SRN LEADS/Stanford University: School Redesign Network — Leadership, Equity & Accountability in Districts & Schools

Summer session 2007

LEADS SUMMER PROGRAM: REMARKS AT THE FINAL DINNER

JUNE 22, 2007

© James G. March

 

I am very honored to be here this evening.  Those of us who do research and teach about leadership are properly in awe of those who do it.  We are here mostly to acknowledge you, to celebrate the conclusion of the program, and to thank you for the jobs you do. 

The rules of the occasion dictate, however, that I am supposed to say something more — even though you have already received more advice than a person should have to endure.  I am reminded of an old Wisconsin story:

A poor farmer went to the university in desperation.  "Professor", he said to the dean of the College of Agriculture, "My cow, my only means of livelihood, is sick, listless.  What should I do?"  The professor replied, "OATS.  Feed the cow only oats for a week, and then come see me."  A week later, the farmer returned, panicked:  "Professor, last week the cow had just a few symptoms, but now she's limping, her eyes are half-closed, and she's got no more milk.  Professor, you must help."  "BARLEY", said the professor.  "Feed the cow only barley for a week, and then come see me."  When the week was up, the farmer appeared again:  "Professor, professor, the cow is listless and can’t do anything.  For God's sake tell me what to do."  "CORN," said the professor.  "Corn for a week, and then come see me.”  And when, a week later, the farmer returned, the professor asked, "So, how is the cow?"  The farmer replied, "Professor, it is very sad; I must tell you that my cow died last night."  "What a shame," said the professor. "I had so much more good advice to give you."

If you have already tried oats, barley, and corn, I have no new additional advice on how to revive your cows.  So, I will not speak long. 

My job is to provide a relatively painless bridge from the drinks before dinner to the drinks at dinner.  In the course doing that, I want to explore the proposition that great literature engages and illuminates fundamental issues of leadership more profoundly than do contemporary popular treatises on leadership.

I will try to illustrate the proposition with several pieces of great literature.  It is a sampler.  Read closely any other piece of great literature, and you will find ample evidence for yourself.

Yeats

My first item is a poem by William Butler Yeats, entitled Easter 1916.  It is a poem that illustrates the extent to which poetry is a natural medium for expressing and contemplating doubt, paradox, and contradiction — features of life, well-known to experienced managers, but normally banished, perhaps with reason, from the public language of management. 

Easter 1916 is a short poem of some 430 words arrayed in 80 lines.  It is a song of exquisite lyricism with sounds and rhythms and rhymes that would deserve recitation and incite admiration even if the lines were devoid of meaning.  There is music in the words. 

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.

There is music in the words, and that is reason enough to enjoy the poem.  Anything else is extra.  However, Easter 1916 also evokes a cascade of meanings.  In particular, it illustrates the epigram (attributed to W. H. Auden) that poetry is “the clear expression of mixed feelings.” 

The poem celebrates the Dublin insurrection of 1916, a failed but inspirational cameo in the history of Irish independence.  The poem honors the visionary leaders of an ultimately successful revolution, paying tribute to the martyrs of the Easter insurrection and their “terrible beauty”.

MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

However, the beauty the poem finds in the martyrs of 1916 is, in modern terms, a socially constructed beauty.  Their actions and their natures were purified and sanctified by the executions of 1916 and the subsequent independence of Ireland; but the poem is unabashedly ambivalent about the individuals. 

One is viewed as distracted by the insurrection from his true literary potential; another as a strident rabble rouser; and another as an egocentric bastard.

A drunken, vain-glorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart

Easter 1916 is a eulogy in which the heroes of 1916 are both extolled and reproached.  The poem invites an awareness that the leaders involved in radical change are saints only by subsequent reconstruction; that battles lost and won in life are often fought in a muck of human lunacy; that the demands of history may conflict with the demands of decency. 

The implicit claim of the poem is that ambiguities, contradictions, and ambivalences are not errors to be purged from consciousness.  They are components of any intelligent comprehension of reality. Confidence has its doubts; love has its hates.  Every virtue has its vice, and every vice its virtue. 

Such a sense of life as filled with unavoidably mixed feelings matches the experience and understanding of many experienced managers, but it conflicts with standard rhetorical imperatives for managerial talk.  The rhetoric of management is a rhetoric of decisiveness, certainty, and clarity. 

Managers are usually expected to represent confusions as clarified, contradictions as resolved, estimates as certain, and doubts as driven out.  Although the confusions and contradictions of life are often obvious to them, managers often articulate a fantasy world that is simpler than the world in which they live and that they know from experience. 

This rhetorical fantasy may often serve a purpose.  There is ample evidence that confidence and certainty, even when unfounded, create conditions for decisive action; and decisiveness is often a prerequisite for effectiveness. 

The paradox that simple-mindedness is an instrument of change and, in moments of change, adaptive organizations often exhibit rigid leaders is well-known.  As Easter 1916 observes,

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter, seem
Enchanted to a stone

Rather than flexible instruments adapting to life’s natural course, committed leaders are obstructions to it —stones in a river, stubbornly inert “to trouble the living stream”, as the poem describes them.

