Howard T. Prince II
Visiting Professor
Director, Center for Ethical Leadership
Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs
The University of Texas at Austin

I am very proud to have on our panel today a very experienced leadership educator, Catherine Sweeney, who's known as Kitty. Kitty and I have been friends and professional colleagues for several years now. We first met at the Jepson School at one of these conferences several years ago. Kitty is a real pioneer - and I mean that literally - and she also developed a program at the University of Denver called The Pioneer Leadership Program, which grew steadily under her persistent leadership. And persistence is what it took because her story is one that's not uncommon. It's one of having to deal with and overcome resistance on campus that comes from many different sources. And Kitty is a real heroine among leadership educators for having persisted and worked through that, and gained support, and created a program that thrives. She left the program recently but it is so well established that it would be very difficult to pull it out. She sowed a field of dandelions that no one will uproot.

The other member of our panel is Phillip Thompson. Phil Thompson is with St. Edward's University here in Austin. Phil is a Renaissance man. Phil is a lawyer; he was a practicing attorney for a while, and then he went back to school and got a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in History of Culture and worked with some of the leading intellectuals in American academic life as a graduate student. He is building a graduate program at a very fine smaller school, St. Edward's University here in Austin, in Organizational Leadership & Ethics. They are the little - Like the children's story, I think of St. Ed's as "the little train that could." We started our program at UT about the same time he was getting started. I woke up one morning looked at the front page of the Austin paper, and there was this great big story about Phil and his program, and I thought, "I've got to get with the PR guys and get going because St. Ed's is going to get all the students!"

I have been with the LBJ School for a little over a year and a half now. I'm beginning my fourth semester with them. I came to Austin in 1997 to semi-retire, to do essentially consulting on a part-time basis and begin to kick back after what was an exhilarating and exhausting stint at the Jepson School. I was the Founding Dean at the University of Richmond's Jepson School of Leadership Studies, having served there from 1990 to 1997. That program is in good hands, as you may have heard yesterday when Gill Hickman presented on the Jepson School, , and is thriving and doing well, and represents a unique example of what is possible in leadership education. But it may be an example that would be very difficult for anyone else to replicate because of the resource base that they enjoy.

We're going to begin today with remarks from Kitty Sweeney, followed by Phil Thompson, and then I will wrap up. We want to invite you to dialogue with us. Would it be all right if people asked you questions while you're presenting?

Kitty Sweeney: Oh, absolutely. Sure.

Phil Thompson: Sure.

Howard Prince: Feel free to jump in at any point in our presentations. We plan to divide the time roughly two-thirds for us and one-third for you, and it may end up being more for you, depending on how aggressive you are with your questions and remarks.

Catherine (Kitty) Sweeney
Former Director, Pioneer Leadership Program
University of Denver

Thanks. Well, first of all, let me tell you, our program was founded in the fall of 1994 with 19 students who were hand-picked, and when I left in the middle of September this fall, we had 250 students. Basically, our program is a residential program in the first year. There was a time period there where we were the only leadership program in the nation that had a residential component. There are some others that have been added. It leads to an academic minor in Leadership Studies, a 24-hour minor; we are on the quarter system. It is an interdisciplinary program. The program is co-owned, if you will, by the College of Business, the College of Education, and the Human Communication Studies Department. Believe me, that was tricky. It has a service learning component that involved volunteer service hours and a number of projects, which I will tell you about. It's also a student-mentored program.

Now, going from there, let me tell you, since we're dealing with ethics, what I've chosen to do is I've chosen to sort of couch my remarks in three areas: ethics of community, ethics of service, and ethics of commitment. Lots of things I could say and I'd be more than happy to answer your questions, but as we go along, I'll start with the ethics of community.

Obviously, our students live together in their first year. They occupy the entire second floor of a residence hall that's kind of a funky '50s residence hall and very much in demand by incoming freshmen. The RAs that serve this community are hand-picked and are given some extra training by the Residence Department and by me, when I was in that job, and serve above and beyond what you would normally expect of an RA.

We start out about a month after the students have arrived - and we take an incoming class of 60 students - with a retreat. No big deal. We go to the mountains. We camped. Two years ago, we camped in the snow. We do ropes courses. The whole idea is to begin to enhance high levels of trust. And so when I talk about the ethics of community, I'm talking about intentionally developing that element of trust among these 60 students. The reason we do this is we want to have a level playing field. As you know, incoming freshmen begin to jostle each other. They compete a little bit, particularly in the leadership area because they want to emerge as the leader of the leaders. And I have along the way made some decisions that enhance the level playing field. I want all of those students to be in the same arena, to be coming from the same place, at least in terms of the leadership program. So we don't do any election of officers or anything like that.

The civility, the high levels of trust, are promoted by all of the classes that our students take in their first year. The first course that they take first quarter is pretty much a survey of leadership research. The second course that they take is called Self as a Leader, where they take a really good, close look at themselves. They go through a number of different test instruments, surveys, et cetera, to begin to take a look at themselves: What do I bring to the leadership process? What are my weaknesses? What are my strengths? The students are asked in that course to begin to do their many projects together where they go out and they serve someone else. And then in the spring we have a course that's Leading Teams, where we focus in on what is different about being a team leader. We have had a benefit, a special benefit, in that Carl Larson, who wrote Teamwork and Collaborative Leadership, is on the faculty in the Human Communication Studies Department, and he has been very actively involved in this teaching. It just so happens, he's also my husband, so we've been involved together in doing this!

We send out expectations to our students before they even come on the campus. Expectations involve scholarship. We expect our students to maintain a decent to high grade point average. We don't designate what that is but we make it clear from the very beginning that this is expected. We let our students know that they will be expected to do a certain number of volunteer service hours in their first and their second years. We expect that PLP students will emerge as leaders on the campus, so we expect them to become involved in the variety of student groups. And then we expect participation in PLP events and in campus-wide events. So we make that very clear from the beginning.

