections from workplace harassment long afforded to academics to enable them to engage in serious thought and serious research.

This approach to academic life undermines academic excellence in the grossest way possible, by making faculty frightened to think, speak, publish, and teach. In institutions governed by fear, where a ruthless CEO-president can fire at will (and there are such institutions of higher learning out there), faculty become so intimidated that they will not open their mouths even when academic integrity is at stake.

I have seen a case like this first-hand, and it has been sobering to watch. The president-CEO whose behavior I’ve observed closely, since I have had to work closely with her, actually calls herself a CEO—and proudly so. Her pattern, by now a well-established one, is to go into a relatively stable academic institution and immediately produce such chaos that the institution starts to malfunction, and then falls on financial hard times.

The chaos results from a pathological tendency of this leader to imagine that even those she has placed in positions of trust, and needs to trust in order to keep her institution functioning, are conspiring against her. When she begins to distrust a member of her own team, she actually targets that person and begins actively subverting his or her work, to lay a foundation for firing him or her with allegations that the team member did not work hard enough or competently enough.

The economic hard times this president-CEO induces through her deliberate creation of institutional chaos then become an excuse to fire more faculty at will—targeted faculty whom the president suspects of being enemies—without due process or strong proof of financial exigency. This, in turn, leads to negative media attention and negative scrutiny from accrediting bodies and academic watchdog agencies, who censure the schools led by this president. And the negative media attention and censuring by academic bodies in turn causes further attrition of funding to the school from donors who would otherwise support the school’s mission, but become concerned that its current leader is undermining the mission.

I’ve become convinced that this person’s behavior does, indeed, have a very strong sociopathic basis. She seems tragically incapable of viewing the other human beings around her, including members of her own academic team, as human. She treats people as objects—dispensable objects to be moved around at her whim on any given day, and when she has grown tired of those objects or suspicious of them, to be discarded like used tissue, with nary a thought about the consequences of such treatment for their human lives.

To behave that way, and to do so over and over again, even when the consequences for oneself are painful (e.g., negative media attention, complaints to academic watchdog bodies, lawsuits), one has to be sick, I’ve concluded. One has to be incapable of learning to change one's dysfunctional patterns, even when those patterns cause one increasing pain. This is a very specific kind of soul-sickness, a soul-sickness rooted in a remarkable capacity of a CEO to view other human beings as less human than herself, as, in fact, dispensable objects.

The corporate world rewards such sociopathic behavior in its CEOs by paying them big bucks. Sadly, the academic world has begun to do the same, as it makes dollar signs rather than academic integrity its bottom line—as its governing boards do this, that is.

In the case I’m discussing above, though the CEO-president in question has now replicated the pattern I’m describing at each institution she leads, her governing boards have stood behind her. Her ruthless, inhumane treatment of her employees is justified as good economic stewardship, necessary hard-nosed pragmatic decision making to keep an institution economically viable.

When this approach to academic leadership is allowed to go unchallenged in our society, and when it’s allowed to become prevalent throughout higher education, we’re in trouble as a society. Higher education is not, in the final analysis, about making big bucks. It should not be about that goal, at least.

It should be about producing leaders who have sound values necessary to keep democracy alive. We fund all institutions of higher learning, both public and private, lavishly because of the social contract colleges and universities have made with our culture, to use those funds to produce strong, ethically grounded leaders with the skill to build democratic institutions for the next generation.

When we allow sociopaths to run our universities, and to justify their sociopathic behavior by claiming that they are simply being good CEOs, we’re headed for big trouble as a society. Academic leaders who betray core democratic values in how they run a university teach an unhappy lesson about values to the students of their university.

As I've noted in previous postings about this topic, before it loses its soul definitively, American higher education would be well advised to re-examine the philosophy of some of the prophetic founding figures of values-oriented, transformative higher education, including Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder of Bethune-Cookman University. In her "Spiritual Autobiography," Dr. Bethune notes the foundational significance of institutions of higher learning in imparting the values necessary for democracy to thrive, as she concludes, “In this atomic age, when one small materialistic possession has wrought fear among peoples of the world, I am convinced that leadership must strive hard to show the value of these spiritual tools which are as real as anything we touch or feel, and far more powerful."

Mr. Obama Reaches Out to Progressive Bloggers re: Health Care: Too Little, Too Late?

There’s much important discussion (e.g., here and here) right now in the blogosphere about President Obama’s recent confab with progressive bloggers, as he appeals for support for his initiative to reform health care. This outreach is essential, if this crucial social reform is to be enacted under Obama’s presidency.

It’s essential because the Republican party intends to do all it can to stop health care reform in its tracks. The GOP knows that if this one reform is pushed through by the new administration, the fate of the party of angry old white men will be sealed: health care reform will consolidate the Democratic hold on the White House and Congress for the foreseeable future. And so the Republicans are willing to block health care coverage for millions of needy American citizens, even as they argue that they represent the moral high road and defend Christian values in the public square.

It is particularly disappointing to see a Catholic, African-American leader like Michael Steele try to block health coverage for all Americans, when his own religious community strongly supports the need for health coverage for all citizens, and laments the lack of health coverage for the neediest among us. Because poverty affects African Americans in the U.S. disproportionately, a significant percentage of African-American citizens lack access to good health care.

I applaud the president’s outreach to the progressive blogging community, re: the health care issue. At the same time, I’m of the opinion that this outreach is too little and too late. As I have predicted in many previous postings about the president’s betrayal of progressive supporters, while Mr. Obama has dilly-dallied, tried to build futile bridges with the Republican party and the Christian right, and refused to commit himself to key aspects of the progressive platform on which he campaigned (e.g., immediate abolition of don’t ask, don’t tell), his poll numbers have begun to dip, and the forces of resistance to him have begun to recoup strength.

The honeymoon period is over, and having alienated his staunchest supporters—progressive ones, who include many members of the LGBT community—the president is now casting about for support for policies he should have been steadfastly pushing forward from the beginning of his administration, when his ratings were high and the power of the opposition was in decisive check. I wholeheartedly agree with Miles Mogulescu when he concludes that the president has shown a “paucity of audacity” in allowing himself to be led through the nose by key advisors who are nothing but pragmatist number crunchers tone-deaf to the ethical implications of leadership.

It is impossible to lead well while ignoring the ethical foundations of good leadership. In my view, the administration of Bill Clinton, which began with promise similar to that of the Obama administration, failed dismally when Mr. Clinton began to cut hard-nosed and ethically bankrupt deals regarding issues like gays in the military. Once he showed himself to be ethically compromised, it was easy for his many opponents to block important aspects of his platform including health care reform.

