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Author: Victoria Devlin

The Hunting Ground

I attended the event hosted by Spiders Against Sexual Assault and Violence (SASAV) on Monday, November 18th. They were hosting a film screen “The Hunting Ground”. The movie “The Hunting Ground” is a documentary exposing the underlying sexual assault culture on college campuses across the country, along with the institutional cover-ups and the social retaliation that followed.  The documentary begins by giving the stories of sexual assault and rape survivors and the different ways they were able to cope. It then delves into the reporting process and the administrative side of the issue.  One of the interviewed administrators said that they purposefully made the process difficult, so they do not have as many reports and to “artificially keep their numbers low”. Another discussed how the top priority of the school was to protect its reputation and the protecting the students was second. Many of the schools did not properly punish those convicted of the offense by only giving them a warning or a $25 fine. One example given was Stanford University and from 1996-2013, there was a total of 259 reports of assaults and only 1 expulsion during this time. This is one of the primary reasons why survivors feel as though reporting will not help their cause. They also frequently suffer from victim blaming as they are accused of wearing something revealing, drinking too much, asking for it, and not saying no enough times. Sadly, sexual violence has become a part of the college culture, from fraternities to sports, as 1 in 4 girls experiences this. As a society, we need to do better to address these issues and work to fix them. The problem not only lies with the perpetrators but also with the universities’ administrations who refused to acknowledge and properly hold the assaulters responsible.

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The Future of Leadership

There are some qualities of leadership that will always remain constant, however, there are also some that must change with the times. The way leaders lead must always evolve based on their environment and what situations they are being put in. Leaders must also be flexible as what may work for one leader, won’t work for another. McFarland gives examples of some old beliefs that must be revised to form new habits. “If I’m the boss, I’m supposed to have all the answers. If I’m the boss, I’m not supposed to make any mistakes” (457). This type of thinking puts leaders on a pedestal and if followers start to believe in this, they begin to idolize these leaders. You need to reinvent and both the organization and the leaders, not just one or the other.

 

There are six different themes that emerge from this reading. The first is that “leadership is no longer the exclusive domain of the ‘boss at the top'” (458). Leaders are not the only ones in an organization who are responsible for leading. Followers are also given the opportunity and have the obligation to lead as well. The second is that “The new leader must facilitate excellence in others” (458). This reminds me of the transformational leadership we learned in class earlier in the semester. The third is looking for “The distinction between leadership and management” (458). It is important to be able to differentiate between the two as leaders have people who follow them while managers have people who work for them. The fourth looks further into “the newly emerging, sensitive, and humanistic dimension to leadership” (458). There has been a shift recently towards being more empowering and bring the best out of people, getting tied back to the second theme. The fifth is concerned with “the growing need for leaders to take a holistic approach, embracing a wide variety of qualities, skills, and capabilities” (458). Like many occupations, leaders have to be very well-rounded and have many qualities that span across many different fields. The last is “a mastery over change… predicting and redirecting change before it comes up” (458-459). Leaders should be open to change and embrace it, not try to stick to the status quo.

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In and Outgroups

Giles and Giles define an ingroup as being “a social category or group with which you identify strongly” while on the other hand, an outgroup is “a social category or group with which you do not identify.” (142). The idea of ingroups and outgroups perpetuates the idea of the outsider and systematically forms oppression, especially in the United States. These social categories can be divided by race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, etc. Each group has its own distinct language, customs, and holidays that differentiate them from one another. In my SOC 101 class we learned how this can be identified as their culture – a collection of ideas, values, practices, and material objects that hold significance to the society it pertains to. One specific example used in the reading was the quote by Osama Bin Laden, “The world has been divided into two camps. One under the banner of the cross and another under the banner of Islam.” (143). I related this back to one of our previous sections, groupthink, where one of the symptoms involved includes stereotyping the opposition as being evil, immoral, or wrong.

One example from the reading about having multiple cultural identities was about a person who values their Korean ethnic heritage and is also a proud American citizen. In some situations, this is possible, however in other situations it is not. The reading describes how Korean Americans are often surprised when visiting Korea when locals only see them as being American. This is not solely the case for Korean Americans but for everyone who has multiple cultural identities. This reminded me of a quote from the movie ‘Selena’. “Being Mexican-American is hard. We gotta prove to the Mexicans how Mexican we are and we gotta prove to the Americans how American we are. We gotta be more Mexican than the Mexicans and more American than the Americans at the same time.” One of the ways in which someone is able to identify who is an authentic member or who is an imposter is language and their ability to speak it fluently, with/without an accent. Many times, people unfairly discriminate against immigrants telling them to speak English because we are in America. This can lead to many children of immigrants losing their ability to speak their native languages because they are not taught as young children.

