Joanne Ciulla Oral History Interview

Scarpino: Alright, now we’re live for real. As I said when the recorder was off, I’m going to read a statement and then I’m going to ask your permission to do the things you just agreed to in writing, and then we’ll get going. 

Today is Thursday, June 21, 2018. My name is Philip Scarpino, Professor of History at Indiana University/Purdue University, Indianapolis, IUPUI, and Director of Oral History for the Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence, also at IUPUI. Today, I am interviewing Dr. Joanne Ciulla in a conference room on the IUPUI campus. This interview is part of a joint venture undertaken by the Tobias Center and the International Leadership Association. We’ll include a more detailed biographical statement with the transcript of this interview. For now, I will provide an abbreviated overview of Dr. Ciulla’s career. 

She earned her PhD in Philosophy from Temple University in 1985, defending a dissertation titled Work and Virtue. She also holds an MA in Philosophy from the University of Delaware conferred in 1976; and a BA from the University of Maryland, also in Philosophy, earned in 1973. Following awarding of her PhD in 1985, Dr. Ciulla held several short-term appointments in well-regarded schools of business, including the Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration and The Warton School of the University of Pennsylvania. 

Dr. Ciulla is a founding faculty member of the Jepson School of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond, serving on the faculty there from 1991 through 2016. She moved through the academic ranks, earning tenure in 1995. When she left in 2016, she was a Full Professor and holder of the Coston Family Chair in Leadership and Ethics. 

From 2017 through the present, she has served as Professor of Leadership Ethics and Director of the Institute for Ethical Leadership, Rutgers Business School, Department of Business and Global Management. 

Dr. Ciulla’s publication record is impressive and a major contribution to the field of leadership studies. She is the author or co-author, editor or co-editor of eight books – noting that Leadership at the Crossroads, which she edited and published in 2008 is a 3-volume set. Her first book, The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work, 2000, was number two on Amazon.com’s 10 Best Business Books of 2000. It was translated into Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Between 1984 and the present, she has authored more than 80 book chapters and over 40 journal publications, for most of which she is the single author. 

Dr. Ciulla has served on several editorial boards, including The Leadership Quarterly, Business Ethics Review, Leadership, and Leadership and the Humanities. As Series Editor of the New Horizons in Leadership series, she has been responsible for editing more than 30 volumes. Taken together her service on editorial boards and as Series Editor of the New Horizons in Leadership series has made a major contribution to expanding the field of leadership studies. 

Dr. Ciulla’s impact on the field is also reflected in the fact that she has been invited to speak, give seminars, and/or consult on leadership curricula throughout the US and in numerous other countries. 

Joanne Ciulla has earned numerous recognitions and awards nationally and internationally. The one that brings us here today is the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Leadership Association. Dr. Ciulla will also be receiving a second lifetime achievement award in August 2018, The Eminent Leadership Scholar Award from the Network of Leadership Scholars at the Academy of Management. 

So, I want to ask your permission to record this interview, to have this interview transcribed, to deposit the recording and the transcription in the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives, where they may be used by patrons including posting of all or part of the recording and transcription to the website of the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives, and the same considerations for the Tobias Center and the International Leadership Association. 

Do I have your permission to record, transcribe and deposit as described above? 

Ciulla: Yes, you have my permission to do all of those things. 

Scarpino: Okay, so, for the benefit of anybody who’s using this interview in the future, I’m going to start with a question and then I’m going to ask you to clarify one of your recent awards, and then some basic demographic questions. I’ll be talking to you about your youth, young adulthood and your education. After we do that, we’ll shift to some bigger picture questions about leadership and ethics and the humanities. We’ll follow those questions by working our way more or less chronologically through your career, which we’ll probably end up doing at a second session. 

I’m going to start with a question that’s intended to clarify one of your recent awards and to help put your scholarly contributions into context. 

As I mentioned, in August 2018, you’re going to become the recipient of the Eminent Leadership Scholar Award from the Network of Leadership Scholars at the Academy of Management. When I talked to Ronald 

Riggio, he told me that this organization is largely the senior-most respected scholars, mostly in schools of business, and you represented, he said, an out-of-ordinary recipient for the Eminent Leadership Scholar Award, which he saw as a true testament to the significance of your research and your scholarship. 

I have two questions on that – number one, do you agree with his assessment? Would it be unusual for somebody of your background to receive a lifetime achievement award from this organization? 

Ciulla: Yes. It’s quite, I was quite moved by it. My work, I’ve always been an outsider and pretty much all of my work has been kind of an outsider; and for them to give me the award, I was pretty surprised by it because my research is so different from what they do, but at the same time, I’ve always wanted to figure out ways to put together the kind of humanities-based research that I do with the kind of social science research that they do. The fact that they even paid attention to my work is wonderful, and it means that maybe we’re moving more in that direction, which is what I think the field needs to do. 

Scarpino: Why do you think the field needs to do that? 

Ciulla: Well, ever since I started, so I go back to the early days of leadership studies, so even back in say 1991 when I started, James MacGregor Burns, Bernie Bass, Joe Rost, all of these really big figures in leadership studies, we used to all get together and talk about the field. The one thing everybody uniformly agreed was that it had to be interdisciplinary, and so, but it never got that way. Those of us at the Jepson School believed it, but the real problem wasn’t interdisciplinary between psychology and sociology. The real problem was interdisciplinary between history and psychology or religion and organizational behavior. I mean, those things never came together, but it seemed to me, and everyone made the same complaint, including people like Jerry Hunt. I had quotes from several people in one of my earlier papers where they all said we’re not getting anywhere. You can’t get anywhere until you actually put together, I mean – looking at a piece of research that you do with a bunch of undergraduates in a laboratory on leadership only tells you a tiny snapshot of something that happened, that it’s not even clear you can universalize. But if you took that research and you put it next to something that was a historical pattern and you tested it in the present, that would be something interesting. That would give the research a grounding it’s never had. Conversely, if you only did history – and you’re a historian; you can appreciate this – and you made observations about how people behaved in history but you never actually tested it, it’s still an open question as to whether those – and so my dream in leadership studies has always been to put the two together. 

Scarpino: When you started answering that question, you said, “but it never happened.” 

Ciulla: No. 

Scarpino: Why do you think it never happened? 

Ciulla: Partly because of the way the Academy is structured. It’s the way the journal system is structured. The new journal Leadership, or the relatively new journal Leadership, Leadership is a much more open one, and they’re starting to see a little more – there’s a lot of critical theorists who write for Leadership, but it just couldn’t do it because the Academy’s not made that way. The closest it started to happen was at the Jepson School because next door to you, you had a psychologist. So, when I wrote papers and I wanted to bring in the best literature in psychology, I could just go next door and say, “Who do I need to look at?” and then sometimes show my friend, Al Goethals, say, “You know, tell me if this sounds stupid.” And that’s, of course, the problem with interdisciplinary work is that you don’t know if you’re sounding stupid because I’ve seen it on the other side. We did a special issue of Leadership Quarterly on leadership in the humanities, and a bunch of social scientists submitted papers where they did quote history and had no appreciation for the fact that there actually is method to doing history. You don’t just look in a book and then talk about that. 

Scarpino: Well, my undergraduate students do that. 

Ciulla: Yes, well they were written like undergraduate students. They did the same thing with philosophy, and they did the same thing with literature. They had no appreciation that there’s actually a method. If I had done that with an empirical study, they would have been all over me. But basically, we sent it out to people in the disciplines and a whole lot of people who were otherwise well-known got rejected. 

Scarpino: You’ve been doing this for a long time and you’re in a business school now, do you think we’re any closer to a real synthesis between social science and the humanities now than we were when you got started? 