I had hoped that with President Obama, we would not be in for another round of spineless, morally obtuse Democratic “leadership” which treats the progressive wing of the Democratic party with contempt. Many indicators suggest that, after the considerable damage inflicted on all of us by the Bush administration, the nation as a whole has moved to the left in its expectations and would have strongly supported a wide range of progressive initiatives when the president took office.

The president’s advisors, however, have insisted on playing by the playbook of the early 1990s, and have chosen to ignore the mandate given to Mr. Obama in this election—along with the ardent hope of many Americans for substantive progressive changes to set the nation back on a democratic course following Bush-Cheney. As Pam Spaulding argues very persuasively in a posting yesterday (see the first link above) about Mr. Obama’s appeal to progressive bloggers to support his health care initiative, there has been a fundamental lack of consistency, of coherence, in how President Obama has pursued his progressive platform.

That lack of coherence, which began (just as in the Clinton administration) with a cynical betrayal of promises to the LGBT community and with a gleeful willingness to throw LGBT supporters under the bus, is now undermining the president’s ability to push through the crucial health care reforms many of us so strongly want. I predict—and I do so with great sadness—that Mr. Obama’s inability to articulate and decisively push forward the unambiguous progressive platform for which so many of us voted will undermine everything that he now seeks to do as president, and will succeed in re-empowering the Republican party and the religious right.

Leadership and Kairos: The Gay-Rights Tipping Point and Moral Implications for Leaders

Sharon Olds says, “When you speak from your real spot, people are not indifferent,” and Thoreau (Walden) notes, “Our whole life is startlingly moral.”

And I realize as I think about both quotations that my previous reflections on the moral basis of leadership and its connection to securing human rights for gay persons as the civil rights challenge of our time contain a number of assumptions that are never clearly spelled out, and which may cause some readers to miss my point. Because I haven’t articulated the “real spot” from which I’m speaking . . . .

And here’s that real spot: lately, I’ve been watching the horrifying fragmentation of a leader I once admired and supported, the demise of her effectiveness as a leader, the eclipse of her reputation—all rooted in kairotic decisions this leader made about gay persons intimately connected to her as a self-professed transformative leader. At a critical turning point in her career as an academic leader, this administrator was faced with a life-altering decision either to stand by her gay friends and supporters, or to repudiate them. To stand up for what she claimed to believe about gay people and gay rights, or to prove herself false in making those claims.

She chose the latter. And her career is falling apart as a result. The decline in her ability to provide sound, effective leadership in the academic institution she serves is rooted—absolutely so—in crucial choices she has made first to ditch and then to attack a number of gay persons who had been among her strongest and most persistent supporters.

In making the decision to behave this way, this leader gave a clear signal to those she leads that her leadership rests on shaky moral foundations, and the considerable support she had managed to build up for her vision and her strategic plan because people bought into the values underlying both began to evaporate. She is now at a point at which she is embattled on all sides, unable to garner support from almost any quarter, and subject to constant scrutiny and critique, no matter what she does.

People now talk about this leader as someone who would be willing to do almost anything to anybody, no matter how vicious, to save her own skin. If she could treat her friends who happen to be gay the way she chose to treat them at the turning-point moment in her career, while professing to oppose homophobia, what might she do to anyone who has the misfortune to incur her wrath, they ask.

What makes this situation horrifying—tragic, to be precise—is that it could have been avoided. This leader could have come to the kairotic crossroads and walked down the other path, the path consistent with what she claimed to value in academic life: opening doors for the dispossessed, creating an inclusive dialogic community of scholars, helping that community engage the culture at large through public discussions of important issues, and so forth.

Tragic, too, because I happen to know that a number of this leader’s strongest advocates—including the gay persons she kicked to the curb when it was expedient to do so—begged her to take the path she did not take. And warned her that, in taking a path leading to moral bankruptcy, she would tear apart everything she had sought to build as an academic leader, and would destroy her reputation.

In some cases, it clearly makes a huge difference—all the difference in the world—when leaders undermine the moral foundations of their leadership. Granted, this has not always been the case, when gay lives are at stake.

There have been times, in fact, and there are still places, in which leaders actually consolidate their leadership by marginalizing gay persons. The leader whose demise I’m watching works in a church-related college. She is one of several female leaders under whose administrations I was happy to serve in church-owned colleges or universities, precisely because these were women leaders. I think it’s extremely important to create social institutions that provide women as much opportunity as men have to fulfill their talents and exercise leadership.

Because this academic leader works for a church-related college, some of her counselors have persistently cautioned her to take a cautious gradualist approach to gay issues. Some of these counselors have told her to keep silence about gay issues, because those issues are too volatile for most church-affiliated folks to deal with today, and she will impair her reputation if she becomes too identified with gay people and gay causes.

And that approach has worked effectively in any number of church-affiliated colleges and universities for years now: force gay colleagues and employees to remain closeted, and threaten them with punishment if they come out of the closet. While claiming to stand for love and justice, seek to destroy the reputations of gay colleagues and employees who have displeased you, by insinuating every base thing possible about them, knowing that they have little legal recourse to defend themselves in many areas of the country and in many church-related colleges.

And when one thinks about the way power has been stacked (and used) in many church-affiliated colleges for years, one can see how close to impossible it has been for gay members of academic communities to fight and win: I have seen church-related institutions in which leaders use surveillance devices to spy on those they target, and armed guards to intimidate them; in which they compile bogus dossiers full of manufactured documents to support their case against employees they have targeted; in which fancy attorneys earn huge salaries while assisting in the destruction of the livelihood and reputations of gay persons, even as they have to know that their behavior, as advocates of justice, is despicable. And in which boards of trustees sit by in silence as all of this takes place . . . .

However, the climate in American higher education today is rapidly moving away from such homophobic practices. The clear trend in higher education is to open the door as wide for gay persons today as the academy has sought to open it in the past for people of color and women. Though churches and their institutions continue to drag up the rear, it is increasingly difficult to be a persuasive, well-regarded leader in American higher education today, even in church colleges, and to keep silence about gay people and gay issues, or, worse, to engage in overt discriminatory behavior against gay persons.

I want to sketch a context here for a sea-change in some cultures, in which it becomes a moral imperative to oppose homophobia, to break silence about the lives of gay persons and about how saying nothing in the face of injustice implicates one in injustice affecting those lives. Up until recently, the prevailing wisdom in many political quarters, including among many liberal Democratic leaders, is that one would be exceedingly foolish to say too much about gay people and gay issues, or to align oneself too closely with gay lives and causes. The price of solidarity was too high . . . .

That wisdom is becoming dross before our eyes. The sea-change that I have described in American higher education, which made it unwise for the leader who undermined her leadership by repudiating her gay supporters to refuse solidarity with these supporters, is happening right now in American culture at large, and in American political culture in particular.

