What Academic Institutions REALLY Strive to Produce

Beline U. wrote A Leader is a Thinker in response to an interview on bloggingheads.tv between Mark Edmundson of UVA and William Deresiewicz of Yale University. Beline argues that the professors make hasty generalizations. But, generalizations are inevitable when talking about a large group of people. She  argues that we need both leaders and thinkers to have a successfully functioning society when in fact society would ultimately benefit from a fusion of leaders and thinkers rather than both. Thinkers are skeptics of everything who need convincing to do something, whereas leaders blindly commit tasks. They seem to keep things going in a robotic manner and question nothing. Beline also stated that colleges bring in these skeptical thinkers with the goal of producing these blindly obedient leaders.

Beline argues that Edmundson and Deresiewicz just give their own personal opinion and that "one cannot assume that everyone thinks like these men." These men are well educated and can generalize the academic institution very well. They have been on both sides as students, then teachers. And yes, they give their opinions; And although not everyone falls into the educated generalizations they provide about how students think and how institutions act, their opinions are still very accurate.

I agree with Beline when she states that institutions need a balance of leaders and thinkers, as there are advantages and disadvantages to both. But what they really need in order to achieve this balance is not leaders and thinkers separately, but rather a fusion of the two. They are too extreme to function in the real world properly. The balance they need will be achieved when each individual is not labeled a leader or a thinker but has characteristics of both categories. Successful real world leaders such as politicians like Obama and inspirations like Martin Luther King Jr. and JFK all have or had qualities of thinkers and leaders. These qualities ensure success.

Beline argues that "if universities did not want thinkers in their institutions then why are they continuing to admit thinkers?" and later states that "universities are more interested in creating leaders. This implies that Universities admit thinkers with the goal of changing them into leaders. But if you look at any college application, admissions are always looking for what you were involved in throughout your high school years. What clubs and sports did you keep going and contribute to in order to better the community. Clearly colleges are looking to admit leaders who will get involved, but they believe are capable of thinking. Leader qualities are a must for college admittance. Institutions want their leader-esque freshman to learn to think and ultimately graduate with leader and thinker qualities. These are the people who will keep producing successful alumni to benefit the schools in future years. I agree that the ultimate goal of schools like Yale is to produce Yale alumni, but the caliber alumni they want to produce are leader/thinkers.

Beline argues that:

"institutions are not helping people understand the questions because most of the people in these places have not found the answers to these questions"

Yes, professors don't have the answers to these big questions but its clearly because there ARE NOT steadfast answers to these big questions like what is the good life. The good life varies from person to person. Academic institutions fully understand this and want their students and alumni to find out what works best for them in their lives. We spend our entire lives hoping to answer these unanswerable questions, but the least we can do is keep them in the back of our minds as we go through life and try our best to satisfy the inevitable insatiability brought upon by these questions. The good life is deemed unreachable by the nature of human beings. The goal of academic institutions is to create alumni who understand these big questions inside and out and have an optimistic, yet realistic view of attaining the answers for themselves.

A leader is not a thinker after all, but leader/thinkers are the ones who will prosper in the future. They are what academic institutions are really looking to mold out of those capable leader-types they choose to admit. They will keep the cycle of alumni going that every academic institution needs to survive.