Ciulla: Not really, especially not in business schools. Business schools are a mess. There’s like four journals that you’re allowed to publish in and anything else doesn’t actually count. So, what do you tell smart young scholars about that, right? So, part of the reason I went into the business school is I still have an awful lot of fight left in me, and I believed in bringing the humanities to the business school. You know, years ago, when I started at Wharton, we implemented the first required business ethics module. I worked on that and ended up teaching most of it, and that was like a big inroad. So, I’ve been fighting for the business ethics part for years. In leadership studies, and in leadership, there’s a lot of that done in business schools, not very well and not very often unless you’re a special school that has some of the top scholars in it. So, putting them together though, in terms of the real-world implications, because somewhere down the line, if you’re studying leadership, it should have something to do with real leaders, and so, down the line, unless you put things like history together with leadership, you’re not going to really have anything that’s very useful for anyone, not even in business organizations. And, of course, the big critique of business schools by business is that half of the research doesn’t have anything to do with what they do. It’s not very useful. 

Scarpino: Perhaps, other than Jepson, are there any leadership programs that come close to what you think they should be doing? 

Ciulla: Well, I think they make a good shot at it at Claremont McKenna, in the Kravis program. I think there are little pockets of places that try to do it. What it really takes though is probably collaboration between someone from the humanities and someone from the social sciences. Just getting that marriage together isn’t easy. The best shot for it is with senior people who don’t have to worry about jumping through these various hoops, but that’s kind of a pity because then you lose out on capturing the really bright young people who are doing research, and I find that a shame. But I’ve worked with people, I’ve worked with Don Forsyth, my other colleague there. We’ve co-authored something and he’s a psychologist who has certainly done a lot on leadership, on groups and things like that. Al Goethals has helped me with papers; I’ve never co-authored with him. Crystal Hoyt and I did a paper on whether you could use gaming to teach leadership. Crystal is also a social psychologist. So, I think we need to keep encouraging it. I think the ILA tries to encourage it. Certainly, you don’t get much encouragement for that in the Academy of Management group because they’re all coming from the same field. 

Scarpino: The colleagues you mentioned, those were all colleagues at the Jepson School? 

Ciulla: Yes. 

Scarpino: Okay. Alright. So, let’s back way up. I want to talk about your childhood and get some basic demographic information in here. So, when and where were you born? 

Ciulla: I was born June 16, 1952, in Rochester, New York. 

Scarpino: And did you grow up in Rochester? 

Ciulla: I spent the first eight years there, and then where I really grew up was around Baltimore, in Woodlawn. 

Scarpino: Brothers and sisters? 

Ciulla: I have an older sister. She’s about 20 months older than I am, and I have a brother who’s nine years younger than I am. 

Scarpino: Who were your parents? 

Ciulla: My parents were Andrew Ciulla and mother, Corrine Cristiano. My mother was from Geneva, New York. My father was from Rochester. He’s first generation Sicilian. My mother is second generation Calabrian. 

Scarpino: I’m going to ask you a somewhat complicated question to try to get at your early years. The way I like to do this is as follows: In October 2011, I interviewed Manfred Kets de Vries… 

Ciulla: Oh, I know him. 

Scarpino: … a very interesting man… 

Ciulla: Fascinating. 

Scarpino: … at the ILA – although the transcriber had an awful time with his accent –at ILA when they were meeting in London. Getting ready for that, I read an article that he published in 1994 titled “The Leadership Mystique.” There was one thing that he wrote in there that really, really spoke to me. What he said was: “All of us possess some kind of inner theater and are strongly motivated by a specific inner script. Over time, through interactions with caretakers, teachers, and other influential people, this inner theater develops. Our internal theater, in which the patterns that underlie our character come into play, influences our behavior throughout our lives and plays an essential role in the molding of leaders.” 

So, here’s the question. If we use Kets de Vries’ term, inner theater, can you tell me about your own inner theater, about the early experiences and individuals who may have shaped your character and the professional adult you became? 

Ciulla: Yeah. It’s sort of interesting. That’s an interesting question. Well, he’s a psychiatrist, so that’s why he thinks this way. 

Scarpino: But it’s a useful idea. 

Ciulla: It is a useful idea. So, if I go back to being a child, when I was very young, in early elementary school, all I did was write poetry. I really liked to write poetry. I thought I would be a poet when I grew up. As a matter of fact, I almost flunked second grade because we had work to do, and once you were free from the work, you could do like crafts or something. Well, I used to make books. I would get construction paper and I would staple it in the middle, fold it over and make a cover, and I would write either a story or poetry. So, most of my life, starting from a very young age, I was just interested in writing. And in high school, I took tons of writing courses, was on the newspaper and everything. I was a quirky student; I wasn’t like the straight A, does everything right because I was kind of off doing my own things very often. And there were things I really liked and things I didn’t pay attention to and just did to get rid of them, you know. I actually look back and I see students today who are so hyper. I was pretty relaxed about grades and other things that people tend to be really stressed about these days, getting into college. I sort of thought I’d get in somewhere, but didn’t know where. When I got into college, I actually, I decided then – I’d written some plays that were actually put on. When I got into college, I had applied to Bard, which had really good acting and playwright. I also acted, so I’d done a bit of acting in high school and then I took acting at Bard. What happened is I got into the University of Maryland, Bard accepted me for second semester. So, I went to Maryland for a semester. But in those days, Bard had absolutely no money for scholarships and it was exceedingly expensive, and my sister was in college, and my family simply couldn’t afford it. So, I had to go back to Maryland. Well, then I thought, well, if I really want to be a writer, forget all this writing stuff, I should take philosophy. So, I began studying philosophy and Maryland had a really good philosophy department. So, then I did philosophy. Originally, I really liked Ancient Greek philosophy because I liked mythology and I liked all of the theater and drama of Ancient Greece, but my pitfall was that I was terrible at Greek. So, I had to take Ancient Greece. I was terrible at that. So, I got into philosophy because I wanted to be a writer, but I think I’d always wanted to be a writer. The irony of that was, so then, I go through my philosophy degrees and nothing kills good writing more than doing philosophy. I was an analytic philosopher. Analytic philosophers are like the scientists of philosophy. I was interested – when I did my Master’s, I did a three-paper Master’s because I had three areas I was interested in. I really thought I was going to do philosophy of science, so I wrote a paper on theory development in physics. That actually turned out to be something that foreshadows a whole lot of what I did. The reason why is I was looking at Kuhn, Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper and a man named Imre Lakatos. Part of what was at stake there that made me interested in philosophy of science was how fields of knowledge came together. That was really fascinating. Kuhn and Popper are very linear thinkers. So, Popper says you falsify something, you go on. Kuhn was pretty much that way, too. Lakatos talked about research models and systems of things and how they overlapped, and so it wasn’t this sort of Darwinian Kuhnian Popperian thing, but this broader thing. The reason why that was important was that when I left, got my Master’s – so, I did it on that and then I did a really strange paper on theories of time by a Scottish philosopher named McTaggart – nobody ever heard of him – but they were about different notions of time related to physics. And then I did one on ethics, which was on abortion, but the reason why I did that is I was – I went to the University of Delaware and did a Master’s because one of the great ethicists from Oxford, Richard Hare, was at Delaware for a year and I went to study with him. Classes were really small, I got to know him really well and he really liked my work. So, I’d say of all the people who actually just gave me probably the biggest boost in my career was Hare. He was a tough old guy. He would write nasty letters about his graduate students, but apparently, he liked me. Through him liking me, I got my first job at the age of 23 teaching philosophy. 

Scarpino: Where? 

