Blog

Does it suffice for leaders to be accountable only to their own followers and not to anyone else? For example, do leaders in the private sector have any responsibility for what happens in the public one? Or are business and government entirely separate?

If they are siloed, then CEOs of major banks are accountable only to their own stakeholders – most obviously their boards, stockholders, and employees. But, does this seem right? That corporate leaders are accountable only to their own – as opposed to having some responsibility for the commonweal more generally.

Was it fine for CEOs of major tobacco companies to fight labels warning that smoking could be bad for our health? Is it fine for CEOs of major oil companies to fight efforts to reduce carbon emissions?   

In January the CEO of JPMorgan, Jamie Dimon, surprised many when he suggested that a second Trump presidency might have significant virtues. In an interview with CNBC, he said, “Take a step back, be honest. [Trump] was kind of right about NATO, kind of right about immigration. He grew the economy quite well. Trade reform worked. He was right about some of China.”     

In May it was reported that hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman was likely to support Donald Trump in the upcoming election. This meant following in the footsteps of another financial services heavyweight, Blackstone CEO, Stephen Schwartzman, who had already announced that he would “vote for change” by voting for Trump in November.

This month it became clear that leaders such as Dimon, Ackman, and Schwartzman were hardly alone. The Wall Street Journal reported that despite many having previous misgivings, especially in the aftermath of the January 6^th attack on the Capitol, America’s “top CEOs are flocking to Trump again.”

Their willingness to cozy up, to toady up, to Trump is curious. It would make sense if they genuinely thought that another four years of Donald Trump would be better for them and their companies than another four years of Joe Biden. But during Biden’s presidency, both have done stunningly well. CEO pay packages have continued to soar, and the stock markets are at or near all-time highs. Corporate profits are up, inflation is down, and so far has been no sign of a recession. It would also make sense if they disbelieved all the warnings about Trump, including those out of his own mouth, that if he becomes president a second time, he will do what he can to edge the country away from democracy and toward autocracy.  

Whatever their reasons for supporting Trump, his fanboys in the private sector should be clear: what they do and do not do in the private sector will impact the public sector. Business and politics are irrevocably entwined, as are capitalism in America and democracy in America. Moreover, history testifies that no autocratic leader anywhere at any time became an autocratic leader without the support, explicit or tacit, of many followers – and of many other leaders in many other silos who chose in the end to bend to the wind.

In one of my earlier books, Bad Leadership: What It Is, Why It Happens, How It Matters, I identified seven different types of bad leadership. One of these was Insular Leadership.

Insular Leadership is when the leader and some followers minimize or disregard the health and welfare of “the other” – that is, of those outside the group or organization for which they are directly responsible.

To know anything about the lives of George Washinton and Abraham Lincoln is to know how much grief pockmarked their lives, not just militarily and politically, but personally. Nor were several of our more recent presidents immune to calamity and difficulty. But if ever was a president who has endured more tragedy on a purely personal level than Joe Biden, he does not come to mind.

The facts are well known. Biden lost his wife and baby daughter in a car crash in 1972. He lost his golden son in 2015, Beau Biden, who succumbed at age 46 to brain cancer. And his remaining son, Hunter Biden, has now been found guilty of three felony counts for lying on a federal firearms application. This, after years of extreme alcohol and drug abuse, which we now know, courtesy of the trial, wreaked havoc on many in his family, including his children. Nor is Hunter done. He is slated to stand trial again in September on a different charge, this one for violating tax laws.

Still, whatever the calamities that rained down on Joe Biden in the last half century – including his own life-threatening aneurysm on an artery wall at the base of his brain – none diminished his overweening ambition. His lifelong ambition to become president of the United States. Biden has prided himself on doing it all: being a devoted and loving husband to his wives, being a devoted and loving father to his children, being a devoted and loving grandfather to his grandchildren, while simultaneously, decade after decade after decade, serving first as United States Senator, then as vice president, and finally, as president.

Joe Biden’s ambition was so great he was not to be deterred. Not by repeated personal tragedies, nor by repeated political setbacks. Nor, even now, has the dream died. Biden is running for president a second time, at age 81, when his health is less than robust and at a moment in his life when family might be presumed to take precedence. Still, his priority remains the presidency. Biden is there for his family; he remains a steady and caring presence. But even his day has only 24 hours – which, given his fixation on his office, means his focus on his family must be finite.