Ethics of service. It's one thing to just require somebody to go do service hours, volunteer service hours. Without the reflection piece, it doesn't mean much. Without taking those experiences and discussing them in the classroom, it doesn't have very much meaning. It's just something that they do. Part of what we were doing is we were trying very hard to create a culture of service. We want PLP students coming in to understand that service is what you do in this program. I would say that the people who created this program, if you asked them who did they think that they were creating, we would call them community leaders. But we've taken that a step beyond and we look at what we call civic leadership, so that that involves not only community leadership but also, how do you live successfully as a leader in a democracy. So we didn't want to leave out political process. We wanted to encourage our students to look at and consider engagement in political process, so that's why we expanded our focus from community leadership to civic leadership.

Now, I have a model that comes from a colleague, Fred Gibson. He looks at service at four different levels. Indirect service is that kind of service where you are raising money for something that's going to be given; that's a philanthropy. The second level is a more direct service. You go to the soup kitchen. You go and you work with the illiterates. You get engaged in some activity directly, but you're not taking a leading role. The third level he calls service- plus. Service-plus is where you are serving an organization and the plus is you're also involved in making some leadership decisions, and making choices or leading a decision-making or a problem-solving group. And then the final part of his model is that grassroots advocacy, that grassroots where you're taking total responsibility. The two areas of service that we focus on are those last two. It's all very well and good to have volunteer service and so on, but we want to teach our students to take responsibility and to actually take on leadership responsibilities.

Ethics of commitment. This one can be a tough one, and I know you know this. Students today are engaged in their classes. Invariably they work; 90 percent of our students not only had work/study responsibilities but they also had jobs off of the campus. They like to have a social life at this age, so you're really competing for their time and their commitment. One of the things that I never was able to resolve is, we were enhancing these students to be leaders and yet at the same time they'd go out and they'd get involved on the campus or out in the community, and then how was I going to get them engaged back in activities related to PLP? I never solved that problem. You just have to come up with really attractive things. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but it's a challenge all of us face.

High standards. As I told you, we never set a particular grade point average. What I found happening was that there was a lot of peer pressure. Leaders have to have egos. You have to have an ego to be a leader, and part of that ego has to do with self-standard. Well, if you're a college student, part of that having a self-standard is maintaining a decent grade point average. I found that I didn't have to get involved very often with a student that might be struggling with grades because the peers, they would work each other over in terms of whether or not they were maintaining grades. The same things were true with drinking and other kinds of behavior that, generally speaking, would not be considered acceptable. This group, just by virtue of coming into the group, these students seemed to maintain a higher level of grade point average and also ethical behavior.

Now, I need to stop here and tell you about our selection process, because I know our selection process is a little bit different than some other leadership programs. The first thing we looked at - this was a committee every spring that would meet, and it included students, current PLP students. It was faculty, administrators and students. The very first thing that we looked at in our applicants was community service; even before leadership, we looked at community service. To the best of my knowledge, we never let a student in who had not done community service. The second thing we looked at was grade point average. We were not looking for the highest of grades but we were looking for kind of a stability. I know that we've let students in with as low as a 2.6 coming out of high school. You know, sometimes there's a reason why a student has got a 2.6. I'll get back to that. Third, we looked at the leadership experiences. We were particularly attracted to those students that had had an unusual kind of experience, such as that student who had been engaged in Civil War reenactments, a more deep involvement in leadership. We had another student that came in who had done a lot of children's theater. We had another student who had been instrumental in her city in having their Botanic Gardens develop a handicapped garden. You know, there are lots of students that have been President of their study body, who have done Eagle Scouts, who have been emerging as team captains and so on, but we're looking for sort of that unusual.

Now, we had a fourth category that I have never, ever heard any other leadership program talk about, and this involved taking into account any kind of a life-maturing experience. And that's why I say sometimes there's a reason for a 2.6. We have a number of students in our program that are recovering alcoholics, who have had cancer themselves, who have lost a sibling, who have lost a parent. Now, we were not trying to create a giant support group, but the assumption was that if a student can go through one of those life-maturing experiences, maintain a decent grade point average, be involved in some leadership activities, and do community service, by God, that is potential! We're not looking for those students that are out there that have already started their business, that are making more money than I'll ever make in my lifetime, who have dealt with sitting on the City Council of their town, who are already there. We were looking for potential, those people who were going to develop. And I challenge you to think about that in terms of your own leadership programs.

Let me go to the sophomore year at this point. Our students tend to scatter in their sophomore year, although a number of them do choose to live together. We do have a Greek system on our campus and many of our students go and live in their Greek houses, and happily, I can report to you, are beginning to emerge as the top officers in those Greek houses. In the sophomore year, the fall course is a 4-hour course; it's the only - no, there's another; the capstone is also a 4-hour course - called Collaborative Leadership. We teach other models of leadership, primarily the collaborative leadership model, in that fall course. In the fall course, the students are given an assignment to come together to create their own group projects; to come together around things that they are passionate about, causes that they are passionate about. They're given the entire school year to make this project happen.

In the winter and the spring quarters, the students meet once a week with what we call faculty coaches, and the faculty coaches take on groups. They take on students by groups that interest them. Some faculty are more interested in projects that deal with youngsters. Other people are more interested in what we might be doing for old people. So we let the faculty coaches choose the projects that they want to be engaged with. At this point, what we're looking for are faculty who are facile enough to be able to deal with, how do I get in touch with somebody in the Mayor's office - to we're having conflict in our group; how do we deal with this conflict? - to we want to go get in touch with a Hollywood producer; would you sign a letter? Et cetera. That kind of thing. Now, winter and spring quarters, the faculty do come up with a couple of what I would call content areas that deal primarily with ethics, because now we're dealing - we've asked them to go out and deal with the outside world. They're given two mandates with this project. One, the project must benefit others and it must involve collaboration, and we don't just mean collaboration among themselves; collaboration to the outside world.

