We Who Never Set a Squadron in the Field

ANDOVER, Mass. — For the past month and a half, I have taught at the summer session of Phillips Academy. Although working close to home in this sylvan corner of northern Massachusetts was a joy to me, I have to admit a certain amount of moral struggle that I faced as a faculty member of an institution whose students condescendingly referred to me as a “local” while I grew up in neighboring North Andover. Now, at the end of the summer, I have seen the other side of the campus’ New England brick and, I hope, gained a great lesson in moral growth.

My mentor teacher and I taught Othello to our Prep for AP English class and, in my rereading of the tragedy, I found one character who struck me as unmistakably familiar. This one character has knowledge, power, and smarts, knows when to show sympathy, or when to march up indignation. He is the supreme politician. This one character struck me as devoutly Harvardian in his understanding and use of human weakness. I could envision him campaigning amongst important friends for student office, dashing up to an extra-curricular office in Hilles, or whispering knowingly with a TF after section. This one character was Iago, the villain.

I will enter my senior year at Harvard in less than a month, and in my time here I have seen myself grow more and more “well tuned,” to use Iago’s words, to the art of politics. We learn quickly here how to court both professors and classmates, to attend the proper dinners and shake the proper hands. This is not specific to a particular group of students, either. Whether vying for President of the International Relations Council or admission to the Delphic, it is quickly made clear to us that we need to know the right people, make the right early moves, and smile when we need to. But I realized early this summer that teaching smart, capable people to be politicians does not necessarily make them leaders.

I had the pleasure this past year of living with another transfer who had spent the first two years of college enrolled in the United States Military Academy at West Point. He left to become an academic, but never lost the values of duty, honor, and leadership that are instilled there. We left straight from our last final to dash to South Station, took the Fung Wah bus to New York City, and then boarded a night train headed north towards West Point. We camped clandestinely in the woods, dodging the military police, and rose with reveille in the morning to see the young leaders he had trained with graduate.

The commencement speaker, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, did not focus specifically on the tasks at hand in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, he strove to arm those cadets with an ideal of leadership, telling them, “I've come to believe that few people are born great leaders. When all is said and done, the kind of leader you become is up to you, based on the choices you make.” He characterized a leader as someone willing to understand and care for those led, but more importantly, as someone who has “moral courage.” “The hardest thing you may ever be called upon to do,” he said, “is stand alone among your peers and superior officers. To stick your neck out after discussion becomes consensus, and consensus ossifies into groupthink.” And while Harvard’s commencement speaker, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, did nod briefly in his speech to the class of 2009 as “future intellectual leaders,” in that very same breath he asked them to “join” in his task-at-hand, not to lead.

Harvard today is lucky to house many naturally-gifted individuals, but as Gates admitted, “few people are born great leaders.” As Harvard students, selected for our abilities and given every advantage, we should be expected to become stewards for the rest of our society. However, this cannot happen on a wide scale unless the University, its administration and its culture, begin to cultivate a new ethic of leadership. We are given knowledge and power, but we are afraid to be openly conscious of ourselves as leaders, perhaps out of noblesse oblige or a fear of seeming arrogant.

However, when we refuse to be conscious of our need to be leaders, and honorable ones at that, we become highly empowered but morally vacant. One of the founding principles of my summer employer is that while goodness without knowledge is weak, knowledge without goodness is dangerous. I ask our administration, whose refusal to be open with those it leads and whose desperate flailing in the economic crisis have done little to exemplify good leadership, to recognize this, too. I ask those who guide Harvard to cultivate this new ethic of leadership, to see us as potential leaders and instill in us the great duty by whose will we should be formed.


Jeffrey J. Phaneuf ’10, a Crimson editorial writer, is a history and literature concentrator in Dunster House.