Shakespeare’s tragedies – such as Hamlet, Henry V, and Julius Caesar – all have heroes with tragic flaws. In most cases they are not ordinary men. They are royalty with domains over which they preside. They are leaders with followers over whom they rule. But there is nevertheless a chink in their armor, a flaw that is not, simply, a defect. It is a flaw that is fatal, that leads ultimately to disaster, even to death.

Is Biden so afflicted? Especially in the eight years since Beau Biden passed, has Joe Biden’s unquenchable ambition been his fatal flaw? Did it cost his family – and if so, how much?

Questions like these are of course unanswerable. Who can know what would have happened within the Biden family had the patriarch not remained, even after Beau’s death, consumed by his desire to become president. To run for and then win the presidency not immediately, in 2016, but in 2020, even though his family was still demonstrably traumatized by Beau’s premature demise.

Sometimes life does imitate art. So though so far as I know Shakespeare never used the phrase “work-life balance,” it’s possible that Joe Biden’s prioritizing the first over the second, was, is, his fatal flaw. Prioritizing work over life not in his heart or even in his head – but in how he has chosen to spend his time.

In the immediate aftermath of Hunter Biden’s guilty verdict Joe Biden flew to Delaware to give his son a very public hug. But in short order, the chief executive left to resume his public duties. “I am the president,” Joe Biden said, “but I am also a dad.” Notice the sequence.

John Roberts is reportedly Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. But can this be accurate? And, if it is, where is he? Where is John Roberts during what is arguably the Supreme Court’s greatest crisis of confidence, ever?

Once upon a time the nation’s highest court was one of its most venerated institutions. Those days are gone. Now (April 2024) only 36 percent of Americans approve of the way the Supreme Court is doing its job, whereas 51 percent disapprove. Moreover, two of the nine justices are under a cloud of suspicion, suspected in both cases of extreme judicial bias and in one case of corruption. Meantime the Court’s leader, the Chief Justice, has gone MIA. So far as the American public is concerned, Roberts is missing in action.

To be clear: the Court has significant systemic problems. For example, the nine justices are appointed for life, even though life spans now are decades longer than when their forever tenures were enshrined in the Constitution. It is also true that the Chief Justice has little power over his colleagues, nearly no carrots to reward them for doing what he wants them to do; nearly no sticks to punish them if they do not. But in the past Roberts was reputed to be an institutionalist who would protect the Court against debasement first because he cared deeply about the institution, second, because he cared deeply about the law.

It cannot be known what Roberts is doing in private, behind the Court’s closed doors. But now is the time if ever there was one for him to make a gesture in public. He recently turned down an invitation to meet with Senate Democrats to discuss the Court’s ethics crisis. Further, if the Court is developing, of its own volition, new ethics rules, or new procedures, or new codes of conduct or new anything to prompt its own ethical conduct, we the American people have not been told about it.   

Chief Justice John Roberts appears a leader who is exceedingly old-fashioned, steeped in tradition, buttoned-up, cautious in the extreme. But what if the moment demands a different kind of leader? What if Americans need, even crave, reassurance by word and deed that their institutions are holding fast? That under the leadership of John Roberts the Supreme Court will not succumb to the mood of the moment?   

If John Roberts is so hidebound he cannot adapt even slightly, history will not judge him kindly. He will be remembered as a little leader – not big or brave enough to take on changing challenges in changing times.

How to understand yesterday’s verdict rendered in an American court: a former president found guilty by a jury of his peers on 34 counts of falsifying records? And how to understand where Americans are today, faced with the real possibility that Donald Trump, now a convicted felon, will be elected president a second time?

How not to understand what happened – is happening – is to fixate, obsesively, on the man himself. On the leader. This is not to say that Trump is unimportant. Rather it is to say that he is not all-important.

Without question he will go down as one of the most significant figures in American history. Politically inexperienced and inexpert when elected president, Trump has nevertheless dominated American politics during the eight years since. Notwithstanding his loss to President Joe Biden in 2020, to this day it is Trump who sucks the air out of our room.

But leadership is not about single individuals. Leadership is a system with three parts – each of which is as important as the other two. Part one is the leader – here Trump. Part two is the followers – here the many Americans who continue to support Trump. Part three is the contexts – here the domestic context, the United States at this moment in time; and the global context at this moment in time, within which democracies everywhere are struggling.

In my book The Enablers, I divided Trump’s followers into two groups: his Tribe and his Team.* His Tribe consists of Trump followers who remain at a distance. They include among others those who make up his often rabid and always reliable base; and members of his party, intractably constant Republicans who continue to support the former president no matter what he does or says.

