On Leadership

When I was a young teacher, I used to lead student trips to France, staying in rural, hardscrabble parts of the eastern provinces — quite close to the battlefields of World War I.

One such locale was in Burgundy, where we stayed in an old, partially restored 16^th-century château — a damp, old stone structure. Abandoned for much of the 19th century and left to the elements, parts of it had been dismantled by local farmers over the years, scavenging for stone. American soldiers leaving battlefields of World War I bivouacked there briefly, and their graffiti was still discernible on walls up in the attic.

By candlelight, we could make out the name of a young corporal from St. Louis, Missouri. The date was December 18, 1918. The guns had finally fallen silent on those battlefields just weeks before. He was far from home at Christmastime, and as he sheltered in the old hulk of a building, I had to wonder what he had seen, what he had endured, what images haunted his sleep.

Because vestiges of World War I surrounded us in this region, we dug into the local history. But the old battlefield sites, with green grass neatly trimmed, now bucolic, evoked little of that tragic war.
So, we tried a different approach to help our students gain a perspective. Each time we entered a village in our travels, I asked them to locate in the town square the inevitable memorial to those who had lost their lives in La Grande Guerre, as the French say.

They were to count the number of villagers killed in the war, and then consider the overall village population. Thirty-six men died in a village of 135. Fifty-five lost in a small town of 250; fourteen lost in a rural hamlet of sixty-five people.

The old photos in our history books allow us to distance ourselves from the horrible reality of war. Somehow, standing in a forlorn village common, not far from the actual battlefields, the cold simple numbers seemed to have a far more immediate, wrenching, and powerful effect.

One afternoon on one such trip many years ago, to spark some reflection on their part, we said to our students, “Your ticket to dinner this evening is a poem in French that is somehow inspired by something you did or saw today.”

At the conclusion of our evening meal, we went around the table, and the students read their poems. Then it was Valerie’s turn. Valerie was a Nigerian girl from New York City. Her poem was written in the first person, and as she read slowly and clearly, she situated her narrator alone in front of a hearth late at night, staring at the dying embers. The room was dark and bleak and empty, and it emerged that the narrator was an aging French peasant woman, recalling the loss of her son, decades earlier, in some battle whose name she could not recall, in a war she could not understand. She had lived many, many such sad lonely evenings, and even at this advanced age, she was reliving the pain and loss quite vividly each day.

We were all deeply struck by the sad beauty of her poem, but even more so, by her ability, through empathy and insight, to travel across generations and cultures. With her mesmerizing imagery and beautiful words that evening, without even seeming to try, she had us all in the palm of her hand.
I find Valerie’s extraordinary insight to be a source of hope and optimism that we can bridge the issues that divide us — that we can understand the pain of others — if we choose to.

This human capacity to see into and understand the lives of others, when we choose to exercise it, is the basis for real leadership. Leadership, after all, is not a title, or a position, or a role — it’s a mindset. When you can demonstrate the ability to create connection with others, and to believe in their good will, people will trust and will go with you. And I believe we all have it in us; we simply have to recognize it, and to act on it.

Sincerely,

Stephen S. Murray H’54 ’55 ’63 ’65 ’16 P’16 ’21
The Shelby Cullom Davis Class of 1926 Head of School

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— Adapted from the Baccalaureate address, spring 2025