It's amazing. This is by far the very best thing that we have done in this program. Some of the projects that have come out of this program are just astounding. And it's been said over and over and over again by everybody that I've heard at this conference and at other conferences, you cannot do without the experiential piece if you are teaching leadership. You just can't. It's one thing to do book knowledge but unless you're out practicing, it just doesn't work.

Let me give you an example of a couple of projects. A couple of years ago, one of our groups - this was right after the Matt Sheppard murder - a group of our students came together and created "Erase the Hate Week" at the University of Denver, and this is my reference to the Hollywood producer. A Hollywood producer was creating a documentary about hate crimes and got wind of what was happening on the University of Denver campus, and came in and taped all of our activities for the whole week. There was a series of candlelight vigil - actually, we got Matt Sheppard's mother to come - a number of other things that were happening. And sure enough, we showed up in the documentary. That was great. It was really a very much consciousness-raising event on our campus. But then what happened in the second year - and that's where I really start to glow, because we have many multi-generational projects that get started and then get picked up by other PLP students and carried on the next year. The next year, they created a curriculum to take out to the high school, the local high schools, about hate crimes. They made their own connections with the high schools and they went out and they taught it. It didn't involve me at all. The local high schools love our students for what they do and go out and promote. That's just one example.

I could keep going but everybody else needs a turn. Let me just say that one of the basic assumptions about our program and the trust-building - let me get back to that residential piece - is that if you have 59 people behind you saying, "Go, go, go!" you are more inclined to go and risk running for an office that you might never have considered, trying out for a dramatic role that you might not have tried, taking on a job that you might not have had. And this is what we were doing as we were enhancing that climate so that students would go out and risk. I think that we were teaching or enhancing heart. We were raising their level of social consciousness. And I have some small feedback from a couple of classes that we've graduated that it's working. I'm going to stop there.

Phillip M. Thompson
Director, Center for Ethics and Leadership
St. Edward's University, Austin, TX

Thank you. First of all, I agree with a number of things Kitty said. I would particularly comment on, just very quickly, that one, make reflection an aspect of what you do with your leadership programs. That's very important. I think a lot of leadership programs leave that out. Particularly, we talk a lot about ethical reflection on leadership. Second, also, experiential learning. I think she's absolutely right there, as well. We have two signature initiatives at my university, St. Edward's University across the river here. One is Ethics in Leadership and the other is Experiential & Service Learning. I view those two as going together. The University has devoted resources and attention - and I believe the discussion was, "You know what people care about by where they put their resources, their money, and so forth." Well, I think that our university has done that. I think both of those are very, very good points: the reflection and the experiential learning.

Also, just one other quick comment. Howard's initial comments were so nice, I wish I had them on tape to take back to my school! Although he did mention I was an attorney, which I think now I have no credibility talking about ethics whatsoever! I'm a recovering attorney. I'm in a 12-Step Program. I've gotten over - I don't wake up in the middle of the night trying to bill people. I have recovered to some extent.

I'm going to talk a little bit about my institution and what we've tried to do. It is, as Howard mentioned, a new program. It's a new signature initiative. We are a small, approximately 4,000 students, about 2,000 traditional undergraduates, liberal arts, Catholic university founded by the Holy Cross Brothers. They also - you might know Holy Cross because they have that other university in Indiana, somewhere in South Bend. I don't know that much about them. They're not that famous. But that's the same group. We're also founded by the Holy Cross.

Now, the question is, when I came in, I think the first question - at least the way that I approached it is to think about, what are we trying to create? What do we mean when we say "an ethical leader"? And I would define it as follows: An ethical leader is a person who possesses both the technique - that is, the skills - of leadership and the moral development to successfully pursue worthwhile goals. I think these two things go together. And if you looked at Howard's information that he has about the new Center here at UT, that is expressly stated there, as well. You have to have both the competencies - and by "technique," I mean things like everything from budgeting to communication - but you also have to have moral development, because if you're going to pursue worthwhile goals, how do you know they're worthwhile if you haven't had a process of moral development?

So the question is, how would we do that? And I'm going to talk a little bit about how you go about talking about ethical leadership and developing an ethical leadership program. We'll look at specifically - I'm going to spend a little bit of time on something I think is fairly unique for what we do. I call it the 4-Step Plus Program. I've tried to incorporate ethics for all of our students at various points in the curriculum.

So let me start off by just talking a little bit about the choices you would have to make, and these are choices we have to make, as well. Most schools don't have limitless abilities to engage in ethical leadership. Students don't have limitless amounts of time, so you have to make some choices. Part of the choice you're going to make or you would have to make if you're starting a program or thinking about expanding your program is this: If you want your program to be targeted - you know, a sort of systematic program which goes from year to year, a similar kind of program where there's a certain sort of consistency and coherence of what you're trying to do, building, as Kitty was describing her program, from one year to the next, that kind of a program; or are you looking also maybe perhaps for saturation, in other words, looking for possible opportunities that may be different from year to year, where you can talk about ethical leadership, like for example different kinds of speakers or symposiums, things of that nature. At St. Edward's, our process is somewhat synthetic, as you'll see. It encompasses some targeting where we think that's feasible, and some saturation.

One thing you have to do with any program you start - and I suspect the panel would agree with this - but you have to know your institution; you have to know your faculty, your staff, and your students, and you have to design your program to fit them. The program I'm talking about may very well not be exactly what would be good at your institution and vice-versa. You can always draw - and I've drawn a lot from what I've heard here so far and from others - getting ideas which you may use in a different form, but do fit it to your institution. Don't try to be somebody else's ethical leadership program.