Easter 1916 is a tribute to fanatical visionaries for their contribution to Irish independence, but it also observes that leaders are quite likely to be (or become through the process) something less than unconditionally attractive as human beings. 

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.

The heroes portrayed by the poem have been led by the sacrifices they have made tosubstitute an ugly confidence in their own simple faith for an intelligent comprehension of the complexity of real human experience. 

Is there an alternative?  Can managers sustain an awareness of the contradictions, paradoxes, ambiguities, and ambivalences of life (as intelligence, human beauty, and learning require) while espousing a rhetoric of simplicity, clarity, consistency, and certainty (as managerial norms and practice require)? 

A passion for poems such as Easter 1916  helps.  Poetry is a voice of incoherent and contradictory truths.  It reminds managers and their advisors that life is gloriously chaotic and endlessly confusing, that contradictions of feelings and comprehensions bring a bittersweet, but essential, enrichment to life, and that although the rhetoric of management is exquisitely disconnected from managerial reality, that disconnection itself is part of the panoply of paradoxes that protects the beauty of human existence.

Borges

The second piece of great literature about which I want to talk is a short story written by Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinian writer.  The story is called “El Sur” (“The South”) and was once described by Borges as perhaps his best story.  The story is quite short and quite simple:

Juan Dahlmann the grandson of German immigrants on one side of his family and of an old Argentinian family on the other is employed by the municipal library in Buenos Aires.  He leads the sensible life of a sensible man.  One day, he incurs a cut that becomes infected.  He goes through eight days of hell.  Ultimately, he goes to a clinic where he is operated on and discovers that the previous hell was just a suburb of hell.  

At first, the doctors tell him that he is on the verge of death.  Then, when they say that he is recovering, he decides to go to the South, the real Argentina, “un mundo más antiguo y más firme.” (a world more ancient and more harsh)   He travels by train and gets off the train in a remote place and walks to a place where he can eat.  There is a very old man curled up, dark, small and parched, a reminder of gauchos of the South.  There are also a group of ruffians.  He sits down to eat. 

Suddenly he feels a spit ball hit his face.  Somebody has thrown it.  Then another one.  The owner of the place says, don’t pay any attention to those fellows.  However, words are exchanged and one of the fellows takes out a large knife and invites Dahlmann to fight.  The owner objects, saying Dahlmann does not have a weapon. 

En ese punto, algo imprevisible ocurrió. (At that point, something unforeseen happened.) Desde un rincón el viejo gaucho estático, en el que Dahlmann vio una cifra del Sur (del Sur que era suyo), le tiró una daga desnuda que vino a caer a sus pies. (From a corner the old, immobile gaucho, in whom Dahlmann saw a figure of the South (the South that was his), threw him a naked dagger which came to lie at his feet.) Era como si el Sur hubiera resuelto que Dahlmann aceptara el duelo.  (It was as though the South had resolved that Dahlmann should accept the duel.)

Salieron, y si en Dahlmann no había esperanza, tampoco había temor.  (They went out, and if there were no hope in Dahlmann, neither was there fear.) He thought that in the clinic if he could have imagined a death it would have been one like this.  Dahlmann empuña con firmeza el cuchillo, que acaso no sabrá manejar, y sale a la llanura. (Dahlmann resolutely took up the knife, which in any case he would not know how to use, and went out onto the plain.)

Through Juan Dahlmann, Borges invites us to think about how we justify action in a world in which victory is elusive and virtue is not reliably rewarded — for example, in the world of education.  

Modern discussions of action are overwhelmingly in a consequentialist, rational tradition.  Commitment and persistence are seen as choices; and choices are seen as based on hopes for, indeed expectations of, good consequences.   Great actions require great hopes.  To motivate their commitment, we tell our students:  “You CAN make a difference!”

We teach people who want to manage schools that they should adopt such a consequentialist theology as a sacred doctrine. We teach them to evaluate their alternatives in terms of expected consequences, and to implement strategies with expected outcomes that appear attractive. 

Such teachings honor ideas that are of enormous importance in the history of human development.  Nevertheless, the ideas have their limitations. In particular, tying commitments to grand hopes for their consequences leads not only to the glories of great actions but also to false illusions, cutting corners, cheating, and the sacrifice of decency.  When hopes are frustrated, as they often are, the frustration leads to lies, self-deception, despair, and retreat. 

As Ibsen’s Doctor Relling reminds us in The Wild Duck,

“Tar De livsløgnen fra et gjennomsnittsmenneske så tar De lykken fra ham med det same.”

If you take illusions away from an ordinary person, you take away happiness at the same time.

Awareness of the tendencies toward self-deception and the other limitations of a consequentialist dogma is not new.  John Stuart Mill, himself a distinguished utilitarian, characterized Bentham, the patron saint of modern consequentialist thought, as having the "completeness of a limited man". 

What Mill recognized and we, to some extent, have forgotten is that Bentham and his modern consequentialist disciples exclude from their vision of humanity a second grand tradition. That second tradition sees commitment as based not on anticipations of good consequences but on attempts to fulfill the obligations of personal and social identities and senses of self. 

