Word: leader
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...leader of an activity is also as much a representative as is the Marshal or the Student Council member, though the sphere of his representation may be smaller. The head of a political club is as involved in representing the member of his activity as the Council member is in representing the student body...
This absorption in one's activity differentiates the student-leader from the regular student's absorption in study or in his own problems. The student-leader may look at his grinding roommate and feel the disdain for his single-mindedness that his academic roommate may feel for his unacademic pursuits. The student-leader, in absorption in something not at all academic, becomes, to a certain extent, alienated from an academic community. In colleges where success is the ideal for the majority of the student body, the student-leader is placed in a plane above the majority, which feel a degree...
Thus arises the paradox of the representative becoming divorced from the group he is supposed to represent. Even as a leader in his activity, the student-leader represents the members of his club only while they are in the club building; once out of it, the two groups are again servered...
...takes a while, however, for the student-leader to note that no matter how hard he may be working to represent his fellows, no one really considers him his representative. The feeling that no one appreciates what he is doing (and this applies as well to the club officer's regard of his rank-and-file) leads to a martyred bitterness toward those whom he is supposed to represent. The realization that his fellows are asking "Who cares?" eventually leads him to mutter, "The hell with them," and the chasm between the academic reality and the dream of the leader...
...attitude of "The hell with them" usually breeds the resolve no longer to care what "they" think, and to discard the notion, or what is by now the pretense, of being a representative. The student-leader's guiding motive shifts from the electorate to his own mind, or his own desires; the rationale is no longer representation, but power; not altruism, but egoism. And with this comes the abnegation of responsibility, a ram pant evil among Harvard undergraduates...