Last year, Assistant Professor of Political Science Margaret Brower (MAPS’18; PhD’21) invented a simulation to use in her first teaching session at the Civic Leadership Academy, a six-month program for local nonprofit and government agency leaders run by the Center for Effective Government and housed at the Harris School of Public Policy. The simulation called on participants to build their own social movement.
“It went really well,” recalled Brower, who teaches at University of Washington, “and it’s gone well the couple of times I’ve used it since then. We have such interesting discussions and reactions.”
It unfolded so well, in fact, that Brower is using the simulation in her classes at University of Washington. She said it’s a great teaching tool.
“I intend to use it for the rest of my career,” Brower said.
Brower is one of many CLA faculty who have been enriched by their experiences teaching there. Celebrating its 10th year in the 2023-24 academic year, CLA has become a program that faculty return to year after year.
“It’s always a highlight of my academic year,” said John P. McCormick, Professor of Political Science at UChicago, who teaches political philosopher and statesman Niccolò Machiavelli at CLA. McCormick has been teaching at CLA for almost 10 years.
“Doing it always makes me nervous in advance because it’s something that gets me out of my comfort zone,” he said, “which is a good thing.”
McCormick keeps returning, he said, because he finds it extremely enriching to engage with local leaders of nonprofits and government agencies as they translate Machiavelli’s observations into their own experience as leaders.
“I have learned as much from these sessions as I hope they do,” McCormick said. “That’s why I take a humble posture with them. I accede to them that they know more than I do about leadership, and I’m just a conduit for this very famous book about leadership (Machiavelli’s The Prince) that may prove to be helpful to them.”
Valuable Back-and-Forth
CLA was established in 2014.
William Howell, Director of the Center for Effective Government and the Sydney Stein Professor in American Politics
“They wanted to bring together nonprofit organizations and government entities in the Chicago area so that points of collaboration could be identified,” said William Howell, Director of the Center for Effective Government and the Sydney Stein Professor in American Politics at Harris. Another objective was to develop a pipeline of talented leaders in nonprofits and government agencies. The result would be a much stronger Chicago.
Every year 30 high-potential leaders participate in CLA’s six-month curriculum, which includes lectures, case studies, workshops, and conversations with civic leaders across Chicago. CLA also features a week-long global practicum abroad.
By January, 300 leaders will have participated in the Civic Leadership Academy.
Interacting with CLA fellows is appealing to faculty from many disciplines, Howell said, largely because the engagement allows faculty to learn from people who are performing street-level work to effect change in communities.
“The back-and-forth dialogue can be immensely rewarding for either an English professor who’s trying to make sense of a text that involves the ethical obligations of leadership or a social psychologist who thinks a lot about the elements of persuasion,” Howell said.
A participant himself, Howell said he has found that his discussions with fellows have informed his scholarship on institutional design and how to enhance the way branches of government work with each other.
“It’s an expansion of my own imagination and appreciation for how the kinds of issues that I have studied in my own scholarship play out locally,” he said. “I’ve learned a ton being in conversation with fellows about their own thinking on how to undertake this work. That’s been terrific.”
When Howell asked Kenneth Warren, the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor in the English Department, to teach at CLA five years ago, Warren was reluctant. He considers leadership outside his expertise and thought he had nothing relevant to contribute.
Howell persuaded Warren by explaining that CLA was looking for people from a variety of scholarly backgrounds, not solely in leadership, to deal with broader questions.
Warren decided to teach the Herman Melville story “Bartleby the Scrivener,” as a basis for discussing the responsibility of running an office and the broader concept of responsibility. He was surprised at how engaged the CLA fellows were by the tale of the lawyer who hires a copyist and how that engagement sharpened Warren’s sense of Melville’s perception of historical change.
Warren has returned to CLA every year since and plans on continuing.
“When I’m teaching, I always find myself back in a new relationship with the work,” Warren said, “and I do think that one of the reasons I keep returning is that I find that the relationship to the work that’s created by this particular audience is just different.”
Apart from gaining a teaching tool from her participation in CLA, Brower found professional fulfillment there by teaching a recent journal article she wrote about activism at educational institutions.
“It was really rewarding for me to see it come to life in this classroom,” she said, “and see it have some kind of value and practicality to the lives and the leadership roles of the people in that room.”
Brower also has found that teaching at CLA aligns with her goals as a public scholar who wants to stay in constant connection with practitioners. And her participation allows Brower to reconnect with people in the nonprofit sector, where she worked before academia.
“There aren’t a lot of efforts at universities and colleges to create these connections and bridges between academics and practitioners,” she said. “I think that’s pretty powerful and important.”
Effective Community Engagement
Over its decade of existence, CLA’s atmosphere of engagement has fostered trust and camaraderie that encourages sharing ideas and experiences, but still allows for disagreement.
“We engage people who are committed to our city over a long period of time and build relationships with them,” Howell said. “This is not about inviting them to serve on a panel for a one-off event, nor is it about us bestowing our wisdom upon them. This is about creating space and building trust and fostering sustained engagement and exchange.”
CLA alumni and incoming fellows are a community that faculty and the university get to know, learn from, and engage for years, Howell noted. That long-term relationship is important to support alumni working to make Chicago better and it represents one of the university’s most effective methods of community engagement, Howell said.
“This is just a really rich community,” he said of CLA alumni and fellows, “and I feel like the university can play a productive role in creating space and trust to facilitate rich and important conversations about political and civic reform. It’s a great privilege and honor to be a part of it.”
Originally published by the Harris School of Public Policy.