Colleges should appreciate qualities of followers, too

With March comes the annual fanfare of college acceptance and rejection letters, both of which will cite strong leadership experiences — or lack thereof — as a key factor in college admissions panels’ decision-making. But according to one op-ed published Friday in The New York Times, leadership is, for myriad reasons, a problematic metric through which admissions panels make their decisions.

Writer Susan Cain’s op-ed has unearthed a dangerous, albeit unintentional, consequence of American colleges’ age-old obsession with leadership. That is, admissions panels’ oversimplified praise of “leaders” has subtly stigmatized and devalued the noble role of “follower,” and primed in students the false sense that effort and devotion to a cause or activity, however passionate they may be about it, are a waste of energy unless the pursuit satisfies traditional notions of what a leader is.

Cain, who also wrote Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, cites numerous fundamental flaws with prioritizing and disproportionately glorifying leadership skills and experiences. There is, first and foremost, the simple fact that committed and genuine followers are requisite to any movement for change and reform, and to the success of any new, ambitious innovation.

According to Cain, leadership skills are conflated with dominance or being in a position of business or political power that allows an individual to “order people around” in today’s culture. Even when students do rise up as leaders, they are compelled to do so in pursuit of “stature” and resume-building rather than a call to service.

Across the nation, elite institutions fester in their obsession with leadership. On countless college application websites — such as those of Harvard, Stanford and Yale — “leadership” is listed among other qualities admissions officers look for, in addition to academic rigor and standardized test scores. In an effort to make time for club or executive board positions or titles that they can list on their applications, students cease to participate in volunteering programs or activism that are crucial to advancing humanitarian causes which benefit society as a whole, due to this precedent.

That is not to say that leadership positions and ambition are inherently the marks of greedy, grasping people. But in demanding that students empirically demonstrate leadership, all while doing little to counter traditional, rigid constructs of what leadership is, there is no denying that colleges have placed students under high pressure to put titles and narrow pursuit of advancement before work that they are genuinely committed to and passionate about.

Additionally, Cain notes the dangerous “romance of leadership” theory, a phenomenon in which all of an organization or movement’s successes or failures are sweepingly attributed to its leader. The theory tells society that CEO Mark Zuckerberg alone constructed the mass social media empire that is Facebook, and college admissions panels’ fixation on leadership goes hand-in-hand with telling students that their work only matters and will only receive recognition if it is associated with a title to demonstrate power and authority.

It may be that college admissions panels are no outlier in this situation. The devaluation of the role of the follower is present in nearly every sphere of society, but that being said, the solution could very well lie in an overhaul of the message colleges are sending to prospective students.

That is, colleges must offer a less nebulous definition of what constitutes leadership. In leaving this to the imagination, students will presume that they are referencing the traditional, societal definition of leadership, which is positions of power, plain and simple — and this will shape their every pursuit throughout their academic careers. Unless colleges clearly delineate what leadership is beyond being the president of a club, they are complicit in establishing a resume-building culture.

Beyond offering more inclusive definitions of leadership, colleges could also place less emphasis on or simply use the word less in an effort to destigmatize what it means to be a follower. Admissions panels could, instead, demand commitment, collaborative skills and devotion to students’ respective causes. These are, after all, the qualities and skills that drive movements.

But ultimately, perhaps it’s also time for colleges to reevaluate how they regard different experiences listed on applications and resumes. After all, defining leadership, calling for the skills of followers and refining their word choice can only do so much if they continue to singularly reward traditional leadership positions above all other extracurricular pursuits.