142 Ethics in Higher Education: Values-driven Leaders for the Future
then we are on course to make of our national life the Wild West. A
leader therefore has no choice but to be the exemplar and model of the
nation’s best idea of itself.
In a recent article in Al Jazeera on line, Hamid Dabashi, a scholar of
Persian Studies at Columbia University had this to say:
“Therefore the agent “must” act according to a “model” which he
would like to see diffused among all mankind (sic), according to
a type of civilisation for whose coming he is working-or for
whose preservation he is “resisting” the forces that threaten its
disintegration (2013:3).”
It is precisely that self-confidence, that self-consciousness, that self-
assuredness, that audacity to think and plan ourselves into an
unimagined future that the seeds whose birth lie embedded in the loins
of present time, are brought to birth. If only leaders would think not just
of the present time, but recognize that they are indeed planting the seeds
that may cause the nascent future to become aborted, then they would
recognize that their present conduct makes the future they wish to see
dim. Jim Wallis in his book, The Soul of Politics (1994) says that
without the value of moral conscience, our political life quickly
degenerates into public corruption, cultural confusion and social
injustice. It is not enough just to mouth a vision. The vision must
however be compelling on one’s conduct because the vision must direct
the way we act. This is perhaps what may be referred to as
“transformative ethics”. In other words leadership that must be
possessed of the imagination to think radical ideas that go to the heart of
the matter, that are imbued with idealism that dares to imagine the
unimaginable and to desire only that which is the best. Leadership ethics
should be by its nature transformative because it is capable of
challenging given norms and orthodoxies to a better ideal of itself.