Bruce Payne

Wrestling with the strategic and moral dimensions of leadership

In Michael Chabon’s short story “A Model World,” a Ph.D. candidate stumbles upon an obscure, dated – but amazingly prescient – treatise about the very thesis subject he’s been struggling with. Certain that he won’t be caught, the young man, named Levine, decides to copy the argument word for word and submit it as his own.

On a cool fall afternoon, students in the public policy course “Policy Choice as Value Conflict” use Chabon’s tale as a lens to focus a discussion of plagiarism before tackling the much more complex and difficult underlying themes of hierarchy and power in academia, loyalty and infidelity, and friendship and betrayal. A core course in the public policy studies curriculum, the PPS 116 class explores how conscience, character, and varieties of moral reasoning can help in facing corruption, deception, war, and social injustice.

Hart Leadership Program faculty member and lecturer in public policy Bruce Payne has been teaching this course since 1972, when he created it at the suggestion of Joel Fleishman, professor of law and public policy and at the time the director of the Institute of Policy Sciences and Public Affairs (the precursor to the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy). Fleishman felt strongly that the public policy curriculum needed an ethical component, years and in some cases decades before such inquiry was an integral part of policy programs at other universities.

Known for his simultaneously well-informed and seemingly spontaneous oratory, Payne encourages students to probe their own system of values, to define where they stand on ethical issues, and to reflect on the possible outcomes of one’s actions.

Payne initiates today’s conversation by posing an open-ended question: What puzzles you about this story? Hands shoot up. A fluid back-and-forth ensues between Payne and his students. One is bothered “that there are no good guys in the story.” Another asks why Levine would abandon a dream of becoming an artist for the academic world when his heart was clearly not in it. Several others strike a similar chord: Why did Chabon allow the Ph.D. candidate to get away with his deceit? Why bother following the rules when people around us routinely get away with lying and cheating, and even benefit from it?

“What does lying do to a relationship?” Payne asks. “Think of the profound distress of doing something that would ruin your spouse’s or your child’s view of you. Those are big-time hostages to fortune.”

But Levine eventually goes on to success, someone argues, securing a huge research lab and a well compensated, highly visible academic appointment. By the end of the story he has earned a bright reputation and seems to be making innovative advancements in research. Might the end justify the means?

“Levine is an immoral SOB and I wouldn’t want him running my lab!” Payne retorts with a laugh. “He’s also living a life that is permanently at risk for being exposed because it is based on lies.”

Payne then shares a personal anecdote. Years back, a close friend received a major promotion and in the press release that was prepared, she noticed an error. Although she had taken classes at a university she never graduated; the release said she did. Did Payne think she should stay mum? After all, who would ever know?

“I told her you absolutely cannot do this,” Payne said, his voice rising at the memory. “You must correct this. Even if no one else ever finds out, you will know.”

“A Model World” is one of more than a dozen texts that the class is tackling this semester, drawing from political theory, fiction and history. (There are also three films – Schindler’s List, Weapons of the Spirit, The Children of Chabannes – one poem, and one hymn.) Featured writers include Jorge Luis Borges, Primo Levi, Nadine Gordimer and Robert Penn Warren, among others. Payne augments class discussion with study questions on the readings and weekly quizzes.

“This has been true for the past thirty years: Duke students are fabulous skimmers,” he says. “To learn from these great writers and thinkers, and engage seriously with the work, I assign unskimmable stories and unskimmable essays. We use the Socratic process in class discussions to help us come to agreement on issues. This gets students out of the performance mode – which Duke students are good at because they’re so smart – and into the hard work of questioning how individuals and communities face moral choices.”

Alumnus Don Burton (’85) says that the major personal impact Payne’s ethics course had on him was “the expanded view of human frailties and excellences. Those stories reveal the depth and breadth of human experience. They make you realize that you are or could be every character because of our shared humanity, because the most evil deeds and the most excellent are both within our repertoire as humans. It has much more of an impact than studying a list of 10 abstract qualities a leader might possess.”