Perhaps it was wise even a year or so ago to approach gay people and gay lives gingerly in the political realm. Following Kerry’s defeat, there was all sort of whispering in Democratic circles about how the Democratic party had shot itself in the foot by advocating gay rights at a time in which the prevailing trend in American culture was against enlarging the sphere of rights for gay persons.

In my view, we are now at a tipping point in our culture in which leaders who fail to see the extremely important moral implications of gay rights at this point in history will undermine their effectiveness as leaders, if they do not speak out now. Right now. Not down the road. Now, when speaking out matters tremendously, because it decisively helps to tip the balance.

The understanding of what is moral, when it comes to gay issues and gay lives, is rapidly shifting, right at this moment, in our culture. A religious right which only a few months ago continued to celebrate its exclusive ownership of the word "moral" when it comes to consideration of gay issues is finding that the word has slipped from its hands and now belongs, in the mind of many Americans, rightfully to those who support and defend gay human beings, far more than it does to the morally bankrupt leaders of the religious right.

I began this reflection by sketching a kairotic moment in the career of someone I once admired, in which her savage treatment of her gay supporters doomed her career. I am using the word “kairotic” deliberately here.

The prevailing "wisdom" that is rapidly coming to be unwisdom in our cultural and political life is the wisdom of chronos, wisdom dependent on taking the long view of history, calculating this or that trend against the backdrop of gradually unfolding time. Political wisdom often depends on making sound prudential judgments against precisely such a backdrop.

But within the gradually unfolding, long span of chronos, there is also occasionally a significant interruptive moment, the moment of kairos, in which our pragmatic judgments are put to the test, and we must choose: this path or the other? To take a stand or to remain silent?

Kairotic moments demand a choice. We really have no option except to respond to them, yea or nay. It is in their nature to demand a response. Martin Luther King, Jr., realized that point brilliantly when, against the prevailing wisdom of many advisers, he chose—because he had no choice—to break silence and condemn the Vietnam War. Even though he was told that doing so would doom the civil rights movement, by diluting the concentrated force of its zeal for rights for people of color, by bringing issues of war and peace into the picture.

Lyndon B. Johnson saw kairos staring him in the face, too, when he became president, and, against the advice of many wise counselors who told him that the Democratic party would pay a steep price in the South if he promoted civil rights, he did what was right rather than expedient—the only thing he could do—and led the nation finally out of the legal segregation that persisted in many areas of the country despite decades of opposition to segregation.

The only thing he could do, that is, if he wished to exercise any leadership at all, in any area at all, because in the final analysis, leadership is always moral, always susceptible to the intrusive demands of kairotic moments—and how could it be otherwise, when “our whole life is startlingly moral”?

The New President and Human Rights of Gay Citizens: Continued Discussion

And, yes, the discussion of President Obama's silence about gay people and gay issues at a time in which these issues are at the forefront of national awareness and conversations continues (here). UPDATE: and still more discussion (here) of the new president's silence in the face of the biggest civil rights challenge of our period.

And my own position (here and here) remains unchanged: effective leadership has a strong moral underpinning. And these issues are, in the final analysis, moral issues. They are moral in a much broader and more profound sense than the narrow fixation on pelvic morality in some Christian traditions recognizes.

Nothing can be more profoundly moral than the question of whether a group of human beings is fully human and deserving of the full range of human rights that others enjoy. When a group of human beings is unfairly stigmatized and pushed to the social margins, those human beings suffer, and the unmerited suffering of others has a claim on anyone who pretends to be moral.

These moral questions are at the center of an important national discussion right now, one that mirrors similar discussions about race in the past. Had we waited for nationwide consensus in those conversations about race, before we moved to address the injustice of systemic, historic racism in America, we would still be talking.

It took decisive leadership to move the nation to a consensus that some sections of the nation (notably the same southeastern states which now fight tooth and nail against humane treatment of gay citizens) bitterly opposed. In my view, Mr. Obama's response to the human rights questions now facing the nation through its gay citizens and those who stand in solidarity with us will either make or break his presidency--not just for gay citizens, but for all citizens.

It is a time for leadership. I call on the new president, who has my wholehearted support, to offer it in this crucial area now.

Arne Duncan as Education Secretary: Reflections on Obama's Cabinet Choices

I’ve been ho-hum about most of Mr. Obama’s cabinet appointments. But the choice of Arne Duncan as education secretary interests me and even gives me reason for muted hope. It’s not that any of the previous selections have struck me as particularly bad. They have just been unexciting.

Most seem sound enough, if weighted a bit more on the side of centrist expertise than I’d have hoped. And by “centrist,” I’m referring not only to the ideological orientation of the cabinet choices. I’m referring as well to the provenance of those being selected. They’re from the usual power centers of American society; they have the predictable educational pedigree of such selections. They represent, in other words, the very folks who have led us right to the brink of economic collapse—and that concerns me.

The appointment of Arne Duncan does grab my attention, though. I knew next to nothing about Duncan before the appointment. What I’m reading strikes me as hopeful. I like that he has managed to maintain positive ties to the teachers’ union in Chicago while running a major metropolitan school system. He supported the failed plan to start a high school for gay-lesbian youth in Chicago—a good plan for a valuable project, which should have been implemented.

And, according to today’s New York Times, Duncan is a strong advocate for an initiative dear to the new president’s heart—an enhanced early childhood education program for youth across the nation (www.nytimes.com/2008/12/17/us/politics/17early.html?partner=p). This is an initiative we sorely need.

It’s no secret that the American educational system is in trouble—dire trouble. And at all levels. What seems to escape the attention of a public infatuated with scores “proving” that pupils can read, write, and cipher adequately (or proving the opposite, which is, unfortunately, more often the case) is that a good education is about more than acquiring basic skills.

It’s about entrée. It’s about ability to contribute in a participatory democracy. It’s about access to power and privilege in a society in which power and privilege (and the world’s goods) are inequitably distributed.

The most scandalous failure of our current educational system is its apparent inability to level the playing field by drawing the youth of marginalized communities inside. We have spent several decades lamenting the lack of basic skills among American students, and punishing educators and schools that work hard to inculcate those skills, while ignoring the most salient—the central and glaring—fact about our schools’ shortcomings. This is their inability to begin the process of educating youth on the margins at the critical early-childhood threshold—to begin the educational process in a way that draws these young folks into education and into the participatory structures of democracy for their entire lives.

Too many of our citizens are left outside. Too many of us not only live on the margins: we are left on the margins. We are left there by an educational system that does almost nothing to educate us, even when it graduates us and offers us degrees.

Early childhood education is critical because the early childhood phase is the make-or-break moment in the educational process. Fail to induct a youngster into the educational system at this threshold moment, and you’ve lost him or her for life. Society has lost this valuable citizen, and the talents this citizen brings to us, forever.

