Jepson School of Leadership Studies: Scholarship and Achievement

The Jepson School’s diverse faculty members and students engage in a broad range of scholarly endeavors.

Students in professor Charles Metzgar’s Leadership in Organizations class received rave reviews last fall after externing with some of Richmond’s top companies.

To better understand leadership and develop leadership skills in the context of organizations, students in the class did research in an organization in Richmond – and then figured out how to create and develop an organization from scratch. More

Constitutional Scholar McDowell Reflects on the 20th Anniversary of the Bork Nomination

Writing in The Wall Street Journal on Oct. 23, 2007, Gary L. McDowell put into a broad context the fallout from a long-ago nomination battle: "Twenty years ago today ago today the United States Senate voted to reject President Reagan's nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court. The senators may have had every reason to believe that was the end of the story. However ugly it had been, however much time it had taken, Mr. Bork's defeat was only one more routine sacrifice to partisan politics. But time would prove wrong anyone who actually thought that. The battle over Mr. Bork was politically transformative, its constitutional lessons enduring." Read the complete article. (If the link to the Wall Street Journal has expired, go here.) More Details.

Teaching ethics in business classes has taken off in the wake of Enron and its ilk. So, when Duke University MBA students were accused of cheating on a take-home test, it appeared to be just business as usual. Upon closer analysis, Associate Professor Terry L. Price cautions about drawing hasty conclusions about the effectiveness of teaching business ethics.

Price writes in the June 4, 2007 edition of Inside Higher Ed.com: " We should be careful not to infer too much from the Duke cheating scandal. A successful ethics component within a business program does not guarantee that its participants will never behave immorally. Not even churches or prisons boast that kind of effectiveness. So why should we expect it of an ethics class? What we expect is that when students complete the ethics component, they will approach moral problems with greater thoughtfulness and intellectual sophistication, as well as be more likely to resolve these problems in the right way. The goal is improvement, not perfection." Article

Incoming dean Sandra J. Peart's newest book has made the A-list for academic presses. The book is The Vanity of the Philosopher: From Equality to Hierarchy in Postclassical Economics, by Peart and David M. Levy, who teaches at George Mason University.

Each year, the American Library Association's Choice magazine, a trusted resource of reviews of academic titles, chooses Outstanding Academic Titles.This prestigious list reflects the best in scholarly titles reviewed by Choice and brings with it the extraordinary recognition of the academic library community. The list is quite selective: it contains approximately 10 percent of some 7,000 works reviewed in Choice each year. Choice editors base their selections on the reviewer's evaluation of the work, the editor's knowledge of the field, and the reviewer's record. The list was known as Outstanding Academic Books until 2000. The new name reflects an increase in reviews of electronic products and Internet sites.

In the book, Peart and Levy argue that while classical economists assumed equality among human beings, postclassical economists are fundamentally inegalitarian in their beliefs. The Choice review credits the authors with explaining "the 19th century turn to the idea that some humans are essentially more important than others" and for making "an argument that will shape debates in economics, intellectual history, and social theory for several years." It was described an "essential" purchase for academic libraries.

In awarding Outstanding Academic Titles, the Choice editors apply several criteria to reviewed titles:

overall excellence in presentation and scholarship
importance relative to other literature in the field
distinction as a first treatment of a given subject in book or electronic form
originality or uniqueness of treatment
value to undergraduate students
importance in building undergraduate library collections

Gary McDowell, Tyler Haynes Interdisciplinary Professor of Leadership Studies, Political Science and Law, will soon have the chance to explore one of his primary research interests: the use of original intention as a method for interpreting the U.S. Constitution. McDowell received a highly coveted $40,000 full fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund his research. Details.

Nominee for Political Science Prize Studies Human Rights

Assistant professor Karen Ziv is a nominee for a prestigious prize from the Foundations of Political Theory division of the American Political Science Association (APSA). Her paper, “Rights and Politics of Performativity,” is a nominee for the Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award. “Drawing on the well-known feminist theorist Judith Butler,” Zivi said, “I argued that [human] rights remain an important part of progressive democratic politics.”

Jepson Professor Wins Inaugural Prize for Writing About Human Virtue

Douglas A. Hicks and Jonathan B. Wight have won the inaugural In Character Prize, saluting the editorial treatment of human virtue and its importance in the life of our society and country. The $10,000 Prize was awarded at a ceremony at the Library of Congress. Hicks and Wight were recognized for “Disaster relief: What would Adam Smith do?,” originally published in the Jan. 18, 2005 Christian Science Monitor.

“The submissions to the Prize demonstrate a broad and universal concern for the role of good character, and how it provides the foundation for habits, practices, and ways of living that foster human happiness and fulfillment,” said Kimon Sargeant, Vice President of Human Sciences, the John Templeton Foundation. “Douglas and Jonathan’s essay reminds us that compassion for those who are suffering—and action in response to that feeling—is something we can all applaud.”

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Sprawl and Civic Life Subject of Williamson’s Work

Just before joining the Jepson faculty last fall, Thad M. Williamson, assistant professor of leadership studies, received the 2005 Harold D. Lasswell Award from the American Political Science Association. This high honor recognizes the best dissertation in the field of public policy studies completed in 2004. Williamson explored the relationship of suburban sprawl and American civic life and suggests a model of how political theories can be applied to concrete public policy debates. Williamson is now finishing a book on the topic and is in demand as a speaker and presenter on the topic of sprawl. Read the complete article

Price Book Explains Immoral Leadership

Why do leaders fail ethically? Why do leaders act as if they think they are special and as if ordinary rules do not apply to them? Those are among the difficult questions applied ethicist Terry L. Price explores in Understanding Ethical Failures in Leadership. Dr. Price rejects the standard view that leaders behave unethically simply because they are selfish. "Leader immorality is more a matter of belief and knowledge than a matter of desire and will," Price says. "Unethical behavior cannot be fully understood in terms of putting self-interest ahead of what people know to be the requirements of morality. Leaders can come to believe that they are morally justified in making exceptions of themselves." Read the complete article

A Research Center for Social Psychologists

Social psychologists study prejudice, discrimination, diversity, gender, attitudes, persuasion, violence, identity, conflict resolution and a host of other topics that explain how human beings act human. They look at anti-social behavior and pro-social behavior—like philanthropy, helping, volunteering and leading. They analyze group dynamics and interpersonal relations. They help us understand how humans interact and behave.

The University of Richmond’s concentration of top social psychologists rivals any university in the country, says Dr. Joel Cooper, professor of psychology at Princeton University and editor-elect of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. “ The University of Richmond must now be considered one of the top programs in the United States, linking the study of leadership to social psychology,” he says. “The faculty’s research complements each other nicely so that students will be able to receive training and advice from several well-known and productive scholars.”

Three of the University’s social psychologists are Jepson School faculty members. John Donelson Ross Forsyth is one of them. The heart of Forsyth's work is to build knowledge about why people feel, think and act as they do. An authority on group dynamics -- whose text Group Dynamics is in its fourth printing -- Forsyth focuses on groups' reactions to success and failure, the interpersonal functions of groups, including small group decision making. He has studied influence, juries, mobs, crowds, clubs, cliques and leadership. His broad interests include social behavior, leadership and group dynamics, and research methodology in the social sciences. Another scholar, George R. Goethals, focuses on politics, leadership, the presidency and peer interaction and performance. Crystal Hoyt, assistant professor of leadership studies, researches the effects of stereotypes and discrimination on women and minority leaders. Read the complete article