Now, we do - and I'm not going to talk about it - we do look at the technical skills in terms of our students. We do try to, for example, put a big emphasis on communication. Our Freshman Studies program has an entire year of writing and oral communication. All of our students have to take one class in Oral Communication beyond that. They have to take a language class and they have to do a senior research paper called the Capstone, and we do other projects trying to develop skills. But that's not really what I want to focus on today. I think what we do there is not that unusual from other institutions.

We did come up with a problem, though, that I think we've come up with a somewhat unique solution. The problem was this: We do a Capstone paper where students have to discuss a controversial issue, and obviously as an aspect of that there's an ethical analysis component. The problem was, our students were getting there with very different sorts of ethics training by the time they got to do that paper. So we said, how can we resolve this? All of our students have to take an Ethics course, but they were taking it from different professors with different methods, different languages, and by the time they got to the senior essay, the professor teaching that essay has to start all over because he's got so many different backgrounds as far as students in terms of their ethics training that it doesn't make sense to do anything but to sort of start from scratch with them. We said, really the point of the Capstone paper is, they should be fairly far along in their ethics training so they can really go deep into their analysis instead of having to spend so much time just trying to get them up to a sort of basic level of ethics training.

So we did this. At a Faculty Development workshop last summer - and John Paige down here was at that. John was part of this process. We did this: We had a faculty group representing four aspects of our core curriculum. They were there from Freshman Studies, an American Dilemmas class all students have to take, as well as the Ethics professors who taught all the Ethics classes that they have to take one of, and professors from the Capstone Senior Essay class. And it was decided - this wasn't initially the idea, but eventually it came out of this faculty workshop that what they were going to do is try to come up with a standard method and a standard language for how to approach ethical issues when they taught these various classes. And the idea is this: Basically starting with Freshman Studies, all students at St. Edward's will be trained using a variation of Vincent Ruggiero - you may be familiar with his work on critical thinking and ethics - using a variation of Ruggiero's method, which basically talks about obligations, values and consequences as features to then analyze ethical issues. Looking at obligations, values and consequences in Freshman Studies we would then, in a very sort of preliminary way, give them a sequentially more complex version of that analysis through all of Freshman Studies into their subsequent American Dilemmas class; then give them some real depth when they would take their Philosophical Ethics class - you go into some depth in terms of philosophy and/or religious perspectives; and then by the time they got to Capstone, they would have this common language, this common method, so that now they're prepared to go into that and really examine carefully a social controversy. And this would be for all students.

Now, this isn't easy, as you can imagine. But we got the faculty, the leaders of the faculty in these various groups have agreed, and this coming summer we're now going to take all the faculty from our Freshman Studies and our American Dilemmas, our Ethics classes and our Capstone, and we're going to have a workshop to develop how we're going to do this method. This will not only involve the method itself, the language to be used, but also give them some idea of some of the cases they can use and how it's going to be sequential. In other words, in Freshman Studies, we're not going to get into certain distinctions, let's say, between norms and values, which we'll get into in the second state, in American Dilemmas. We keep it relatively simple in Freshman Studies, get into more complexity, and then so forth.

And amazingly, we've had - and you may find this amazing - no faculty revolt to this point! Everybody has agreed. I think there are some reasons for it, one of which I would say is this: We developed a core curriculum a few years ago where all students have to take six courses. They're on things like The West & Identity, American Dilemmas, American Experiences, Literature & Art - there's a couple of others. But they have to take - we developed these core courses that all students had to take, and it brought together faculties from all our departments to develop those. So now I came in a year and a half ago. I'm developing this program on ethics, the common ethics method in instruction. They're used to working with one-another. They're not afraid of the other disciplines anymore. They're not afraid of giving up their territory, so to speak, because this is basically going to be in the core curriculum, in something that's not really within a specific discipline. So they're not particularly threatened by some sort of disciplinary protection there, that they feel like they sort of have to protect their turf, and they're willing to come in. And I think our faculty are to be tremendously commended for being willing to do that, but I think part of that is they had already gone through this process with a core curriculum to then be able to accept this kind of a program.

And I call this the 4-Step Plus Program because we don't just have them get ethics in these classes. This past summer at the same workshop that brought up this idea, we were training faculty on how to work with ethics in their particular discipline, right? Now, this is within their discipline. And we tried to make them comfortable with the idea that they were probably already often doing some of this ethics instruction and we were just going to deepen that, and we were going to also play to the strengths of their disciplines. For example, often disciplines, particularly professional disciplines, already have a code of ethics or professional responsibility, so why not start there? You're not teaching a whole class on ethics normally; if you're just bringing in a component, go with what you know. Go with those things which you're already beginning to discuss. We'll talk about Kant and Mill and Aristotle and Locke and all the various ethical theories in the Philosophical Ethics classes, but you don't have to know that.

And when you give them - we did give them Ruggiero's method of obligations, values and consequences. This is not terribly complicated stuff. I don't want to say it's simple, but they were able to grasp that, and it's amazing the kind of projects which came out of that. We had one professor who was explaining the difference - student had to come up with a 5-act play in this Theater class and they had to, within those acts they had to demonstrate an ethical issue which they exposed in terms of obligations, values and consequences at different points within the play - some sort of ethical issue which they then would resolve in the course of coming up with this little play they put together. That's one example. There were many other examples. But I think it's an interesting process and I think faculty, once they get into it, are not afraid.