What strikes me as particularly promising about the choice of Arne Duncan for secretary of education is not so much his potential to address the manifold problems of our educational system. It’s his focus on what is the problem of the system, the core problem: its failure to reach children on the margins, particularly at the key moment of early childhood education.

The various educational reforms of recent neoconservative administrations have been, frankly, shell games. They have been shell games because they begin with the assumption that the most significant thing wrong with our educational system is its failure to teach basic skills. From there, they move to the punitive (and polarizing) assumption that schools should be rewarded or penalized on the basis of students’ scores on standardized tests.

What this neoconservative strategy entirely misses is the fact that many American students will never get to the point of meeting society's benchmarks in the areas of reading, writing, and doing math because they have not been reached at all by the educational system. Not, that is, in any way that counts, in any way that allows them to understand the importance of education to their entire lives. Not in any way that allows them to become educated.

They were not reached at the moment when reaching out and drawing in is most important: at the very beginning of their schooling. They will never be adequately taught, these students left behind, because our society and its schools have not cared enough to demonstrate to these marginalized young people their importance to all of us, as they begin their educations.

Until we address that social assumption—the assumption that we can live with marginality and do nothing about it—we will not being educating the majority of our citizens. Not adequately, that is.

And addressing that assumption is definitely going to take reform of how we train those who teach. The education departments of too many of our universities are, frankly, laughable. They are too often staffed by people too woefully uneducated themselves to educate any other human being.

And they are staffed that way from the top down. There are wonderful educators in many of our education departments. There are people in those departments who are willing to wear themselves out trying to reach students.

But these educators rarely control or even exercise much influence over the direction of schools of education. Instead, “professional” “educators” tend to predominate at the top of such departments—and at the helms of universities that sponsor schools of education. “Professional” as in trained—trained bureaucrats.

Many of those heading education departments and entire universities are people with doctorates in fields like education who are shockingly devoid of even the basics of education—of the depth and breadth of a liberal education that comprises wide reading, of interaction with educated people from many different schools of thought, and so forth. Too many professional educators approach the task of education as an administrative game. Too few understand it as what it is when it is done right: the challenge of reaching out and drawing in, particularly of reaching to and drawing in those on the margins.

Too many educators lack this perspective on what education is all about because their educational “training” has taught them to create nifty slide presentations or to crunch numbers in salary scales or how to craft a memo to avoid legal entanglements. But it has not taught them to understand how social structures work or how the human mind and heart function. The education of far too many educational bureaucrats is simply not education at all, in the classic sense of that term.

I hope that Obama and Duncan begin addressing these problems. It is high time that they do so. It is imperative that they do so, if we’re going to begin recovering our democracy.

Doing so will not be easy, however. It will require that they go up against the most powerful and least educated elites in our educational system—folks like the presidents and boards of trustees who run the universities. The folks who command the high salaries while assigning the hard work of education to shockingly underpaid and exploited faculty members such as those Gina Nahai discusses in a Huffington Post article earlier this week (www.huffingtonpost.com/gina-nahai/the-great-shame-of-americ_b_150940.html). (Here's where the good relationship with the Chicago teachers' union will be valuable: the "professional" educators at the top are there because, on the whole, they resist adequate pay for the real educators beneath them.)

As long as the system producing the "educators" who have failed to educate several generations of American youth remains in place, not much is going to change. Nothing much has changed as we have allowed—forced is a better word—our schools to play the numbers game with standardized scores while failing to reach scads of our youngsters in any meaningful way.

And nothing at all will change as long as we allow grossly overpaid, soulless—and yes, corrupt; corrupted by their privilege and power over others—educational “experts” to run our educational shows. How can someone who does not understand or value what his or her own soul says—who does not have the tools to do that, tools provided by a real education—touch the souls of others?

Characteristics of Good Leaders: Mary McLeod Bethune as Mentor to Barack Obama

As Mr. Obama continues to form his leadership team, I’ve been thinking about my advice in the open letter I wrote him as he campaigned at Bethune-Cookman University. I encouraged him to look at the significant 20th-century educational leader, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, as a role model.

I’m thinking these days about what made Dr. Bethune succeed as a leader, someone capable of taking waste land in Florida and building a college on it. In my view, successful leaders (in government, church, and the academy) need to have the following characteristics, in order to succeed:

1. Leaders are values-centered.

They understand the core values of the institution they lead. They communicate those values successfully to various constituencies. They embody these values.

In a democratic society, these values are first and foremost the civil values that make participatory democracy work. These include the willingness to accord respect to others, to recognize the dignity of others, even (and particularly) those pushed to the margins of the power structures of an institution.

They also include the willingness to create a table large enough to allow everyone a place, a table at which every voice is able to be heard, including voices we want to exclude because they ask questions that trouble us. Civic virtues also include a commitment to work against structures of marginalization and exclusion within the institution one leads. Leaders care about whether the civil rights of all employees are guaranteed, about whether employees receive just wages, about whether anyone or any group within an institution is unfairly excluded from rights and privileges, or marginalized by the mainstream.

2. Leaders are inclusive.

As the preceding comments suggest, good leaders practice inclusivity. They deliberately reach beyond group boundary lines to bring the Other inside, to the table. Dr. Bethune practiced such inclusivity by deliberately crafting a cross-racial, cross-gender leadership team in the institution she founded. She also instituted town-gown meetings on her campus to bring together various communities, to allow members of those communities to interact without privilege accorded to any single group.

In her own behavior and life, Dr. Bethune modeled such inclusivity. At a time and in a place in which it was unthinkable for a black woman to form friendships across racial lines, Dr. Bethune practiced the inclusivity she considered essential to good leadership.

3. Leaders are consultative.

Good leaders listen, weigh and take into consideration the views of others, and, in particular, of the leadership team they appoint. Good leaders never seek to stifle the voices of their leadership teams, even when the team members tell the leader what she/he does not want to hear.

Good leaders resist building a cult of personality around themselves. They do not set themselves up to be the authority, the final word, the hammer ready to come down on the head of those who call for respectful hearing of alternative views. They reject perks and privileges offered to them, when these perks and privileges contribute to forming a cult of personality around the leader: good leaders are not found sitting on daises strewn with rose petals. They are at the table listening carefully to those whose judgment they trusted enough to appoint them to a leadership role in their institution.

Good leaders do not take reprisal against members of their leadership team who fulfill their responsibility as advisors by speaking truly. A good leader would never mount a purge of such trusted advisors, by setting the advisors up for failure, by refusing the advisor access to the leader, by meddling in the advisor’s area of responsibility to make it appear the advisor is not doing his/her work, by soliciting (and seeding) negative reports about the advisor who speaks the truth.