Ciulla: At LaSalle University. But Hare took me aside and before he left, he said, “You need to do ethics and you need to do applied ethics.” He said, “Don’t do philosophy of science.” And actually, plus I would have had to get a degree in physics or something else to do it right. I kind of thought about it. I didn’t like medical ethics. I thought writing about, well my abortion paper was actually hilarious. 

Scarpino: It doesn’t seem like a subject that’s got too much hilarity attached to it. 

Ciulla: Well, I had these really silly examples to sort of show how ridiculous it was, some of the prohibitions against it. The idea someone would frivolously have an abortion was crazy, so I had these really funny ideas. So, he got a kick out of that. But anyway, so he sort of said that and I thought okay, ethics, alright, I’ll consider that. Then he helped me get my first job at LaSalle. They needed somebody sort of, you know, abusive part-time labor. I started out teaching one course a semester; it ended up four and four. I was teaching eight courses the whole time I was in graduate school, sometimes with three preparations. So, I’d teach logic, philosophy of science, and ethics or metaphysics or any of these courses. So, it was great though. I taught the whole range. So, I started, and then here’s the seminal moment of my life. So, there’s this other turning point. One is working with Hare; the other, believe it or not, is a faculty meeting. At this faculty meeting, we were talking about the fact that nobody liked to take our courses. LaSalle’s a Catholic school and you either had to take a certain number of religion courses or philosophy. Well, nobody wanted our courses, but my colleagues back then, a lot of them didn’t have PhDs, a lot of them were former priests but weren’t priests anymore. Almost all their courses, it was like Saint Thomas Aquinas all the time. So, like what undergraduate wants to take a course in that? So, we’re sitting there and we said, “Well, in effect, what are our best sellers?” We had a course on death and dying. That was very popular; this is, we’re talking now in the ‘70s, right, Kübler-Ross and all of that. The second course was a course called Love and Human Sexuality, and this course was taught by a colleague of mine who had 11 children. So, we figured he knew what he was talking about. 

Scarpino: Yep, he did, yeah. 

Ciulla: We’re sitting there and we said, “Okay, well these are the only two courses that, you know, we have waiting lists for.” So, we said okay, so basically, we had sex and death. I said, “Well, what do you do in between them?” I said, “How about a course on work?” Then we started thinking about it and they thought it was a great idea, so they said, “You design it and teach it.” At this time, I was now 24 and the only woman in the department, the youngest person in the department. So, I designed the course. It went from one section to seven sections. We had to hire some of my colleague doctoral students from Temple to teach them. Then we went into the evening school, which it became the most popular course there. So, for the rest of my time at LaSalle – I mean, that’s why it took me longer to get my PhD – I was running a huge course on work, and it was different than the labor. There’s work courses on labor that were going on in Europe that were Marxist, Tavistock Institute and all of those. This one was really interdisciplinary, and people weren’t doing interdisciplinary work back then. So, I had to learn a lot about economics, political economy, management, all sorts of things, history, you know, reading Taylor and people like that, and the literature. So, reading literature literature about it. So, we created this course and I helped other people teach it and it went really well. Of course, in the midst of all of this dissertation topic, I said well, might as well write on work. 

Scarpino: So, that’s how you came up with that dissertation topic. 

Ciulla: Yes, and so… 

Scarpino: I’m actually going to ask you about that later, but I… 

Ciulla: So, I’ll hold off on the details of it, but that’s how I started writing on work. And to just jump ahead, so we go from work to my postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Business School to business ethics to leadership. So, but those two seminal events, always wanting to be a writer and then working with Hare, sort of led me to where I went. Was any of it intentional or planned? Not in the least. So, I think if there’s anything to my life, I just sort of, a lot of things, you know, you’re there, but it’s just opportunities you take advantage… 

Scarpino: Do you give yourself credit for recognizing an opportunity when it presented itself? 

Ciulla: Yeah, I never know where they’re going to go, but it’s – when I look back as a young person, it was always, okay, well that sounds kind of – I mean, I was kind of a really relaxed person. Not so much now. 

Scarpino: Probably a good thing. 

Ciulla: Yeah, but it was like it sounds like a good idea; a course on work, I can do that. You just start doing it and –but I wasn’t thinking oh, well I can do this and then do this. Then the Harvard Business School was really interesting because I applied for two fellowships when I was about to finish my PhD. I didn’t want to stay at LaSalle. I applied for two fellowships. One was a congressional fellowship. I got both of them. The congressional fellowship with, actually I think he was from Indiana, was it congressional or senate? 

Unknown Person: Hello. How are you? 

Ciulla: You better stop it. Hi. 

(PAUSE RECORDER) 

Scarpino: This has been running the whole time; this is my backup. So, if I have to use it, I’ll edit it. But let’s make sure we’re still working here. Okay. 

So, what I want to do, we’ve been talking about sort of the formation of your thinking and the way in which you arrived at your interest in leadership and leadership ethics, but I want to go all the way back to your youth. Both of your parents were Italian, and your dad was Sicilian. Did that heritage, growing up in that environment have any impact on the adult you became and how you look at the world? 

Ciulla: Well, very much because we used to talk about Americans. 

Scarpino: As though you were not one? 

Ciulla: Well, my grandparents, I mean, my grandmother was Italian and came to America. She had some connection actually, because my grandmother came to America when she was 13 and worked in the garment industry for 35 years, and was part of the first movement, labor movement to organize garment workers under Amalgamated Union. 

Scarpino: In New York City? 

Ciulla: No, in Rochester. She worked for Bond Clothing in Rochester. She told me about that once, which I thought was pretty cool, and that was when I was starting to do work on work. But, no, it had a very, very – we were very strongly Italian and everybody who lived near each other was Italian. When I lived in Rochester, I thought most of the world was Italian. You know, the stores were Italian, I heard the language, I unfortunately don’t speak it, but I heard it all the time. So, yeah, it had a lot to do with it. My grandmother had like a third-grade education. My grandparents didn’t have much education. My mother did a couple years of college, but it was during the war. My father went to college, but Italian identity was very, very strong in my life. I don’t know if it had that much to do with what I am in terms of scholarship, but it certainly had a lot to do with what I am now. I still think of myself as Italian-American, yeah. 

Scarpino: How about things like work ethic and so on; did that…? 

Ciulla: Oh, yeah. Well, that was like the big thing. For my grandmother, well, my grandmother worked in a factory. My grandfather was a stone mason. Yeah, the work ethic was a really – it’s the immigrant work ethic and that you just had to keep working hard and hard. For my grandmother, she would always have this one expression, could be the most rotten human being around, but: “He’s a good man; he works hard.” And ironically… 

Scarpino: I knew those people. 

Ciulla: … ironically, my dissertation on Work and Virtue was about exactly that, what is the relationship between moral values and work? I grew up with somebody who thought it was everything. 

Scarpino: They’re the same thing, pretty much. 

Ciulla: Yeah, yeah. Worse than – you thought Max Weber and the Protestant Work Ethic was bad; the immigrants were the ones who had that work ethic. 

Scarpino: It sounds like my father. So, what did your parents think when their elementary school daughter wanted to write poetry and make books? 

Ciulla: Oh, I used to read them my poetry. Some of them they kind of liked. Oh, so I got in trouble and so they had this big meeting. I was in 39 School in Rochester. It was an inner-city school and it was sort of black and Italian, the students. We had this big meeting because they were trying to figure out why I wasn’t doing very well in school. As a matter of fact, they were wondering if maybe I needed to be held back. So, then I remember the conversation very vaguely because they were all kind of looking at me like, you what? And I said, “Well, I don’t really care about doing those exercises, so I just put some answers down, and then I go and make my books.” I remember my father, “You are not to do that anymore.” Then they actually put me in a different kind of class I think, and I can’t remember what kind of class it was, but kept me busy in a different way. Because the problem was the kind of busywork and the fact that the reward was that if I just got it done fast, I could do what I really wanted to do. So, then they put me in a class that was structured differently so I couldn’t do that anymore. 

