Courageous Academic Leadership: 5 Strategies for Shaping the Enlightened Leaders the World Wants

You’re an academic leader, committed to the noble vision of helping shape students into the kind of enlightened leaders the world wants. Future leaders that see, listen, think, speak and act in ways that transform their corners of the world into better corners.

Perhaps your primary responsibility is as faculty whose corner of the world is the classroom where you strive to guide those future leaders. Perhaps your primary responsibility is as an administrator whose corner of the world is where you strive to provide the top cover and structure needed for the faculty to be their best. Perhaps yours is a different setting or responsibility.

Whatever your academic setting and responsibilities, permit me to share some observations that I suspect connect and put us on common ground, especially if you’re in a business or theological setting:

• Students are increasingly anxious about having an affordable life and secure jobs, especially in light of AI.

• Students increasingly blame corporate greed as a major factor in higher prices.

• Students increasingly distrust and reject capitalism as a system.

• Students are likely to vehemently identify as Capitalist, Democratic socialist, Socialist or Other/None, based on relatively little life experience.

• Students who identify as Capitalists typically understand the ethic of “maximize shareholder value” or “maximize profit” to be the literal law.

• Your new normal is that your classroom is polarized, through no fault of yours, it just comes packaged that way.

In addition, something I envision about you—and hopefully I come close if not nail it—is that you want to productively engage and guide your students about our economic system in ways that help them expand their thinking and want to become the kind of enlightened leaders the world wants. My intent with this post is to help you do just that, by exploring the themes of academic freedom and depolarizing the classroom to develop 5 strategies for you to use.

Image Credit: P. Knowlton

Academic Freedom

Freedom in the Classroom, a report issued by Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) (“Report” revisited 6.11.26), provides a concise distinction between education and indoctrination. I encourage a full reading of the relatively concise Report if you haven’t already. Meanwhile, I focus here on the indoctrination side, as that’s a concept too frequently misunderstood and errantly misapplied to attack faculty and the academy in general.

For the purpose of developing courageous academic leadership, I found this paragraph of the Report instructive:

Indoctrination occurs when instructors dogmatically insist on the truth of such propositions by refusing to accord their students the opportunity to contest them. [From a prior paragraph, such propositions are:  … whenever an instructor insists that students accept as truth propositions that are in fact professionally contestable.] Indoctrination occurs when instructors assert such propositions in ways that prevent students from expressing disagreement. Vigorously to assert a proposition or a viewpoint, however controversial, is to engage in argumentation and discussion—an engagement that lies at the core of academic freedom. Such engagement is essential if students are to acquire skills of critical independence. The essence of higher education does not lie in the passive transmission of knowledge but in the inculcation of a mature independence of mind (Report, II.A., para.7).

In courses that are part of degree granting programs such as business administration, economics, or social sciences and theology (related to economic justice issues), and the like, faculty would be expected to address the dominant ethic of maximize shareholder value and its related ethic of maximize profit.

Why do we have this ethic of maximize shareholder value in American capitalism? How well does it serve us? Does it create collateral damage? Is it sustainable? Is it the law or just a choice? From where did it originate? These are all rationally related questions of contextualized intellectual inquiry. So why wouldn’t faculty explore these and similar questions about a dominant ethic, particularly given our observations above about our students?

Image Credit: The New York Times | innowiki.org 

A Sidebar

Thinking about these questions for classroom discussion, I’ll take this sidebar to point you to Milton Friedman’s 1970 article, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” (Sept. 13, 1970, revisited 6.11.26). I don’t believe it is hyperbole to assert this article is among the most influential economic articles since 1970.

I encourage you to read Friedman’s article yourself. Meanwhile, I quote from and comment on just its last paragraph:

I have called [social responsibility] a “fundamentally subversive doctrine” in a free society, and have said that in such a society, “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.

Friedman’s opinion that a business should disregard any social responsibility except to increase its profits is, well, just that, his opinion.

When did Friedman’s opinion become law? Never. Not in any American jurisdiction is this the law. It is, however, such an engrained mindset that it’s often assumed to be and treated as if it’s the law. So much so, that a growing majority of states have established benefit corporation legislation, designed to protect business leaders from shareholder suits when those business leaders operate with other social responsibility agendas.

