The Liberal Arts and Leadership: How to Design a School of Leadership Studies

Abstract and Background

The greatest academic adventure of my life was working with a small group of colleagues to design a new kind of school in a university, from scratch. The Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond was the first undergraduate, degree-granting, liberal arts school of leadership studies in the world. The task was not easy because, at the time, leadership studies was still an arm of management studies. What excited me was that the school offered an opportunity to recast the liberal arts. I glibly called it ‘liberal arts with a point’ or with a focus on understanding leadership. Students could study, history, philosophy, anthropology, literature, etc. as a means for understanding leadership. Aristotle once said that the liberal arts taught people how to make good decisions in a free society. To my mind, the Jepson School took that idea one step farther. We designed it to teach students how to make good decisions and how to work with others to implement them.

This chapter is about developing the Jepson School, the challenges that my colleagues and I faced, and the mistakes that we made. Moreover, it is about what students need to learn to be good citizens and leaders. The Jepson School’s development, and subsequent hiring of faculty from a variety of liberal artsdisciplines, created a model for leadership education. Over the years, the faculty’s research has expanded the field of leadership studies, to include work from disciplines that had not been represented in the leadership literature.

Ciulla, Joanne B. “The Jepson School: Liberal Arts as Leadership Studies,” eds. R Riggio and M. Harvey, Research Companion to Leadership Studies: The Dialogue of the Disciplines. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2011, pp. 20–35.