Newly Appointed Dean Shares Ideas on Leadership Studies and
Jepson's Past and Future Roles in the Academic World
January 2007
You will soon be a part of the Jepson School. But for
the moment, you have the benefit of distance. From your
perspective, as a teacher and administrator at
Baldwin-Wallace College, an institution of similar size to the University
of Richmond and a
college that has a leadership studies program, how you
describe the current national and international
reputation of the Jepson School of Leadership Studies?
Throughout the country and internationally, the Jepson
School is regarded as the exemplar for a high-quality
undergraduate program grounded in the liberal arts. It’s
known to have the curriculum to emulate for those who
want to establish a challenging program that educates
students for and about leadership. From the introductory
course that stresses the philosophical and historical
foundations of leadership, to critical thinking and the
emphasis throughout on ethics, to applied courses that
approach leadership questions from a specific
disciplinary perspective, to the emphasis on
co-curricular and service learning, Jepson has developed
a superb program. It’s also known for the excellent
scholarship done by the Jepson faculty. That scholarship
is a critical element of the success of the program, for
it supports and enlivens what the faculty does in the
classroom and ensures that the curriculum reflects the
leadership questions that engage scholars and
practitioners alike.
Please describe the leadership program you created
at Baldwin-Wallace and your thought processes in
organizing the curriculum and so forth.
That program, founded in 2000 and serving an incoming
class of 25 undergraduates a year, consists of an
interdisciplinary minor in leadership studies. It was
modeled after the Jepson program, which is a nationally
known program of academic integrity. Before we began our
program, we sought advice from the founding dean of the
Jepson School, Howard Prince. Like Jepson, the approach
is interdisciplinary and the program is rooted in the
liberal arts and there is an emphasis on service
learning throughout the curriculum.
As you went through the interview process for the
Jepson position, what particular ideas came to mind that
you clearly identified as priorities for the School?
As I reviewed the priorities in the position description
one theme stood out: articulating the nature of
leadership studies and Jepson’s mission throughout the
University and nation. This is a challenge I will
take up eagerly. The School is virtually unique in its
superior program and high-quality faculty research.
That’s an easy message to convey.
There is, however, room to shape future conversations
about leadership studies both on the campus and beyond.
There is a role for someone who has the time and energy
to convey with a sense of pride and urgency why
leadership studies is so important. While the field of
leadership studies has grown rapidly recently, many
within the academy and among the general public are
misled about what comprises leadership studies.
When I began the work that eventually helped create the
program at Baldwin-Wallace College, for instance, some
of the faculty thought the program would be entirely
co-curricular. They were convinced that leadership is
something we do or practice with little real academic
content. The public, too, may well think there aren’t
substantive academic questions associated with
leadership, it being instead something we can watch and
imitate. But there are, of course, questions relating to
leadership that we can study. We can learn from history.
We can use the social sciences to construct hypotheses
about what frameworks or rules generate good (effective)
or bad (ineffective) leadership. And so on.
As you talk about the Jepson School to national
audiences, of what will your message consist?
First, I would lean heavily on the mission of the Jepson
School, learning “for and about” leadership, educating
students who can respond to and, when needed, initiate
change. I would also emphasize the vision of leadership
that emerges from my scholarly work, whereby leadership
is a means by which individuals reconcile common with
individual goals. When these common and individual goals
overlap only partially, leadership entails convincing
individuals to achieve the social good, while respecting
their individual needs. But here a thorny problem arises
that has occupied philosophers from Plato to Rawls:
What’s the social good? Ambiguity surrounding the
nature of good, both individual and collective, is why
a leadership studies program is best grounded in the
liberal arts, in reading works of philosophers and
political theorists, and evaluating the history of how
the good has been used to generate outcomes. The study
of politics, political administration and social
psychology then helps students appreciate how people
actually behave in settings that involve group and
individual tradeoffs and dynamics.
I would emphasize, moreover, that we neglect ethics (and
assume ethical leaders) to our peril, as a glance at the
papers or a recollection of Enron will remind us. Though
we might wish for perfection, in the real world
leaders are people, subject to the same sorts of
temptations we all face. Human nature being what it is,
we mustn’t expect people who come to positions of
authority always to take only the common good into
account. Consequently, institutions or rules are crucial
to ensure that leaders behave ethically. Rules of
conduct, ethical codes, institutions that generate
transparency and allow challengers to enter the playing
field are much-needed structures to generate good
(ethical and effective) leadership and the study of such
institutions in the context of leadership yields
tremendously important insights into how to achieve
ethical leadership.
What message would you like to share with alumni?
Jepson graduates come from a terrific institution whose
reputation is going to continue to move upwards. To the
extent that they put their Jepson School education to
good use, they not only benefit themselves but future
students who will enter the School.
How will you envision working with current students
and what priorities do you see in terms of student
recruitment?
The best way to recruit good students is to use our
strengths, to showcase our current and former students
as well as our faculty. Once I’m at the School and able
to work with the faculty, staff and students already
there, we’ll develop additional ideas to convey our
sense of excitement about the possibilities opened up by
a major at Jepson. For now, I’d like current and former
students increasingly to tell their stories, to let
prospective students know what attracted them to Jepson,
what they took away from their education there, and the many
ways they’re now using what they learned at the Jepson
School. Prospective students will be intrigued and
attracted to the School when they observe and hear these
stories about how our current and former students have
put their Jepson School learning to good use. As good
students are attracted from all disciplines, across the
University, the School will become increasingly diverse.
The Jepson School was founded in 1992. Our first
class graduated in 1994. As you are well aware,
particularly in the early years of an institution, much
growth and change occurs. And, an
individual—particularly one sitting in the dean’s
chair—can have a tremendous impact in a short time frame.
