ABOUT LEADERSHIP AND DIVERSITY

History as Prologue

This casebook reflects the history of higher education in America. In the 1830s, American colleges were in deep conflict over whether they should teach French, Spanish, and German, the languages of diplomacy and trade, as well as Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, the languages of religious and classical scholarship. The aspirations of successful merchants fed this conflict. They wanted a college education for their sons in order to improve their commercial opportunities as well as their minds. After the sons of merchants came working men, well-to-do women and their sisters from ordinary backgrounds, African Americans excluded from white institutions, veterans who paid in service for the opportunity to study at low cost, and immigrants from all over the world. For almost 200 years colleges and universities have been debating whom they should educate and what should be taught. The questions of inclusion in policy education belong to this long tradition.

The National Diversity and Public Problem Solving Project began with a conversation with Michael Lipsky of the Ford Foundation in 1991. We sat next to each other at a conference and I mentioned to him my interest in directing a program that would begin to make the content of policy education more reflective of the whole world, its people, problems, and solutions. The Ford Foundation had supported curriculum transformation programs in many liberal arts disciplines. These efforts had created demand on the part of incoming masters students for a more inclusive policy education. I knew that the curricula of policy schools with their emphasis on realpolitik, practical skills, and professional norms would be much harder to change than liberal arts education. Michael and I talked about these problems. Eighteen months, two letters and a proposal later, the National Diversity Project began.

The National Diversity and Public Problem Solving Project ran from 1993 through 2003 and had homes in the University of Minnesota, Radcliffe College, and UCLA. Its overall purpose was to improve the critical reflection on and creative response to teaching about the great social divisions—race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and class—in policy education.

The Project had three main objectives. The first was to conduct three summer institutes for faculty in professional schools and ultimately foundation executives, held in 1994, 1995, and 1996. In these institutes faculty and foundation executives did what is rarely done in such sessions. They focused on the research about social cleavages including history, theories, concepts, and empirical research. Armed with this knowledge, the participants discussed pedagogy, research design, and methods of social investment through targeted philanthropy and research support. This was a far cry from the early “how do I keep my class from exploding” approach to diversity in professional schools.

The second objective was to disseminate the pedagogical lessons from the summer institutes. In addition to the “Diversity and Public Problem Solving” article, the instructors in the summer institutes and I gave dozens of speeches and workshops on curriculum reform in policy and professional education, in the United States and abroad. Perhaps the most interesting of these presentations included being called as an “expert witness” in the “trial of public affairs education,” which was “indicted” on charges that included giving too little attention to diversity.

The third objective was to publish the cases developed or modified for the summer institutes. I had taught these cases in the Diversity and Public Problem Solving summer institutes, in courses at the University of Minnesota, Harvard, UCLA, at the Public Policy and International Affairs Summer Program at UC Berkeley, and in many workshops. I had revised them a number of times, a practice all too infrequent in case writing. My final task was to revise them for publication and to write teaching notes, a task I had avoided because I guessed, rightly, how time consuming it would be. It was during the writing of the teaching notes that my growing emphasis on leadership became clear to me. I also realized that the cases would be easier to use if I situated them in the larger philosophy of leadership education I had developed in part from teaching them. Leadership and diversity are intimately connected, as the casebook shows.