Mohan Dutta's reflections on the Academe

There is an increasing emphasis across campuses on fostering leadership, and yet one of the things that seems to be missing from so many of these leadership efforts is the idea of leadership with compassion, of leadership with a heart. It would seem in the face of the economic crisis faced by most universities that we need to reconsider the meaning of leadership in a world where teaching our students simply in terms of profitability, efficiency, effectiveness and marketability is not working. That the neoliberal logic with its emphasis on unfettered greed and profitability has its limits has been demonstrated very well by the current economic crisis. That our students with MBAs need to be taught about issues of ethics, responsibility, accountability etc. is something that has been brought to the forefront in the face of the economic crises, corporate malpractices and economic downturns. The place where this needs to happen firsthand I believe is the academe. As we teach our students s

At a recent academic leadership workshop I attended, I heard a talk about the irrelevance of ideology in academic leadership. The talk emphasized how academic leaders need to be fundamentally pragmatic. As a critical scholar, this made me reflect upon my interest in issues of academic leadership. What kind of leader do I want to be, given the ideologically based nature of my scholarship, my teaching, my very existence as an academic? Are there even spaces of leadership for those scholars who deconstruct academic practices and their ideological bases? Where are the spaces for leadership for those scholars/paradigms that explicitly note the ideological nature of knowledge producing practices/entities? As I reflected more on this and conversed with my colleagues, it became apparent that such discourses of apolitical/ideologically divorced leadership are misleading because they are fundamentally ideological in their articulation of pragmatism. As one of my colleagues put it, "Machiave