Thinking of classes, one other thing I must say, which I think is also fairly unique to what we do, is this. We got our - and I don't know how; it wasn't anything brilliant I did - our Business faculty agreed to put an ethics component in every single one of their classes, without any dissent. Not a single - they were expecting some dissent but they didn't get any dissents. And I think part of this is, we have cultivated our Business faculty on the idea of working with the community, particularly the businesspeople in the Austin area, that they want business ethics. We've done polling from our university of businesspeople; they said, "We want more business ethics instruction." Our faculty know that. They know that this is sort of a niche for them, our Business faculty. It's a way that they can sort of be somewhat different than other business programs. You know, we're not going to be a great business research institution. We're not going to sort of make our mark there, per se, not that our faculty don't do some of that but that's not really our particular strength.

But when we did this polling, for example, we were thinking about doing this Master of Science in Organizational Leadership & Ethics, as Howard mentioned - this is for people coming back in from business who would then attend these classes, which we've now started. But when we did the polling of the business community, we said, "If we start this program on Business Ethics & Organizational Leadership, will you send your people?" We looked at small, medium and large businesses here in Austin, and 77 percent said yes. And then we asked the all-important question, "Will you pay for it?" and two-thirds said yes. And a certain percentage of that have actually come through! And when your business faculty - you know, they're businesspeople generally. They understand when you say this is a good thing, but it's also a niche for yourself as well. So you've got to use whatever means for that which is attractive to your faculty to bring them to the table. We also, by the way, pay a pretty generous stipend for our faculty to attend the Faculty Development Workshops, although I put them through long hours and hard work, which John could testify to. They were all complaining about how long it was, mainly because I droned on, but nonetheless we paid them reasonably well to come to this, too. You know, you've go to put your resources - you've really got to indicate that it's important for it to work.

Now, just very briefly - that's the main thing I wanted to talk about. We do obviously try to find other saturation points for our ability to teach ethical leadership. We have a minor in Professional Ethics we just created. The Master of Science in Organizational Leadership & Ethics I mentioned. We have a number of other ways to get to our students across campus through symposiums and lectures and workshops of various kinds. We also do a lot of co- curricular work with our residence halls and our residence hall advisors and our directors of our residence halls. And what's interesting is, I use the same method and language that we use in terms of our classes - this obligations, values and consequences - when I talk to the residence hall people in Student Affairs. Now, theoretically - and I put this theoretically - in the best of all worlds, if everything went right, our Student Affairs people, our students and our professors would all have, or at least a lot of them would be on the same page in terms of being able to talk to one-another about ethical issues, and these would be mutually reinforcing mentions of what we do in terms of ethical instruction.

So just to sum it up, what our particular goal, angle, aim at St. Edward's University has been, to try to find a way to develop the ethical dimension of our leadership program. In other words, through curriculum - and we also put a big emphasis, as I mentioned, on experiential learning and other areas. But we've tried to find ways, creative ways, to make sure that our students come out with certain fundamental understandings of what ethics is - how does one go about ethical analysis? - in a very serious and systematic way, but we also allow for other opportunities as well. And I don't think it should be an either/or between targeting and saturation. I'll stop there and let Howard get to his project.

Howard T. Prince II
Visiting Professor
Director, Center for Ethical Leadership
Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs
The University of Texas at Austin

This afternoon I'm going to walk you through a presentation that we developed for our Center here. We use this to communicate to various audiences. And when I'm done with that, I'll be happy to respond to the questions that aren't addressed in this kind of more structured presentation.

If you're looking for rationale for "why do leadership education?" you can find it in lots of places. One of the best sources of wisdom in this area that I've found is Scott Adams and Dilbert. This is one that I use to talk to people about the effects of trying to manage and trying to be a part of a bureaucracy. Scott Adams' newest book on leadership is called Don't Step in the Leadership, that really is the title of the book. Robert Greenleaf, the author of Servant Leadership, gave this as a rationale for, "why do leadership development?" Few of us are perfect.

Why connect ethics and leadership? Well, here are three different angles on that. The first one suggests that the leader needs to have a sound moral compass. A leader often is involved in setting direction. We hear that expressed in different ways, the vision thing and so on, but it takes a person of character, someone who has contemplated what is worth striving for together with other people, what is worth our collective effort, what is worthy of our humanity. Take Frances Hessenbein, who is a distinguished leader in her own right - she reformed the Girl Scouts of America a few years ago and she's been the CEO of the Drucker Foundation recently. Gordon Sullivan is a former Chief of Staff of the Army. He was chosen to be the Chief of Staff just after Desert Storm and got the unenviable task of reducing the force by 40 percent. He brought the Army down from somewhere around 770,000 people to about 480,000 or so now. Talk about downsizing and its effects. And Sullivan calls to our mind here an ethical dimension of leadership that is often overlooked. We often tend to the question of what is right, what ought one do? That's the starting point. And leaders [end of Side A] ...

... and when the Society decided to go to a volunteer manning system. Prior to that decision in 1973, the exercise of authority too often passed for leadership with draftees. When the Army and the other services had to go into the labor market - that particularly impacted the Army. When we to go into the labor market and recruit people and try to then retain them, we have to completely rethink, what does it mean to lead? And so there's been a lot of effort, a lot of research funded and a lot of resources expended toward reconceptualizing and then turning that into training programs for new leadership for the military. There's not a lot of literature from the field in public sector resources, and so part of my hope for our LBJ Center will be that we'll be able to begin to do research to add to the literature in another domain.

Service. We intend to offer leadership education not just to graduate students at the University of Texas but to a whole range of institutions and organizations who might be interested in what we have to offer. We're going to think beyond what you might expect of a School of Public Affairs. We're not just going to focus on government or public sector organizations. We're going to offer leadership development programs to community leaders, to leaders in education, even to the corporate sector. Some early initiatives that I've become involved in are with the local high-tech community. There's a group called the Austin Software Council which is trying to develop a way to provide leadership development activities for leaders in these dot-com start- ups. Many of the people who start those companies are young people who have technical backgrounds and they have a good idea for a product. But they don't know how to build an organization, to lead people and to provide for the long-term development of an organization, and they need a place to go for help. I don't know how it's going to turn out, but I'm working with a group that is thinking about that problem.