Scarpino: So, you were pretty much an independent thinker from the beginning. 

Ciulla: Yeah, I’ve never kind of fit into the mold. 

Scarpino: Where did you go to high school? 

Ciulla: I went to high school at Woodlawn Senior High. 

Scarpino: And that’s in? 

Ciulla: Well, it’s outside of Baltimore. Yeah, it’s a public high school. It was kind of an interesting school because it was sort of a mixture – it was a lot of Jewish students, almost everybody I knew was Jewish, and it had a class system. I was in an honors section, and they were by letters, so you knew exactly where you were. All of the Catholics were at the bottom and all of the Jews were at the top. So, on Jewish holidays, there was nobody in my class. So, there’s this really interesting sort of weird identity thing. The reason why wasn’t because Catholics were dumb, it was that a lot of them, the feeder schools that were elementary schools were really bad Catholic schools. So, a lot of people came into that high school not as well prepared as other people had been, and so it was an odd thing. So, I grew up with also this feeling that I was also a little bit Jewish because that whole culture was very, very strong and, in some ways, very similar to Italians. 

Scarpino: Were you better prepared than your Italian-Catholic colleagues or just smarter? 

Ciulla: I think it was partly that we, we went to public school. We didn’t go to Catholic school. And, you see, when we moved from New York State – New York State had great schools back in the ‘50s and they had regions exams and all of that kind of stuff. So, the school I went to was really fantastic. When we went to Baltimore, it was like going back a few grades or something because it was so easy. But then I think we got into a middle school in Baltimore that was a lot better and then, by the time I got to high school – and also I just always was reading. That was the other thing is I just – one of the things I was proud of in elementary school is I read every book in the library. I started at one end, and I ended with Shakespeare. So, I was in elementary school, I started reading Shakespeare because I just – there was this room full of books and I thought that’s my goal, and I did it. 

Scarpino: Do you think good leaders should read? 

Ciulla: Absolutely. How are you going to learn anything? Absolutely, yeah. 

Scarpino: When you were in high school, were there any individuals who had an influence on you that stuck with you and helped mold the adult you became? 

Ciulla: Not really. No. I had one teacher who was a writing teacher. Well, that’s where I started reading philosophy actually. 

Scarpino: In high school? 

Ciulla: In high school, yeah. I started reading philosophy in high school and thought it was pretty cool. Actually, when I went to Maryland, I was considered a philosophy major. So, I started from a freshman doing philosophy. Then when I went to Bard, I was doing more writing and acting to playwriting, and they had a fabulous English class, composition class there that had like seven students in it, very intensive; it was wonderful. 

Scarpino: When you grew up to become a teacher, I mean, part of your adult occupation, did your acting experience help you as a teacher? 

Ciulla: Enormously, I can’t tell you, and I do a lot of public speaking and, yeah, and especially at Bard, the acting teacher there was incredible. It was Stanislavski method, but I remember. We learned how to like sit in a chair without moving for a few classes. You would learn everything about controlling your body and everything else. I think probably the most useful thing for teaching is acting. 

Scarpino: I don’t know what the Stanislavski method is. 

Ciulla: It’s sort of being your part. So, when you see some actors, like Marlon Brando and people like that, the idea is you just become that character. But it’s also a lot about how you control your body and things like that. So, you sort of wed the part to what you are. It was really useful and I often think about that. 

Scarpino: When you were in high school, were there any events that shaped the way you saw the world and influenced the adult you became? 

Ciulla: Any events; you mean historical events? 

Scarpino: Could be local, national, things that you just remember that you… 

Ciulla: Well, the war in Vietnam. I was very active in the anti-war movement. I cut school on several occasions to go to the moratoriums in Washington. I actually cut school quite a bit. 

Scarpino: For other reasons too. 

Ciulla: Well, sometimes we would cut school and go horseback riding, but that was a different – no, I went to the moratoriums and was pepper gassed and had to like get rid of it all before I got home to look like I hadn’t been pepper gassed. The war in Vietnam played a huge role in high school. It was stuff I wrote about in the newspaper. I gave the commencement address in high school and I talked about the war in Vietnam there, and, so yeah, that was the main event. 

Scarpino: What was it about the war in Vietnam that influenced you at the time? 

Ciulla: The total injustice and corruption of it, the ridiculous of it, the barbary of it, I mean, it was all of it. So, it was the anti-war movement that we were up to our necks in. I remember there was me and this other guy, and I still remember his name was Rodney Knight, and he was like very radical and wanted to do radical things, and I wasn’t radical about how to do it. I mean, we both believed in the same sort of stuff, but I was more let’s do it in a civilized kind of way. I remember the principal calling me into his office to see if I would control this guy. But I was weird because I was both that, the anti-war movement, but at the same time also I played varsity lacrosse. So, I was also in athletics. I was a reasonably athletic person. 

Scarpino: When you were in high school, what did you imagine your future would hold? Where did you think you were going? 

Ciulla: Well, by high school, I knew I wanted to do philosophy, but you know, the other thing about starting out in philosophy, is all they tell you back then, you would get notes saying there were no jobs. Most people would start out with their PhD in philosophy and end up – most of the people I knew ended up with law degrees, and also it was a seven-year degree. Because in those days, when I was in… 

Scarpino: A PhD in philosophy was seven years? 

Ciulla: Yes, because you had to qualify in every area. So, you basically, in the old days, we didn’t, you could specialize for your dissertation, but I had to take exams in every field of philosophy, which was nice because I was teaching it and I basically could teach and did teach – except for philosophy of religion – I taught every major field of philosophy. And you had to have two foreign languages and you had to have advanced 15 logic. So, you had to know how to do what’s called soundness and completeness – these are proofs of mathematic systems. So, to do all of that, you had to take a whole lot of courses and the exams took a couple years because the exams would be half-day. But like – oh, my logic exam, my God, the logic, that was really hard, a really hard exam –but you had to, you just had to do a lot. So, I mean, all of it, I neverhad to pay for graduate school because they usually just paid mytuition, you know, scholarship kinds of things. So, I never had to paytuition, but I had to support myself, but I had my job at LaSalle, but theirony of that was they didn’t even pay me enough to pay my rent. So, Iused to go to graduate school, teach, and work in restaurants.

Scarpino: What did you do in the restaurants? 

Ciulla: I wrote about this in my work book actually. Well, I started out as a waitress, but in college I had started bartending. So, then I really just did bartending because that was more lucrative. 

Scarpino: So, you were a philosopher and a bartender. 

Ciulla: Yeah, I mean, talk about a stereotype. 

Scarpino: Well, I mean, the devil is going to make me say this, but you must have been good at talking to the drunks. 

Ciulla: Bartending was probably the other most useful thing I did because you just learn to deal with all kinds of people. Then after that, I was a cook because I always could cook. So, to study for my exams and because I knew a lot of people – this was in Philadelphia in the restaurant business – I knew Georges Perrier, who was the owner of Lautrec , which was, I think, a three-star Michelin French restaurant in Philadelphia. So, I knew him and he got a new chef who came in and so what the new chef said is – they only spoke French there – and he said, “Well, you can come in on like a Tuesday and sous chef with us so you learn technique and you speak French – oh, and you get to eat the meal,” which I did, and I will work for food. I did that for a while, and then I worked for a restaurant in the summers where I would go in in the morning and I would cook all of this stuff like vichyssoise and other things for a gourmet shop. It was a restaurant, but they also had a gourmet shop. So, I did all of that for, I had about 10 years of experience doing pretty much everything in a restaurant you could do, but cooking and bartending were my favorites. 