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Women in Leadership

The traits that are commonly associated with effective and powerful leaders are dominance, assertiveness, and competitiveness. All of these characteristics are typically associated with men and called agentic traits. Women are mostly affiliated with the communal traits of friendly, emotional, and nurturing. The main question Schein asks at the beginning of the paper is ‘Would a woman lead differently because of the traits she is typically associated with?’ I believe that most people would say yes to this question because it is commonly believed that women are “too emotional” to be effective leaders, which is not the case. “Women leadership had been proven to be linked with enhancing world peace, reducing corruption, and improving opportunities for the downtrodden” (Schein 162). One example that comes to my mind of a successful female leader is Queen Elizabeth I. After reading this I’m wondering why don’t we have more women in leadership positions if it’s been proven that it is more beneficial than harmful?

Schein stated that there are 13 categories of managerial behavior, ex: representation, crisis management, problem-solving, etc. These are all things that can be taught through specific classes, so I do not see why gender is an issue when it comes to leadership. Schein brings up the concept of the glass ceiling and its emergence. The glass ceiling symbolizes the barriers to any advancements in careers, mostly affecting minorities and women. No matter how qualified they are they will always have trouble advancing or are not given the opportunity to advance. I learned about this in my SOC 101 class with Dr. Grollman along with the glass escalator, which is a much newer concept. The glass escalator describes how heterosexual white men are able to advance in their careers much more easily than women are, even in female/minority dominating fields. We have slightly advanced though as it used to be harder for the women who wanted to start a family because there were barely any maternity leave benefits. Now there is both paid maternity and paternity leave. This allows the father to also take time off of work to take care of a newborn without the mother having all the responsibility. Unfortunately, this leads some women to either choose between their career and their family, which is an unfair ultimatum as men aren’t asked the same question.

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Followers

It is commonly thought that organizations and businesses succeed and fail based on how well their leaders are able to lead. Kelley states that this success/fail rate is also dependent on how well followers are able to follow. Without having followers, or in the case of a boss employees, a leader is nothing. It is hard to enact change if you do not have any support behind you or run a business if you have no one working for you. I found the experiment about the commercial bank very interesting and posed many questions to answer about the leader/follower relationship. There was a bank on the east coast that was on the verge of being shut down and the head of the department had set up his employees to work without a leader to take responsibility and accountability for themselves. The employees were able to successfully do this, the department regained control and the bank was saved. This leaves us with the question of if we really need leaders. It is understandable that some cases definitely need one. For example, a whole country without a leader would only result in mass chaos. But maybe in some environments similar to the one above, it would be more beneficial and effective for there to be no leader.

Kelley states that if a person is a leader in one situation, they are most likely going to be a follower in another situation. Even though the head of a department is the boss to their employees the still need to report back to whoever is higher up than them, like a CEO. The role of a boss comes with power, attention, and a bigger paycheck so there are some selfish people in the world who only take the role to reap the benefits rather than help people. Kelley lists four essential qualities an effective follower must have: management, commitment, competence/focus, and courage/honesty/credibility. These are the same essential characteristics an effective leader should have so if they have the same qualities why don’t those effective followers become leaders instead? This shows us that there may or may not be something special about these leaders which causes them to be able to rise up to the role, like the Great Man Theory. Yet, effective followers have the possibility to become leaders if they have these traits.

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Jonestown

On Bad Ideas Podcast, this episode talked about Jonestown/The People’s Temple and its founder Jim Jones. Jim Jones started off by preaching racial equality and advocating for desegregation. He started his church based on the purpose of changing the world. Members of his church were committed to feeding the poor and they started free nursing homes. This surprised me because I never thought of a cult having good, normal intentions at the beginning, but that the ideas were radical from the start.  But then, Jones started to become more radical and believed he could “heal” people. For example, the podcast mentioned that someone complained about their cancer to him and he was somehow able to rip it out of them. This was absolutely crazy to me that someone could believe that because that is not how medicine works. Jones also claimed to be a psychic and although this was manipulative, it was also clever. During his information meetings he would have current members talk to people in the audience and then give him notes about them so that Jones could pretend he was a psychic by talking about them, without knowing them. Jones would use this in order to convince those members of the audience to join the church and most did.

