… Leadership in  Liberal Democracy, part 2

This entry is a second reflection on the notion of leadership in a liberal democracy. In the last post, I wrote about how Labaree describes the immanent tensions in a liberal democracy, whereby efforts to allow for the expression of personal liberties and the promotion of the common good conflict. I related Labaree’s idea to the irresolvability of being a pedagogue, floundering about in muddiness. This, I think, is essential to teaching and leading, or indeed citizenship, but perhaps not so great for trying to make money. In this post, I want to write about how floundering is an important part of public leadership in light of the so-called `Founder’s Syndrome’ in the non-profit sector.

In the last post , I described how Labaree’s description of leadership mucking about in muddiness is radically different from the narrow-minded CEO ethos that seems to permeate so-called education reform today. On a side note, I recently read a job description seeking a head (US: principal) for a school who has a `relentless focus on outcomes.’ I’m sorry folks, focus ain’t enough anymore. It’s got to be relentless. I recommend this reform agenda starts to make one-word motivational posters for their CEO’s offices.

Above `RELENTLESS’, you might have imagery of desert heat or the clinched jaws of a pit bull.

Of course, nowhere in the job description does it mention the head’s duty to care about teachers’ learning, to foster an environment where teachers flounder a bit in the irresolvability of being a pedagogue. Perhaps just maybe students might then also wrestle with the complexity of being a citizen, a brother, a sister, a labourer, a poet.

But there is no place for weakness in a society fearful of decline. We’ve had enough failure. And of course, it’s women’s fault. The vulnerability of the femaled progressive educator must be squashed. Bring in the boys (and girls), rolling into a community near you, sittin’ on the hoods of bulldozers and tanks, shrink-wrapped in Facebook advertisements….

Whew… Okay, enough ranting, I’m off topic… Back to F(l)ounder’s Syndrome.

When I started New Urban Arts, I quickly learned about the founder’s syndrome and felt haunted by it. The syndrome describes founder’s tendency to stay too long at their organisations, outweighing their usefulness. The assumption is that while founder’s may have charisma, vision, and good looks needed to start organisations, they usually don’t have the other capacities needed to build and sustain them.

This is of course simplistic. There are enough counter-examples to show that this isn’t always the case. But, there are enough examples to show that this description does hold water.

I was always afraid I was going to be the last one to find out that I had over-stayed my welcome. I imagined no one would want to be the person to tell me. To avoid that scenario, everybody was going to have to sit me down at the same time and do some intervention. I’d be sitting in my office and all of a sudden I would start hearing ferocious creaking from the gallery, i.e. all the chairs being lifted out of New Urban Arts’ homemade chair truck to make some scary circle of doom.

Of course, I never knew when that moment might come. I also knew that if I felt it was imminent, then it was too late. I needed to be ahead of doom.

So, how did I know I wasn’t there yet but might be soon?

Well, I started to feel too comfortable in my job. I didn’t feel like I was floundering as much. I felt too certain. I felt like I was providing staff and artist mentors more answers than questions. My idealistic look forward toward describing an unknown future was giving way to a more cynical look backward, rooted in the certainty of an authoritative past.

I was thinking about this last week as Jason shared with me some reflections of the Institute of Other Significant Pursuits, indeed one of the most exciting developments in New Urban Arts’ short history. The purpose of the Institute is to provide a touchpoint for alumni, a moment where they might return to the studio to wrestle around with the irresolvability of being an artist, educator, community-problem solver, parent, etc. It’s a moment to do this together as a way of catalyzing whatever the next giant leap in their development might be.

The Institute serves as a metaphor, I think, more broadly for New Urban Arts. As much as New Urban Arts thinks about what happens in the studio each day, week, month and year, it is really a story of beginnings. It’s a place where all of us attempt to find our flying feathers before we let ‘em rip.

This was one of the tensions of being the organisation’s founder, in light of fears about the syndrome. While almost all the students, artist mentors and staff flew the coop, I stayed. The irony for me was that I couldn’t understand New Urban Arts until I left. And no one else could experience the priviliged irresolvability of that position until I was gone.

This strikes me as what is so powerful and important about the Institute. I think it also relates to the reflections on New Urban Arts that I am considering in this blog. These are the stories of continuing to navigate these impossibilities in light of what we learned at New Urban Arts, in light of New Urban Arts continuing to provide generative interventions in how we navigate these impossibilities.