A good leader does not surround himself/herself with puppets, with yes-persons who can be manipulated into doing the leader’s will. A good leader chooses skilled advisors, advisors with integrity, not those with shady pasts and compromised character who can easily be used as tools by an egocentric leader.

4. Leaders are empowering.

Good leaders trust those they appoint to leadership positions. They allow these advisors to use their skills for the good of the institution. They do not micromanage. They do not depict themselves as the ultimate authority who knows more about the area in which others lead than those the leader has appointed to supervise that area.

Good leaders do not deliberately subvert the good work of those who work on their leadership team. They do not see good work and expertise as a threat to their own control or their own ego. They gladly allow those working in an advisory capacity to do their jobs, even when the work done in the advisory capacity excels what the leader herself/himself might accomplish in that area.

Institutions with good leaders at their helms are institutions in which all employees feel empowered, hopeful, energized—not beaten down, frightened, targeted, susceptible to bullying and spying by low-life goons who have the ear of the leader. One can immediately sense the energy of empowerment in a well-functioning institution, just as one can immediately feel when employees are harassed by their leader, not appreciated, taken for granted, and made to live in fear.

5. Leadership is mission-driven.

In everything a good leader does, one can see clearly the core values of the institution at work. A good leader refers constantly to those values, seeks advice from everyone in the institution about when and how she or he can more effectively serve those values, or when and how she or he may be betraying those values.

Leaders are committed to the values and mission of their institution first and foremost, not to themselves. When it becomes apparent that a leader is self-serving or is benefiting chiefly herself/himself and a group of cronies, something has gone radically wrong in the institution and its leadership: it has disconnected from the vital center of its mission. Institutions that disconnect in this way from their mission and its values, and which are permitted to do so by trustees or other supervisory boards, inevitably fall apart.

6. Leaders have integrity.

Integrity is about wholeness. This is what the word means, in its root sense. It is about articulating a plan for an institution on the basis of its values, and then carrying that plan through. Good leaders, leaders of integrity, do not constantly interrupt the work of the institution and disrupt what is being built in line with the strategic plan, in order to shift about personnel due to personal whim.

A key sign of an institution whose leader lacks integrity is this constant shifting, due to the personal whims and petty jealousies and pique of the leader. Such an institution itself begins to lack integrity, when such shifts are permitted to take place at the whim of the leader and no one challenges the pathological behavior of the person at top. They lack integrity because the mission, core values, and strategic plan of the institution begin to seem subordinate to the ego-wishes of the leader.

In my view, Mr. Obama can craft an effective leadership team and leadership strategy if he is guided by these principles of effective leadership, which flow from my study of the life and work of Mary McLeod Bethune. In my years working in academic life, I saw well-run institutions whose leaders embodied the preceding principles and built good institutions. I also saw some egregiously shaky institutions, whose egregiously bad leadership caused the institution itself to begin to topple. Because I want to see Mr. Obama succeed, I hope he will think very seriously about the leadership he intends to model as he becomes president, and the kind of leaders he surrounds himself with.

Corporate Greed and American Higher Education: More Signs of Leadership Failure

Troubling news today about the growing disconnect between the values American higher education actually practices in its allocation of salaries, and those it proclaims as it inculcates democratic values in students.

A study to be released on Monday in the Chronicle for Higher Education shows that, in this period of economic downturn when faculty salaries remain frozen or are declining and when tuition is rising, salaries for university presidents at public universities are growing rather than declining. As Joel Siegel’s ABC summary of the Chronicle report, “College Presidents Cashing In, Study Says,” notes,

The number of college and university presidents taking home eye-popping paychecks continues to climb even as more and more students have trouble paying their tuition bills. Fifty-nine presidents of public universities reeled in more than $500,000 in salary and benefits during the 2007-08 academic year, more than double the number who broke the half-million mark three years earlier, according to a survey by the Chronicle of Higher Education released on Monday (www.abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=6266263&page=1).

As Senator Charles E. Grassley of the Senate Finance Committee observes, “It’s surprising that many public universities are raising their presidents’ salaries. In these hard economic times, apparently belt-tightening is for families and students, not university presidents” (see Tamar Lewin, “Presidents’ Pay Rises Faster at Public Universities Than Private Ones, Survey Finds,” www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/education/17college.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink). Grassley concludes that the Chronicle’s study “shows that the executive suite seems insulated from budget crunches" (www.abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=6266263&page=1).

As Sigel notes, “College presidents defend their compensation packages, saying they function, in effect, as chief executives overseeing complex, multibillion-dollar enterprises and are still paid far less than CEOs in other lines of work.” The Chronicle report also indicates that presidents of private universities have, in general, always been paid more than those of public institutions. The rise in pay scale in recent years is particularly noticeable in publicly funded universities.

As Bilgrimage readers know, my concern with this issue has to do with the role institutions of higher education play in shaping the values of graduates (see, e.g., http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/10/leadership-crisis-role-of-american.html).
In many previous postings on this topic, I’ve noted that, in the American democratic experiment, taxes and donors lavishly support higher education (both public and private) because Americans assume that universities help build a democratic culture by instilling in students the values necessary to sustain such a culture.

This was a key insight of the educational and social philosophy of the pioneering African-American educator Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, whose work I have often quoted on this blog. When she founded her own college, Bethune-Cookman at Daytona Beach, Florida, Dr. Bethune explicitly built the values component everywhere into its curriculum, because she believed that colleges have a critical role to play in building a participatory democracy that brings everyone to the table.

Dr. Bethune also insisted that institutions of higher learning should model inclusive participatory democracy, since students learn what they experience and see more than what they are told. Her belief in the role of colleges as learning “collaboratories” led her to create a cross-racial and cross-cultural leadership team for her new college, as well as to sponsor public forums at which members of various communities could meet and discuss their shared concerns, collaborating as equals in solving social problems and involving students in the democratic process.

Colleges and universities play a premier role in keeping democracy alive and extending its values—in building a democracy that actually fulfills the founders’ ideals by achieving ful participattion. They cannot play that role when their own practices belie the values they proclaim.

Rising pay for those at the top of the university pay scale—while faculty salaries do not rise and tuition is increased—sends a contradictory signal regarding values to a university’s constituencies and to the public at large. It suggests that universities value the culture of corporations more than the culture of democracy.

The claim of university presidents to merit higher pay because they are CEOs should trouble anyone interested in the values American higher education has traditionally served. In order to be educational leaders, university presidents need to value education rather than profit. University boards should be rewarding educational excellence and success in teaching values, not dollar signs. University leaders who see themselves as CEOs rather than educators have departed from core values essential to the mission of higher education, if it is to fulfill its traditional function in the democratic social contract.