One thing that struck me was how Jones was only able to have one child with his wife because of her back problems so he got another lover, which reminded me of King Henry VIII.  Jones then chose to start his community in Guyana because the natives spoke English, it was isolated, and they could help people. After the community was established things started getting really crazy with physical punishments and people were being isolated from their families and all of their possessions belonged to the church. One of the most crazy events that happened before the big murder/suicide night was the White Night rehearsals where Jones would test his followers’ loyalty to see if they would “drink the Kool aide”. It is crazy to me how something started with such good intentions and ended with the deaths of hundreds of people. Jones believed he was doing the right thing, but he endangered society and the lives of all his followers. This is leaves the question: is Jones a charismatic leader or a toxic charismatic?

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Marshall Center Lecture Series

On September 11th, the Jepson School hosted the Marshall Center Lecture Series. Joshua B. Kaplan was the speaker and his talk was titled “Be Careful What You Wish For: Exploring the Consequences of Electoral College Reform”. Joshua is an associate professional specialist and director of undergraduate studies in the department of political science at the University of Notre Dame. He got his undergraduate degree at the University of California: Santa Cruz and his graduate degree from the University of Chicago. Joshua first started his talk by explaining that its purpose is not to debate the pros and cons of the electoral college but to explore the consequences of the electoral college reforms that have been proposed, which is more complicated than it sounds. I believe that this talk is relevant especially in today’s political climate and after the last election where the electoral college results and popular vote results were different.

Joshua gave a brief overview on how the electoral college works before going through the four possible reform proposals: the automatic plan, direct elect, the proportional plans, and the national popular vote plan. If the automatic plan was enacted it would keep the electoral votes but eliminates the electors which would eliminate the problem of the faithless elector. One of the consequences he brought up was that it would require a constitutional amendment. Through direct elect it would eliminate the possibility that the winner of the popular vote would lose the electoral vote, increasing the chance that no candidate would get a majority, resulting in party strategy changes. This reform would be the biggest difference to our current system. The proportional plans make the electoral vote more closely reflect the popular vote but can introduce distortions of its own. The national popular vote plan would focus on an interstate compact that would only go into effect when the states agree of a total of 270 electoral votes. The one issue with this is that it might violate the Voting Rights Act if it diminishes the power of minority votes. My question after hearing this talk is would it be safer to stay with the system we have now or change to one of the reform proposals?

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Leadership Forum Talk

I watched the talked hosted by the Jepson Leadership Forum on September 27th online. This was the first in the series named “Truth and Representation in the Internet Age”. Katie Hafner was the speaker discussing the history of the Internet and how it emerged. She was on the staff of the New York Times for ten years writing about technology, healthcare, and society. Throughout her life, she had written many books and her most prominent one being “The Origins of the Internet” which she had written with her late husband.

She first started off the talk by showing the audience a graph of the number of hosts on the Internet. Before 1995, the slope remained relatively constant and then spiked from the years 1995-2000. As of now there are about 150 billion hosts on the Internet. She then debunked many of the myths, one being that the Web and the Internet were the same thing, which I though so. One name that I felt frequently came up was Paul Baron who invented packet switching. Packet Switching is the idea of taking a message, dividing it into packets, sending them away on a network, and then they reassemble at the destination. Throughout the talk she used different technology terminology that I had never heard of before and she did a really good job of explaining what it was. Katie brought up how everything seemed to have aligned to create the perfect situation for them to create the Internet. This reminded me of the idea we talked about in class of leaders being born in the right place at the right time.

Katie ended her talk with a quote from her interview with Larry Roberts. She had asked him what he believed the biggest problem with the Internet would be. He replied that in 2018, he believed that the biggest issue would be network security and that it would take a lot of work to solve this problem, which currently does not have a solution.

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Groupthink

Janis describes the idea of groupthink being “the mode of thinking that persons engage in concurrence-seeking becomes so dominant in a cohesive ingroup that it tends to override realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action” (Janis 361). This was one of the main ideas brought up in George Orwell’s novel 1984 and affects many decisions in politics such as the Bay of Pigs, the Korean War stalemate, and the Vietnam War escalation. Outside of politics I believe that groupthink can be commonly found in courtrooms, especially when the jury is coming up with the verdict for the defendant. In Leadership 102, we also learned about groupthink and how humans do not like disagreeing with others and when we are in a group we tend to escalate and focus on more radical ideas.