Another area that is very important to our larger society and its well-being is leadership education for police departments. The Rodney King massacre in my mind is the equivalent of the My Lai massacre - the Rodney King beating was the equivalent of the My Lai massacre in that it's shown a spotlight on an issue that was glaringly wrong. At the Rodney King beating, there were officers in the chain of command who stood by passively and took no action to stop that brutality, and that's part of the LAPD's long-standing culture. That has surfaced again recently with the Ramparts scandal in that department. And they've just completed a self- examination in that department where they changed from the rotten apple explanation - that was their first explanation of Ramparts: "We've just got a few bad cops." - to an acknowledgement that this is much deeper, that it is part of their culture. They know how it got into their culture, and the real question now is whether they can begin to change that. Well, that caused police leaders across the nation to begin to think about, what do we do about this? How do we begin to enhance the capability to lead within police departments? And I have been working with a group called the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which is an umbrella organization for police chiefs in this country as well as in about 80 other countries, who are interested in developing some way to introduce leadership training and ideas into police organizations.

And I've also been working in the State of Texas to help the state fulfill a legislative mandate, for example, to provide a week of leadership training every two years for all police chiefs. They have to go through this to keep their badge. And in the process of doing that, we're trying to raise awareness and the desire on the part of police chiefs to really develop leaders for the first time in most of those organizations. When you ask a police officer, "Who's the leader in your department?" even in very big departments, they will say, "The Chief." They don't perceive anybody else as a leader. And many of those people at the intermediate levels don't take on leadership responsibilities. They just pass orders. They do a technical job, but they don't try to influence people towards some greater good. And they certainly don't think of themselves in terms of having the ethical responsibility anywhere near to the extent that they ought to be.

We want to offer educational opportunities in a variety of formats. We're going to try to establish an advisory board. We are slowly doing that. This conference has taken a great deal of time in the last year and a half, and developing those courses is taking a great deal of time. My hope is that in the long run, we will be able to develop a solid set of courses within the LBJ School that will prepare our graduates better for what is going to be the reality of their futures. The LBJ School for a long time has prepared students to be analysts, and we do that quite well. They learn the quantitative techniques. They learn political theory and philosophy. They learn about governmental structures and operations. They learn about recent legislation. And then after four or five years when they take their first job, somebody says, "You're great at what you do. I'm going to put you in charge of a group of people to do the same thing." And as they move on through careers, they maybe even take on more significant responsibilities. The Governor of Colorado is a graduate of the LBJ School, and some of you heard Ken Apfel yesterday, who's the outgoing Commissioner of the Social Security Administration, who's a graduate of the LBJ School. The majority of our graduates over 30 years are working in less senior positions, but they're doing the real difficult leadership work, the role of the middle leader, throughout many different kinds of organizations.

I want to stop here. One of the things I want to be sure that I make everyone aware of who's here at this conference is something that's not related to the LBJ School but it's something that I want you all to know about, because there are some pioneers who have labored for a long time to pull together some of the resources that are hard to bring together, that I want you all to know about. The Center for Creative Leadership is a non-profit organization in Greensboro, North Carolina, which serves primarily the corporate sector. Some yeoman there at least 10 years ago, in response to the need from the leadership education community, began to pull together resources. They have published on a biannual basis something that they call a Leadership Resource Book. It's available to you at ccl.org - not dot-com, dot-org. The newest edition just came out. It's the 8th edition. It's $45. It's a gold mine. It contains annotated bibliography. It contains descriptions of videos and other materials that people have found useful. It contains annotated descriptions of assessment devices. It contains names of people, organizations and conferences that are involved in leadership education. If you go back to the 6th or 7th edition, there were two volumes. One was divided into programs and people and the other into the resources. And in those earlier editions, which you might be able to find in libraries, there were descriptions of programs in higher education, even syllabi. So to me, that is the most important single reference to know about if you are involved in leadership education, whether it's in higher education or in some other venue.

Let me stop there and ask Phil and Kitty to join me in making ourselves available for your questions.

Audience Member: I have a couple of comments. First, for Dr. Sweeney. I noticed that you required for admission some demonstration of community service, which leads me to a question or just a comment, that it seems to me that you have already self selected people who probably have a high likelihood for being successful in what you're trying to do. So what I am wondering is, or what occurred to me at least is, if you pick very bright students that are elite in an elite school and they're still very bright when they come out, the question is, what have you added? I was wondering what you added if you would answer the question.

My second comment is, I was very interested in your freshman year program that you had there. I think it relates to what Dr. Prince was talking about in ethical standards - "a person with character" is the phrase he uses - because it seems to me that you are not teaching leadership, but what you are teaching - some of the words that I heard from you are, you're talking about self- confident, self-knowledge, sense of confidence, how to live in a democracy, how to take on responsibility, development of [word], which you define as a self-standard or self-internalized standard. So it seems to me that what you are teaching is not so much leadership there but assisting the people that have self-selected to be interested in service in creating their own sense of self, their own autonomy, their own competence and self-confidence, which leads to the conclusion I made that [inaudible] ... a real fundamental characteristic of leaders. So they are just comments.

But I have one question. Underlying a lot of things that have been said by all three of you is the question of ethical standards and what have you. So I wonder at Denver - not so much at LBJ graduate school but at Denver and St. Edward's - do those schools have a good, solid operating honor system for undergraduates that actually works? I come from an institution, Rice University, that I think that of the great characteristics of the undergraduate education there is because it's a long tradition. It's been in place ever since the school was founded, really - is a really operating honor code and honor system that's run by the students. So it's my firm belief that there is an ethic of honesty in general. I mean, this is not in the program or anything. It's just out there in the school. So I was wondering if Denver or St. Edward's, or in fact any undergraduate institution that is attempting to teach leadership, in some enrichment maybe, has a good solid operating ethic of honesty that permeates the undergraduate student body or that the institution attempts to inculcate through working in honesty?