One of the primary reasons our nation is now on the brink of cultural collapse is the failure of its institutions of higher learning to produce leaders for a new millennium. And universities can not produce good leaders when their own leadership is shoddy—when this leadership models itself around values of the corporate boardroom and not of the academy.

The choice of university boards to reward CEO-presidents with obscenely large paychecks and perks and privileges that often extend those paychecks even more than the public realizes (particularly in private institutions, where salaries and perks are often not disclosed), is a dismal choice. I hope that in a period of concerted effort to rebuild our democratic culture, university boards will begin to pay attention to the values their institutions should be serving, and not primarily to charts showing higher profit margins.

Otherwise we’re lost.

And Speaking of What Leadership Is (Not)

And speaking of leadership and what it is or is not, a reminder of my posting earlier this week on the chicanery of those who are travesties of good leaders (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/09/bread-and-circuses-reflections-on.html):

In that posting, I provided a checklist of maneuvers demonstrably poor leaders use to try to disguise their lack of substance and knowledge. My checklist begins with the following two points:

1. When the going gets rough, change the subject. When you’re questioned about the real problem, invent another one and respond to that question, rather than to the one you’ve been asked.

2. Simply ignore questions. Create a shield around yourself when you’re asked to answer questions. Characterize those asking questions as disrespectful. Make yourself inaccessible. Speak through mouthpieces.

Anybody see last night's debate? I'm just saying.

It's not really too hard to distinguish capable leaders from those who have nary a clue. Is it? I'm just asking.

Collaboration and Better Angels: Leadership Paradigms for Full Democracy

In his New York Times op-ed statement “Edge of the Abyss” today, Paul Krugman says vis-à-vis the current economic crisis, “And what’s truly scary is that we’re entering a period of severe crisis with weak, confused leadership"(www.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/opinion/03krugman.html?th&emc=th).

Weak, confused leadership: Do you think?!

We can’t say it enough, those of us who want to see the American democratic experiment continue: we are in serious crisis now, as a nation, in the area of leadership. There simply are not anywhere near the number of models of good leadership in our nation right now to prepare for a viable future. And we’re not going to find our way out of the mess we’re in as a culture if we try to revive the paradigm that got us into this mess in the first place: the blustering self-serving swagger of the obscenely overpaid big man (or woman) on top, all bravado and threats, all egocentric fantasy that only she or he is capable of pulling the strings to save us, all facile, shallow concern with image-management and media manipulation.

Getting us out of our present mess will require a consultative and inclusive style of leadership that harnesses the best angels of all of our natures. Everyone needs a voice in participatory democracy, if we’re to survive as a democratic society. Those of us without jobs and health coverage definitely need a place at the table, as we resolve our economic crisis.

When I heard Mr. Obama talking recently about how a job is fundamental to everything where he comes from, I longed for the opportunity to sit down and talk with him about what not being able to find work—meaningful work that engages one’s talents and allows one to give back to the community—does to a person’s self-esteem. I also wished for the chance to sit and talk with him about how not having any health insurance affects one’s self-image, not to mention one’s health.

When I listened to Mr. Obama, I wanted to tell him how tinny, how false, many of the statements our churches make about the need for full employment and full health coverage sound, when one looks at what the churches actually do. When one examines the leadership models churches offer—top-down, big man/woman on top, power pyramids with no opportunity for those on bottom to contribute to the unilateral decisions of those on top—one wonders how churches can imagine that they have any alternative to offer. Not when their models of leadership perfectly mirror those of the political system that has walked us right to the edge of the abyss . . . .

And when one looks at the other key institution of American culture that also touts itself as the bearer of alternative visions of leadership, one is equally dumbfounded. Universities also replicate leadership model of the top-down, grossly overpaid big man/woman on top. In how they structure themselves, in whom they choose to reward and whom to punish, they do not provide that viable alternative paradigm of leadership that they profess to offer, when they ask for our tax dollars. And when we need such alternative models so desperately today . . . .

Like the political sector, our universities—and chief among them, church-owned ones whose policies prohibiting salary disclosure hide the glaring disparity between what is paid to those on top as compared to those on bottom—love the leadership model of blustering swagger, bravado and threats. The model that does not and cannot harness the better angels of our nature when all of our energies, all of them together, are needed now to avert disaster . . . .

As I’ve noted before, in his vision of a new paradigm for American politics, Mr. Obama could do far worse than to turn to that early 20th-century African-American leader Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune for insights. Dr. Bethune’s insistence that any democratic structure worth its salt must pursue “full democracy” is worth retrieving, for a post-modern paradigm of participatory democracy. In her essay “Don’t Miss the Foot-hold! Women and the Civil Rights Report,” Dr. Bethune urges African-American women to teach their children the concept of democracy they advocate for themselves. Dr. Bethune calls this concept “full democracy”; she notes that full democracy entails bringing everyone to the table, and teaching our youth that color, national origin, or the religion of others can be seen not as stigmatizing characteristics that make us different from one another in ways that alienate us, but differences that enrich a full democracy (Bethune papers, Dec. 5, 1947; in Audrey Thomas McCluskey and Elaine M. Smith, ed., Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World [Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999], p. 191).

In Bethune’s view, institutions of higher learning play a premier role in American democracy by modeling full democracy. In the university she founded, Dr. Bethune fashioned a leadership team that crossed racial and gender lines. She also pioneered inclusive town-gown community meetings that drew communities together for collaborative work to solve problems faced by all members of the community. She made a concerted effort to assure that those most excluded by social structures from the table of full democracy had equal access to a voice at her town-gown meetings.

The model of full democracy that Mary McLeod Bethune worked to create at the school she founded, Bethune-Cookman University, is at the heart of what that university’s current president, Dr. Trudie Kibbe Reed, an expert in leadership studies, calls “transformative leadership.” In Trudie Kibbe Reed’s view, “Transformative leadership is the ‘art and science’ of learning to facilitate value-centered change within organizations through inquiry, reflection, critique, and collaboration” (the quotation is from an unpublished 2005 manuscript of Dr. Trudie Kibbe Reed, as cited in William D. Lindsey and Reed, “Transformative Leadership: A Conceptual Framework and Application” [Bethune-Cookman University, 2005], p. 2).

Note the strong emphasis on collaboration as an essential quality of transformative leadership. Healthy democracies build teams of leaders that collaborate in inquiry, reflection, and critique, because no institution can thrive and meet the challenge of the future without inquiry, reflection and critique.

And such inquiry, reflection, and critique must occur in a collaborative context in which the myth of the quasi-imperial big man/big woman on top with all the answers and all the power is put to the test of critical inquiry and reflection. When the test of inquiry, reflection, and critique is applied to such mythic notions of sound leadership, they are found wanting. They are found wanting because they depend on the illusion that only the grossly overpaid, self-interested ruthless individual at the top of the heap has the ability to solve problems that affect an institution or social structure.

