Followership: The Missing Virtue on the Modern Campus

Universities love to talk about leadership. We build programs around it, brand ourselves with it, and put it in glossy brochures as if a campus were a leadership factory. And to be fair, a university should cultivate leaders and citizens who can shoulder the opportunities and responsibilities of a free society. But here is the truth we do not like to say aloud:

The modern university’s obsession with leadership may be producing institutions in which too few people know how to follow. And a person who cannot follow responsibly may not actually know how to lead responsibly either.

Not blind obedience. Not yes-men. I mean the harder, more honorable work: responsible followership—people who can support a mission, tell the truth upward in the face of foolishness, and carry their share of the load. Universities do not run on presidents’ speeches, important though they may be. They run on the thousands of daily choices made by faculty, staff, and students who decide whether to contribute or quietly opt out.

The paradox is that followership is everywhere—except in our vocabulary. In higher education, we resist the word follower because it feels demeaning in a culture built, in theory, on independence of thought. Faculty tend to hear followers and think of them as subordinate, passive, or intellectually captured.

But refusing the label does not erase reality. Universities are not pure democracies. They are not corporate hierarchies either. Authority and responsibility are shared among the board, the president, and the faculty, and that arrangement works only if people understand their roles. The real question is whether people can learn to lead when needed and follow when appropriate without surrendering their moral spine.

Healthy followership means mission-first thinking: Does this help students learn and develop? It means truth-telling with respect—dissent that strengthens the institution rather than burns it down. It means personal responsibility—owning outcomes rather than playing the blame game. It means moral consistency—matching your words to your conduct, especially when it costs you something. And it means shared work—understanding that not everyone is in charge, but everyone is accountable.

The alternative is institutional cynicism: refusing to lead, refusing to follow, and still demanding influence. Everyone wants a voice, but no one wants responsibility.

Faculty are not merely occupants of academic positions. They are stewards of an educational mission. That stewardship requires more than expertise. It requires the willingness to serve something larger than one’s own discipline, preferences, or grievances. If the institution becomes a loose confederation of personal projects, students will smell the incoherence a mile away. And so will the taxpayers who pick up the tab.

Universities should stop treating followership as a dirty word and start treating it as a civic virtue. Followership is not the surrender of independent thought. It is the disciplined use of independent thought in service of something larger than oneself.

In my experience, universities do not primarily fail from a lack of intelligence. They fail from a lack of conviction—full heads but hollow chests as C. S. Lewis intimated in The Abolition of Man.  He referred to “Men without Chests” suggesting that contemporary society produces individuals with full heads (strong intellect and logic) but hollow chests (moral emotions and sentiments). Followership, rightly understood, puts substance back into the chest: duty, courage, humility, and service.

A final word: followership is how we rebuild public trust. Public confidence in higher education is not restored by marketing. It is restored when universities show, day by day, that they can govern themselves with integrity. That requires leaders who lead. But it also requires followers who follow well—people who neither idolize authority nor despise it, who understand that freedom and responsibility are welded together. A thoughtful and free institution needs people who know when to lead, when to follow, and how to do either or both, responsibly.

So yes, teach leadership. But teach, and honor, followership as its indispensable companion. Without it, shared governance becomes theater, process becomes paralysis, and mission becomes a tagline.

And students? They graduate having learned the worst lesson possible: how to criticize institutions without ever learning how to carry one.

That is not education.

That is abandonment.

Walter V. Wendler, Professor of the Practice–Higher Education Reform, Bush School of Government and Public Service; President Emeritus, West Texas A&M University; Chancellor Emeritus, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Weekly columns available at walterwendler.com.