A Leader's Adventures in Wonderland

Women in Higher Education Conference
ACE-Office of Women in Higher Education
East Lansing, Michigan
June 11, 2002

Thank you for inviting me to be with you today. I’m delighted to have this opportunity to speak with you, in one of my last public appearances as Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. At the end of June, my term expires, and my life will change. I don’t know how it will change, but that’s alright, I don’t need to know that yet. After all, change is something that good leaders get used to. Day after day, we find ourselves in situations like Alice did, that day in Wonderland, when she was invited to play croquet with the Queen of Hearts. Do you remember the scene? A strange game it was: the croquet balls were hedgehogs; the mallets were live flamingos and the Queen’s soldiers stood on their hands and feet to make the arches. Just as Alice tucked her flamingo under her arm and straightened out its neck, ready to whack the hedgehog, the flamingo would lift its head up to look at her. And by the time she got its head back down again, the hedgehog had unrolled itself and was crawling away! Meanwhile, all the players played at once, without waiting for turns.

In some ways, this bizarre croquet match serves as a metaphor for our times. Like Alice, we have a sense of what game it is that we’re trying to play, but we find ourselves coping with ever-changing roles and rules. There are no static elements to the game; everything is alive, dynamic, with an intelligence of its own. Because all the elements are in constant flux, there are no ready-made strategies to fall back upon. Whatever Alice knew about croquet before will no longer fit in this game in Wonderland. (Were we to continue unpacking the metaphor, we might try to figure out who, in our own institutions, are the flamingos, and who are the hedgehogs! But I’ll leave that to you, after the talk.)

What I want to share with you is that, in a time of ever greater flux and uncertainty, the primary resource we have is ourselves. And we must have the courage to bring our whole selves into our work as leaders, to make our own wisdom available as a resource for our decision-making and management. Through the 70s, 80s and even into the 90s, women who achieved positions of authority often seemed compelled to mimic the leadership styles of their predecessors to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the institution. Inevitably, their predecessors were men, and many women leaders found themselves adopting what might be deemed as (stereo)typically masculine styles of leadership, involving rigidly hierarchical relationships and a cold rationality in decision-making.

The first wave of women leaders, in many cases, was forced to exclude other dimensions of their personality and being from their work for the sake of fulfilling the expectations of male-dominated institutions. Everyone knew–or thought they knew–what leadership looked like. There was a template, a way to do it, and that template typically required women to distrust their deeper selves. But now, a new generation of women leaders has found its way into the administration of the academy. Our task now is to have the courage to trust ourselves. We are no longer expected to parrot the approaches taken by our predecessors. The old templates are gone. We have the freedom to claim our originality, and that originality, I believe, arises most authentically from a faith in our own inner capacities for knowing what to do and how to do it, even as the rules and players change around us. The solutions to our problems are available, if we bring our whole selves into the equation.

At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, I had the good fortune to serve as deputy chancellor with David Scott, a leader who spoke passionately about making the University a more caring institution and developing more holistic approaches to teaching and learning. Over the past year as Interim Chancellor on the Amherst campus, I have spoken passionately about values, about community, about family, about our responsibility to serve each other. I believe that each of us, and the University as a whole, has an abiding duty to enable others to become more complete and healthy human beings. I believe we have a responsibility to care for each other and to rise above the cynicism, pettiness, and self-interest that often threatens to drag us down.

As I prepare to complete my term, many people seem to comment on their perception of me as someone who is "genuine" and honestly concerned about other’s well-being. But I find that a strange compliment. After all, I’m not doing anything special. There’s nothing remarkable about taking time to talk with a senior faculty member about his new grandchild. There’s nothing special about hugging a student who has recently lost a family member. I’m not trying to enact a "people-centered" management style. I’m not trying to experiment with a radical new philosophy of leadership. I’m just doing what comes to me, as the right thing to do at that moment. I believe that all of us know what the right thing to do is in the moment before us that calls for "doing." Yet we rarely trust in that, and we rarely trust each other. In our institutions, we spend a dreadful amount of time creating policies and procedures to safeguard against someone doing the wrong thing. And in a legalistic society, perhaps those safeguards are necessary. Yet I wonder what would change, if we replaced–or even added as a preamble--our thick policy manuals with a few simple tenets of belief, like these:    

• Members of this academic community believe in our inherent intelligence and goodness.
  
  
• We believe that only by trusting one another, can we realize our dreams as a community of learning.
  
  
• We believe that our differences are the resource we need in order to find creative and collaborative solutions to our problems and to the creation of new knowledge.

Women leaders, because in many instances we were denied authority and authenticity for so long, have a special responsibility to create a different environment from the one we inherited, an enabling environment. That means leading in such a way that others feel enabled to grow into the fullness of themselves. And we can only do that, if we trust in our own resources, if we trust that–even as our flamingos protest and our hedgehogs walk off the job–we will know what to do to make things work out right. I’d like to invite you to reflect for a moment on your own leadership, in relation to your deeper sense of self. What are the touchstones of authenticity in your life? And how do you manifest that authenticity in your leadership? When do you feel alienated from your own wisdom? What does it mean for you, to act like a leader? And what does it mean for you, to feel at home in your leadership?

By trusting ourselves and working from the fullness of ourselves, we model for students what we mean by integrative learning. If what we desire for learners is a sustained and productive response to order in flux, then we must model a trust in our own capacity to find coherence amid diverse angles of refraction on ways of knowing. As educational leaders, we have a responsibility to create an environment in which students can attend to their physical, psychological, philosophical, intuitive, spiritual, intellectual, and emotional selves because attention to this totality clarifies purpose and the connectedness of life. Leaders have a common agenda with others dedicated to human enablement. I used to tell students in one of my classes that parents, teachers, and doctors have a painful measure of their own success: parents succeed when their children don’t need them anymore; teachers succeed when their students don’t need them anymore; and doctors succeed when their patients don’t need them anymore. What is painful about this measure is that, in order to be successful, we must proceed consciously and actively knowing that we are presiding over our own declining purposes.

One of the things we know, as women leaders, is that the quality of our work is ultimately measured by the success of others. Enabling others to become competent and confident in their own right means becoming less and less necessary in that process ourselves. In short, leadership might be thought of as the art of disappearance. And that takes me back to Wonderland….At the end of the croquet match, Alice meets her old friend, the Cheshire cat. The cat’s head appears out of thin air; first his grin, then his eyes, then his ears. When she sees the cat’s head hovering there in the air, the Queen of Hearts gets upset, as usual, and responds with her only method of resolving problems: "Off with his head!" she exclaims. A grand hubbub ensues. The executioner is puzzled, arguing that you can’t cut off a head unless there is a body to cut if off from. But the King of Hearts argues that anything that had a head could be beheaded! Meanwhile, the Queen is threatening that, unless the problem is solved immediately, everyone will be beheaded! (Does this scenario sound familiar at the end of the semester?) Such a muddle….But the cat knows what to do. As the knaves and soldiers and advisors debate, the cat just smiles. And slowly, gently, the cat begins to vanish; first his ears, then his eyes. And the last we see of him, is his grin.

In uncertain times, we might be wise to emulate the Cheshire Cat. Just as things seem to be most chaotic, with everyone worrying whether they’re about to lose their heads, there we are, trusting in a deeper truth amid the chaos. Knowing we have done our job well, and that others will do theirs, we have the ability to slowly vanish. And the last they will see of us is a smile.

Dr. Marcellette G. Williams
Chancellor