Academic Leadership

"In our first two weeks, you have read several articles, seen several videos and been engaged in several discussions related to the concept of academic leadership. At this point, and in your own words, what does the concept mean to you? What subjects or interests do you have a sophisticated, intellectual understanding of that you may want to turn into a major academic project in this class? How do people sometimes abuse academic knowledge to manipulate others? How would you feel if someone used your work to manipulate other (as Jared Diamond claims Mitt Romney has)? How can creating academically sophisticated, intellectual leaders help prevent such people from taking advantages of others the way they do? how can this created a stronger democratic society?" 

Academic leadership will teach us how to be great leaders, by our own standards and by using what we are good at. It will allow us to understand how to improve our talents in a way that will benefit both ourselves and others, since it will allow our capacity to work with a group to be improved, facilitating future projects. We were also able to learn how leadership doesn’t always come from the head managers from companies, and just because you have a good job doesn’t mean you are a great leader.  Something that was told is how leadership can come in any way and from any person, by learning about several leaders, and how they used their leadership in situations they were confronted with. For me this is very important since I’m not entirely comfortable with being a leader that stands in front of a big group and tells people what to do. I would just rather be a ‘silent leader’ that instead of telling others what to do, inspires them to do things by performing them himself.

 I believe that a leader is not created alone; one example is the Dancing Guy, who would not have been a leader if others did not follow him. But that is not the only way in which a person needs more help in order to become a leader. Another example would be the leader’s ideas; because even though a leader might have a set goal or idea, he will, or already has, been inspired by others. Those who have or will inspire the leader should also be considered leaders, since even though they did not go out and state what needed to be done; they somehow showed someone else that, and ended up motivating that person. 

"A leader always sets the trail for others to follow"

As this picture says: “A leader always sets the trail for others to follow”. In this way, the person who inspired someone else to star leading is also a leader, because they helped create the trail that should be followed. Even though I believe that ‘silent leaders’, as I would like to call them, are important, I also agree that the leaders that state their leadership by going out and actually leading people with their words are as important, since without a ‘vocal leader’, which will be their name, several actions would not have been taken, and ideas would not have spread. So, both the ‘silent leader’ as well as the ‘vocal leader’ are needed for something to happen, but both of them are leaders and both are able to show leadership, only in different ways, that please their personalities and talents.

We have also learned how people sometimes abuse academic knowledge to manipulate others by misrepresenting ideas and using them to support their ideas, this way using an illegitimate source of support. One example is Mitt Romney, who thought that by using Jared Diamond’s argument, it would only support his idea, but against his will, his representation of Diamond’s book only harmed him and his idea. If my ideas are any day, misrepresented like what happened in this case between Mitt Romney and Jared Diamond, I would be very offended, since my ideas would be used wrongly. Also, I believe I would do something similar to Diamond’s response, since instead of confronting the person who distorted my ideas, rephrasing them and explaining what I really meant would have a better result.  This is where academic leadership would fit, since a professional with this knowledge would know how to deal with the problem, without making a fool of himself, and instead, by re-stating his idea and explaining how it was misunderstood. If more people were academic leaders, then I think mistakes and misrepresentations like this one would be less common, and people would know how to support their ideas without damaging another person’s word, or how to protect their idea with strong and stable arguments.