One University's Response to the Anti-Leadership Vaccine: Developing Servant Leaders

Executive Summary This article addresses the need for institutions of higher education to be involved in the development of leaders who believe that power and authority are for helping others grow. A description of the Servant Leadership Program at Columbus State University is offered as one university's effort to address this need. Students commit to leadership development through academic study, extensive community service, and mentoring. The purposes of this paper are to explain the servant leadership philosophy and how it interfaces with major leadership theories and to describe how the philosophy is being applied through the CSU program. ********** "We give every appearance of sleep-walking through a dangerous passage of history," writes John Gardner (1990). "We see the life-threatening problems, but we do not react. We are anxious but immobilized." Gardner lists immensely threatening problems of our times such as terrorism, AIDS, drugs, threat of nuclear conflict, toxic waste, depletion of the ozone layer, and the very real possibility of economic disaster as current problems crying out for leadership (Gardner, 1990). Pulitzer Prize winning author James MacGregor Burns (1978) joins those calling for "compelling and creative leadership." Burns also argues that intellectual attention should be paid to the phenomenon. Burns points out that no central concept of leadership has yet emerged in modern times and that without a modern philosophical tradition we lack the very foundations for understanding a phenomenon that powerfully shapes our lives. The recently accumulated research, however, provides a strong tradition of leadership literature and studies. Bass & Stogdill's Handbook of Leadership: Theory, Research, & Managerial Applications (1990), for example, contains over 7,500 references. Such a research base makes an intellectual breakthrough now possible (Burns, 1978). Although the call for leadership has become "one of the keynotes of our time" (Burns, 1978), institutions of higher education have been slow to respond (Greenleaf, 1969). Robert Greenleaf, writing of the leadership crisis in the 1960's, agreed with Gardner that colleges seemed to administer an "anti-leadership vaccine" (Greenleaf, 1969). We, in fact, have the misfortune to live in the age of the antileader, according to Greenleaf. We've done a good job of educating cynics, critics and experts--the technical specialist who advises the leader or the intellectual who stands off and criticizes the leader, but no one wants to educate the leader himself (Greenleaf, 1969). With an increasing awareness of the need, the demand, and perhaps their mission, more colleges and universities are heeding the voices that call for their involvement. The Kellogg Foundation's Leadership reconsidered: Engaging higher education in social change (Astin & Astin, 2000) declares that higher education has the potential to produce future generations of transformative leaders who can help find solutions to our most vexing social problems. About 700 college programs now specialize in leadership development, a number that has doubled in the last few years (Reisberg, 1998). Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia, took the initiative three years ago to define the kind of leadership development that might make substantive changes in students' lives. The CSU Servant Leadership Program, a collaborative effort between the university and multiple business and private partners, combines extensive community service, mentoring, and formal academic studies in such a way that the parts complement and reinforce each other. As the program took shape, questions arose concerning the meaning of "servant leadership," its theoretical framework, how the concept could be practically applied, and how future servant leaders might be helped to grow. The program is Columbus State University's answer to the "anti-leadership vaccine. …