Loving Your Students – A Faculty Model For Today’s Classroom

This paper reviews research related to four recent business management models of charismatic and inspirational leadership. It goes on to select the key traits and behaviors of these leadership models for the workplace environment and use them as the foundation of a model for a loving faculty member. Like the business leader, the devoted, caring professor leads his engineering students in their quest for knowledge, growth and learning. Based upon peer-reviewed leadership research which reports the value and benefits of a caring, mentoring and loving leader in the business world, the loving professor will also be successful in meeting the learning needs of students in the 21 century classroom. As faculty transition from the ways of old the authoritarian, dictator, Machiavellian ways of teaching they must search within themselves and ask, “How should I act so as to achieve the rank of loving professor? Which behaviors, activities and actions will allow me to successfully lead my students and best promote their learning?” Leaders, Leadership and The Rise of Civilization Leadership has been a research topic since before recorded history. Understanding the behaviors, traits and personalities of leaders has spawned questions of what it means to lead, who will lead and how does one lead. The myths, legends and stereotypes associated with leadership (both good and bad) can be found in the old and new testaments, in Greek mythology, in Latin classics, in all the great literature of the world, in fiction, the movies and television. The stories of leaders have played an important role in the development of civilizations, nations, ethnic societies, and almost every human group ever organized. In military settings, the characteristics which identified a good leader are documented in writings across the centuries and from around the world. Wren (1994, Chapter Two) provides a chronological framework of management leadership starting 22 centuries B.C. and ending with the start of the industrial revolution in Great Britain around 1750. Leaders such as Hammurabi, Sun Tzu, Confucius, Chanakya Kautilya, Moses, Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Gutenberg, Francis Bacon, Copernicus, Galileo and Isaac Newton are widely recognized and studied for their abilities to lead and advance civilization. The word ‘leader’ first appeared in the English language around 1300. Prior to that words like commander, chief, general, emperor and king were commonly used. As concepts of inherited roles, nobility and royal families were questioned, the word ‘leadership’ began to surface (around the middle 1700s in parallel with the rise of democracy). The word ‘leader’ was widely used to describe political influence and control within the British parliament. Thus, even though the study of leaders is old, scholarly research related to the meaning of leadership can be seen as a relatively recent field.