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Following the Divining Rod: beginning movements in ethics and servant leadership

The image of following the divining rod describes the feel of these early stages of our work in the D. Abbott Turner Ethics and Servant Leadership initiative: discovering the places where scholarship and activity toward service to the public good lie in the ground of the Emory University community. I move carefully and attentively to identify sources of liveliness for our project, to invite faculty, administrators, and students into conversation with us and with each other, and to solidify the core of an ethos of ethical servant leadership.

Robert Greenleaf provides three elements of the divining rod I use in my search. First, Greenleaf argues that knowing who one is, who one is becoming, and why one is choosing to become such a person forms the basis of all servant leadership. His claim encourages me to trust my own way of being in the process of growing Ethics and Servant Leadership at Emory. But also, Greenleaf's insistence on 'being' as the first step in servant leadership confirms that the effort to know the persons who live and work in the Emory University community - to know who they are becoming and why - is indeed the path toward uncovering and cultivating authentic, ethical servant leaders. Second, Greenleaf's hunch - indeed, his assertion - that a natural impulse to serve resides within every person adds an arm to my search for the well-springs of ethics and servant leadership that bubble within the university. If Greenleaf is correct, the impulse to serve exists even within persons trained for exacting intellectual rigor and scholarship and, perhaps, inhabits faculty teaching and research. Therefore, I read about Emory faculty endeavors with my senses keen to find traces of the impulse to serve. When I detect the concern for our common life, I follow it. I then turn to the practice of listening advocated by Greenleaf as the third element of my divining rod. Broadly speaking, I ask faculty and administrators how they engage questions of the public good, both in their scholarship and their pedagogy. In the brief summary of my work offered here, I offer a sample of the richness of the conversations I have been privileged to participate in thus far and a sense of where my Greenleaf-crafted divining rod has led, and perhaps what it points us toward.

Law professor Abdullahi An-Na'im professes the value of universal human rights as the ground for his research and scholarship. Being from the Sudan, he tells me that he knows what happens when scholars indulge themselves in the luxury of discourse limited to the exclusivity of the academy. He cannot participate in such elitism; he asserts that we are morally accountable not only for what we do, but also for what we do not do. He gives us a powerful voice of ethical leadership with accountability for the effects of our work on the least privileged. In his research on women and land in Africa, he designed a methodology that incorporated advocacy and activism as its final movement. Dr. An-Na'im knows such scholarship is subject to attack for its potential loss of scientific rigor; he aims to create practices that hold him responsible to his discipline. Yet, he finds no place of engagement across the university in which to hone his explicitly value-based methodology or converse with other scholars around such matters. From him, I am inspired to imagine a dimension of the Ethics and Servant Leadership project that brings faculty together to develop methodologies that encompass advocacy and pedagogies that shape students in such a paradigm.

When I listen to biology professor Pat Marsteller, I hear a woman who thrives on just such practices. She cares about doing well, but she is also committed to doing good. I ask her why. She tells me that as the oldest of eleven children, she knows what it is like to be poor. Dr. Marsteller came of age in the 1960s, when the ethos surrounding her asked what she could do for the country. She remembers when she was a graduate student assigned to teach young people who had been provisionally accepted to college; her job was to get their skills and knowledge up to speed. She fell in love with them. From this legacy, today her students participate with public school teachers in developing top-notch, hands-on science curriculum for young people who would otherwise go without.

Dr. Marsteller also told me about one of her newest initiatives: with a Hughes Foundation grant, she will become involved with an Atlanta public high school, attended predominantly by African-American students, to create a Health and Human Services Academy, and she aims to situate a wellness center for the community in the school. I quickly imagine this site as a place for all kinds of work by Emory students learning to partner ethically with the community in addressing multiple needs. Business, nursing, medical, education, theology, and law students could easily become involved; sociology, African American studies, Women's studies, and Violence studies students might find a fertile ground of practical learning and service here. With vision, energy, and leadership like Dr. Marsteller's, all these things are possible.

I found springs of energy for the servant leadership initiative in both these faculty members, and I took a growing sense of possibility to my meeting with a sociology professor who also teaches in the School of Public Health, Corey Keyes. I was intrigued by Dr. Keyes' investigation of mental and physical health from a positive perspective and his facility with interdisciplinary pursuits. Dr. Keyes is committed to the "good" in his work and in relationship with his students. He recalls the difficult summer when he struggled with whether to become a priest; the commitments which lay behind his question remain evident. Specifically, he is part of developing a new field of positive psychology, and as part of his work, he has developed instruments to measure well-being.

Would he, I asked, be interested in investing in a community/public school project to probe what well-being looks like and how it might be fostered among people of racial minority? He paused and thought a moment, then responded, "How soon could we get started?" Dr. Keyes admits that, off-the-record, he and colleagues discuss the issues of advocacy and activism for social change that might flow from their research pursuits. Would he, I asked, be interested in intentional dialogue to facilitate such inquiry and to foster those ends as part of scholarship? Without hesitation, he answered, "Oh, yes."

And so the divining rod leads me on. These conversations with Professors An-Na'im, Marsteller, and Keyes are representative; this is not an exhaustive or comprehensive report. Nor do I suggest that the imaginings recounted here prefigure the specific shape of our project. Each administrator, teacher, and student to whom I listen funds our project in connecting ways. With Greenleaf's three-pronged divining rod, I continue to pay attention and follow where I am led. I imagine the coming tasks for our project as building aqueducts, reflecting pools, conduits, reservoirs, and pumps that unite, direct, and harness the energies we identify. We will cultivate this initiative as ethical servant leaders - offering a vision, shaping it in partnership with those we serve, and helping the vision become reality.

[ Posted by Melissa Wiginton at February 1, 1999 02:13 PM | More Ethics and Servant Leadership articles ]

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