Trump’s Team is different. It consists of followers who are up close and personal. For example, during Trump’s time as president, it was Vice President Mike Pence’s fulltime job to slavishly follow where the president led. Similarly, Trump’s son in law, Jared Kushner, who during the four years of Trump’s time in the White House was among his closest advisors, prepared at all hours to do his father in law’s bidding, without questioning.

Of course, not all followers – subordinates – follow all the time. Some of Trump’s underlings quit, such as his onetime Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis. But most have been loyal all along – and they remain so now, in the immediate wake of the guilty verdict. Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, spoke for the lot of them when he declared that yesterday, the day the jury handed down its unanimous decision, was a “shameful day in American history.” Johnson then launched a frontal assault on America’s judicial system by calling Trump’s trial “a purely political exercise, not a legal one.”

The contexts within which the trial took place are as important as Trump himself – and as those who remain unfailingly faithful. In the domestic context consider these: the declining trust in American institutions; the declining respect for authority and expertise; the declining belief in the American dream; the declining sense of American community and commonality; and the declining faith in America’s ideology, notably democracy.

And in the global context consider these. First, according to Freedom House, the non-profit organization that measures democracy globally, “Global freedom declined for the 18^th consecutive year in 2023. The breath and depth of the deterioration were extensive. Political rights and civil liberties were diminished in 52 countries, while only 21 countries made improvements.” Second, rightwing parties in Europe are rising in popularity – notably among young people. What becomes immediately clear is that the United States is not an exception. Leaders in most liberal democracies are having a hard time persuading followers in most liberal democracies not only of their own virtues but of the virtues of everything for which they stand.

Whatever your view of Donald Trump, the bottom line is he is a convicted felon. But to make sense of the next several months, attention must be paid not only to him. Attention must equally be paid to the American people – and to the America within which their drama will unfold.

————————————————————–

*The Enablers: How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

He is chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (F.D.I.C.). Moreover, he has been in a top leadership role at the F.D.I.C. for almost twenty years. But as a leader of any sort, anywhere, Martin Gruenberg is on his last legs. He is in any case slated to step down from his present post as soon as President Biden can name a successor.

Gruenberg agreed to resign only very reluctantly. Moreover, given there are politics involved – to keep the F.D.I.C. in line with Biden’s agenda the Democrats must continue to control three of the five board votes – the president was not keen to replace him. But so far as his underlings are concerned, Gruenberg’s departure cannot come soon enough. They were the ones who threw him under the bus – followers who rebelled against their leader.

In America incidents of follower power have gone from being very rare to not so rare. The recent spate of campus unrest is an example of how increasingly subordinates take on their superiors. But Gruenberg’s turned out a textbook case of how people without power and authority can and now do take on those with.

Gruenberg agreed to resign only after the chair of the Senate Banking Committee called for him to do so. After reviewing a report that was commissioned in response to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, and hearing some of Gruenberg’s subordinates testify, Senator Sherrod Brown said he was left with one conclusion: “There must be fundamental changes at the F.D.I.C. Those changes begin with new leadership, who must fix the agency’s toxic culture and put the women and men who work there – and their mission – first.”  

The report by a prominent law firm, Cleary Gottlieb, concluded that the F.D.I.C. was a “patriarchal, insular, and risk-averse culture” where management’s responses to misconduct were “insufficient and ineffective.” While Gruenberg was not the sole target, he was held responsible for a workplace that had long since been unpleasant to the point of being uncomfortable. Moreover, some of the attacks on him were personal, not just managerial. Gruenberg was said to have an “explosive temper” and to be “misogynistic.” His promise during the Senate hearing to take an anger management course was under the circumstance preposterous – far too little, far too late.

Changes in technology, and in culture, are key to understanding why Gruenberg fell. Both have emboldened followers at the expense of leaders. Moreover, both have made it easier, and more acceptable, for those without authority to take on those with. Here is the sequence they make possible.

• Step 1: Information. Information used to be the private preserve of people with power and, or, authority. No longer.
• Step 2. Expression. Expression once was available only to those granted permission. Now most can speak, and most can be heard, anywhere in the world.
• Step 3. Communication. In the past it was impossible for people in large groups and organizations to communicate with each other. Those days are over – many if not most of us can connect, one to another, in an instant.
• Step 4. Action. Information prompts expression. Expression prompts communication. Communication can and sometimes does prompt action.

