When Power Plays Fail, You Can Lead by Example

Janet Letizia

Higher education would be better off if more of the people involved in leading colleges were driven by a desire to serve rather than a wish to dominate, argues Angelo J. Letizia, an assistant professor of education at Newman University,

In Using Servant Leadership: How to Reframe the Core Functions of Higher Education (Rutgers University Press), he considers how various actors in higher education — administrators, faculty members, even students — can lead others to make more of their colleges and their lives. He suggests, for example, that administrators, ideally, can use their positions not to accumulate power but to exemplify wise and selfless leadership. Faculty members could use their research and teaching to live out and inculcate in their students the values of social progress and personal growth.

Letizia’s determination to make his case is striking in part because he is a junior faculty member, with just three years on the faculty of Newman, a Roman Catholic institution in Wichita, Kan. “If we don’t recapture some of what higher education is,” he says, “we’re going to lose it.”

Educators, he writes, must make a case for the immediate and long-term benefits of intellectual life as a force for social change and personal growth.

The concept of “servant leadership” has grown more familiar in various walks of life in the nearly five decades since Robert K. Greenleaf, a management researcher, introduced the idea in an essay. The term encompasses such qualities in leaders — whether they hold managerial titles or not — as altruism, humility, and an ability to inspire others to press on toward goals in situations “fraught with setbacks, self-doubt, and self-questioning.” Such leaders, Letizia says, are high-level conceptual thinkers who counter “rabid individualism” by advancing an ethos of service to others.

In a higher-education context, the concept can relate to improving institutional life along various axes. These include exercising restrained but effective control, increasing diversity and tolerance, and helping students to become leaders who advance causes of social justice.

Letizia says servant leadership may also entail finding ways “to measure growth on these axes without falling into a pathology of measurement.” That means not only being able to quantify accomplishments in such terms as degree programs offered or graduates duly credentialed, but also to offer a “narrative of accountability” that demonstrates accomplishment “in the chaos and volatility in which organizations must operate.”

He harks to theorists who had considerable currency some 30 years ago in higher-education circles, but whose influence has waned. They include figures from the Frankfurt School of German intellectual history — Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, among others — who advocated a critical gaze on social and cultural presumptions, and such figures as Paulo Freire and Henry Giroux, champions of “critical pedagogy": of learning to think freely about such issues as injustice and social change.

“Their ideas,” Letizia says, “are more pertinent now than ever,” in a time of “rampant anti-intellectualism.”

The tenets of servant leadership may sound utopian, he allows, but often vision is about what is possible rather than probable, as it seeks to “give hope in volatile times.”