Leadership programs need retooling

How many student leaders does it take to screw in a light bulb? Well, it doesn't really matter if they can't afford a light bulb in the first place.

Intrigued by the latest squabble over the LeaderShape program, I began thinking. On campus, we have Emerging Leaders with a budget of about $50,000. LeaderShape is priced around $50,000 also. According to our leadership website (yes, we actually have one; I was surprised too: www.leadership.gatech.edu. Check out their "Levels of Leadership" section for a good laugh.) the Bradley-Turner Foundation at some point awarded Tech with a $1 million dollar endowment specifically for leadership initiatives. These are not the only groups and programs.

The upshot is that leadership education involves a large sum of money. Yet we do not seem to have a clear idea about how exactly this expenditure benefits campus.

Therefore, I was pleased to read that Student Affairs will be taking an in-depth look at these programs. "We're in the process of trying to re-energize a discussion that started probably five years ago on leadership education programs," said William Schafer, vice president of Student Affairs, in the 'Nique last week.

This campus needs a debate about which is more effective, teaching students how to hypothetically lead, or on-the-job-training and having funds available so that the opportunities exist for students to step up as leaders. This is especially pertinent in the shadow of yet another choice between slashing Tier III funding and increasing our Student Activity Fee.

Current initiatives have a huge selection bias, meaning those who don't want anything to do with activities labeled as "leadership development" and all its connotations, will probably not sign up for a course or a weeklong workshop.

This begs the question: If these programs only attract "leaders" anyway, then what are we actually developing?

Jennifer Schur wrote an excellent editorial back on Oct.. 15, addressing the current student-organization system, which in my opinion is a side-effect of these leadership programs-a self-perptuating clique of student leaders exists on campus, or rather ".elites serving elites."

When I was visiting Harvard last year I had the chance to speak candidly with a professor in the Kennedy School of Government. We got around to talking about the different academic centers available to students. He volunteered the idea that, from his experience, these centers seem to come and go like fads in cycles of five to six years. He felt the leadership-education bug-also the itch of moment at Harvard-had been played and would slowly suffer the usual burnout.

Tech's student body has never been one to jump on the latest fashions; maybe the Institute is catching the leadership jive too late. Have our current student leaders so quickly disappeared that we need to institute some bureaucracy as a stop-loss measure? Come on now, what we call civilized society has existed for thousands of years. Any charlatan posing as a "leadership consultant" portraying it as a novel concept will have some ulterior motive.

If pushy donors who earmark funds are the reason we have all this money for leadership initiatives, then the issue is more tenuous; however, Tech still needs to stand firm. Money should not be taken just because someone wants to give it; every program has unintended consequences. Donors need to be educated that the Institute might be in a better position to decide how to allocate their contributions than they are.

I'm going to give our administrators the benefit of the doubt and assume that leadership programs are worthwhile. In that case, let's prove it. We have an entire community on this campus skilled in taking unwieldy, politically charged problems and determining the cost-effectiveness of programs: the School of Public Policy.

Funding a short, two- to four-year longitudinal study of student leaders and the leadership-development architecture on campus would be an excellent living lab for policy students. If the results were to come out positive then fantastic, we have been doing well and now have something tangible to display to donors and other schools. We may also learn where our returns will effectively be diminished.

If we find that our programs have serious flaws and the money could be better spent elsewhere, then that's just as beneficial of a result. At least we would know where we are and how to change for the better.

To me, it seems we are currently leading leadership blindly. An unbiased, academic study is the only way to make sure that the light bulb gets installed properly.