Scarpino: So, you were a graduate student, you were working at LaSalle, and you had various positions in a restaurant all at the same time. 

Ciulla: Yeah. 

Scarpino: What did you take away from that? 

Ciulla: Well, I wrote about it in my work book because I said, you know, “Your identities are attached to all of these things.” So, in the morning, I usually taught at LaSalle, so my identity as a professor, and you get a certain amount of respect and everything as that. Then in the afternoon, usually the graduate seminars were like 4:00-6:00 or something like that, so then you’re a graduate student. And, of course, being the only – I was usually the only woman in the class. There were very few women in philosophy then. Sometimes they’d really beat up on you, oh, and sexually harass you, by the way; sexually harassed through the entire graduate school program because there’s very few women in philosophy and philosophers are socially not adept at anything. So, you had a lot of that going on. I had a teacher in the middle of a class tell me he didn’t think women should study philosophy. 

Scarpino: In the class in front of the other students? 

Ciulla: In front of the other students, yes. So, it was a lot of fun being a philosopher (LAUGHS), but I kept at it. One of the things that helped me keep at it was that I was teaching. I mean, I had a job, which was like amazing because if you remember the mid-‘70s, the economy is not very good. Schools like LaSalle were not real well-off. Then at night, sometimes, I remember I had this one job in a very fancy hamburg restaurant, so then you’re a waitress. So, your whole status shifts all day long, and that was actually really useful for thinking about work; how it affects your identity, how you’re treated with respect at work, all of those things were important. So, while I was writing my dissertation, that experience was really helpful. It was exhausting, but helpful. 

Scarpino: I can see, I can see both. So, when you graduated from high school, you mentioned you went to the University of Maryland, BA in philosophy in 1973. Just so we get it in one place, why philosophy? I mean, even at that point, you must have known there wasn’t a future there for most people. 

Ciulla: You know, this is the thing. When I was young, I never worried about getting a job because, first of all, I knew I could always work in a restaurant, which sounds like a very low level, but it was like I never – and they kept telling you there’s no jobs in philosophy. But I think I always thought it would work out, but I never worried about it, and then, of course, because I had gotten this job. I guess the big boost was I sort of knew I could be good at it because Hare – we all saw our letters from this guy Hare, and I was the only one that got a good letter. There were people in my seminar who I thought were much better than me, and so I thought well, if Hare thinks I’m okay, then, you know, he’s considered sort of one of the best. That was like a nice boost, but I don’t know. I just never worried about it; I just kept plugging away. 

Scarpino: Did you ever professionally intersect with him again after you became an established professional? 

Ciulla: Well, he passed away. Yeah, he passed away before I – I was still working my way up. I mean, I always had jobs, but I forgot what year he passed away, but he was gone. I did communicate with him once. Then I had this funny experience; when I went to Oxford as a visiting scholar, my future husband and I were traveling along and we had the radio on in the car. We were in the middle of Wales and all of a sudden I heard my professor talking, because he was quite a public intellectual too. That was the last time I heard him because he went back to England, and then for a long time I wasn’t traveling in Europe because I was broke. 

Scarpino: Do you picture yourself as a public intellectual? 

Ciulla: I was more because there’s a second part to the writing thing, and that is that when I finally finished up and I was at Harvard, I decided that I needed to fix my writing up again. So, I had started writing book reviews for the Philadelphia Inquirer and my editor at the Inquirer went to the New York Times, and I started regularly writing for the New York Times. I’ll have to tell you, newspaper editors are the best writing teachers around because you couldn’t get away with – you can get away with so much nonsense in academic writing that you cannot get away with in newspaper writing. So, I wrote for the Times and I had done some writing for Psychology Today and then later the Wall Street Journal, I think I wrote one piece for them, L.A. Times. So, I kind of got back to it, and then I was a bit of a public intellectual. Then I wrote a blog for the Washington Post. They had a leadership blog and so I wrote that, and I have one letter… 

Scarpino: When were you doing that? 

Ciulla: That was probably six or seven years ago. It was when Ben Bradley was alive because he sent me an email telling me how much he liked my piece and I kept the email. 

Scarpino: Gee! 

Ciulla: Yeah, but so in a way I am more of speaking, and I think I’ve planned to become more of one now because I think academics need to really start talking more about what’s going on with leadership in this country, and everywhere for that matter. 

Scarpino: So, you got your Master’s degree, you went on for the PhD at Temple, which you earned in 1985, dissertation Work and Virtue, and you eluded to this before, but why did you decide to go for a PhD in philosophy? I mean a Master’s degree is one thing – it takes a few years. I mean, I’m not poo-pooing it, I have one, but doctorate, that’s a major commitment – money and time and your life. Why did you decide to do that? 

Ciulla: Because I liked it. I didn’t know if I’d ever really get a philosophy department job, but I really liked it and I had a really interesting life. I mean, I wasn’t a typical graduate student, so I had this job, so I taught at LaSalle. I have to tell you, I got very teary-eyed my first day at work at LaSalle because I actually had an office with my name on the door. It didn’t have a window though, but it had my name on the door. The weird thing was I never worried about it because I was teaching the whole time. So, I was actually doing what I wanted to be doing and I really liked teaching and that was… 

Scarpino: Did you think that maybe when you were done that the ideal thing for you was to be a teacher? 

Ciulla: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I wanted to do that and I liked to teach, but while I was in graduate school, and it took a long time because I took some time off because of the – I mean, I was working. LaSalle was really working me hard and they were paying by the piece rate which was why it was hard to make ends meet, but I also had a really interesting life and had no friends in graduate school or academics. I had friends – I knew everybody in Philadelphia. 

Scarpino: Tell me about your interesting life in Philadelphia; what stands out? 

Ciulla: Well, I was involved in politics. 

Scarpino: In what way? 

Ciulla: I was a speech writer for a man named Vince Fumo who ended up in jail, and this was in the days of machine politics in Philadelphia. 

Scarpino: What was Fumo running for? 

Ciulla: Well, he was a state senator for years. The reason why he was just in the newspaper is what Cohen has been accused of with campaign finances and mixing them, is what Fumo got thrown in jail for four years for. So, him and then Ed Rendell – do you know who he is? Ed Rendell was the Governor of Pennsylvania. He was the DA for Philadelphia. There used to be a very famous mayor in Philadelphia by the name Frank Rizzo. Alright. So, Frank Rizzo was Mayor; big corrupt Italian machine politics. Ed Rendell ran for Mayor after him and won. 

Scarpino: And you were working for Rendell while he was running? 

Ciulla: I was working for Rendell. I was Rendell’s treasurer of his campaign. So, Rendell wanted somebody – this is ironic – completely clean to be the treasurer of his campaign. I was completely broke, I had no investments, I had nothing else, I was a philosophy professor, so he made me his treasurer. 

Scarpino: How did a philosophy professor talk her way into becoming the treasurer for somebody running for Mayor? 

Ciulla: Well, he asked me, because I knew everybody. I had a roommate; we shared this big house. She knew a lot of people. We’d have parties with the Philadelphia Phillies, people from the Philadelphia Ballet, and politicians from all over the city. I had a very happy life. It was fun. I mean, and artistic people; we knew a lot of artists. It was just those times when we – so, I had a really great life and I studied philosophy while I was doing it. It was completely different than anything else. I wasn’t like the typical graduate student. Maybe that’s why I was never anxious because you know how graduate students, they get together and they worry about – and then these professors sometimes they’d harass you and I’d think they were such jerks because it didn’t affect me in a way. You know, you just sort of – that’s why it’s fascinating to look at the Me Too Movement now. But, yeah, I was more interested in just living an exciting life, and philosophy was part of the exciting life and teaching was part of the exciting life. But if it all didn’t pan out, it was fine, but I just kept at it. I do tend to keep at things. I’m a little bit tenacious. 