How might you see yourself making a contribution?
Rather than presuming to know how best to address each
of the Jepson School’s priorities, I only want to offer
some general statements at this time. Developing faculty
is probably the most significant role a dean plays.
Here, I would take a page from Jepson's good
record and study it assiduously.
There is a special complexity that arises from the
Jepson approach of hiring faculty with a non-leadership
disciplinary specialty who also teach and conduct
research in leadership. But I support the approach. I’ve
lived a similar life, having been trained as an
economist but with a specialization at the intersection
of history, economics and philosophy. It’s not clear to
me that there’s one “correct” balance between the
disciplines, but the administration needs to ensure
individual faculty members have the resources at hand to
achieve the combination that best suits his or her needs
and those of the School.
Because Jepson is such a young program, many of the
faculty members are at the assistant or associate level.
I would want to tap their energy and focus on their
needs and aspirations as they move forward in their
research and career process. As dean, it’s critical that
I mentor each member of the faculty and that is a
one-on-one, individual relationship. I will also
strongly encourage faculty to share their knowledge with
others.
Jepson is already making vast contributions to our
national intellectual discourse and our knowledge of
leadership. The work that is being done on leadership at
the Jepson School brings national attention to the field
and I shouldn’t wish to change any of that. What I might
be able to add, should the faculty at the School welcome
this, is increased collaboration between economists and
leadership studies. I have ideas about enhancing two
kinds of collaboration: between economists with an
interest in their disciplinary history and the Jepson
faculty; and between experimental economists and
leadership faculty. The first endeavor would add a
relatively untapped dimension to the history of economic
thought and leadership studies: exploring leadership
insights of political economists such as David Hume,
Adam Smith, J. S. Mill and Frank Knight. Secondly, if
leadership is a means by which individual and collective
interests play out, subjecting our ideas about
institutions to experimental procedures would be an
important contribution to leadership research. I’d like
to help make these collaborations happen.
How does your area of scholarship, economic thought
and political economy connect to the study of
leadership?
Economic thought in earlier centuries was very much
concerned with ethics and the mechanisms by which
ethical decision making emerges. Since at least the time
of Adam Smith, political economists have been interested
in the question of how individuals, motivated by
self-interest, can come together and make decisions
affecting the group or polity. In 1759, Smith wrote the
Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which he makes the case that
people are essentially imaginative, social beings who
care about approbation or approval, and who want not
only to be praised but praiseworthy. He grounds a system
of ethics on this argument and says that humans who
exchange with one another do so in a social context so
that we're not solely motivated by private concerns.
A number of leadership questions arise quite naturally
because we all are a mixture of private and social
motives. What sorts of institutions help ensure that the
best (most effective and also ethical) decisions
emerge from the group? Who can lead the group? Does it
matter how we choose the leader? So, for instance, if a
leader is chosen democratically, does this affect his or
her effectiveness, compared to a leader who is chosen by
fiat? Can leaders who are chosen randomly also be
effective? If what Smith argued is correct, that we all
have the capacity to lead, then
as long as people in the group perceive the choice of
leader is fair or unbiased, then random leadership
should work and prove effective.
While we have some faculty at Jepson who have studied
economics and others with a keen interest in the
discipline, you will be the first economist. How do you
see yourself sharing your scholarship and expertise? Do
you anticipate teaching any courses in economics or are
there other ways you plan to incorporate your field of
study into the Jepson curriculum?
The experience of leading a major curriculum revision taught me a great deal about building coalitions
and support among disparate faculty. What I bring to the Jepson School, given my
disciplinary interests, is a willingness to work with
business school faculty to strengthen already-existing
connections. I teach game theory as a cross-listed
course in economics and business that counts as an
elective in our leadership minor. Among other things,
here we study how actors (firms, nations or people)
come to be leaders moving first and thus pre-empt their
rivals. We look at what it means to be a rational
actor and whether rationality consists of acting
competitively, selfishly, cooperatively or
altruistically. We examine how people come to modify
their actions and choices when they talk to each
other about what it means to be selfish or cooperative.
We consider whether repeated interactions yield the
same sort of choices (leaders) as one time interactions.
In experimental economics, much of this is put to test
in the lab. So, an additional course that might
fruitfully be offered both to leadership and business or
economics students would focus on experimental
economics. "Law and Economics" and "Public Choice
Economics" would be also be potential courses. In
a course on public choice, the key question to explore is how
individuals come together to form and run a collective. But that begs the question of leadership, and
it makes a good deal of sense now to think about
leadership in the context of public-choice economics.
First and foremost, I am a historian of economic thought. I came to
leadership studies because many questions relating to leadership were treated
in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and The
Wealth of Nations, and J. S. Mill’s
Utilitarianism, On Liberty and Principles of
Political Economy. A course
that works through some or all of these texts would
offer a great deal both to students of economics and of
leadership.
What role(s) do you want to consider that Jepson play
on the local metro Richmond community and on the
national stage?
There’s no doubt in my mind that Jepson can play a
leading role on the national stage in terms of
curricular development and leadership scholarship.
Programs in leadership studies will continue to develop
at liberal arts colleges and also at larger institutions of
higher learning. The Jepson School can continue to be a
model for such programs as they develop. As the School
matures, its students, staff and faculty can continue to
develop and strengthen connections within Richmond. The
School has some of the best minds in the country
teaching and learning about leadership alongside some of
the most willing hands actually doing projects in
service to the larger community. Those minds and those
hands are a great resource for the community at large
and there is a great deal that we can learn from doing,
as well as studying and researching.
Biography of Peart
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