Catherine Sweeney: The University of Denver has a brand new Honor Code that came on board, actually, this fall. Many of the PLP students were engaged in the committees that brought this forth, and it's been a very positive experience for those students. The first students to sign the Honor Code were the incoming freshmen this year.

Phillip Thompson: We do have sort of a policy, an academic policy, about honesty, but do we have an Honor Code? No. That's something I have on the agenda for next year to do. The center for this, as you may know - Duke has a Center for Academic Integrity which has a lot of information if you wish to - that's one thing I've been looking at, looking for centers that deal with this issue to follow-up, to develop a really strong program. And that's frankly one area where we could be stronger.

Audience Member: It just seems to me that that would be a way of [inaudible]. I don't know how it is at other institutions but if there was an us-against-them, sometimes [inaudible] this kind of ethic, an us-against-them attitude - in other words, we're the students and whatever it takes, we're going to do it with [word] and whatever - if the leadership program is in a sense in opposition to this ethic - that is to say, it's attempting to teach honest and confident standards and what have you - it seems to me that there's potential discontinuity there that makes your job a lot harder.

Howard Prince: And John Treadway comes from a university where they have such a thing and a leadership program. Do you want to comment on that?

John Treadway: Yes, very briefly. I'm going to speak on behalf of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Many of the undergraduate institutions in Virginia have long-standing programs such as what you're talking about: Washington & Lee; I attended University of Virginia, which happens to be [inaudible]; University of Richmond has a very long-standing program like that where students take care of business. I think you're right; it does make things a little bit easier at the University of Richmond. It certainly made things easier at the University of Virginia. That is part of the culture. Once upon a time in New York City, fool that I was, I was a graduate student, and no bank would cash an out-of-town check until, in a moment of desperation I said, "On my honor as a student at the University of Virginia." The bank Vice President walked by me and said, "That's good enough for me. They have an Honor Code; cash his check."

Howard Prince: I think your general point is one that's really well taken, though. The process of developing people to be willing to take on leadership roles and responsibilities is affected by things much greater than just our efforts in the classroom. We need to be sensitive to the larger environment in which that program operations. That's something that's central to the Military Academy. They're able to align almost every element of their program in a way that nobody else could possibly do. But the other side of that is it creates a world that's so idealistic that when the students go outside that world into the field Army, they often are disillusioned because they encounter people who are doing things that they wouldn't imagine doing at home, and they can't understand why anybody's doing that in the Army. It forces the faculty there to help students deal with this first encounter with imperfection, human imperfection. Other observations or comments?

Audience Member: I was really interested in the selection process. I'm Cheryl [Holtz] from Northwestern [Name] State University. In putting together our leadership program, as Chief Judicial Officer I see the leadership program as another and most important end of that continuum, and I'd like it to be less judicial and more leadership-building. However, we've made a decision not to begin our program until the second trimester because we're so concerned about getting only the high school leaders rather than [inaudible] ... upon some [word] at the university begin to reinvent themselves. I'd like to hear from you if you gave some thought to starting the program a little later, and how you came to your decision to start it where you did. I think the benefit of the freshman interest group pieces is enormous; however, I am still, from my judicial standpoint, concerned about the leftovers who don't select an interest group in their freshman year and then are much more active later on.

Catherine Sweeney: The original conception of this program was as a residential college, based on the English model, and the early things I've seen written about it had faculty living in the dorm and all of that kind of stuff. So you have to understand that we were coming originally from that standpoint. I do think that we use that residential piece in a very effective way, and I don't think it would be as effective if we started in the sophomore year. That identity group, yes, that's a good part of what it's about. Parents love us because they perceive living together in that environment as being safe. I don't know as they're always right, but they perceive it anyway as, "Gosh, my little darling is going to go off and live in this safe place where they're going to be keeping a good eye on him or her." Well, we acknowledge that; we welcome that; but more importantly than that, it's that coming together and building on that trust, and enhancing the risk- taking.

Now, I will say that it has been troubling to me - there is, of course, so much maturation between the freshman, the first year and the fourth year, and the leadership program does or does not have anything to do with that. That first course that our students take, they seem to have trouble with it because they think they know how to do leadership; they want to be out there doing it; they've been invited into a leadership program, so why are you making me sit here in this classroom and read books and discuss and that kind of stuff? By the time they are seniors, they can come back to us and say, "Gosh, you know, I understand now why you did that," but boy, it is just rough that first quarter. We have talked about changing the order of the courses; should we have something a little more experiential in the first quarter? It has a lot to do with what they bring from their high school experience. So, yes, we've debated that, but I really ultimately think that because we have that residential piece, that it's important that we start in that first year.

Howard Prince: The gentleman in the back over here.

Audience Member: A little bit of a prologue here. During my sabbatical, I had the rare opportunity of being sent to the Ethics Publisher Training Operation up at Bentley College, and the Chair of the Business Department up there at Bentley convinced all of us that Daniel Goleman's work on emotional intelligence, which is a popularization of an Israeli scholar, is not only teachable as a subject for [word] correlation but success and leadership, and therefore was very important. So I'm going back trying to build a program and my people are laughing me out of the room. So I guess the question is, is there a place for that, pertaining to that same type of thing by another direction?

Catherine Sweeney: We use it in the Interpersonal Communication area, which is a part of the Collaborative Leadership, presenting other models of leadership, and we talk about it extensively within that particular class.

