Leadership
True... and false
Leadership is a rare quality: when it’s authentic and pro-social it can be the most emotionally resonant element for people, striking chords deep within our psyches from the years when we lived in roving bands of closely-related foragers. When it is false or selfish or malevolent it seems contemptible as few other things do.
I recently re-watched the stirring and magisterial historical film Gettysburg (1993) and was struck (as always) by Jeff Daniels’ portrayal of Col. Joshua Chamberlain, commander of the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment. The unit was already at less than half strength before the battle of Gettysburg even began and was positioned on the ultimate left flank of the entire Union army (the Army of the Potomac). The Confederates had charged up the hill against their position three times and been repulsed each time and Chamberlain had positioned his reserves on his flank to prevent envelopment but his men’s ranks were thinned by death and injury and those left standing were almost completely out of ammunition.
The Confederates charged a fourth time, and Chamberlain thought quickly: he had the higher position and would generate an element of surprise against troops which had to be as weary as his own. Humans have a deep fear of being stabbed, so while bayonet charges are a desperate gamble in modern warfare they can sometimes generate routs. He ordered a bayonet charge. It was a relatively rare example of a field-grade officer on the Union side thinking flexibly and aggressively and it won Chamberlain the Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest award for gallantry and military service in the United States.
There are many aspects of a modern society only really understood and measured by social scientists (and even most of those scientists seem now to have slipped down a slope into Critical Theory nonsense). One of them is how a culture trains and appoints and empowers leaders… not just politicians but managers and thought leaders and cultural figures. Russia, for example, is uniquely weak because it has few institutions to identify and reward and shape leaders for tomorrow. This has been a weakness of the country for over 100 years and the Soviets understood this and tried to reform it but their changes didn’t go deep enough. Historically the United States has been a relatively good country at promoting those with merit and honoring competence above station of birth. The Civil Rights era promised access to an entire reservoir of untapped human excellence, suppressed by bigotry. I won’t go into any more detail about this feature of modern societies, except to say that the ways a society identifies and places leaders can change very quickly.
Joshua Chamberlain was a Maine college professor who volunteered to serve in the Union army because of his anti-slavery and humanist ideals and his profound patriotism. After Gettysburg he had a distinguished military service record which saw him attain the rank of Brigadier General. He was wounded six times. After the war he was placed by society as the president of an outstanding Northeast private Liberal Arts college, Bowdoin University. He was a 19th-century academic leader.
Claudine Gay is a petty and unoriginal administrator who has chiefly made her mark by reducing merit-based application and selection processes in favor of racial and sexual quotas. She has published 11 academic papers total in her career (A decent annual output for many professors), about half of which are now exposed as including instances of flagrant plagiarism. After an embarrassing and divisive appearance before Congress she has refused to step down to help Harvard or its application pipeline and has positioned any criticism of her as equivalent to racism. Claudine Gay never went to war, led people in a urgent and coordinated project, or (to my knowledge) sacrificed anything for her beliefs. Largely because of her race and sex (and some shallow academic and administrative experience) she became the president of an outstanding Northeast private Liberal Arts college. She is a 21st-century academic leader.
