President's Office - 2006 Convocation

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Learning to Lead
2006 Convocation Address
August 29, 2006

The beginning of a new academic year marks a turning point for all of us. Members of the Class of 2010 are entering a new stage of life and a new level of learning, a change that marks each new cohort of students. For the college, new students bring renewed energy, and our return to the historic vocation of teaching and learning also refreshes our traditional practice with a measure of innovation that turns us toward greater excellence. Today we celebrate those turning points as part of the cherished rhythm of collegiate education.

This particular academic season, however, offers us far greater possibilities than those we usually celebrate in our annual ritual of renewal. Because of the exceptional character of our faculty and staff, because of the recent achievements of our institution, and because of the caliber of our students, we now have the opportunity to transform the traditional rhythm of our academic life by “learning to lead” in the world around us. For students, this means using your education to build the capacity for leadership beyond your college years. For the college, this means capitalizing on our achievements to take a leadership role in higher education and in the communities we serve. For faculty and staff, this means embracing the larger roles of being mentors to leaders and midwives to institutional greatness. Leadership is the new vocation of this academic community in the years ahead, and “learning to lead” is the new work to which all of us are now called.

We are called to leadership for two reasons. First, we are privileged to enjoy the gifts of great talent, great mission and vision and great capacity for service. With those gifts comes the responsibility to share them with others and to use them to enhance our world. Second, our world confronts significant dilemmas that challenge the best among us to step forward on behalf of the highest ideals of human communities. We are those people, and this is one of the institutions that can make a difference in the world. We dare not shrink from using our gifts for the good of those around us, and we dare not fail to exercise leadership on behalf of the great ideals that have guided our life and work here for more than a century.

In “learning to lead,” our aim is not to discover how to gain high position or to exercise authority, which most people consider to be the primary avenues of leadership. High position and commanding authority are not essential for leadership, for it can come from anywhere and can take many forms. Likewise, we should not concern ourselves with what might be called the techniques of leadership, which can easily be gleaned from the significant literature on the subject. Rather, we should be concerned with what it means to lead and what is required of us to do so.

In his analysis of what has made the Jesuits such a successful religious order for 450 years, Chris Lowney has shown that they have relied on a distinctive type of leadership that can inform our own development as leaders, individually and institutionally. In the Jesuit order, everyone is considered to be a leader, because “leadership is not an act” that only some can master, and it is not just a role accorded to those in privileged status. Instead, a Jesuit would say that leadership “is my life (sic), a way of living” that “springs from within. It is about who I am as much as what I do (sic).” In that context, Lowney notes, Jesuits “never complete the task of becoming a leader. It is an ongoing process.” (Heroic Leadership, p. 15). Learning to lead, then, is not a simple matter of mastering techniques but a more challenging process of shaping who we are and how we direct our lives toward the possibilities of leadership.

Those possibilities are grounded in four central elements of leadership Lowney has identified in the practice of the Jesuits (Heroic Leadership, p. 27ff):

Self-Awareness – “Leaders thrive by understanding who they are and what they value,” by knowing their “strengths, weaknesses, values, and world view” and by “cultivating the habit of continuous self-reflection and learning.” (p. 27)
Ingenuity – Leaders are “confidently innovating and adapting to embrace a changing world,” what the Jesuits describe as “living with one foot raised” (p. 27). “They eagerly explore new ideas, approaches, and cultures rather than shrink defensively from what lurks around life’s next corner” (p. 29)
Love – Leaders “encourage others with a positive, loving attitude” (p.27) They “passionately commit to honoring and unlocking the potential they find in themselves and in others,” and “they create environments bound and energized by loyalty, affection, and mutual support”(p. 31).
Heroism – Leaders “energize themselves and others through heroic ambition” (p. 27). They “imagine an inspiring future and strive to shape it rather than passively watching the future happen around them. Heroes extract gold from the opportunities at hand rather than waiting for golden opportunities to be handed to them” (p.33).

Together, these four traits define someone who not only has the capacities of a leader but who will live as a leader, no matter what position they occupy or what circumstance confronts them. Consider now how we might reshape our life and work toward that type of leadership.

For students, especially those just beginning their collegiate journey of learning, nurturing these traits ought to be one of the prime objectives of your college years. Beyond merely expanding your knowledge and honing your competence, you have the rare opportunity to explore and shape who you are and how you might live as a leader.

