#15: How To Not Be a Leader
Instructed by Dr. Barbara Nagel at Princeton University
PREVIOUS: #16: Material Culture & the Iconic Consciousness
For students who are interested in building a career within politics, there are a number of universities which offer courses on leadership, public speaking, campaign strategies, and speech writing — various areas of life as an elected official that any aspiring politician needs to understand. But at Princeton University, one course turns the idea of leadership on its head.
Dr. Barbara Nagel’s freshman year seminar How to Not Be a Leader explores how decentralizing governance — taking the power out of one figurehead’s hands, and redistributing it to the masses — has contributed to modern political movements like Black Lives Matter and the fight for gun control.
How To Not Be a Leader
School: Princeton University
Course: How To Not Be a Leader
Instructor: Dr. Barbara Nagel
Course Description:
Since the 70s, U.S. education has had “leadership” as its vector — still kindergarteners are supposed to find “The Leader in Me.” We are presently at a critical juncture, as many are frustrated about the lack of leadership; in the fight against climate change and mass shootings, high school students have emerged as figures of leadership of a different sort. How might political action look that does not take the centralized form of leadership? In pursuit of this question, the arts, together with those traditionally excluded from leadership, have the potential to be experts in resisting, questioning, and ironizing the lure of the leader.
Ask the Instructor: Dr. Barbara Nagel
Why did you elect to offer this course at Princeton this year?
We are right now at a critical juncture of the leadership paradigm: younger people in particular have become disillusioned with the elected leaders because they — and this goes for the vast majority of corporate leaders as well — have not sought (let alone found) answers to today’s most pressing issues: the climate catastrophe but also, in the U.S., an unending series of mass shootings. At the same time, groups like Black Lives Matters, Fridays for Future, or the Parkland Students have emerged. So, I am excited to look together into the history of political action that does not take the classical form of centralized leadership. That said, in the face of the environmental crisis there is, of course, even on the left all of a sudden a strong desire for real leadership in the form of a Green New Deal in order to implement urgent measures at least to reduce the effects of Climate Change.
Is How To Not Be a Leader offered within the department at Princeton in which you usually teach?
My home department, the department of German, encouraged me to offer a Freshman Seminar again and gave me every freedom in designing a course. I am also a faculty advisor at Butler College but this semester Whitman College happens to host my freshman seminar.
What do you ultimately hope that your students take away from participating in How to Not Be a Leader?
Of course, the Ivy League is not free of the ruse of the leader. I want students to see the comically self-contradictory character of leadership-discourse and to ask themselves what happens when we all want to be leaders (i.e. who is left to be a follower? does that require special training too?). So, the seminar has a strong comical component in that comedy often gives voice to those who have been traditionally excluded from leadership — children, women, the queer, the colonized.
If you could teach a course on any topic at all, what would it be?
For me, this is it — the seminar combines so many aspects that I cherish: it is political, feminist, literary, and full of humor.
NEXT: #14: Genius: Deconstructing the Idea of Intelligence
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