letter to the editor
Amid this past weekend’s festivities was the presentation of the annual Leader of the Pack award, which was given this year to Ms. Kati Scruggs. I applaud Ms. Scruggs for her commitment to NC State and appreciate the recognition of her hard work to improve our community. At the same time, however, the yearly conferral of this award has left me desiring something more from our campus with how both our administration and students ask themselves what it means to be a leader.
William Deresiewicz, author of the book “Excellent Sheep,” articulates this sentiment when he asks, “Does being a leader, just mean being accomplished (and) being successful?” Deresiewicz wonders whether great heart surgeons or great shortstops are leaders by virtue of their accomplishments, ultimately concluding that they are not. For the word “leader” to have meaning, he determines that “leadership and aptitude, leadership and achievement, (and) leadership and even excellence have to be different things.” The takeaway here is that someone can excel in their field and still not be a leader. In the context of NC State, someone could be very good at fulfilling the work of leadership positions and making good grades, yet still not be a real leader.
Who, then, are the real leaders, if not the people who appear excellent at what they do? I am sympathetic to the late David Foster Wallace’s definition of leadership, which reduces the word “leader” to its essence in favor of ignoring the cliché that a leader is a successful person. A real leader, Wallace proposes, “can somehow get us to do certain things that deep down we think are good and want to be able to do but usually can’t get ourselves to do on our own.” This sentence liberates leadership from success, casting off self-promotion and perceived excellence in favor of recognizing something that any person, regardless of their social standing, can come to possess.
At the core of this idea is a leader’s character. Discussions of character aren’t exactly vogue on college campuses; after all, it’s much easier to celebrate a material accomplishment than something we can neither see nor fully articulate without moral terms. Yet, the strength of character is found precisely in our difficulty to label it. Unlike our successes, our character cannot be formatted into bullet points on our resumes. It exists in a central place within any human being, independent of external validation and built on a foundation of values made strong through one’s everyday actions. Good character reinforces itself, often resulting in material accomplishments, but the mark of great character is a capacity to live deliberately even when circumstances seem to rob us of our agency.
In the grand scheme of commendations, the Leader of the Pack award is a small award and I write this letter with no ill will toward its current or previous recipients. Yet, the award and the attention it summons should be challenged if they do not encourage us to overcome our own limitations and do, as Wallace would have us, “better things than what we can get ourselves to do on our own.”
We must be reminded that there are many leaders at this school and in our lives who do not receive awards to be known — yet you will see them because they show up to do hard work regardless of whether they are lauded for their service. If ever there comes a time when we wish to reward them, we might do so with our own commitment to become better people.
Neel Mandavilli is a 2015 graduate of NC State