Earlier this week, I conducted a survey of all Middle and Upper School students. I presented them with 35 qualities and behaviors commonly associated with effective leadership, segmented into groups of seven, and I asked them to select all that, in their opinion, were most essential. Over the last two years, in researching and developing the MICDS Strategic Plan, our Board of Trustees and administration have learned that leadership cultivation is perhaps the most highly-valued educational opportunity in the view of all community constituencies—and thus it is both explicitly and implicitly identified in the Plan’s priorities and objectives. I was excited to hear what our students this year had to share about their own perspectives on leadership.
In the responses of the hundreds of students who have taken the survey so far, leadership traits associated with integrity and trust have significantly outpaced those in other categories. This is not to say that other leadership talents are not valued. Adaptability and problem-solving, empathy and relational skills, and drive and resilience were all frequently cited by our students, followed by empowerment and fairness, communication and influence, and decision-making and courage. It’s just that qualities of integrity and trust were cited far more often—more than two standard deviations above the mean frequency—than those in other surveyed categories. It wasn’t even close.
Among individual leadership qualities, the top three—all selected by more than 80% of participants—were honesty, problem-solving ability, and trustworthiness. Additional traits selected by more than 70% of participants included, in rank order: positivity, dependability, listening ability, passion, fairness, empathy, accountability, emotional intelligence, approachability, confidence, and self-discipline.
The premium that our students place on honesty, trustworthiness, dependability, and accountability—four of the five qualities of integrity and trust included in the survey, all of them among the top 10 scorers—is especially worthy of our attention. “If you wanted to work on a core problem, rebuilding social trust — if you can figure out how to do that, it would be an awesome contribution.” I recalled this statement by David Brooks, shared in my letter to you last week, as I began to review student replies to the leadership survey; and I have recalled it again, repeatedly, as I have reflected on the wide range of responses in our country to the assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah on Wednesday afternoon.
“The medium is the message.” This observation by the 20th-century Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan contends that the means by which we receive information influences us more than the information itself. “The ‘content’ of any medium,” he wrote, “blinds us to the character of the medium.” McLuhan did not live to experience our media-saturated world today, but I expect if he had, he would suggest that the message of cable news channels is not “empower the world” or “inform and connect” but rather simply “keep watching”; that the message of social media platforms is not “bring the world closer together,” “inspire creativity,” or “promote and protect the public conversation” but rather simply “keep scrolling”; and that the message of internet search and software technologies is not “make the world’s information accessible and useful” but rather simply “stay online.” The media are the message, and the message is “your attention is our product.”
Our principal medium of connection on campus—reinforced since last year’s cell phone prohibition—is a few feet of air between students in a classroom, performers on a stage, athletes on a field, and children on the playground. The medium is the message, and the message is community. In the wake of widespread reporting on and public reaction to Wednesday’s political violence, the vast majority of it transmitted via cable, social, and other digital media (“your attention is our product”), I was concerned about MICDS community impacts, especially in view of the near inescapability of graphic footage on social media platforms and their managers’ apparent abdication of responsibility to remove it. Our Student Support team, divisional leaders, and faculty were prepared for potential repercussions on Thursday, but the day proceeded relatively normally, up to and including our joyful Upper School Parents Night. In hindsight, I should have known that it would.
“Politics is downstream from culture,” or so declares the Breitbart Doctrine, to which I would add, “and culture is downstream from media.” Our community-seeking “few feet of air” medium at MICDS is a healthy antidote to the attention-seeking technological media in our students’ lives off campus that so thoroughly infect American society and, by extension, American politics. We will continue to aspire to be a sanctuary of hope and faith in humanity, no matter how countercultural such an aspiration may be. A few feet of air, not a million miles of airwaves, is the better medium for nurturing the leadership qualities that our students’ most esteem—honesty, trustworthiness, positivity, listening ability, dependability, accountability, empathy, emotional intelligence, and approachability notable among them. This week as ever, I am so very proud of our school.
Always reason, always compassion, always courage. My best wishes to you for a happy weekend ahead.
Jay Rainey
Head of School
This week’s addition to the “Refrains for Rams” playlist is Purple Dress by Liam Finn (Apple Music / Spotify).