Payne’s personal experiences inform many of the discussions. While working toward his master’s degree in political science from Yale University, Payne joined the burgeoning civil rights movement and became a field worker for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In 1963, he and a fellow field worker were brutally attacked in Mississippi in broad daylight by Ernest Avants who was later convicted in a 1966 murder that prosecutors say was part of a failed plot to assassinate the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. So when discussions turn to race, Payne can offer first-hand observations about the charged atmosphere of the Sixties South, including police intimidation (for example, “how it was possible to receive a speeding ticket while sitting in a parked car”).

Payne teaches through the Hart Leadership Program, Duke’s undergraduate leadership development initiative launched in 1985 through a seed grant by the Milledge A. Hart III Family Foundation. (Payne was the program’s first director.) He says ethical problems are at the heart of most genuine leadership dilemmas – for example, conflicts of value; competing notions of virtue; and problems of keeping faith with the whole range of responsibilities and obligations that we have as professionals, as citizens, and as members of communities and families. “If our relations of influence are not guided according to some ethically consistent pattern, the chances are that leadership will be manipulative or destructive, and in the long run, unsuccessful,” he says.

Given the subject matter covered in his classes – Payne also teaches PPS 145, “Leadership, Policy and Change” – it’s not surprising that students often seek him out after class. A dedicated mentor, Payne spends hours talking with students about personal as well as intellectual matters. He notes that the current generation of students seems to be most concerned about “not measuring up to some impossible standard. These students are smart, attractive, and incredibly blessed with intellectual and financial resources, yet they don’t think well of themselves. They compare themselves to this person’s athletic ability and that person’s physical beauty, this person’s writing talents and that person’s mathematical ability and they come up with an impossible composite of someone, a sort of FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] with legs. No one can measure up to that.”

Payne says part of his goal in his ethics classes is to help students see what they are capable of doing. “They don’t have any idea of how powerful they are,” he says. “One of the things I try to impress upon them is that the great aesthetic experiences in our lives result in heightened consciousness about the world. I want our students to produce work and ideas that bring our consciousness along another step.”

Even after they graduate, Payne’s former students reach out to him from time to time. An alumnus’ start-up company was headed toward bankruptcy. When should I tell my employees, he asked. Payne’s response: “What is the point beyond which they would feel betrayed?”

“Former students do call me with moral problems but in truth they don’t really need my advice,” he says. “They want their ethics professor to see that they are encountering these kinds of problems and working them out. It’s a funny kind of counseling.”

In 1998, Payne launched Leadership and the Arts in New York (LANY), one of the Hart Leadership Program’s four experiential learning component programs. Students spend the spring semester seeing plays, opera and dance performances, as well as visiting galleries and museums. They meet with artists, philanthropists, entertainment lawyers and curators, and take a full course load of classes.

As with the course readings in his ethics class, the plays and operas students observe serve to illuminate individual responsibility, problems of public choice, conflicts about moral rules, and questions of character -- loyalty and betrayal, integrity, honor and vainglory, courage and cowardice. Class conversations can last late into the night, long past the closing curtain. As one LANY participant observed, “Sometimes I liked the conversations about the plays more than I liked the plays!”

It’s no wonder. Take, for example, one of Payne’s study questions for Shakespeare’s King Lear:

“Gloucester is easily fooled, and far too trusting. But his strength in adversity is astonishing. What do you think empowers him to act against Cornwall’s instructions, and what do you make of the courage he shows? In the confrontation with Cornwall and Regan (a scene of believable horror rarely matched in the English-speaking theater), what might we reasonably infer as to the various sources their cruelty, and what seems beyond your capacity to understand?”

And that’s just one of nine questions for one play – the group sees nearly 50 performances in one semester.

Payne says he is encouraged by students’ dedication to exploring the ethical dimensions and implications of their own lives and of the world around them. It’s more than just an academic exercise, he says. It’s preparation for a purposeful life.

"Leadership is a term that means many things to many people. For me, leadership emerges when groups and individuals face problems and dangers, and as they are involved in conflict and disagreement about significant change. My goal as a teacher is to help students think more clearly about the strategic and moral dimensions of leadership, and to help them develop their own capacities to lead more effectively and more ethically.”

-- by Bridget Booher