Rather than speaking of expectations, incentives, and desires, this second tradition — like the Argentinian South that Juan Dahlmann rediscovers in Borges’ story — speaks of self-respect, honor, and obligations. 

Cervantes

A predilection toward pursuing a sense of self is captured exquisitely by the hero of my third piece of great literature, the magnificent novel by Miguel de Cervantes —  Don Quixote de la Mancha.

En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo

When challenged to explain his foolish behavior, Quixote disdains a consequential justification.  He says:

“que volverse loco un caballero andante con causa, ni grado ni gracias: el toque está en desatinar sin ocasión.” .(I, 25)

“For a knight errant to make himself crazy for a reason merits neither credit nor thanks.  The point is to be foolish without justification.” 

Notice what he says:  If you have consequential reasons for your actions, your actions deserve no particular credit.  They are products of your situation, rather than manifestations of your will.

When Quixote encounters the traders from Toledo, he demands that they certify that Dulcinea del Taboso is the most beautiful woman in the world.  When the traders say they would have to see Dulcinea before they could say that, Quixote disagrees.

"La importancia está en que sin verla lo habéis de creer, confesar, afirmar, jurar, y defender."

"The essential point is that without seeing her, you must believe, confess, affirm, swear, and defend it."

For Quixote, Dulcinea’s beauty is not a question of reality; it is a question of will.

Quixote’s actions are based on the claims of his identity.  He says simply: 

"Yo sé quien soy." (I, 5)

"I know who I am." 

As Quixote's misadventures illustrate quite vividly, following a sense of self has its own confusions, dangers, and limitations, but Quixote celebrates a non-consequentialist view of humanity.  He reminds us that the human spirit thrives on the joy that is achieved by the imposition of will on reason.  If we trust only when trust is warranted, love only when love is returned, and learn only when learning is valuable, we abandon an essential feature of our humanness — our willingness to act in the name of a conception of ourselves regardless of its consequences. 

In the Quixote vision, great enthusiasms, commitments, and actions are tied not to hopes for great outcomes but to a willingness to embrace the arbitrary and unconditional claims of a proper life.

I would not pretend that it is possible or desirable to ignore consequences altogether in education, but as educators, we are committed to our institutions of learning and to the traditions of teaching not simply as instruments of success but as objects of beauty and affirmations of humanity.  

The story is told of an encounter at a recent Stanford alumni gathering between a multi-billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur who had graduated from Stanford and a classmate who was a teacher in the public schools.  The entrepreneur greeted the teacher heartily and said "I want you to know that I think what you do contributes just as important things to society as what I do.  We are both engaged in God's work".  To which the teacher replied, "Yes, we are both engaged in God’s work.  You in your way and I in His." 

Our involvement in education undoubtedly has many consequences that we value, but we also pursue and venerate knowledge and learning as a manifestation of faith in what it means to be a human being. 

The words are obviously a bit peculiar for a group of practical administrators.  Nevertheless, I think they have some mundane implications for those of us who claim to be educators.

Recently, our conception of schools has become overwhelmingly consequentialist.  It is a conception that yields useful insights and is not to be dismissed thoughtlessly.  But it is a conception that fails to capture the fundamental nature of the educational soul. 

Søren Kierkegaard said that any religion that could be justified by its consequences was hardly a religion.  We can say a similar thing about education.  Education only becomes truly worthy of its name when it is embraced as an arbitrary matter of faith, not as a matter of usefulness. 

Schools are temples, not factories.  Being an educator is a calling, not a choice.  Students are not customers; they are acolytes.  Teaching is not a job; it is a sacrament.  Research is not an investment; it is a testament. 

I do not know whether such a perspective is imaginable, much less possible, in our daily lives in the institutions of education.  But if it is, and if we can – to some degree – achieve it, then perhaps we, as educators, may some day be able to say that we, like Quixote, know who we are. 

Sénancour

There is another beautiful text written at the start of the 19th century by the French writer Étienne Pivert de Sénancour

"L'homme est périssable.  Il se peut; mais périssons en résistant, et, si le néant nous est reservé, ne faisons pas que ce soit une justice."
(Obermann, 1804, lettre xc)

"Humans are perishable.  That may be; but let us perish resisting, and, if nothingness is what awaits us, let us not act in such a way that it would be a just fate."
(Étienne Pivert de Sénancour, Obermann, 1804, letter 90)

 

collaborations for effective leadership

LEADS focuses on a critical arena in school reform, and it is founded on operating principles that promote high quality practice and effective outcomes. First, all arrows point to instruction. The implicit, sometimes explicit theory guiding the work is that districts are there to support effective teaching, and every practice and policy needs to be assessed in that light. Second, it emphasizes the importance of evidence - decisions informed by careful analyses of information - which is so critical and all too rare at both district and school levels. Finally, LEADS stresses the importance of documenting knowledge that can be shared among participants and beyond. We spend too much time re-inventing the wheel in education. Learning about best practices is just as important at the district level as it is at the classroom level, and LEADS participants contribute to as well as benefit from that knowledge base.

Deborah Stipek, Dean, Stanford University School of Education