LEAD 310
Leadership in Hard Times: Governance and Activism in America's Urban Crisis Spring 2015
Division II
Cross-listed HIST 385
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Class Details

Politics, the philosopher Hannah Arendt tells us, is a means of intervening in otherwise “automatic” processes. It follows that political leadership—whether exercised by elected officials or community activists—represents a vital instrument by which people may attempt to shape the social processes that structure their communities and their everyday lives. Seldom have American communities had greater need for creative and effective leadership than did American cities following the Second World War—yet seldom has this kind of leadership proven more difficult to realize. In the postwar years, cities, the drivers of the nation’s phenomenal economic growth for nearly a century, confronted a host of new challenges: declining private investment; the out-migration of their middle and upper classes and, consequently, a new position as sites of concentrated poverty; persistent fiscal crises; seemingly endless ethno-racial conflict; and the rise of new epidemics—drug use, AIDS, and mass incarceration. By the mid-1960s, these challenges had come together in the public discourse to signify a general “urban crisis.” This course will introduce students to the processes that have shaped American urban life since the Second World War (some of which, we will see, were in fact far from “automatic”). We will also examine how public officials and community leaders tried to intervene to shape those processes, what resources they could muster for doing so, and what came of their efforts—so as better to understand the possibilities and the limits of leadership in hard times. What kinds of leadership are possible when a zero-sum logic obtains, when social “problems” prove “insoluble,” when “positive” action appears impossible? Must urban leaders operating in such conditions necessarily privilege the interests of a particular class? What happens when government and community leaders act upon incompatible visions of social justice and the public good?
The Class: Format: research seminar
Limit: 19
Expected: 19
Class#: 4009
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: several short essays, weekly writing assignments, and a longer research paper with presentation
Prerequisites: previous course in American politics or American history
Enrollment Preferences: Leadership Studies concentrators
Distributions: Division II
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
HIST 385 Division II LEAD 310 Division II
Attributes: HIST Group F Electives - U.S. + Canada
LEAD American Domestic Leadership
LEAD Facets or Domains of Leadership

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