It’s a sequence to which Martin Gruenberg can testify. Within the F.D.I.C. information about him and his management style was eventually widely distributed. Employees at the agency were increasingly willing to express their anger and frustration, in some cases so loudly everyone could hear. Eventually one complainant connected with another, and then another and another. Finally, action was taken. Which is why Gruenberg’s time at the top was finally, humilatingly, up.

I’m trying – and failing – not to get frustrated!

Repeatedly, experts on women and power are asked why their numbers remain so low. And, repeatedly, they give the same answers. Answers they’ve given for decades – which, however, have proved insufficient and, therefore, unsatisfactory.

This is not to suggest the answers they give are wrong. Or that their efforts to improve the situation – to increase the number of women in positions of authority – have been for naught. They have not: good intentions have made a difference; with measurably more women leaders now than a generation ago. Still, progress has been slow. Women are stuck in a rut and wonder why.

My return to this subject was prompted by a piece in Monday’s Financial Times, whose headline reads, “Number of US Women Executives Falls.” It’s not, however, the numbers that are disappointing.  No surprise there. What’s exasperating is that experts on women and leadership are still giving the same old answers to the same old questions.

Jennifer McCollum, head of Catalyst, a non-profit that speaks for women in the workforce, is quoted in the article as saying that an “unconscious bias persists” against women.  She adds that women and men with the same talents and skills are still thought of differently, which creates “invisible barriers that can have an enormous impact on women’s advancement.” Carolyn Childers, chief executive of Chief, a network of women executives, also provides a familiar explanation: the post-pandemic return to the workplace has disproportionally hurt women who “still have the majority of childcare.”

McCollum and Childers are not, of course, wrong. But their answers are shopworn. Even in a country such as Sweden, where business and government have done an excellent job developing policies that, for example, encourage equal responsibility for caregiving, the number of women leaders still lags.

Which is precisely why we need a radical relook at the gender gap. This relook focuses not on the similarities between women and men but on the differences. Women are different from men – their brains, their bodies, their minds, their psyches. These differences are relevant to why the number of women in power remains low, and they are important. Until they become part of the discussion, and until their implications are aggressively addressed, large numbers of women are destined if not doomed to be excluded from the C-Suite.

As I wrote in the post linked below: “We pretend the distinctions between the genders either do not exist or do not pertain. But they do.” They do exist and they do pertain – and they matter a lot.

A Radical Relook at the Gender Gap – Barbara Kellerman

Last October, in an earlier post on the increasingly close ties between Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping, I remarked on their similarities – and their coincident interests. (The link is below.) In the intervening months their alliance became still stronger. Right now Putin is in Beijing to reaffirm his alignment with Xi on a range of geopolitical issues – and their shared antagonism toward the West. A joint statement approved by both leaders declared that China-Russia relations had demonstrated “strength and stability” and were experiencing the “best period in their history.” Putin and Xi were, they agreed, “priority partners,” a claim supported by their having now met, in person, 43 times!

Both leaders recently survived, at least for now, adversity. In Putin’s case among his other challenges a miserable, humiliating start to his war against Ukraine. In Xi’s case among his other challenges a period of China’s declining economic growth and emigrating entrepreneurs. Further, both have recently become more oppressive domestically and more adventurous internationally. Both also realize, even more than before, that the other has something they want. In Putin’s case he wants, and badly needs, China as a trading partner. (China has become Russia’s most important trading partner, buying its commodities, and supplying it with goods including wartime technologies.) In Xi’s case he wants, and badly needs, Russian oil and gas. (Last year Russia surpassed Saudi Arabia as Russia’s biggest supplier of oil.) Finally, both Putin and Xi have come even more than before to recognize that whatever their differences, they pale in comparison with those they have with the West generally, and the United States specifically.

Nothing unsettles the two gorillas – they’re both 800 pounds because while Xi’s China is a much bigger and stronger, Putin’s Russia has a large arsenal of nuclear weapons – more than the thought that they might be dethroned, pushed from their perch. Given that both have either literally or effectively anointed themselves leaders for life, it’s of primary importance to them that they stand up to the West. That they establish themselves as an immutable, impregnable, bulwark against anything vaguely resembling messy, and threatening, democracy.

An article in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs titled, “The Axis of Upheaval,” makes the argument that along with Russia and China, Iran and North Korea constitute “a collection of dissatisfied states converging on a shared purpose.”* This purpose is to challenge the dominance of the United States, which even now remains the epitome of democracy globally, and presides over the principles and institutions that continue to underpin the international system.