Dr. Bethune’s concept of full democracy and Dr. Reed’s notion of transformative leadership depend on and incorporate the confidence that the solution to complex problems affecting an entire institution or the entire body politic is to be found among all of us affected by these problems. Models of transformative leadership that value full democracy assume that all of us have valuable insights into the problems with which we struggle together, and all of us need a voice in the resolution of our shared problems.

On the basis of that assumption, transformative leadership pursuing full democracy brings everyone to the table, and provides a voice for everyone. This is why full employment and full health coverage are so essential to a democratic society, and why institutions (e.g., churches and universities) that profess to offer alternative visions of leadership must work to overcome unemployment and lack of health coverage for all citizens—and why any church or university, and above all, any church-sponsored university, would never contribute to the problems of unemployment and lack of health coverage by unjust termination of valuable employees.

It is for all of these reasons that I recently called on Mr. Obama, as he prepared for his presentation at Bethune-Cookman University on September 20, to take seriously the legacy of Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, and to promote her vision of full democracy as he campaigns (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/09/open-letter-to-barack-obama-hbcus-and.html). Mr. could do far worse than to look to this prophetic African-American leader for inspiration, as he seeks leadership models that engage the better angels of the natures of the American people in the 21st century.


*Note: this is an end-of-week précis of points I’ve made at greater length in postings throughout the week, particularly http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/10/leadership-crisis-role-of-american.html.

Leadership Crisis: The Role of American Higher Education

“The American century was created by American leadership, which is scarcer than credit just about now” (David Brooks, “Revolt of the Nihilists,” www.nytimes.com/2008/09/30/opinion/30brooks.html). When neoconservative thinkers—who previously proclaimed the virtues of the “American century” that introduced our current leadership vacuum—are decrying the lack of good leaders in American culture today, you know something momentous is happening. The frankness with which gurus of the right are now willing to admit our leadership problem is refreshing—as is the attempt of some of these thinkers to investigate the root causes of the morass in which our culture finds itself.

As Richard Cohen’s recent “Topical Depression” in the Washington Post notes, it was, indeed, a culture of a specific sort that got us into this mess, and the mess in turn will have profound new cultural consequences, if we do not find ways to address its cultural roots effectively (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/29/AR2008092902660.html). Cohen notes (as I have also done on this blog, following the lead of Naomi Klein in her ground-breaking book Shock Doctrine) that a distinct possibility of a period of economic depression which is not adequately addressed is outright fascism. In hard times, people look for scapegoats; it has happened before, and it can happen again. Unscrupulous anti-leaders who know how to manipulate disdain for stigmatized others often seize power in such periods, with the active complicity of terrified citizens looking for any salvific promise of a way out, no matter how ugly the promise and the price it entails in the suffering of others.

I certainly welcome the proposal to examine our culture for clues to the decline of leadership. I’m baffled, however, that those same neoconservative spokespersons now lamenting our dearth of leaders and calling for analysis of the roots of this phenomenon haven’t been pointing there all along. Had they been doing so, perhaps we wouldn’t find ourselves where we are now.

I also have to say that, unfortunately, some of the cherished tenets of those same neoconservative talking heads are, in my view, precisely what led to our current state. To my mind, chief among these is the mystical belief in atomic individualism that pervades our understanding of economic life (and, as a result, our culture in general).

I blogged about this recently, noting that our economic system depends on the faith-based assumption that, if we allow the market to run its course without restraint, a “hidden hand” somehow intervenes to smooth out the wrinkles, to distribute the goods generated by the free market in a way that approximates rough justice (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/09/economic-crisis-and-workers-rights.html). In what follows, I’d like to probe the leadership implications of our counterfactual, totally mystical faith in free markets. What does our belief in economic individualism and the hidden hand translate into, when it comes to our expectations about those who lead us?

In the first place, it’s clear that our socioeconomic philosophy of atomic individualism glorifies the strong individual at the top. This is the kind of leader we want, in a culture of unbridled economic individualism: strong; decisive; willing to step on toes to get things done; willing to put the bottom line of higher profits above every other value including fidelity to friends or humane treatment of co-workers and subordinates. In other words, we want a victor who has risen through the ranks (so we choose to believe) by will power and determination, someone who has earned the right to be at the top.

In the counterfactual philosophy of economic individualism that frames our entire cultural outlook, those at the top have battled their way there, and therefore deserve all the perks they receive at the top of the economic scale. They exemplify for us what the system is, at its best: one that thrives on combat and willingness to sacrifice anything and anyone to further our own self-interest; one that rewards stern self-interest with incentives to more self-interest. Since those who rule us are generating more for everyone, they are entitled to more for themselves, we like to tell ourselves.

These are the kind of leaders we have long emulated in American culture. They are the sort we emulate even more after the Reagan revolution. They are, as well—and this crucial point must not be overlooked—the same “leaders” who have marched us right into economic calamity. Certainly they have benefited themselves. They have not, however, benefited the rest of us—as the mystical belief in the hidden hand promises, if we let them and the market have their way.

A corollary of our entirely counterfactual belief in the virtue of the strong individual at the top is the assumption that the best structures of leadership, those most in tune with self-interested human nature, are hierarchical. On the face of it, this is a strange assumption for us to make, since the philosophy of atomic individualism is anti-hierarchical. Its governing metaphor is, after all, the clash of atoms to produce something greater and more glorious than any individual atom can make by itself.

In reality, cultures of atomic individualism always generate hierarchies for two reasons. I’ve noted the first: to prevent our asking embarrassing questions about the inequity of how they allocate the world’s goods, these cultures require role models for the rest of us, as a reminder of who we might become if we leave behind our sluggish ways or our scruples about stepping on the rights of others to ascend to the top.

But the culture of atomic individualism also needs a hierarchical framework because implicit in this philosophy is the recognition that in unbridled individualism, in the clash of self-interested atoms, is the potential for not only the ebullient creativity we’re told to expect in the free market, but for its opposite as well: for anarchy and decline. We imagine that we want, and need, strong leaders to nanny the system, to keep it in top-notch order (while refraining from stifling its individualistic impulses) as it spews out benefits for the hard-working individualist and punishes the indolent who fall to the bottom.

As much that I have written on this blog suggests, I’m especially fascinated by the way in which these seminal cultural assumptions have translated into models of leadership in the two worlds with which I am most familiar in my professional life, the church and the academy. To say that the models I have just described have made strong inroads into both institutions would be an understatement.

Universities today are every bit as captive to the ethic of ruthless individualism as the culture at large is. They have invested just as heavily as our economic sector has in the myth of the strong leader at the top and the need for hierarchy.

