Caryn McTighe Musil

As I write this article, thousands of Iranian citizens are marching in the streets for a second week, defying riot police, Basij militia, and supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei because they do not believe that the June 12 national election was fair. While opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi is the nominal rallying point, it seems apparent that much more is at stake than a single election. At the heart of the unprecedented resistance in Tehran is a demand for a government that better represents all of Iran’s people, not just a narrow band. The protesters are calling for leadership that recognizes the full diversity of the Iranian population—in other words, for leaders who can create more inclusive government structures and policies.

Within the sea of people amassed in the streets at increasing risk of bodily harm and imprisonment, who are the leaders? What identifies them? Their anonymity, of course, challenges the authorities. But their tactics and true identities suggest lessons for those of us in the United States to learn as we explore how to create inclusive leadership in American higher education.

According to New York Times op-ed columnist Roger Cohen, among the protesters “Iran’s women stand in the vanguard.” These women are not just young, but middle-aged and older, too. “For days now,” Cohen writes, “I’ve seen them urging less courageous men on. I’ve seen them get beaten and return to the fray. ‘Why are you sitting there?’ one shouted at a couple of men perched on the sidewalk….‘Get up! Get up!’” (2009, 10).

Recognize the Invisible Leaders Everywhere

One of the lessons from the streets of Tehran is that leaders are everywhere. Although often unrecognized by those in traditional locations of power, they are influential, courageous, and resilient. Most of us could name the “go-to” people in our institutions, the women and men who make things happen. Some of these leaders have fancy titles that they use to leverage their influence. But others exercise leadership that, while less visible, is no less essential.

In the mid-1980s when apartheid still wreaked its murderous reign, Archbishop Desmond Tutu received the Peace Award from the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy. Upon accepting the award, Tutu was careful to explain to those of us in the audience that we could see him to honor him because he was standing on other people’s shoulders. We had proudly recognized his work as an individual. He wanted to be sure to recognize the thousands of invisible leaders who lifted him up to be seen.

Most leaders are invisible. Inclusive leaders recognize these leaders, both privately and in public.

Be Sure Leaders are Diverse

Another lesson from the streets of Iran is that inclusive leaders listen to and reflect the wide range of human histories, cultures, ethnicities, and perspectives. Were the vanguard women in Tehran from only one class, one religious sect, one age group, or one ethnicity, the streets would have been emptier. The political statement would have been less dramatic, the solution less apparent, and the possibility of genuine unity less likely.

The same leadership diversity must exist at colleges and universities. The construction of inclusive academic institutions will fail miserably unless the architects are themselves diverse and drawing upon an even fuller range of voices, talents, and sources of knowledge than they themselves possess. Diversity simply makes the design better. Many Fortune 500 companies have discovered this and are tapping diversity as a long-ignored asset.

If women are to be at the vanguard of the transformation of higher education in this century, they need to be a diverse cohort.

Come Together in Public Spaces

When people poured into the streets each day in Tehran, they gave each other courage to do it again. They made themselves visible to one another, discovered their common commitments, and shaped the meaning of the moment. They recognized that they were part of something larger than themselves.

One of Campus Women Lead’s central discoveries when presenting our campus workshops is how few opportunities women have to gather across divisions, domains, departments, and other areas of difference on any given campus. By bringing people together across these divides, our workshops reinforce the energy generated and insights acquired when such public space is available.

As a veteran of the earliest feminist consciousness raising groups, I learned in the early 1970s how important it was to create such spaces. These spaces permitted exploration, critique, and invention of alternative constructions. As we early feminists increased our numbers and moved into positions of greater power, we thought we didn’t need women’s groups anymore. We thought they were old-fashioned, passé. But as Beverly Davenport Sypher, Katie Pope, and their colleagues learned when they created Purdue Women Lead, it is a mistake not to bring women together, even in the twenty-first century.

Women’s inclusive leadership gains strength when women come together regularly in public spaces with diverse other women to talk about themselves, learn more about each other, and work in common for the collective well being of all.

Dream the Impossible

The odds are against the people protesting in the streets of Iran. The high holy leader has spoken against them. The guns, batons, tear gas, and prisons are in the hands of those telling them to shut up, go home, and accept the world as it is. But the people keep voicing their convictions that other alternatives are possible. They don’t know exactly what is possible or how it can be actualized, but they know something else is achievable. They insist that the nation must try to find this alternative.

In American higher education, we call for inclusive institutions and inclusive leadership. But we are still figuring out what that means. We have some research, some evidence, and some benchmarks of success. AAC&U has published several books on inclusivity in higher education and gathered many examples of inclusive campus practices in OCWW and Diversity & Democracy. Still, inclusive leadership is complicated and rarely implemented, except at the most easily grasped surface levels.

And even as they try to make the necessary changes, academic institutions pride themselves on honoring tradition. Virginia Woolf recognized this in Three Guineas when she recoiled at the thought of joining unquestioningly in the “procession of educated men” without first asking “where is it leading us?” (62). She did not want “the arts of dominating other people” to be at the center of her imagined ideal college, nor “the arts of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital.” Instead she wanted the “arts of human intercourse; the art of understanding other people’s lives and minds.” She wanted a college whose aim was “not to segregate and specialize, but to combine” (34).   

Higher education’s new architects will certainly build upon the past foundations and structures that prove adaptable to the moral, economic, and political demands of our current century. But we will also need to reinvent and redesign our institutions. In that process, we will repeatedly have to ask ourselves Virginia Woolf’s haunting question: For what ends are we preparing college students? Building the necessary architecture and embedding it with the necessary moral queries will require vision, persistence, and creativity. Like the protestors in Iran, we must stretch toward what might be possible rather than settle for what we know is neither adequate nor fair.

So women, if we want to make history and help shape academic institutions to be more inclusive, excellent, and useful to world we share, listen to the women in the streets of Iran: “Why are you sitting there? Get up! Get up!” 

References

Cohen, R. 2009. A supreme leader loses his aura as Iranians flock to the streets. New York Times, June 21. 10.

Woolf, V. 1938/1966. Three guineas. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc.