What Even Is "Leadership"?
And Why Won't All the Worst People Stop Talking About It?
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When the last English department shuts down, when the last History class in history comes to a close, we can be sure of one thing: some kind of School of Leadership will be standing in their place. In “leadership,” executives in industry and university administrators have found common ground on what higher education, aside from career training in the latest STEM fields, can provide.
The problem with learning the hard skills of how to code is that it doesn’t teach you the soft skills of how to manage. “Most leaders don’t need to learn to code,” advises the Harvard Business Review, “they need to learn how to work with people who code.” Reading a novel, studying a battle, contemplating a work of art — all of this, unlike staring at a computer command line, takes you out of yourself, and prepares you for a career navigating, and commanding, the lives of others. Maybe reading poetry isn’t an end in itself; as fodder to open the mind of a future leader, it’s hard to beat. “The contemplation and analysis of poetry teaches not only facility with language,” argue the contemporary leaders in ‘leadership studies’, “it also offers a window into the soul.”
This kind of thing goes back a long way. Warren Bennis, mid-century management guru and early promoter of “leadership studies” as an academic field, turned to the literary theory of tragedy in his initial article on the subject in the 1960s. Recent graduates with degrees in business and engineering might be ready to get something done on day one, an executive observed three decades earlier in 1931. But such narrow majors, this executive continued, produce employees who “can’t write intelligible reports, or even letters, and when it comes to even the simplest sort of public speaking most of them are complete ‘busts’.” Western Electric, among the most cutting edge companies of the 1920s, advised potential recruits that a liberal arts degree was “first-rate,” an engineering degree a poor “second-rate” substitute. It wouldn’t do, though, for the future captains of industry to continue to be taught only the Greek and Latin curriculum that had been the focus of students in the nineteenth century. Now that “the phenomenon of economic leadership has emerged,” one economist advised in 1915, the task was to ensure that future executives were simultaneously “technically enlightened” as well as “humanized.”
Woodrow Wilson, in his time as a professor and then university president at Princeton, may have made the strongest case for producing leaders through a combination of a technical and a humanistic education. In doing so, the future politician also gave a strong clue as to where today’s obsession with leadership comes from.
Wilson was fascinated from the beginning of his career in the 1870s by the problem of the leader. With the rise of mass society, he argued, it had become necessary “to organize democracy” by means of a “consummate leader.” For such individuals, “men are as clay”; in their hands, society promised to be “led at last into self-consciousness and self-command.” For Wilson, leadership was not simply a matter of party politics or government administration. There was also a “touch of statesmanship,” he wrote, in engineering and business. The “captains of industry” of the past, mere small businessmen in comparison with the gargantuan manufacturers of the late nineteenth century, had moved up the ranks to become what Wilson celebrated as “generals in command of the forces of mankind.”
Yet Wilson was troubled by the educational tendencies of his time. The new approach to graduation requirements after the abandonment of a curriculum dominated by Greek and Latin was a focus on “electives,” which allowed students to focus almost entirely in the sciences if they liked. But a purely scientific education, Wilson argued, threatened to make a mere “tabula rasa of a man’s mind”; the sciences did nothing to prepare students for the chief danger of the late nineteenth century: socialism. “To hear the agitators talk, you would suppose that righteousness was young and wisdom but of yesterday,” Wilson joked. The task of the university, then, was “making this nonsense ridiculous.” The turn to science in college education was especially worrisome because what made “modern socialism … dangerous,” Wilson feared, was that “its methods are scientific and … the age is also scientific.” From Saint-Simon to Marx and Engels to the US Socialist Party, radicals on the left had found in science a source of progress that had been co-opted by the owners of property but, they insisted, could be repurposed for public ends. This was why, as Wilson put it, a “revolution conceived and led in the scientific spirt” promised “utter destruction.” For Wilson, only a truly liberal education based in literature and history offered students the understanding necessary to oppose the scientific and socialistic “waves of materialism” breaking across the bow of his time.
There have been statesmen, generals, and prophets since the beginning of recorded history; the English word ‘leader’ is attested as early as 1290 CE. It’s hard not to assume that ‘leadership’ must be as old as society itself. But while the figure of the leader may be age old, it is telling that the term ‘leadership’ only begins to appear in English in the early nineteenth century, and only comes into vogue after 1910.
The idea that there is a general quality, ‘leadership’, as opposed to specific qualities like courage or magnanimity, that leadership could be acquired through study, and that educational institutions might produce this quality en masse, is one of the quintessential contributions of the twentieth century. While there are many origins for this project and many forms it could assume — Max Weber saw “charismatic” leadership as a path out of the “iron cage” of social stagnation, Vladimir Lenin called for the training of “revolutionary leaders” to overcome capitalism — in the United States the aim of educating young collegians for ‘leadership’ was, as Wilson makes clear, no secret.
This is not the story you may have heard about the rise of American higher education, where the main purpose of the university was to put science in charge of business in particular and society in general. Nor is this a story of the neoliberal university replacing the liberal arts with the arts of leadership, where higher educations’s hallowed goal of producing democratic citizens has been replaced by that of producing technical experts, “highly trained elites.”
The university in the late nineteenth century was indeed tasked with producing new technical knowledge. The liberal arts were also central from the beginning. But faculty and administrators focused their energies equally if not more on taking in the raw children of the business classes and spitting out finished products: owners and executives who could claim authority without falling victim to the dictates of scientific research, scientific management, or — where both seemed to end — scientific socialism. “Leadership,” as that term took shape, accomplished this task by pushing back against the quantifying drive of engineers and scientists; “leadership” effectively preserved a safe space for all those qualities that, so the term’s proponents claimed, could not be quantified, whether judgement or initiative, entrepreneurialism or charisma. “Leadership,” in short, did much of the cultural work to keep capital in charge of science — even as the new leaders extracted more and more of science’s rewards. The discursive task of “leadership” was to create a need for a superordinate and superfluous class of owners, executives, and their lesser followers in management, and to stop socialism in its tracks.
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