Howard Prince: I haven't used that particular material but I think that's a good example of one of the points I was trying to make earlier about the need to develop new pedagogies, and when you do that, some people may wonder, "Why are you doing that?" or think you've gone off the deep end. But you're talking about developing interpersonal skills, self-awareness, things like that, that require different approaches than traditional cognitive development techniques. Yes, sir?

Audience Member: I've noticed in the department [chair] meetings in the College of Business at the University that over a year ago we were talking of students becoming more and more interested in leadership and wanting something in leadership. And this year in the College of Business it was to ensure all the students receive three hours of leadership training. What I'm trying to do now is seeing the magnitude nationwide of the development of leadership center and teaching leadership courses. Just how big is this that we're talking about? It sounds like it's getting big and growing, but I still don't have a concept of it.

Howard Prince: That's a good question. In addition to the several hundred ROTC units around our country, which I consider leader development programs, at the last count that I heard reported this past November at another conference, there are at least 900 identifiable leadership programs on college and university campuses across the country. The definition of "leadership program," though, ranges from someone teaching a single course all the way to full-blown majors. What's important, though, is to compare that number to earlier attempts to estimate how many there were. When I left Richmond in 1997, we had just completed a survey where we uncovered 600. So since 1997, there apparently are 300 new programs. Maybe they were there before, and we didn't turn over the right rock, but I think what's more likely happening is that it reflects consistent growth of this idea.

Twenty years ago there were a lot of people who were wondering if this would end up being a fad, but I don't think it is. I think that's the case for several reasons. One is that leadership education that's done well is challenging. The students respond well to it. It's interdisciplinary by nature. It helps them overcome what faculty have done to knowledge, which is to split it up into fractions that don't make sense in terms of understanding the world of their experience. They also, I think, are much more - young people are much more idealistic and eager to contribute to society than they have been painted in some of the popular media. I simply have not found these selfish young people that supposedly are created every decade or so. They may be somewhere in our society but, on average, I don't think they're showing up in higher ed places. Most of them come to us eager to learn and contribute and want to be good citizens, and they look to us to show them how. So my sense is, this is something that is being perceived as important, doable, still controversial in many places, but growing, and I think, here to stay.

Phillip Thompson: If I can just make a quick comment on that, I would concur. If you're looking for ethics centers, the Association for Professional and Practical Ethics, APPE, has a little booklet as well as Web site with a list, many of which are business ethics centers with leadership programs, as well as a Ethics Resource Center in Washington, which just completed its 2000 Business Ethics Survey, which is a very interesting thing to share with your business faculty in terms of what businesses are saying about those sorts of issues. So those are two good resources right there.

Howard Prince: Another indicator of whether this is a stable and worthwhile thing or a fad is the development of two professional Leadership Educators Associations. One is several years old; it's called the Association of Leadership Educators. And the other is fairly new. It had its inaugural call for membership this past November. It's called the International Leadership Association. They both have Web sites. The ILA is affiliated with the University of Maryland's James McGregor Burns Leadership Academy, and that ALE does not have an institutional affiliation that's so closely bound. But they both have Web sites. They reflect the effort on the part of people who have been working at this for a while to create a professional identity and a way for people to come together and share their work and ideas. Yes, please?

Audience Member: I'd like to ask a couple of questions. What is your attrition rate if you start a program for a residential group , how many stay in the program?

Catherine Sweeney: Well, it varies from year to year, from 87 to 92 percent.

Audience Member: And then the other question. On our campus we have some programs that are residential coming in. The parents want them to apply [inaudible] part of that. How do y'all [inaudible] ... screening process?

Catherine Sweeney: You know, that's part of the 7 percent that don't stay in the program.

Howard Prince: I have to tell you a story on the other side of that.

Catherine Sweeney: It is true!

Audience Member: [Inaudible] ... some outline [inaudible] ... but I'm interested in other universities and how they structured their centers. Did you already have a large vision for your center? How will you implement all those different arms in centers? In there any way we can learn from each other as faculty person [inaudible] in leadership? I'd be interested if you have a structure in your centers [inaudible].

Howard Prince: You're looking at the organization! We've secured some seed money which is going to provide our operating funds for eight years, during which I'm supposed to raise $10 million to create the capability to do the kind of things that I described as our aspirations here. In the conference handouts I have put a 5-page description of this program. It's labeled "Draft." That's what I sent to the University President, and it was approved without any changes so you can scratch through "Draft." That is what we're going to do.

Probably the best reference that I know of are the 6th and 7th editions of that resource book that I mentioned to you, that's put out by the Center for Creative Leadership.

Audience Member: I would like to add to that, that wasn't a resource for our development of our program, but early editions included the Jepson School and much of the work that you've all done in this area in general in developing our own courses and programs [inaudible].

Howard Prince: Yes, we got them to publish a lot of that sort of nitty-gritty stuff that people wanted. There are two journals that perhaps you might be interested in knowing about as well, that are useful in this field - at least two. You find leadership studies in lots of different places that don't have the word "leadership" in them. But there are two journals that are devoted to publishing in the area of leadership. One is called The Leadership Quarterly. It was established by a group of psychologists who demand that anything that gets published have statistical significance, at least p < .05; better is p < .01. The journal focuses on empirical work, and that's great. But there's another journal called The Journal of Leadership Studies that comes out of an editorial group headed by someone at Baker College, which publishes all kinds of work that doesn't necessarily have an empirical basis for it. And that's the journal that captures what I refer to as the craft of this field. It's the place which accepts articles such as one that Gil Hickman wrote on the role of the classroom teacher as a leadership influence. One of the things we have to think about if we're doing leadership education is the nature of the experience that you create for your students. You have them read things and talk about those things, but if you don't act consistent with what you're teaching them, you get cynicism. And she talks about that, for example, in there. So that journal is the place where - I hate to use the word "softer," but the non-empirical things appear.