Leaders of men?

Throughout much of his academic career, President Woodrow Wilson Class of 1879 was fond of giving a speech he called “Leaders of Men.” For him, a leader was a well-educated man profoundly in sync with his era. Although it’s sacrilegious to say so at Princeton, we can — and should — quibble with his mutable definition of leadership.

One thing his conception misses, to our detriment, is a comfort with taking a stand and accepting the risks involved. Our society already provides enough incentives, including financial ones, for college graduates not to take risks. The concept of leadership that we accept ought not further pave the road to inaction.

I had the opportunity to help organize a crisis simulation two weekends ago here on campus. The scenario was an escalation of the ongoing unrest in Syria, and the countries involved were simulated by Princeton undergraduate and graduate students. From the vantage point of the “control cell,” I helped simulate all other forces in the game and generated new developments to challenge — and sometimes reward — participants.

There were many useful lessons that we all took away, but chief in my mind is an aversion to political risk-taking common to most Princeton students. The participants seemed concerned about the mounting Syrian death toll in our civil-war scenario, but they spent the majority of the game issuing press releases, gathering additional information and seeking to diffuse responsibility to other countries. I have helped to run five crisis simulations in my time here, and the pattern recurs with disturbing frequency each time.

To be fair, the risk-averse participants behave exactly how the United States itself has behaved in recent years. President Barack Obama stated that we wanted Gaddafi ousted then embarked on a half-hearted aerial campaign that was barely sufficient to achieve that goal. As operations dragged on, both European and U.S. officials floated the idea of backing away from their commitment to topple Gaddafi.

Closer to home, universities often emulate Washington’s infatuation with convening task forces to implement the recommendations of working groups that were created to consider the conclusions of a special subcommittee on such-and-such. (I exaggerate, but only slightly, for effect). Congress did much the same thing with the so-called debt “supercommittee,” which allowed the body as a whole to blame the committee for any unpopular decisions it might make. The risk of making a decision and taking action is passed on and on.

What likely underlies this risk aversion in our present and future leaders is a lack of a sense of principle. Our universities do an admirable job of churning out well-educated grist for the bureaucratic mill, and Princeton graduates are as prepared as any to pursue careers in government. The problem is that students and alumni accept, whether consciously or unconsciously, Wilson’s model of leadership, in which the elite have a vision of where society ought to progress and the rest of us ought to simply follow that. As Charles Kesler and other scholars have written, just what “progress” is and how we define its achievement is judged not by unchanging principles, but instead by shifting standards. Those of us not in the elite are expected to “go with the flow” while they refashion us to “progress” toward their undefined endpoint.

This model has taken to heart one of Wilson’s favorite metaphors, in which the captain of a ship is waiting out a dense, low fog. A passenger asks why the captain does not proceed according to the North Star, visible despite the fog. On Wilson’s telling, the captain replies, “But we are not going that way.” As Wilson explained, “Politics must follow the actual windings of the channel of the river: If it steers by the stars it will run aground.”

That might sound reasonable, but another one of his ship metaphors lays bare the unattractive implications of this theory. On his account, just as a boat is free when it sails with the wind, a citizen is free when she goes with the flow of history. She has no freedom, however, to go against the wind. I suspect that most of us will reject that definition of freedom, but it is inherently bound up with Wilson’s vision of leadership without risk. Our leaders ought to take risks to defend principles, not go with the tide of history. And we ought to be free to do more than go down whatever path they see ahead of them and decree for us.

If our generation is to have real leaders in the business, political and intellectual worlds, we must shake this avoidance of all political risk. That process begins with the identification of our principles, and it begins for us now as students. The lives of prudent men of principle like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln remain instructive. Their combination of prudence and principle points us wisely toward taking stands and the associated risks, but also towards compromise when necessary. If we instead chart our course according to Wilson’s philosophy, we will surely end up lost on a windy sea without so much as a compass.

Brian Lipshutz is a politics major from Lafayette Hill, Pa. He can be reached at lipshutz@princeton.edu.