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Joseph has a word to describe those who take their concerns about
private morality and wield them like a weapon against individuals.
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| Joseph: a leader at the
Center for Leadership and Public Values |
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He calls them “virtuecrats.” And while
the former U.S. ambassador to South Africa is as concerned as anyone
about ethics and morality—more concerned than most, actually—he
is just as concerned that the focus on private virtues be matched
by an equal emphasis on public values.
“In this society, we are beginning
to see that people who have been demanding that their leaders act
morally as individuals are now beginning to demand that their institutions
act ethically,” Joseph says. “We have an opportunity now
to enlarge that conversation
—to talk about ethics and government, ethics and business, ethics
and social change, ethics and protest. The moment is basically right.”
Joseph has experience in knowing when the moment is right. His office
at Duke’s Sanford Institute of Public Policy provides just the
latest in a long line of opportunities for him to expound and act
upon his long-held ideas of an ethical society, from his days as a
civil-rights organizer in Alabama in the early 1960s to his appointment
by President Clinton as ambassador to the post-apartheid South Africa
of Nelson Mandela. He has spent the past year as professor of the
practice of public policy studies at the Sanford Institute and as
leader-in-residence at its Hart Leadership Program. In February, he
traveled halfway around the world for four months in South Africa,
a schedule necessitated by his alternating semesters at Duke and at
the University of Cape Town, and by the project for which one could
say he has been preparing since his boyhood: the Center for Leadership
and Public Values, based in Chapel Hill and Cape Town.
“I think I have a point of view and a perspective that ought
to be part of the national conversation,” he says, “and
so I will want to find some time to begin to translate these ideas
into the sort of workable concepts that the public can identify with.”
That translation has taken the form of his “Leadership and Public
Values” class, a book on ethics and public life, and the nascent
Center for Leadership and Public Values, which will be an independent
center affiliated with Duke and the University of Cape Town.
MANDELA’S LEGACY
For Nelson Mandela, principled diplomacy
was not a theory. It was a way of being. Joseph Jaworski, the
son of the Watergate prosecutor, has written a book in which
he borrows from Carl Jung the notion of “synchronicity”
to refer to those moments when things come together in an almost
unbelievable way, when events that could never have been predicted
seem remarkably to guide us along a path.
In his book Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela gives us a
personal, reflective account of his own journey of self-discovery,
struggle, setback, renewed hope, and ultimate triumph. Through
the telling of his life story, he provides a glimpse of how
the stage was set for the South African transition, which occurred
not only without violence and retribution, but with a remarkable
spirit of healing and forgiveness.
In getting to know him, one is struck by the fact that
his extraordinary capacity to do the right thing has more to
do with his total being—the orientation of his character,
consciousness, and commitment—than it has to do with public-relations
sensitivity or good advisers. I once congratulated his communications
director on the way in which he and his staff always seemed
to put Mr. Mandela in the right setting at the right time and
with the right message. He looked at me in amazement and said,
“It is not us—it is the old man himself.”
Many leadership scholars and educators use James McGregor
Burns’ notion of “transforming leadership” to
describe Nelson Mandela. While there is no doubt that Mandela
operated at an elevated level of moral consciousness and appealed
to the better nature of both his followers and his adversaries,
I personally prefer to compare him to Robert Greenleaf’s
idea of the “servant leader,” for whom the first choice
is the choice to serve. Leadership is what follows.
For Greenleaf, it is when the choice to serve undergirds
the moral formation of the leader that we have the best antidote
against the misuse of the hierarchical power that separates
the leader from those led. The potential of hierarchy to corrupt
would be diminished, according to Greenleaf, if leaders saw
themselves as servants of those they lead—if they saw their
job, their fundamental reason for being, as true service.
—from James Joseph, “Ethics
and Diplomacy: What I Learned from Nelson Mandela,” The
Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle Jr. Lecture, given at the Sanford
Institute of Public Policy on February 7, 2001..” |
It is no accident that
leadership is the common denominator. Joseph has been learning and
teaching about the subject for decades, in arenas far removed from
the classroom. “I have decided to focus on leadership because
of my experience in all three sectors of society: business, government,
and civil society,” he says. “I know a lot of people whose
experiences could be beneficial to emerging leaders. One of the best
things I could do is bring those people together, emerging leaders
with experienced leaders, so leaders could learn from leaders. I’m
not developing leaders—I’m identifying leaders who are emerging
and who have the potential to provide leadership in a much larger
way. And I’m identifying experienced leaders who are models of
public accountability and efficiency, who can be not only models but
mentors for emerging leaders.
“That’s why I’m establishing the center. The focus
is not on what can the university teach these leaders. It’s what
these young leaders can learn from experienced leaders. Best practices:
What did you consider when you were mayor to be best practices in
terms of the way you operated as a mayor, and the way in which you
responded to your constituents as mayor? Even more important, how
do you avoid burnout? What do you do for spiritual and intellectual
renewal?”
While he doesn’t hold himself up as the model of leadership,
pointing instead to other leaders, from Nelson Mandela to philanthropist-industrialist
J. Irwin Miller, Ambassador Joseph is one of those who has been through
it, and whose going through it holds the lessons emerging leaders
can follow. He has come a long way from the Jim Crow South of his
youth, when the rules of segregation were clear and brutal—separate
and unequal facilities for education, transportation, and recreation.
Whites only. No Colored allowed.
In his hometown of Opelousas, Louisiana, where he grew up in the late
1930s and through the 1940s, this was a way of life. It was still
a way of life when he was a student at Yale Divinity School, where,
upon earning an internship to spend a year in a college chaplaincy,
he had to request an assignment to an integrated school. And to his
dismay, it was still a way of life when he got his first job after
seminary—a teaching post at historically black Stillman College
in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Alabama had been feeling the pressures of change for nearly a decade
when Joseph arrived there with his wife and month-old son in 1963.
The Montgomery bus boycott of 1954-55 had shown the success of non-violent
social protest and catapulted a young minister named Martin Luther
King Jr. into the national spotlight. Freedom Riders had taken Greyhound
buses into the heart of Dixie’s segregated travel laws, facing
a bus bombing in Anniston, Alabama, and beatings in Montgomery. The
Birmingham movement had survived the dogs and fire hoses of Sheriff
Bull Connor and a bombing directed at King and his lieutenant, Fred
Shuttlesworth. Even in Tuscaloosa, the enrollment of Vivian Malone
and James Hood had prompted bantamweight governor George Wallace to
stand in the door of the University of Alabama’s Foster Auditorium
to fulfill his pledge, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow,
segregation forever!”
But there was no real movement in Tuscaloosa. Despite the currents
of social change swirling around the South, it was clear that the
city remained a stagnant pool of racism. For downtown, where blacks
worked and shopped, a new courthouse was being built—with one
particular design feature that was, for this young professor, the
last straw.
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