Why else do we tolerate obscenely lavish pay for those at the top of the hierarchical pyramid of academic life? Do we truly believe that those who have made it to the top are more virtuous than those who haven’t—that they deserve the top dollar because of their pre-eminent intelligence, leadership skills, strong work ethic, or attention to values? Is it not clear that, in the academy as in the economic sphere, those most likely to rise are often those most willing to step on others—to pay the price of ruthlessness required of leaders in our economic system—to get to the top? Does it take a great deal of moral acumen to observe that those who move up the governance ladder in colleges or universities are often, as with our economic leaders, those most willing to cut moral corners to do the one thing most valued in our culture—to generate profits?

Please understand that I am not speaking of any particular college or university in what I say here. I have seen these patterns at a number of universities in which I have worked, as well as in other academic institutions. I have also noted that those who resist the ruthlessness of the free market model of academic administration pay a high price. Along with colleagues, I have long suspected that the early death of an academic vice-president of one institution at which I worked had much to do with the pressure she received from the top to do things that violated her conscience. And that made her sick, sick unto death . . . .

All of the universities in which I have had full-time positions have been church-affiliated. Unlike public universities, these schools are not required to divulge salary scales. Even while working in these schools, however, I risked going on record several times about my preference for open disclosure of salaries in all colleges/universities, church-affiliated as well as public ones.

I suspect that if ill-paid but hard-working faculty, as well as the public at large, knew precisely the total compensation of many presidents and other top leaders of private institutions of higher learning, they would be appalled. By “total compensation,” I am referring, of course, to the monetary value of the many perks that most top executives of academic institutions receive in addition to their lavish salaries—things like housing compensation, getaway houses or condos, drivers, cars, gourmet meals, plump expense accounts, and so forth.

I also have the impression—though this is not based on rigorous research—that not a few church-owned universities have followed the trend of the political and economic sector in recent decades, and have actually increased the salaries of those at the top while holding those of faculty and staff frozen, or advancing these in a grudging way that does not keep pace with increases in the cost of living. Since quite a few church-owned universities find it hard to be competitive with state schools, church-sponsored institutions often invent highly attractive compensation packages to lure top administrators from other schools—without disclosing this information to faculty who wonder why their salaries do not rise each year.

Why do we tolerate such gross injustice? Why do faculty tolerate their exploitation by an economic system that grossly undercuts collegiality and core values of university life? I can only assume that we do so because we fail to examine our blind faith in the right of the market to reward the strong, ruthless individual at the top more than it rewards us. Despite our own impression that no one works harder than we do—that we do the grunt work on which the whole edifice of the university stands—we are compelled to believe, in our culture at large as well as in our economic life, that the person at top receiving the lavish rewards works harder than anyone else.

And that person often is skilled at giving this impression . . . though this spin-doctor technique is likely to be tested in coming days, if the economic downturn results in dismissal of faculty while top administrators (and their lavish compensation) remain in place, particularly in institutions prone to bread-and-circus behavior that fritters away funds in splashy impression-management stunts, when those funds would be better used to compensate faculty.

The higher education trends I am sketching here deserve attention not just because they help to explain the increasingly top-heavy (and grossly unjust) over-compensation of university presidents and other key administrators, when university faculty and staff are underpaid. These trends also deserve attention because they go a long ways towards explaining how it is that we have ended up with so few leaders in our culture.

It is universities that claim to produce leaders, after all. Is it not? Is this not the claim to fame of universities in our society, the reason the academy routinely uses to justify the tax dollars and other benefits we make available to higher education? If we are now experiencing a dearth of leadership in American culture (and we clearly are), then higher education is clearly a central part of the problem. It is not doing its job.

And it is not doing so because it cannot do so, insofar as it continues to buy into the counterfactual mystical assumptions of free-market atomic individualism, and all that they entail in the area of university leadership. Those now being rewarded with top dollars in American higher education—those most skilled at manipulating numbers and images—do not deserve the rewards they are reaping, if higher education is about modeling good leadership and teaching students the values required for good leadership.

The most lamentable effect of the capitulation of the academy to market values and market ways of looking at the world is the definitive undercutting of the academy’s central claims about its social significance. Higher education is built on the central tenet of collegiality: the belief that educators who collaborate in the pursuit of truth can mold a new generation of leaders who value collaboration and the shared pursuit of truth. If the academy does not live this core value—and it clearly does not do so, to the extent that it rewards “leadership” that militates against this value—then the academy is unable to fulfill its most fundamental task, within the American social contract.

The bankruptcy of the claim of many institutions of higher learning to cherish collegiality, to facilitate the collaborative pursuit of truth, is not lost on students. It is precisely this bankruptcy, which is starkly evident in how the university structures itself, in whom it chooses to promote and reward, that results in the failure of many universities to teach leadership skills to students.

Students have eyes to see. They can see that it is not collaboration, but soulless individualism that is actually rewarded and compensated in the university setting. They can see that the “strong” leader at the top is often the ruthless leader who proudly professes that she/he trusts no one, and who does not encourage collaboration at all, but who remains perched on the top of the heap because she/he expertly pits team members against each other.

In summary, the way in which many university leaders today actually lead puts the lie to the claim of universities to be teaching leadership skills. Leaders who bring out the best in those they lead; leaders who nurture the talents of others; leaders who build strong teams bonded by a shared concern for the mission of their institution; leaders who catalyze and channel the creative energies of colleagues: these individuals are rare anywhere. But they are also increasingly and shockingly rare in the very place that most trumpets the value of such leaders to our society: in the academy. In fact, such skilled leaders, rare as they are, are likely not only to be weeded out in any selection of potential leaders in the market-driven culture of higher education today, but actually to be hounded out of the academy by leaders who want to move their university in a more overtly market-driven direction.

If American culture is experiencing a leadership drought today, there is no way around looking critically at those institutions that have most loudly proclaimed themselves to be the breeding ground of values-oriented leaders for the culture at large: the churches and higher education. The failure of both institutions to produce leaders for postmodern American culture is strongly apparent. The unwillingness of both institutions—both ostensibly dedicated to the pursuit of alternate ways of imagining the world and alternate ways of doing business—to create viable alternatives to the ethos of atomic individualism that so powerfully imbues our culture has had ugly consequences for the culture at large.

When we so desperately need leaders to move us out of economic morass, and when church and academy can only emulate the patterns that have produced this morass, where are we to turn? The sad clownish leaders of too many contemporary churches and too many universities today don’t seem to me to have the answer to that question.

It looks to me as if the answer lies in ourselves, and not in the institutions we have trusted to produce our leaders. We will have to work hard to reinvent those institutions, because they have helped get us into this mess rather than creating the alternative imaginations from which real leadership always springs. That is, we will have to do that if we really do wish to get out of the mess.