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This environment puts leadership to the test constantly. I am not referring to academic tests in the classrooms and labs, but to tests conducted hourly and daily in our offices, corridors, eateries, locker rooms, residence halls, and at our sporting events and other places where we conduct our business of teaching, research, and service. Some of these tests relate to the manner in which we treat peers, subordinates, and superiors in this diversity milieu; they relate to whether and how we take ownership for enriching it through developing other leaders; they relate to whether and how we demonstrate willingness to be open to new ideas and practices, appreciating that “leadership and learning are indispensable to each other,” as the late President John F. Kennedy once observed. Yet, leadership entails more than these features. It is also a journey and not an event. The journeys are not always smooth, but good leaders do not abandon them when the first, or even the tenth, occupational hurricane develops. Moreover, leadership often requires risk taking, daring sometimes to “go where no one has gone before,” to use Star Trek language. It is about the habituation of best practices. As Aristotle once averred: “We are what we repeatedly do.” This Diversity Exchange presents portraits and vignettes of various journeys. These journeys – of leadership, values, and change – do not all follow the same highways and byways; they do not have the same joys and travails; they do not all end at the same destinations. But they all either have been enriched or stand to be enriched by a diversity environment. Thus I am delighted to invite you to share in these journeys. I do so on my behalf and on behalf of our president, publisher, and managing editor. As you will appreciate, this production has involved the devotion of considerable time and energy by contributors and editorial and production staff. Permit me to use this opportunity to thank them for their individual and collective efforts. In many ways, some of the journeys of this magazine’s producers are over, but the journeys of you the readers are about to commence in reading it. As you begin your journeys remember the words of wisdom by Tichy the scholar, Kennedy the statesman, and Aristotle the sage. Journey on!
Ivelaw L. Griffith, Ph. D.
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This sentence in Noel Tichy’s best selling The Cycle of Leadership captures powerfully both the challenge and opportunity of institutions such as ours, although the book is essentially about leadership in the corporate environment. The challenge and opportunity relate to our mission and environment. Our mission entails teaching, research, and service, and our environment is one of racial, gender, religious, occupational, and other diversity.
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