Mission and Vision

What makes a good leader?
As society becomes increasingly complex, our students become increasingly adept, mastering the fundamentals in science, business, and journalism, creative endeavors in humanities and arts, and political theory. Universities carefully teach the skillfulness and craft of the academic disciplines. Students are prepared for national and international leadership. Yet, what has challenged our society most profoundly in the last decade has not been American ingenuity, mastery, or dedication; rather, it has been questions about the possibility of achieving ethical leadership within civic life.

Here is where we are led to ask: What makes a leader good? How can leading citizens be good ones? How can ethics re-infuse the energy of the public square? Can we teach students why to be good and, most important in a world of new challenge and urgency, how to be good?

We see evidence of the failure of ethical leadership in many arenas. Scientific research faces questions of truth telling, human subject violations, and conflict of interest; business has been queried by ethical violations; journalists are asked if they can provide truthful accounts, and political leaders are increasingly challenged to be courageous and honest. Indeed, the public is often concerned that our leaders, scholars and decision makers seem to lack a basic recognition of either the ethical norms and values of our society, or of civility itself, ideas that grounded the very concept of democracy since democracy was born, in the agora of Athens and the courts of Jerusalem, when people came to ask “what is the good act?”

Our students are acutely aware of the need for visionary leadership. Northwestern University students speak of their concern about the issues of civic life —they often tell faculty that they seek an idealistic, activist path, seeking to change the world as well as to know, understand and study it. The goal of the Brady Program in Ethics and Civic Life is to be a program in humanities, ethics and leadership that will match and then direct this idealistic, activist interest. We will plan for a keen intellectual training in ethics and a firm commitment to participation in the public sphere for sixteen selected Northwestern University students in a rigorous, three year program.