Fri 13 Jul 2007
I know that I should be nicer to the hard-working folks at the Office of Campus Life, but this stuff bugs me.
Hello Student Leaders,
If your group has not done so already, please be sure to re-register for the upcoming semester. The Office of Campus Life will be sending out important information early to mid-August regarding the Purple Key Fair, Jamboree, and the Student Organization Summit. Groups are required to attend the Purple Key Fair and the Student Organization Summit in order to receive College Council funding.…
Blah, blah, blah. Nothing wrong with the announcement and the attendant bureaucracy per se, but note the end of the post.
While your at it, please check out the new Campus Life website!
Thank you and enjoy your summer,
Katie Kamieniecki
Campus Life Coordinator, Student Leadership & Development
Is there more student leadership on campus today than 10 or 20 years ago because the College now employs a bureaucrat with the phrase “student leadership” in her job title? I doubt it. In fact, odds are that there is less leadership by students. The more that the College pays people to do things that students used to do for themselves, the less they will learn about leadership.
Remember the Tablecloth Colors!
July 13th, 2007 at 9:56 am
Undoubtedly you’re bothered by the lousy grammar: “While your (sic) at it”.
July 13th, 2007 at 12:25 pm
In an IT Management/Leadership Group paper, Patricia Brown of the Editor’s Corner on Leadership writes: “On a more serious note, let’s talk salaries…” The quality of leadership for her is directly proportional to salary, to how much you are paid. Well on that note, Patricia sounds more like a shopper lamenting that her bag is not full.
In years past, leadership was that ephemeral male quality whose value was incalculable and where men’s focus was on sacrifice and and self-less teamwork.
Today, leadership is about salesmanship and leadership, where salesmanship is the ability to be persuasive about the architecture and implementation of the details necessary to execute the vision (the bullshit) of your company, board, or in general, your benefactors, and where leadership is about motivation, endurance, goal orientation and perspective.
In other words, we interpret leadership compartmentally, where we assign tasks incrementally in order to achieve consensus and are rewarded with compensation to justify the required outcomes. Leadership does not exist. It is about being able to explain, persuade and implement policies and programs while driving under the influence. Honorariums, medals, titles, and offices abound under the heading of “Leadership”.
Leadership now represents equality of access to privilege. We are all leaders, each in turn waiting to lead, only differentiated by salary, title, and access to those exercising influence and power. Authority is now democratized mediocrity.
When asked to lead we ask: How Much?
July 13th, 2007 at 11:56 pm
“In years past, leadership was that ephemeral male quality whose value was incalculable and where men’s focus was on sacrifice and and self-less teamwork.”
So leadership should really be all about Bolshevism… comrade?
July 14th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
I keep looking behind myself and can find no followership insight.
July 14th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
Ms. Noons:
It appears that your experiences about leadership are measured in remuneration. For you, leadership is a learned avocation or a job description, not an abstraction or that rare quality that we seldom find in men.
Clearly for you, leadership is defined by position, vested authority, and the compensation that is accorded to those who manage others.
Weak men despise true leaders and are threatened by them. Look about you. This disease of egalitarianism seeks to rout leadership where it exists. This rot of leaderless existence is eating out the soul of our people and for this we will pay a dear and heavy price.
Cowardice is characterized by looking behind themselves, “finding no followership insight”?
Pardon me pilgrim, I thought there were men out there.
July 14th, 2007 at 9:11 pm
Love to receive expositions on leadership and courage from anonymous posters!
July 14th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
As a recent alum who was on campus before and after OCL was created, it felt like there was significantly less student leadership immediately after the whole OCL bureaucracy was created.
While this is certainly my unscientific and personal opinion, it feels like the addition of all of the new bodies in campus life literally squeezed out many of the student leaders who used to run campus life.
Perhaps this is because each class has different people. But, the classes immediately prior to OCL’s formation were filled with lots of talented student leaders. After OCL’s creation, there seemed to be a lot fewer student leaders. Is this a result of different class composition or did the new OCL bureaucracy prevent potential student leaders from coming forward and asserting themselves? I don’t know.
July 15th, 2007 at 2:35 am
To Anon@July 14, 2007 06:00 PM:
First off: If you didn’t know, I’m male. I don’t know if you called me “Ms. Noons” as some sort of a bizarre personal attack, but if you did, it didn’t work. It wouldn’t distress me in the least if I had, actually, been female. (Admittedly, if I woke up tomorrow as a woman, I would be somewhat shocked.)
Second of all: Who gives a shit about your ephemeral, abstract definitions of “leadership”? Your notion that leadership should be about “sacrifice and and self-less teamwork” would play perfectly into the hands of the average Communist Party commissar.
Leadership is, in actual fact, nothing more than the ability to organize people and get things done. There are some people with high salaries and lengthy titles who can’t do this, just as there are some who can. (There are many people - such as NGO workers - who organize effectively without too many monetary incentives.)
Finally, I fail to see how gender has anything to do with leadership (or organizational ability, as I’d prefer to call it). Women are over-represented in the activism and student organization that does take place on campus. For the most part, they do a good job, although the administrative bureaucracy takes away some of the incentives to start work.
By contrast, most of the aristocratic “Great Men” held up as paragons of leadership throughout the centuries have been anything but. They have generally managed to blindly slaughter their way into the history books. Win or lose, they have been lauded due to their “position [and] vested authority” rather than their actual track record.
To give an example: Josef Stalin. It may distress you to hear this (… comrade), but despite his “leadership” of the Soviet Union during the WWII years, which arguably led to the Triumph Over Fascism, he was in fact responsible for the intelligence failures and military purges that weakened the USSR’s position at the outset. He covered this up (and thereby secured his position as a Great Leader) by murdering millions more of his own people.
And so it goes with the model of leadership that you put forth.
July 16th, 2007 at 1:08 pm
Noons,
Have you taken Chandler’s wonderful course on Leadership and Management? You seem to talk much about the Leadership as if all great leaders should merely be managers, creating organizations and bureaucracies, to handle the great problems of our age. Yet organizations rarely produce the new results which are expected from our leadership, but rather propagate the solutions (or problems) of our past.
The current OCL seems to fulfill this position, relieving students of any need to familiarize themselves with bureaucratic channels, or organization skills. But it also hasn’t encouraged students to tackle issues on their own, but to give them an idea, and to let them handle it. They also act like many other bureaucratic institutions and resist attempts by others to do things their own way, actively blunting the ability of leaders to bring together organizations in search of new ideas, new solutions and new passions.