I’ve been thinking even more than usual these days about leadership, particularly the Frye mantra that one can “lead from anywhere.” I’m embarking on a new season of leadership as I take up my new old position at the University of Mary Washington. Returning to full-time teaching, I look forward to the new lessons I’ll learn, from my colleagues at UMW and elsewhere, and especially from my students. Many bracing opportunities await. (I love the way “bracing” suggests both a support and something that makes you grab on–a primal word!)

As I was working through Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society the first time, a passage on leadership caught my eye:

The role of the educational initiator or leader, the master or “true” leader, is somewhat more elusive than that of the professional administrator or the pedagogue. This is so because leadership is itself hard to define. In practice, an individual is a leader if people follow his initiative and become apprentices in his progressive discoveries. Frequently, this involves a prophetic vision of entirely new standards … in which present “wrong” will turn out to be “right”….

Leadership also does not depend on being right. As Thomas Kuhn points out, in a period of constantly changing paradigms most of the very distinguished leaders are bound to be proven wrong by the test of hindsight. Intellectual leadership does depend on superior intellectual discipline and imagination and the willingness to associate with others in their exercise.

I think that last sentence is the key. It certainly describes the intellectual leadership I want to foster among my students. “Superior intellectual discipline and imagination and the willingness to associate with others in their exercise”: a direct and deceptively simple definition, that. A goal worth striving for.