Scarpino: So, after you got your PhD, did you keep on living an exciting life? 

Ciulla: It got less exciting because… 

Scarpino: More like work? 

Ciulla: … yeah, it got more like work because, so then when I went to Harvard –well it’s funny how I got that job. I got that job because there werelike 125 applications for it. So, I just basically wrote them this letter andtold them what I had been doing and I got it because of my stuff onwork. But I kind of didn’t care if I got it or not and I thought it was weirdthat it was a business school, I mean, because I was kind of a leftyphilosopher, right? And so, then they invited me to the interview andone of the reasons I got the job at Harvard was that I was completely irreverent and they liked that. I remember there was one of these questions – I said, “Well, I’d really like to see something about work,”and he said, “How would you do that? How would you go to interview people about that?” I said, “Well, I’d go in through the union.” He said,

“This is Harvard Business School; we don’t go into the unions,” and I said, “Well, maybe you should.” This guy, John Matthews, he said, “That was one of the reasons I hired you. None of the applicants did that.” 

Scarpino: Who knew? 

Ciulla: Who knew? Yeah. 

Scarpino: You mentioned the issues related to gender. When you went into the field of philosophy, there were not very many women in the field, it was clearly dominated by men. So, we can get this in one place and we can talk about it a little bit, as a doctoral student, did gender and power imbalance influence the way you approached your studies? 

Ciulla: Not really. I mean, you’re always aware of it. So, I mean, I didn’t have a female philosophy teacher. Most departments in those days had one. Actually, most departments nowadays only have one. There’s a few more women. But one of the things that helped is there was a group that formed, and I went to it as a Master’s student, called the Society for Women in Philosophy, SWIP. I went to the first meeting and it was myself and another woman who was a philosophy major as an undergraduate – this was undergraduate. We went to this meeting and some of the better-known women philosophers were there and we basically all talked about how everybody got harassed and some of them by very famous philosophers. We laughed our heads off over it. It was sort of like, okay, yeah, this happens, who cares, these guys are jerks, so the thing you do is you stay away from them and you just make sure – I mean, the first day of graduate school I got asked out… 

Scarpino: By a faculty member? 

Ciulla: … yeah, by the Chairman of the Department. No, it was rampant in those days. It was just crazy. So, I didn’t think it ever affected how I did things. I tended to be in rather masculine areas of philosophy, so I mean, if you were to say – I mean ethics is a little bit more – but the kinds of science and logic I was doing, it’s sort of like women who do math, you know, it’s kind of that thing. But it didn’t affect the content of my work at all. It just was a kind of attitude. And again, it was sort of like I have this other life whereas a lot of graduate students today, that is there life, but I had so much of another life outside of it. It’s like if these people are jerks here, you know, I just go home and have a beer with my friends and life goes on. 

Scarpino: But you must have thought at some point that you wanted to get a job with the jerks. 

Ciulla: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I knew I would, I mean, because at LaSalle I was the only woman and some of them were jerks to me too. But at the same time, one of my strong points there was I made myself completely indispensable, I mean – oh, and I also got underpaid. So, I hired one of my friends from graduate school to teach this course and we were chatting one day and I discovered they were paying him more than me. 

Scarpino: To teach a section of the course that you designed? 

Ciulla: Yeah, and had been teaching for years, right. So, I had to go to the Dean and I went to the Dean who is this big Christian brother – all of the guys there were like six foot tall, Christian brothers and they smoked cigars, because you could smoke in offices then. I went to him and I said, “Why is this person getting paid more than me?” He said, “Well, you know, he’s married and he has a family.” I said, “He’s married, his wife has a really good job and she supports him in graduate school; I am not married” – he has no children – “I am not married, I have nobody to support me.” It was before there was strong enough legislation on this, but I think they knew that they were on really shaky legal grounds. They gave me a little bit of back pay and they upped my salary. But ever since then, the one thing that I always do is I make sure I’m making what the men are making. By the way, I found out at one of my other jobs I wasn’t and they had to compensate me a rather substantial sum of money. 

Scarpino: An academic job? 

Ciulla: Oh, yeah; oh, yeah. All you need to do is look at the AAUP numbers on who gets paid what and you discover it. Yeah. 

Scarpino: I talked to your colleague at the Jepson School, and one of the things that I asked him is, “If you were going to interview Joanne, what would you want to ask her?” I’m paraphrasing one of his questions here, so don’t hold him to every word, but he said, “Ask her if she thinks it was tougher for a woman to forge a successful career in philosophy than it was for a man.” 

Ciulla: I think maybe in general it is, but I don’t think because I was a woman – it never felt like it was holding me back. It was just one of those things you had to work with. But no, despite everything that happened, I can’t say I look back – and maybe, maybe it’s a cognitive dissonance or something, I’m not sure – but I can’t say I ever felt like oh because I’m a woman I can’t do it. It was always more of I just have to be smarter than everybody. 

Scarpino: Given the degree to which those things at least in some ways have changed in the last several decades, do you think it still remains something you just have to get along with? 

Ciulla: Me, or other people? 

Scarpino: Other people. 

Ciulla: Other people? Yeah, yeah, other people. But I think now, actually it works in women’s favors to some extent because it is desirable to have –I think everybody knows it looks really bad if your philosophydepartment – in the old days you could have a philosophy departmentwith no women in it. But yeah, for me, I’ve never felt – stuff wouldhappen, but again, when I was young, I was really pretty easygoing.So, it just was like – and I think my defense was having this other lifethat was always kind of fun and stimulating because I’ve always beeninterested, for example, in the arts. So, that kind of stuff was interestingand then politics. So, politics, I mean, that probably foreshadowed whatI did too. Ed Rendell, by the way, became the Governor ofPennsylvania and then he was head of the Democratic NationalCommittee, too. So, he was sort of – and so, interacting with peoplelike that in politics and talking about policy – my sister was in politics. Iwas the treasurer of the Mondale Delegate Committee campaign whenMondale was running and handled huge checks from unions and stufflike that.

Scarpino: For Pennsylvania? 

Ciulla: Yeah, for Pennsylvania. 

Scarpino: When you got your PhD, as when I mentioned when I introduced you, you began working at business schools which, in those days, were also dominated by men. 

Ciulla: Yeah. 

Scarpino: Did you find yourself having to develop mechanisms for coping in that kind of an environment? 

Ciulla: Mm-hm. Well, I’ll tell you, the proportion of men to women at Harvard Business School was the same as it was at Wharton. There were 15 women on the faculty, if you included me, but I was research faculty. There were 15 women and 150 men – out of 150. At Wharton, there were 200 faculty and 20. The business schools were the hardest for me as a woman. I had one instance there I’ll never forget. So, when you’re a postdoc there, they brought in a bunch of us. They’re usually recruiting you for faculty at Harvard. I was sort of an oddball because they didn’t really have a business ethics program yet and so, if I was going to be recruited for faculty, it would have been in organizational behavior, which I have absolutely no academic background in. So, I went to talk to the Chairman of the department and I said, “I wouldn’t mind trying out some teaching.” The course that I would have fit best in was called Policy 2, which you took at the end of the program. It’s kind of a capstone. It had some ethics and social issues. It was a little more philosophical in a way than your other typical courses. So, I sat down with him and realized –he was saying, “Well, no, you can’t do that.” And what I realized what he was saying was that no women taught that course. So, I was so pissed that I went and taught the exact same course at Boston University. I went and got a job; I didn’t need a job. 

