GreenLeaf, Chapter II

Greenleaf’s thesis: caring for persons, the more able and the less able serving each other, is the rock upon which a good society is built. If a better society is to be built, one is more just and more loving, one that provides greater creative opportunity for its people, then the most open curse is to raise both the capacity to serve and the very performance as servant of existing institutions by new regenerative forces operating in them.

Institutions Most people do not give to institutions the human caring and serving that they give to persons. If we are to have a moral society, moral humanity must also care for institutions. We tend to criticize the impersonal system, but it is our attitude and our level of caring, not the “system”, that need criticism and improvement.

Operating and Managing Operating is more administratering in contrast to leading. Conceptualizers is not necessariloy intellectual or theoretical. They are at their best in practical situations. They are also effective persuaders and relationship builders. Operator – gets it done. Conceptualizer – “what ought to be done”.

Greenleaf, p. 88-89. Read the goals as stated and how Greenleaf argues to make it happen.

The contemporary university, p. 67 For many young people what should be a great creative experience is instead a literal incarceration in rigid, stereotyped academic programs for which they have little aptitude and less interest. The result is enormous institutions that are an impossible meld of elitist traditions and mass education, and which cannot withstand the shattering value changes that other forces are bringing in society.

Greenleaf, p. 67. Colleges and universities now enroll about 50 percent of our young people. They should be a major civilizing force, but instead they stand among contemporary institutions as the most troubled, the most fragile, and the least certain of their goals as institutions.