Janis talks about this throughout the article. Groupthink involves suppressing any criticism you may have for your colleagues in order to avoid social punishment. A person may keep their thoughts to themselves by convincing themselves that it is not relevant to the topic at hand. The more cohesive the group is, the stronger the impulse is to avoid creating disunity. I thought it was very interesting that many people believe working together is actually more beneficial than individually because you can have many great ideas come together. However, Janis points out that group thinking contradicts this. When relating this back to the jury example, it makes me wonder if this is the best way to go about making court decisions. Juries are used in order to make sure that the decision is not made based off of a prejudiced judge. Yet, if groupthink affects juries and causes them to reach a more extreme verdict is this the most beneficial way to solve a trial?

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Transformational vs Transactional Leadership

Couto defines transformational leadership as being “a leader that shapes, alters, and elevates the motives and values and goals of followers” (Couto 103). There is a difference between transformational leadership and charismatic leadership. Couto brings up Burns and I find it very interesting how Burns prefers the term heroic leadership over charismatic leadership. Heroic leadership, according to him, is “the relationship between followers and persons they believe in because of reputation aside from tested capacities, experience or stands on issues” (Couto 103). This type of relationship between leaders and followers lacks the basics of leadership qualities because they do not share the same goals.

Couto also brings up Bass who came up with the idea of transformational leadership, which is different than Burns’ idea of transforming leadership. I found it interesting that Bass conducted a study in schools, the military, etc. and found that transformational leaders were more effective in leading their organization and their followers did not have to put in as much effort. Between Burns and Bass, one of the main differences is that Burns mostly focuses on historical transforming leaders, like MLK and Gandhi, while Bass looked at more general, lower level leaders, like principals and CEO’s. This creates two different scales between follower and leaders and their relationship with one another. The more we learn about leadership, the more tangled all the terms and types of leadership become. Defining leadership is not as easy as it may seem as not every leader fits one certain type of mold and each are unique in their own way.

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Servant-Leader

The idea of being a servant-leader is much more different than that of Divine Right leadership. Divine Right is the notion that God has chosen the monarchs/rulers; therefore, they have the right to ascend to the throne, justifying their leadership. A servant-leader comes with being a servant first and wanting to serve, then deciding to lead. A servant-leader always wants to make sure that their followers’ highest priority is being fulfilled. This can go the other way around too with a leader-servant. This is a person who wants to become a leader due to selfish reasons, to gain power or material wealth, then choose to serve after gaining that leadership position. It seems like there is a good number of leaders in our world who follow this path. I liked Greenleaf’s analogy of the servant and the wheel. No one wakes up in the morning thinking that they want to reinvent the wheel. A servant, however, is always searching for the next, better wheel to emerge.

I agree with Greenleaf’s statement that more servant leaders are speaking up for injustice in our society, however, not all are in political positions. One person who particularly stands out to me is Greta Thunberg and all of the other children fighting for climate change activism. There are many things that a leader needs, both inspiration and to initiate, whichever of his leaders trust him will be the ones who follow. Leaders also need to establish a goal with their followers, either a goal they set themselves or decided on collectively with their followers. The person must have followers who trust them to be able to achieve their goals. To gain their trust they need to be confident in themselves and their qualities like their values, intelligence, ability to lead, etc. This reminds me of the threshold of narcissism a rule must have to be a competent leader. Yet, these leaders need to know the perfect balance between confidence and cocky, so that they are able to remain humble.

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Machiavelli’s The Prince

One of the most renowned ideas from Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’ is the question of is it better for a prince to be feared or loved, and the answer is both but, if you cannot be both then it is better to be feared because your subjects are kept submissive in fear that they will be punished. However, there are many other great ideas that most people tend to overlook because of that most famous one. One example is the idea of being born in the right time and the right place. Machiavelli explains that in “examining their life and deeds it will be seen that they owed nothing to fortune but the opportunity which gave them matter to be shaped into what form they saw fit; and without that opportunity their powers would have been wasted, and without their powers the opportunity would have come in vain” (pg. 104).

In previous classes, we have discussed whether a leader is born or made and in Machiavelli’s case he claims that they are made through the circumstances in their lives. He uses the example of Romulus and that he needed to be exiled from Alba and all the other succeeding events to happen in order to eventually become the king of Rome. In class, we used the example of MLK being born at the right time. If MLK wasn’t born during segregation and exposed to discrimination, who know if he would have become as big of a historical figure as he is now, especially since he was such a reluctant leader in the first place. I believe that leaders can be both born and made, yet there has to be a combination of the two. There are some qualities that people are born with that help them become leaders, like charisma and extroversion. However, some skills people can be taught and can work on them during their life, like public speaking skills and communication.

