Jepson School 20th anniversary
Guest post by Bruce Avolio, Executive Director of the Center for Leadership and Strategic Thinking and Marion B. Ingersoll Professor of Management
I recently attended the Jepsen School’s 20th anniversary celebration in Richmond Virginia. The Jepsen School was the first school in USA to focus specifically on leadership as an undergraduate major as its main thrust and did so taking a broad humanities perspective. They have now graduated over 1,000 students who approach leadership with a very, very broad mindset from the great books of literature and history to the R.O.I. focus of corporations.
During one presentation at the conference, we talked about a program called Shakespeare Behind Bars. From its website, “Now in its 18th year, Shakespeare Behind Bars is the oldest program of its kind in North America. SBB programming serves incarcerated adults and youth using exclusively the works of William Shakespeare.” So try to imagine someone from the African American gang in a correctional institution working with someone from the white supremacist gang on Hamlet. That is exactly what happens, and this program has participants with a significantly lower recidivism rate, lower rate of violence and infractions, etc. So next time someone is in a brainstorming session with you, and they suggest something so out of the range as Shakespeare Behind Bars must have been when it was first proposed, I suggest you suspend your judgment!
