R.S.: One thing that I’ve learned is that the perceptions of what it takes to be a leader are often based on prototypical models that don’t have much truth in reality. People look at the institutions that I have led and they see dissimilarities. I see similarities. When people think in terms of leadership, they’re often thinking about the kind of specific skills needed for different types of enterprises. I think of leadership as more of a disposition — the ability to step into a situation to learn about the history of the enterprise, the opportunities that it faces, the culture that exists and the people who are served by it. To look at all of that, to listen to stakeholders and then to think about how that enterprise or institution should best be served. There is no one model of leadership if you approach it that way. What I have tried to do wherever I go is to start where the institution is rather than try to import particularly rigid constructs from other places. In that sense, I think a leader is more than anything else a facilitator. A person who is able to come in to show a community a picture of what it is, to provide some insight into what it could be — how it could be different or improved perhaps — and then enlist the help of people who are there and others who support that institution in order to move forward together.

I don’t subscribe to the model of hero leadership, which is identifying somebody who can come in and have magical powers and then wield the wand and fix things that have not been fixable before. I don’t see that. I think leadership is a community affair.

M.J.: That makes sense. So how do you approach educating the current generation of students at Prairie View to lead in the way you described?

R.S.: People today are fond of leadership programs that theorize about the profile and tenets of leadership. And students anxiously get involved in those programs. I rather think that our entire campuses are incubators of leadership even without the formality of such programs because if we’re doing what we should be doing, we are acclimating students to an environment in which they have to learn to work with others who are very different from themselves. And that seems to me to be the first requirement of leadership. To actually learn to work with people in a respectful and inclusive way is inordinately important. A campus provides one of the best opportunities for people to be able to do that because you sit in class alongside people whom you initially don’t know. You are discussing your ideas, having people respond to them and often rejecting what you’re saying. You are joining organizations that have certain aims that are being advanced by the collective, so you’re learning how to facilitate. You are asked to step into leadership roles either through student government or organizations. Even in the classroom context you might play a leadership role. You have to learn to express yourself, to be convincing, to write out your ideas, to be more thoughtful than you’d ordinarily be. All of those things are components of leadership.

M.J.: Some would argue that social media, or perhaps disagreements over the concept of safe spaces, have made it more challenging for people to come together and to work together.

R.S.: Yeah, I would say that people frequently say that, but that has certainly not been my experience. I would say that in my days as a student, the tensions were higher, the disagreements were greater, the separation among us was certainly more pronounced. And people are kind of inventing a new narrative, that things are so much worse today than they were in the past. I don’t buy that. I think we have new terminology, because the modern sciences of psychology and sociology and so forth and modern media have enabled us to peer into areas that we were not able to see as easily as before. And so when you have social media and all of the ways in which people can now say whatever they want to say — in an unartful or offensive way — that turns the volume up to be sure. But it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there before.

I would say that the current situation ought to give us much more practice in how to engage with each other because it is not underground. It’s out front, it’s in the open. The media today and the things that are being reported should be upsetting or troubling to students, my goodness. But it may be an even better opportunity to engage students.