Presuming this axis of upheaval is real, the junior partners are Iran and North Korea; the senior ones are Russia and China. What this means is that Putin and Xi have an outsized impact not only on what happens in Russia and China but on what happens on the entire global stage: in Ukraine and Europe; in Israel, Gaza, and the Middle East; in Taiwan and the South China Sea; in South Korea, Venezuela, and Nigeria.

And … in the United States. At a time when America’s politics are so fraught, and its body politic is so fractious, make no mistake. It’s in the political, economic, and military interest of Putin and Xi further to roil our waters. Moreover, together these 800-lb gorillas present a far greater threat than either would alone.

The point of this piece is that they are not alone. By joining forces, Putin in alliance with Xi will bestow on whoever is American president foreign policy and domestic challenges greater than any the U.S. has experienced since the coldest days of the Cold War.  

 ———————————————

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin

*The authors are Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine.

Two months ago, I posted a piece titled, “A Radical Relook at the Gender Gap.” (The link is below.) I pointed out that a half century after the start of the modern women’s movement, progress toward equity at or even near the top of the professional ladder remains slow. This especially applies to the number of women in positions of top leadership and management as compared to men.

My argument was “radical” in that it dared to go where others have not. I argued that one of the several reasons for this persistent gender difference is that women and men are different. First, “there are enormous physical and psychological differences between being a woman and being a man.” Second, these differences have consequences. Specifically, they have consequences for women and leadership. They are among the reasons why women continue to lag men when it comes to seeking, and to exercising, power and authority.  

As I wrote in my previous post, “not every woman has menstrual cramps; or gets pregnant; or is exhausted or nauseous while pregnant; or chooses to breast-feed her baby; or feels more responsible for her child than her partner; or has symptoms of menopause. But many or even most women do.” Which is precisely why to presume that all these – separately and cumulatively – are irrelevant to women in the world of work seems to me absurd.

From time to time I will revisit this argument, notably when there is further evidence either to confirm or disconfirm it. (I obviously think the former is far more likely than the latter.) Today then I am pointing to a new book by Lisa Mosconi, titled The Menopause Brain. Mosconi is an Associate Professor of Neuroscience in Neurology and Radiology at the top-flight Weill Cornell Medical College. In this book she further develops the argument made in her earlier, The XX Brain, that women age differently from men. Physiologically differently, psychologically differently.

In The Menopause Brain she reports on how scans confirm that women’s brains change during menopause – and for that matter during puberty and pregnancy – in ways that can and often do affect how they function. Predictably, Mosconi is careful to be sensitive to the point of being politically correct. While her research seems to suggest that at least some of what women experience during menopause would cause their performance, including in the workplace, somewhat to deteriorate, she prefers to refer to the brain as undergoing “a renovation.” For most women menopausal symptoms are transitory – their brain is simply “adapting to its new biology.”

Clearly Mosconi has hit a nerve. Her new book is selling like the proverbial hotcakes, and her TED talk on how menopause affects women’s brains has been viewed over 4 million times. Even more curious then that the question of how being in the body of a woman impacts women and leadership remains generally unasked and, therefore, unexplored.  

The average woman menstruates about once a month, for about five days, for about forty years. Moreover, about ninety percent of women report they have premenstrual symptoms such as headaches or bloating, and about half have menstrual cramps. Can it possibly be, then, that these facts of life are entirely irrelevant to the still relatively small number of women at the top of the greasy pole? Can it possibly be, then, that women’s experiences of menstruation, fertility, pregnancy, childbearing, breast-feeding, and menopause – none of which are experienced by men – have no bearing whatsoever on who in America holds power and exercises authority?

A Radical Relook at the Gender Gap

In a piece posted on December 30, 2023, I named the late Russian dissident, Alexei Navalny, “Follower of the Year.” (He died in February.) In part I wrote, “No single individual is so strikingly lacking in power, authority, and influence as is Navalny – and is nevertheless leaving such a significant imprint. Navalny’s years-long resistance to Russia’s dictator president, Vladimir Putin, is destined forever to linger.” (A link to the post is below.)

Some eight months earlier, I had posted another piece, this one about another Russian dissident, titled “Vladimir Kara-Murza – a Diehard.” In my book Followership I identified five different types of followers, one of which is a Diehard. Diehards are, as their name implies, [followers] prepared to die if necessary for their cause, whether an individual, or an idea, or both. Diehards are deeply devoted to their leaders; or, in contrast, they are ready to remove them from their positions of power… by any means necessary. Diehards are defined by their dedication, including their willingness to risk life and limb. Being a Diehard is all-consuming. It is who you are. It determines what you do.  (A link to this post is also below.)  