Scarpino: That explains what you were doing at Boston University at the same... 

Ciulla: Right. So, I went to Boston University and taught the same thing. It was a little bit of strategy and stuff, so I just had to learn all that stuff and I went and taught it and actually did quite well at it. That’s how I ended up at Boston University, just because I was so angry at this guy for telling me I couldn’t teach it. Then I found out another woman was told the same thing. So, they somehow thought only men could do this kind of important weighty stuff. 

Scarpino: We talked about the fact that while you were working on your Master’s and nearly all of your PhD, you were also teaching at LaSalle, along with working in a restaurant and being a bartender and all the other things … 

Ciulla: Just during the PhD; not during the Master’s. 

Scarpino: … you were an Instructor, you were promoted to Assistant Professor. LaSalle is a Catholic institution, as you mentioned, and I actually looked at their current website in which they stress the importance of faith and values and so on. So, what were you teaching at LaSalle? 

Ciulla: Let’s see. They had really fancy titles for them. Reason and Reality was one of them. The other one was called the Foundations of the Moral Life and then Philosophy of Science and Critical Thinking and Symbolic Logic. Those were the main ones that I taught, yeah. 

Scarpino: You were teaching at LaSalle to support yourself, but did you have any kind of assistantship or fellowship at Temple? 

Ciulla: They just paid my tuition. That was part of the tension because they were really mad because they didn’t get my labor, but they did pay my tuition. 

Scarpino: What did you take away from that experience at LaSalle that stuck with you? 

Ciulla: Well, I learned how to teach. 

Scarpino: I bet you did. 

Ciulla: Yeah, just threw me right in the water. I learned how to teach, I learned how to put courses together. I learned how to put them together. Well, what I liked about teaching was creating the course. I had an opportunity to put together all sorts of courses. What was really interesting is none of my colleagues were really into research or doing anything different. They were all kind of old and didn’t really publish much or anything like that. So, they kind of just let me do the stuff they didn’t want to do. They didn’t want to have to figure out how to make up a course on work or how to do that. So, what I took away is really how to put – again, going back to this idea of Philosophy of Science, how do you put ideas together into a coherent body of knowledge? I had nine years of teaching experience when I ended up at Harvard Business School. I wouldn’t have traded that for anything in the world, and they weren’t always that nice to me at LaSalle. I’d have to put up with certain comments and stuff like that. I was kind of the kid, but again, they needed me. 

Scarpino: And the course that you created on work kind of lit the place up, provided enrollment. 

Ciulla: Yeah, it lit it up, well, it kept me employed because, of course, I’m the bottom of the barrel, I would have been the first cut. But it also – I shared that with a whole lot of other people because there were no courses like that. So, I was always sending syllabi off to various people for it. That was kind of fun too because I also made a lot of contacts. One of my best friends, who unfortunately has passed away, Bob Solomon, who I co-edited the Honest Work textbook with… 

Scarpino: I’ve got a bunch of questions I want to ask you about him. 

Ciulla: Right, oh, okay. Well, Bob Solomon, of course, is quite prominent. I wouldn’t have met him if I hadn’t been at LaSalle because an editor at Hackett Publishing, a guy named Jay was best friends with Bob, and Jay asked me to review a book on women and work. So, I did and I wrote a very irreverent review. I mean, I used to just, I didn’t, I mean, when I wrote some – when I did some of my critical work, I probably was a little too insulting to people, but I wrote this really irreverent review and he thought it was hilarious that somebody actually wrote this. He said to Bob Solomon, “You have to meet this person.” So, Bob Solomon was in Philadelphia and he met me and we became – he’s one of my, the best friends in my life. Yeah. 

Scarpino: So, you wrote this dissertation called Work and Virtue. How do work and virtue fit together? 

Ciulla: Well, so, it was my grandmother. It was how is work related to you being a good person? And it really was the beginnings of what my book, The Working Life, turned out to be of what work meant. You know, how did people ascribe moral qualities to work? Because if you go back to ancient times, go back to Aristotle, there’s no moral quality in work. Work is necessity; it’s not where you’re freely expressing your humanity. So, how does it go – in my book, I talk from a curse, well, you go to the Old Testament, right, you’re punished by work. Dostoevsky talks about work as this kind of salvation. So, we find it in literature. I took all of those things and I sort of put them together to say, okay, so is morality related to work? That was my question. So, I went through it historically. By the way, the defense in my dissertation was brutal because I wasn’t supposed to be doing work like this. Also, I had several people who were resentful on the faculty that I was doing work like this because nobody did interdisciplinary work. I mean, I was reading social history, I was reading labor history. I had a political scientist who loved my dissertation. 

Scarpino: Did you have an advisor who loved your dissertation? 

Ciulla: Yeah, I did, but, you know, the problem is – and again, nowadays people think strategy when they do these things. I wasn’t thinking strategy. My advisor was a Marxist. 

Scarpino: So, once again, you marched to the beat of your own drummer… 

Ciulla: Yeah. 

Scarpino: … and let the chips fall where they may. 

Ciulla: It was kind of risky behavior. My advisor liked it because he was Marxist, but it wasn’t a Marxist dissertation. They were just mad because it wasn’t analytic philosophy and it wasn’t done the way they thought it should be done. I remember, it was a really hot room. It went on for like three and a half hours. Part of what I was defending was that it was philosophy, which was the funniest part about it. In the end, they came up with changes or things they didn’t like, and you know what I did? I just cut them out because I figured, you know, I’m not going to fight this battle now. I’m just going to move on and I’ll write a book about this later, which I eventually did. But it was one of those things where – and I had already gotten the Harvard Fellowship, so they also knew I was actually more successful than a lot of their students. By the way, I ended up giving the commencement address at Temple in front of 6,000 people. I represented the Humanities for Temple. 

Scarpino: As a new PhD, or before you got your degree? 

Ciulla: Well, the interesting thing is, my degrees, the dates of my degrees are a little off because I finished them all in an awkward period of the year, so I ended up getting – I finished actually in ’83. My degree is awarded in ’84. The same with my Master’s. My Master’s was done in ’75. So, I actually didn’t spend all that – I was already doing my PhD. So, all of my degrees are off. So, I gave the address at the commencement, but didn’t actually get my degree at that because it had to go to the next round because it wasn’t in in time. But I did give a rabble-rousing commencement address defending the humanities, because they were cutting them at Temple at the time. 

Scarpino: How did you get picked to give that address? 

Ciulla: That was a curious thing. I think it was partly because back then, they were really impressed that I got – it was sort of a big deal to get this Harvard Fellowship. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was my dissertation title. I’m not sure what it was, but yeah, I represented all the humanities people at that. 

Scarpino: When you were doing the research that became your dissertation, were there any case studies involved in this? I mean, were you looking at particular kinds of work on the ground and people working or…? 

Ciulla: Oh, yes. I did something really interesting. I went to US Steel the day before it closed in Youngstown, Ohio, and interviewed the steelworkers there. It was fascinating because, first of all, you really have to go into an old steel mill. It had the old Charlie Chaplain wheels turning things. As a matter of fact, you went into US Steel and you understood why they were going out of business because then a year later, I went to Japan and my uncle was a diplomat there, and I got into a research project with JETRO, which is the Japanese-American Economic Trade Organization. I went to Matsushita, which is a big electronics concern, and was talking to them about work. I actually got to actually look at work in Japan, got to see what union people thought about being a steelworker and, of course, what it meant to them. So, I was really interested in meaning questions. Yeah, I did a lot of sort of empirical stuff. It wasn’t part of the dissertation. I think I mentioned it in there. There’s a lot of labor history in there. I was reading a lot of labor history and economic history and political economy. 

