Leadership in the Passive Voice
Ten years ago this month, changes at the school I serve were set in motion.
Anyone whose work I edit — students, staff members who write copy— would be appalled at the hypocrisy of that first sentence. It employs the dreaded “passive voice,” a stylistic choice to which I usually have a downright allergic reaction. At writing, “were set in motion,” my teeth hurt, but any other turn of phrase would suggest more agency than was at work.
In the early summer of 2014, things were happening at Andover Newton Theological School, now Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School, which led to other things happening. Agency had less to do with those things than momentum did. The records in our archives would mark a presidential transition, but, in retrospect, so much more was going on in May of 2014 that had begun long before.
That month marked a Presidential transition. Nick Carter retired after ten years, which were characterized by exploration of every imaginable path toward institutional viability: rethinking use of space, merger negotiations, new programs, creative partnerships. The board selected Nick as President in 2004 because they wanted off the roller coaster. They’d grown weary of chronic crises, related to both money and leadership, which had prevented the school from finding basic stability, let alone thriving.
The net result of Nick’s many attempts at sustainability was a conclusion, written on the wall, “This isn’t working.” I could see that writing on the walls of the tent in which we held Nick’s retirement party. At that party, I listened to Nick talk about how strong the school was, knowing that he was trying like crazy to tee things up for the big changes that were bound to come.
Publicly, Nick was saying that we’d never sell our campus; privately, he knew that relocation might be an inevitability, but he didn’t want to scare everyone when we didn’t have an alternative yet. Martin Copenhaver, at the time a trustee, was about to become Nick’s successor. He saw the writing on the wall, too. As we caught each other’s eye during that speech, at that party, I had to look away.
Martin already knew that the school’s leaders could check off the list the options Nick had explored, and that meant fewer options on the table, and much less time. A combination of deferred maintenance, enrollment decline, rising expenses, nervous donors, and students taking on outsized educational debt were creating a storm even more perfect than the one Sebastian Junger wrote about; that one, after all, only included a collision of three hurricanes, not five.
In retrospect, I realize that I was hanging by a thread psychologically during that Presidential transition. My long history of over-achievement had taught me to pretend things were okay when they weren’t. My overinflated sense of responsibility for a 200+-year-old school was doing me no favors; some decoupling was in order. I and a handful of others were about to be left holding the bag, and the bag was full of tough decisions ahead; we were 18 months away from not being able to make payroll. At that retirement party, I used all my fake-smiling skills, knowing on some level that the next few years were going to be hell.
And I was right, they were hell. The pain caused (passive voice! Again!) by the drastic decisions that I and others had to make was unlike any I’d faced previously. It wasn’t all bad, of course. My family was healthy, my students wonderful, my colleagues inspiring. I learned a lot from the leadership challenges of that dramatic summer of 2014. And when it became clear that my mental health wouldn’t survive the codependent bonds my mind had formed with my institution, I got help, and that help serves me well to this day.
When those I’d thought of as colleagues and friends rejected me because of the decisions I was required (passive voice, three times now) to make, I didn’t take it personally. How could I? What would they have had me do? When Nick Carter retired after ten years of turbulence, to be succeeded by a person whose mandate was, “Get the plane on the ground,” certain changes became inevitable. A direction had been set, and although I had roles and responsibilities in moving the institution in that direction, I knew that anyone who blamed me for the parts they didn’t like was just looking for an easy target.
There are, however, no easy targets amidst change in complex institutions. If someone wanted to lay blame for decisions made in 2014–2015 at Andover Newton, they really would have needed to look back to institutional agreements from around 1925, when Andover brought its assets to Newton without clear agreement on how the two schools would become one sustainable entity. Or they’d need to look at decisions made in the 1960s, when the school went on a construction tear, convinced that the surge in seminary enrollment was a trend, not a blip (it was a blip).
Around the world, we witness crises whose roots dig back decades, centuries, or millennia. As tempting as it is to blame today’s leaders for pain and suffering set in motion long ago, we are better citizens when we recognize the swiftness of the stream into which they swam when those leaders inherited historic problems.
Deists believe that God created the world, set it in motion, and then said, “Taxi!” Otherwise known as the theology — or teleology — of God as “clock-maker,” some believe that the Big Bang was an event that hurtled the planets into being, and that it remains the only force perpetuating reality now. I respect history’s momentum, but I sense God’s presence in every Newtonian unit. I also sense my own agency in the momentum God created, as I’m part of creation too.
Newton wrote that objects move because an outside force imposes upon them to do so. They accelerate, and acceleration gives the objects force. Every day, institutions are both moving forward in directions set long ago and setting new directions. Just this past week, the institution of which Andover Newton is now a part, Yale University, called a new President, its first woman. The world has started to insist on a nonmilitary resolution to violence in Israel and Palestine. Donald Trump was found guilty of a felony. There’s nothing static about institutions, from families to churches to nations to international entities. None of these events were inevitable, even though none resulted from single choices either.
When tossed about sometimes, and capable of turning things in a new direction other times, how do we know what’s needed from us? And how do we stay sane? I find help in imagining time as a fluid rather than a solid. Sometimes we ride it like a wave. Other times we swim against the current. We know better than to beg the waves to stop, or insist that they change direction, or else (or else what?). There’s the active, there’s the passive, and there’s knowing the difference.
