Leaders in the Making

This week, we focused again on leadership and qualities of a leader. This was a timely discussion for two reasons. First of all, this week F&ES announced our new dean for next year, Sir Peter Crane. Dr. Crane is an extremely accomplished botanist, former director of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, England, and former director of the Field Museum in Chicago. He is also a former professor at the University of Chicago. Our previous Dean, Gus Speth, was also an impressively accomplished man, but in a different way. Dean Speth was politically charged with an activist mindset. Though it is difficult to say anything substantial about Dr. Crane's political activities at this point (since all we have to go by is a Google search and a mini-bio by Richard Levin), it is probably safe to say that his priorities and experiences have been more directed towards academia. I personally am very excited about the new dean. I think he will help F&ES grow in a new direction and perhaps make us  a more globally impactful school. From a purely selfish standpoint, I am thrilled to have someone with experience working in museums and living collections. I look forward to having at least a few conversations with him about these institutions, even if his interests lay with plants and mine with animals. 

But a few of my classmates have expressed their skepticism for this new leadership, calling him a "boring academic" and "apolitical." It seems interesting to me that they can make these kinds of judgements about him based on the little information we have. These kinds of arguments also remind of Dean Ascher's (from Claremont McKenna) arguments that leadership is a reflection of the needs and desires of the people being led. F&ES seems to be strongly divided between those who wish to pursue lives nested in academia and those who feel strongly about the political motivations of the environmental movement. There are all manner of interests in the middle, to be sure. But it makes me wonder if it would be possible to hire a dean that would satisfy everyone at F&ES. The diversity of our interests is a huge part of what makes this school so unique and special, in my opinion. But it seems that there are certain challeneges to that diversity as well.

Secondly, reading this materials on leadership seemed timely based on the fact that they came only a few days before my visit to Claremont McKenna College. CMC prided istelf on its capacity to build leaders, and has long-advertised the motto "Leaders in the Making." CMC's focus on leadership was one of the things that drew me to the school in the first place, as I have always felt an extremely strong desire and need to pursue leadership roles in nearly everything I do. A few years after graduating, however, I have to wonder whether CMC really made me a leader, like it promised. Undoubtably, I still consider myself a leader in many respects, especially in terms of my new positions at the zoo and as a captain of the Yale grad student crew team. I think, however, that these are positions I would have taken on regardless of my training at CMC. On the other hand, I cannot deny that after my time at CMC, I feel that I am a stronger person and more capable of weathering challenges, as a leader should. Upon further reflection, I've decided that perhaps CMC did not necessarily give me the skills to be a leader but instead helped me to cultivate and refine qualitites that were already latent within myself. CMC taught me to step up, and to step back, to know when to lead and when to respectfully follow. CMC taught me how to be a silent leader amongst my peers, because sometimes it's not important to vocalize your position but to know how to lead in a more modest and inconspicuous way. 

I suppose now I understand CMC's motto more than I did before. "Leaders in the Making" does not say that the school itself is making the leaders. Instead, it says more that the leaders are passing through the institution, that they were before they came and will be after they leave, and that this school is one step in this ongoing process.