Kara-Murza willingness to endure pain and risk death to poke, to provoke, Putin, rivals Navalny’s. For his troubles Kara-Murza is currently serving time in prison, specifically the first year of a singularly severe, twenty-five-year, sentence. (It is the longest jail term given to a Russian dissident in post-Soviet Russia.) He is, for now at least, Navalny’s most prominent, most eminent, and esteemed successor. Like Navalny, Kara-Murza is a Diehard, willing to sacrifice everything, even to pay the ultimate price, to resist the Russian dictator.

Two days ago, Vladimir Kara-Murza was awarded the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. This was in recognition of seven columns he wrote for the Washington Post, all published in 2023. The Pulitzer judges pointed to his “passionate columns written under great personal risk from his prison cell, warning of the consequences of dissent in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and insisting on a democratic future for his country.”

A splendid acknowledgement of among the bravest of men. I could not help but notice, though, the absence of evidence that he is able to continue to publish.

Vladimir Kara-Murza – a Diehard

Follower of the Year – 2023

On the surface America’s corporate leaders are divorced from what’s happening on the campuses of many of the nation’s colleges and universities. What business is it of theirs if students protest Israel’s attacks on Gaza and America’s support of Israel? 

But not so fast. Recent incidents of campus unrest merely underscore how impossible it is for business leaders entirely to separate themselves from what’s happening in the United States more broadly. They, of course, want nothing so much as to stay in their own silo – the private sector – without getting involved with the public sector. Politics are complicated. Politics are messy. Politics are heated. And, worst of all, politics are divisive. In 2024 American politics are so divisive that if business leaders so much as open their mouths they risk being pilloried – and their businesses negatively impacted – by those who differ even a smidgeon.

Off the record, they do worry. Business columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin reports that a number told him they are “deeply concerned,” especially about “incidents of harassment of Jewish students.” But Sorkin adds that despite the handwringing, “there has been little action from corporations, which have a synergistic relationship with the schools where they recruit employees.”

Sorkin could additionally have pointed to the growing calls by protesters for their institutions to divest themselves from companies that have investments in or do business with Israel. In a major concession to students who took issue with policy at Brown University, the school promised that at the corporate board’s next meeting, to be held in October, members will vote on a resolution to divest.

In a column for the New York Times, Sorkin focused on the growing campus antisemitism and what business leaders might do about it. Clearly, he believes that they could do something as opposed to what they have done – nothing. He suggests, for example, that chief executive officers could announce that any school that refuses to take decisive action against antisemitism is one from which their companies will not recruit. Sorkin additionally notes that private equity and venture capital firms are uniquely positioned to influence what happens in institutions of higher education. They could- though they have not – threaten to stop managing a school’s endowments.

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal similarly insisted that at least in some situations corporate leaders must get more involved in what’s happening on the nation’s campuses. They cannot be or at least they should not be what most would clearly prefer to be, certainly in public, bystanders.

The Journal ran an editorial that compared how the crisis is being managed at three different universities – Northwestern, the University of Florida, and Columbia. Not surprisingly it singled out the last for leadership that went from bad to worse, charging that Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, “has all but surrendered the campus.” The school, the editorial contended, “is barely serving students who pay more than 80,000 to attend, let alone making Jewish students feel safe.”

Then the editorial went a step further. Where, it asked, is Columbia’s board of trustees? Naming names in bold print no less – specifically the names of the board’s chairs and vice chairs, at least three (out of five) of whom are evidently from the private sector, such as David Greenwald, chairman emeritus of the eminent law firm, Fried Frank – the piece pointed out that it is they who are “the ultimate custodians of the institution.” They, in other words, members of the board of trustees, are the leaders ultimately responsible for what is happening, and not happening, at Columbia.

Campus unrest is, of course, not the only hot-button issue on which leaders in corporate America are being pressed to take a stand. The old days when those in the C-suite could wall themselves off from what was happening beyond their four walls are dead and gone. The question though remains – especially during a year in which democracy in America will undergo a stress test – how will they respond? Will it suffice for business leaders to see nothing, hear nothing, and say nothing? Or will they conclude in the coming months that the price for their blindness, and deafness, and silence, might be too high?