What else could a school hope for?

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Yesterday, I was following the tweets of New Urban Arts’ Executive Director, Jason Yoon, as he mulled over what he describes as`leadership in complex situations’.  His tweets streamed excerpts from a report that Bill Westerman wrote about New Urban Arts.  Westerman is an ethnographer writing about the organisation as a part of the Artography project.  

Here is Westerman’s passage that Yoon was quoting, which is worth putting out there in full: 

`Essentially, the organization is minimally centralized.  There is, of course, a board, and an executive director (but not a founding director, who moved on to graduate school), and some staff, but the organization feels like it belongs to everybody. All of the young people I talked to feel a stake in the ownership, and this was also evident in the energy at the graduation event.

There are any number of people on the staff who could participate in the learning community we hope to establish with Artography. Jason Yoon himself is probably the best at analyzing what is going on, because he is closest to the data while at the same time an alum of the experience, and it is his full-time job to make this work.

But part of what makes it work is that so much rests on the shoulders of the mentors and the students themselves. This is also one of the things that makes this so exciting to me as an ethnographer. The culture of the organization becomes manifest in the testimonials of the participants, and not just two or three people on staff.

There is leadership and guidance going on at multiple levels, and as with the artistic instruction, it is not just an imposition from above, but a partnership among many and a respect for the culture of the organization and its short past.

But this is not a “collective,” either. There is stewardship and responsibility, decision-making and a structure that makes this all work. There is a model here that may be replicable, a way to make other youth arts programs more effective (artistically as well as in terms of social transformation)….

The energy we witnessed is carried along in part by inertia and in part by a leadership structure that guides the organization but with multiple gentle hands on the wheel. This doesn’t speak to the quality of the art (which speaks for itself), but it does speak to the quality of the experience in the lives of young, growing artists.’

As I followed Jason’s tweets, I also was beginning to familiarise myself with the work of David Labaree, an education historian, who describes liberal democratic goals competing for primacy in education, and of course, America itself.  He speaks of the democratic urge to promote equatable distribution of power and the liberal urge to tolerate inequalities in power and access that arise from the desire to preserve individual liberties.  

In light of this tension, he discusses three goals in American public education: democratic equality (i.e. preparing capable citizens); social efficiency (i.e. training productive workers), and social mobility (i.e. the meritocratic aspiration of allowing people to get ahead/fall behind).  Labaree tries to move away from simplistically seeing any of these individual goals as good or bad, but rather considers imbalance among them to be problematic.

As I was reading Jason’s tweets, Westerman’s observations of leadership and power at New Urban Arts, and Laboree’s reflections on America(n education), I began to think about how New Urban Arts’ leadership model perhaps navigates the irresolvable tension in liberal democracy by holding onto the tension Labaree describes.

It allows the weirdness and messiness that is a liberal democracy to take hold and fester.  Leadership attempts to both hold onto promoting the common good and individual liberties even as the two feel irresolvable.

Many of us were always (re)establishing hierarchy and power because we felt from the early days that collectives are dysfunctional.  Westerman acutely observes this.  There are directors, people are promoted, and there is a reporting structure.  Some people are paid, some people are not.  Some people are sort of paid.

But many of us were constantly undermining that hierarchy and power by trying to ensure that people listen to one another and that everyone receives a soap box when they walk in the door, even though many can predict ahead of time when and how that might backfire.  

And when it does backfire, it does not respond necessarily through undermining individual liberties, but rather provoking more enquiry.  (If only this was our model for the War on Terror!)  This is best evidenced by the Summer Enquiry project, Untitlement, which creatively responded to a rise in slurs being heard in the studio early last year.  

It also undermines that hierarchy by preserving a certain degree of both clarity and ambiguity about who is in charge.  When I was there, this would be played out in the oft-heard joke:

`I am the Director, but Jesse is in charge.’  

And Jesse responds dryly,`I am in charge, but Tola runs the show.’  

And on and on.

Of course, this model for leadership conflicts with the notion of efficiency that I think underpins our understanding of what constitutes noble leadership today: good leaders can quickly squeeze a lot of blood out of a little stone.  This is a reflection, of course, of the imbalance in our liberal democracy, as evident in our education system, which has heavily leaned toward privileging private interests over the public good for the past thirty years.  

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