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Great Man Theory

The Great Man Theory is the belief that history is made and structured by the influence of great men who possess a variety of traits, like intelligence and political and military superiority, which makes them natural leaders. Typically, this consists of mostly white, middle to upper class men. This leaves hardly any room for the stories of women and people of color to be told. However, it makes sense why this happened when looking at the context of what century it was in. Women were mostly meant to stay at home and raise the children while men were seen as the breadwinners. The history of people of color were not that well known because of how people viewed them in the past; they were seen as being “savages” and “unintelligent”. Therefore, with less primary sources and information it is harder to have accurate knowledge on the person.

I liked how she pointed out that there is not one objective way of telling the past and everyone has a different idea of which stories should be told. However, since there is only a select group of people choosing what gets put in the history books lots of stories end up getting left out. To different people, different stories mean more to them based on their culture and how they were raised. This concept of the Great Man Theory emerged in the 19thcentury which is not that long ago. Since then we have made more changes and have more people investigating into the histories of those who were forgotten or excluded. For example, historians are becoming more involved in looking at women’s history by attempting to show that they were doing important work at the time, they were just overlooked. I thought that it was interesting that she pointed out how people keep telling her to not forget about Marie Curie or Caroline Herschel, when these women already have had their stories told and she’s interested in bringing new stories to light.

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Richard III

“Crooked Politics: Shakespeare’s Richard III and Leadership in 21st Century America” by Dr. Bezio is a great way to compare two leaders, Richard III and Trump, from different centuries and show that politics have not changed as much as we thought they have. Although we now have a multitude of technology, from smartphones to smart cars, we are still very much human and can be fooled by the image politicians show us. “Toxic leaders are attractive precisely because they promise those things that followers feel (or fear) are under threat…” (Bezio 5). This is one of the tactics used by Trump in order to gain the alt-right wing Republican votes. With the strong xenophobia surrounding our country, especially after the 9/11 attack and all of the mass shootings occurring, it was easy to tap into that fear of terrorism and use that to his advantage by creating slogans like “Build the wall”.

 

Both Trump and Richard understand that they need to persuade their audience into believing that they are the most reasonable choice for office/throne and are willing to use manipulation in order to get what they want. In an interview before the 2016 elections, Trump stated that “if [he] were to run, [he’d] run as a Republican. They’re the dumbest group of voters in the country… [he] could lie and they’d still eat it up”. Trump is very much aware of the ideals of the party he represents thus, is able to manipulate them and use them for his personal gain. Our democracy is an imperfect process and is unable to reflect the true popular vote of our country. According to a couple articles, in 2016 voter turnout was around 60%, which is a little over a half. There are many factors contributing to this like unreasonably long poll lines, with the polls only being open during working hours. Many people are not able to take a break/off day from work to be able to wait in those long lines in order to vote, eliminating a big percent of the population. Until reading this article I was never aware as to how many similarities Trump and Richard shared with one another and it is interesting and a bit scary to think that history could be repeating itself.

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MLK & Charisma

I believe that Carson made a good choice in using Marin Luther King Jr. as an example of being a charismatic leader. One of the qualities of a charismatic leader, that was discussed in the Riggio article, is being able to speak eloquently, driving those listening to action. MLK was able to effectively communicate the injustices that African Americans were going through in that time, spurring them to action, such as in his famous ‘I Have A Dream’ speech. Even with the repercussions he had to face in such a racist period, he continued to speak his truth and the truth of others, nonviolently.

 

It was brought up in this article that MLK is thought to be “the initiator and sole indispensable element in the southern black struggles of the 1950s and 1960s” (Carson). I believe that this is true because if you ask someone to name the first person that they can think of who played an important role in the Civil Rights Movement, many people would say King. However, there are plenty of other leaders during this period that had a considerable impact on history. For example, it was brought up in the reading that Rosa Parks was also one of the important Civil Rights leaders, emerging before him, however, she was probably not taken as seriously as MLK based on the fact that she was a woman.

 

Going back to one of our previous readings which talked about if a leader is born through situational events or can be made, I believe in MLK’s case his leadership abilities depended on him being alive during the Civil Rights Movement. There were certain events that had to occur in his life which would inspire him to become the man we all read in our history books today. One may never know, if he was born a couple decades after the 60’s would he still be as known as the leader he is today? Perhaps. Or he could still be known as a leader, but the leader of his local congregation, not a nationwide movement.

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