Jane Eyre And Leadership

There's a pattern in academic leadership that I've seen before and have been watching closely these last few months. It begins with the individual who enters the university carrying the language of trust and what is presented as a genuine conviction to creating the best type of human connections so important in successful organizations. They speak passionately about fairness, equity and what universities owe to the staff they so often exploit and fail. They build a reputation on this performance and language and wear it like a badge.

I re-read Jane Eyre a few years ago and now find myself coming back to the character St. John Rivers and the deception of careful performance and intentional language. Rivers is outwardly selfless and adamant in his conviction to create more trust in the world, but every relationship he has is shaped by his self-interest. He doesn't shout or threaten, he simply withdraws when people fail to comply, and he does it with this sort of serene certainty that the withdrawal presents like an inspired form of leadership. That's the texture I recognize in this corrosive leadership pattern. As the individual accumulates institutional authority, a title, then a seat at the table (but not the adult table), the values they flaunt so publicly stop being the things they serve and become the justification for their authority. The mission serves as their mask and professional collegiality becomes transactionally conditional or disappears without explanation.

What makes this hard for me to confront, and what I think Bronte understood about Rivers, is that the self-deception is total. The individual genuinely experiences themselves as selfless and burdened by a mission others lack the courage to pursue. Every act of self-interest gets internalized as sacrifice. And this is what makes the people around them feel faintly crazy. The people who come to such a leader, genuinely hoping to be led somewhere better, are inevitably disappointed. Some leave the institution. Some stay and learn to be more careful.

Universities need structures that don't solely depend on the character of leaders, because even genuine character isn't stable under pressure and the accumulation of power. The language of social good isn't inoculation against self-interest and self-preservation. And the leaders who are hardest to hold accountable are usually the ones most fluent in the language of accountability.