To deepen your self-awareness, you might keep a personal journal where you reflect on what your experience in and outside the classroom means for you or where you build a world view that is truly yours, not just a reflection of your parents or teachers.
To become comfortable with change, practice “living with one foot raised” by entertaining new thoughts, by exploring different cultures, or by embracing some challenge you never thought possible for you.
To nurture a loving approach, practice putting yourself in the shoes of people quite different than you to appreciate what life is like for them. Look for ways to affirm and draw out what is best in those you meet rather than grumbling about the worst.
To cultivate “heroic ambition,” aim for the highest achievement in your course-work and co-curricular endeavors, and as you make your career plans, undertake to do something truly significant in your chosen field.

When we say that Elizabethtown nourishes a sense of “purposeful life work” in our students, learning to lead in this way is one important dimension of that ideal. So we educators will be partners with you in this effort in many and varied ways sometimes even unknown to you. It is our great vocation not only to build up your knowledge and to sharpen your talents but also to help you find the way to discover and exercise your capacity as leaders. Our faculty and staff will be your mentors, your sounding boards, your role models; they will push you, listen to you, and dream with you as you learn to lead. When you complete your learning with us, then, each of you will be ready for a purposeful life of leadership and for the ongoing practice of learning to lead throughout your life.

Learning to lead is not just an ideal for our students, however. We who are stewards of Elizabethtown’s mission and future must also learn how we can lead as an institution. Just as our students, we have achieved much that has prepared us for leadership, and just as we urge them to reach for the largest possibilities in their lives, we must do so in the life of this college as well. We now have the opportunity and the responsibility to nurture the defining traits of leadership as part of our institutional culture and practice so that we are equipped to make a more significant contribution to higher education and the communities we serve.

With the completion of our strategic vision, we have strengthened our institutional self-awareness by clarifying some central elements of our identity. It is important now to make that self-understanding a guiding element of our work together. This year we will also elaborate and deepen that understanding by assessing the state of academic excellence at Elizabethtown and by initiating the process of building a signature educational philosophy for the college. As we do so, we look to build the habit of ongoing self-assessment as an integral part of our culture.
Having clarified our identity, we now turn to defining our ambition in one of the key signature areas of our work, international and cross-cultural understanding. With the generous support of the Mellon Foundation, a new task force will be charged to shape a distinctive approach to global education for Elizabethtown, and we will undertake new faculty development programs to prepare ourselves for the challenge of global education and scholarship. Here is where we have the opportunity to embrace a genuinely heroic ambition for our educational program.
College environments nurture great inventiveness about the rest of the world but they often resist innovation in their own world. We naturally and reasonably value “order” here at Elizabethtown, but we must learn better how to “live with one foot raised.” If we are to lead, we must often be the first to step into the unknown or to risk new possibilities. To help us think beyond our own experience and explore new areas, we will soon engage our community with other colleges that have excelled in areas important to us, in some instances literally “lifting our feet” to visit such institutions.
What the Jesuits call “love,” we might name as “affirmation” or “drawing out the best” in others. For those of us whose lives are given to analysis and critique, such affirmation is not easy, and it is sometimes perceived as insufficiently rigorous or demanding. Leading institutions, just as individual leaders, however, advance by “dwelling in possibility” (Emily Dickinson) and by actively nourishing the greatest of their possibilities together. One opportunity for drawing out the best in one another at Elizabethtown will come as we work to build institution-wide expressions of our signature attributes that link curricular and co-curricular learning to broaden and deepen the educational value or our program for students.

By learning to lead we will open new possibilities to fulfill Elizabethtown’s mission to “educate for service.” As understood here, leadership is truly an arena of service that shapes our world for the best, and service is perhaps the most meaningful example of leadership itself. If we would serve, we must lead, and when we lead, our service will be greater still. So I invite you students to use your Elizabethtown education to nourish “lives of service and leadership,” as expressed in our new statement of mission and identity. And I challenge our community to seize the opportunities before us to make Elizabethtown College a genuine educational leader in the years ahead. Learning to lead is the great possibility for all of us as we begin this new academic season. The great promise of embracing leadership is that we who gather around the mission of educating for service can contribute even more toward the realization of the best in higher education and in the human community. Now is the time for us to claim that “heroic ambition” for ourselves and for Elizabethtown College.