Yes, Friedman provided the aspirational caveat, “… so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud”? But think about that caveat for just a moment, and granted we have the advantage of 50+ years of experience with this experiment: If increasing profit is the exclusive responsibility of business, and social responsibility is a fundamentally subversive doctrine, doesn’t that leave “the rules of the game” of no consequence after the lobbyists and legislators finished changing the rules that were in place in 1970?

Back to Avoiding Indoctrination

The Report reminds us that, “[i]ndoctrination occurs when instructors dogmatically insist on the truth of such propositions [that are in fact professionally contestable] by refusing to accord their students the opportunity to contest them.” This creates for us a certain irony, does it not, when we present only maximize shareholder value or maximize profit as a rule and not an opinion ripe for discussion? In our good faith effort to educate do we not instead indoctrinate?

How might we avoid indoctrinating our students to a proposition that creates the characteristics we observe in them? By transparently explaining (i) how our economic system arrived at the ethics of maximize shareholder value and maximize profits, (ii) offering creditable countervailing views, and (iii) offering viable alternatives.

Regarding the first, I’ve introduced Friedman’s article and a related series of posts can be found here. With respect to the second, I recommend starting with Prof. Lynn Stout’s insightful, The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations, and the Public (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco, 2012). As regards the third, the countervailing ethic of “optimizing profit”—comprising the principles of enough and mutuality—opens a bridge building discussion onto common ground among our students, however they identify economically.

“It is not indoctrination when, as a result of their research and study, instructors assert to their students that in their view particular propositions are true, even if these propositions are controversial within a discipline” (Report, II.A., para.6). Your next challenge will likely be depolarizing the classroom enough to have that bridge building discussion.

Sigal Ben-Porath | Image Credit: UPenn

Depolarizing the Classroom

Dr. Sigal Ben-Porath is likely a name familiar to those in higher education. For our current purposes it will be enough to mention she has been teaching at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education since 2004, is currently the MRMJJ Presidential Professor, the author of seven notable books related to democratic theory and practice, and studies the ways institutions like the academy can sustain and advance democracy.

Here I draw on and summarize guidance from Dr. Ben-Porath’s 2024 article, How to Depolarize Your Students, and encourage you to read the full text. An overview is available through UPenn here. By way of introduction and orientation, “To depolarize, colleges need not search for a middle ground. Rather, they should cultivate common ground through a shared search for knowledge rooted in evidence.  …  Faculty members and other higher education professionals can do their part by providing students with opportunities to be informed and engaged, rather than suspicious and detached.”

For Faculty to do Their Part

• Set norms and boundaries with students – ask questions of students to co-create classroom norms and set clear boundaries.

• Talk about difficult topics – address hard topics (without sabotaging the lesson) while seeking possible common ground among the students.

• Choose the goal – be clear about whether you intend to foster familiarity with diverse views or persuade students of a particular view.

• Engage students in constructive dialogue – exposing students to information or diverse views is not enough; students need the opportunity to understand where other people stand and why.

For Administrators to do Their Part

• Meet students where they are – set up opportunities for students to learn the value of engaging across differences.

• Cultivate viewpoint diversity and connections – encountering diverse views happens naturally on some campuses and needs to be intentionally cultivated and supported in others.

• Support faculty members working to depolarize – protect those who act in good faith, help faculty learn from each other, provide guidance around campus wide issues while leaving room for dissent.

• Support institutional autonomy and shared governance – maintaining professional autonomy about personnel and curricular matters while resisting political pressure is vital.

The Strategies

Hoping that I correctly envisioned--that you want to productively engage and guide your students about our economic system in ways that help them expand their thinking and become the kind of enlightened leaders the world wants--then my last step is to summarize these strategies for your easy reference:

• Recognize that a substantial number of your students are objectively facing a daunting economic future and they’re anxious about it.

• Remember that you have academic freedom, which permits you to assert controversial perspectives related to your course, if your research and study support those perspectives as true.

• Accept that the ethics of maximizing shareholder value and maximizing profit are simply opinions (whose usefulness have arguably run their course).

• Offer alternative ethics on creating and sustaining profitability through the principles of enough and mutuality.

• Depolarize your classroom by establishing common economic ground, with an emerging economic solution, to a common economic anxiety.

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We write about capitalism done well and provide tools like this courageous academic leadership framework because we collectively have the capitalism we create, and we can collectively create a better capitalism. We’d love for you to join us on this journey of renewing capitalism. You can begin by reading our book, Better Capitalism, and by signing up for our weekly blog post.

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