Scarpino: If the empirical work that you did, talking to the steelworkers and talking to workers in Japan, didn’t really figure too prominently in your dissertation, what impact did it have on you as you continued with your career? 

Ciulla: Well, it had a lot to do with my dissertation because part of it was, and this is why I do applied philosophy, is that you understand things. You can read labor history, but unless you talk to the guy who’s actually standing there with the molten steel, you don’t understand it in the same way. I think a lot of my education has been experiential education. So, I think all of it affected me, and also, it’s related to the writing thing. I always wanted to write so everybody could understand me. That’s not always a good thing because then they can see how you’re wrong. 

Scarpino: You can’t hide behind the jargon. 

Ciulla: Right, right. 

Scarpino: Are there any ways in which your dissertation on Work and Virtue shed light on the interplay between work and business… 

Ciulla: Mm-hm. 

Scarpino: … and the rest of life in a larger society? 

Ciulla: Of course. I mean, that’s why I ended up in a business school, because they saw what I was doing as related to business ethics. So, the things that I did write subsequent to that in business ethics are actually related to the dissertation because business ethics, to me, comes down to fundamental ethics questions, like respect for persons. Rousseau once said that one of the falls from grace is when one man learned to take the labor of another person. I think that’s what we lived through. That’s what a lot of ethics in business is about what you do with labor. So, I’ve always been interested in those questions in business ethics. 

Scarpino: Is that a message that business people want to hear? 

Ciulla: No, and so in my book on work, one of the critiques I had – so when I got to Harvard… 

Scarpino: You’re talking the Working Life now? 

Ciulla: Yeah. 

Scarpino: Okay. 

Ciulla: And but when I got to – the Working Life sort of is my critique, but when I got to Harvard, I had to learn everything I could about management. I did what I call the MBA for dummies – I sat in on all the MBA courses, except the finance and accounting, so none of the math ones. But I had to learn management, I had to learn organizational behavior. At Wharton, I actually taught organizational behavior, which is sort of funny, but I had to learn all that stuff. My critique of it was that it was all about manipulating people because it was all organizational psychology and that the problem was that work wasn’t just a psychological thing, it was a moral thing and that they wanted to circumvent the moral obligations by the psychological manipulations, and motivation is the main part of the book, right? Why are you laughing at me? 

Scarpino: Because I’m wondering how that got you a job in a business school. 

Ciulla: Yeah. You know… 

Scarpino: When we have the recorder off, I’ll tell you about my own experience with the Harvard Business School, but it’s not part of the interview. 

Ciulla: Well, I think it was – well, actually, people got – I wasn’t writing the book at Harvard. So, I was doing case studies, but I was really looking at how people were treated. 

Scarpino: So, at Harvard, were you teaching MBA students? 

Ciulla: No. At Harvard, I was what was called the Harvard Fellow in Business Ethics. They used to have one every year because they didn’t know what to do about business ethics. The other actual sort of mentor I had at Harvard was the Dean, John McArthur. John McArthur, for some reason, took a liking to me. Every once in a while we would sit down and have these really long conversations about what to do about business ethics. He was actually – he was a cool guy. I don’t know why he spent all this time with me, but I spent a bit of time talking to him about it. He kind of liked me and I think he knew ethics was important, but back then they didn’t know what to do about it. 

Scarpino: So, who were your students? 

Ciulla: I didn’t have any students at Harvard. So, I did research and wrote cases. 

Scarpino: For other people. 

Ciulla: For other people. 

Scarpino: Because Harvard Business School works on the case study method… 

Ciulla: Right, so I was the case writer. 

Scarpino: And so, you were writing, alright, okay. 

Ciulla: So, I was writing cases. Then the other really fun thing I got interested in was the history of business ethics. There was a guy who was writing the 350th Anniversary – for the 350th Anniversary of Harvard, he was writing a book on the history of the Business School. So, I got really into that and some of the primary texts that were in the basement and library, like the first business ethics textbook. I actually own a copy from 1930. So, I got into that. But, yeah, so I wasn’t teaching anybody; I was writing cases and I was writing notes. The one note I wrote that was used extensively was a “Note on the Corporation as a Moral Environment,” which was actually, well, it didn’t say this, but it was an Aristotelian take on corporations, looking at how people’s moral behavior affected each other. 

Scarpino: What’s the difference between a case and a note? 

Ciulla: A note is informational. 

Scarpino: Okay. 

Ciulla: So, they’ll teach a particular case, but this would be to sort of give some theory and background to it. 

Scarpino: This actually helps me set up the next question. I read your CV, which is impressive and lengthy, but I noticed that the first three entries under the category that you call Book Chapters, are all listed “under the supervision of Kenneth Goodpaster.” 

Ciulla: That’s how you have to write them, yes. 

Scarpino: And, just because everybody doesn’t have access to your CV, they were “Employee Assistance at United Industries Plastics,” 1984; “Note on the Corporation as a Moral Environment,” which you just mentioned, 1985; and “Building Trust at Warner Gear,” 1985, listed as a case and teaching note. All these are listed as published by the President and Fellows of Harvard, so you’re writing for them. A few years later, in 1989, you co-authored with Kenneth Goodpaster, “The Corporation as a Moral Environment” in Ethics in Practice, edited by Kenneth Andrews. 

Ciulla: Right, and notice whose name is first? Yeah, it’s Ken Andrews, he was the editor. 

Scarpino: Yeah, his name is first, yeah. 

Ciulla: Okay, you just picked out something bad that happened to me. 

Scarpino: Alright, let’s go with that. 

Ciulla: Alright. My main research was on moral environments in corporations. When you’re a postdoc there, you have someone you work with. So, Ken Goodpaster was the one I worked with. So, yeah, I did all this research. So, (INAUDIBLE) great things and we’d talk about it, but he evidently didn’t do any work on it. Then when I moved to Wharton, Ken Andrews’ book came out and he was listed as the author of that, which was taken directly from the note. My name was nowhere to be found on it. I knew Ken Andrews because I used to also help out with the Harvard Business Review. So, of course, I’m good friends with the Dean. So, I wrote straight to John McArthur and said, “Look, I understand I don’t have the copyrights to these, but I wrote that; it’s on the case.” Everybody can see it, right? So, Ken Andrews, who I also knew, said, “Okay, well, we’ll fix this.” I was in the Law Department at Wharton so I wrote it on my law stationery. They fixed it and they made me second author on my paper. 

Scarpino: For which you had done the research and the writing. 

Ciulla: Had done all the work. I mean, there’s a Wittgenstein quote, I mean, it’s verbatim from the note. So, somehow the got my name off the note because normally it would have been my name and his name. So, I have to list it the way it is in the book. 

Scarpino: Which is… 

Ciulla: Goodpaster comes first, yeah. So, when you see it the second time… 

Scarpino: So, Goodpaster was not a mentor. 

Ciulla: Not really, not really, no he wasn’t. If anyone was at Harvard, it was the Dean. 

Scarpino: Although he was writing on ethics and management. 

Ciulla: Oh, yeah. No, he’s a big name in business ethics. Yeah. 

Scarpino: Ethics and Management, Managerial Decision Making and Ethical Values, and so on. Okay. Well, that helps with a bunch of the stuff that I was going to ask you about Goodpaster because I’m going to, I’ll let some of that stuff go. We’ll set Kenneth Goodpaster aside and talk about somebody else who I think had an impact on your intellectual journey and professional development. I talked to Gil Hickman, whose name you gave me, and we had a nice conversation, I interviewed her, I know her, it was just fun to visit on the phone with her, and that’s Robert Solomon. 

Ciulla: Oh, yeah, yeah. 

Scarpino: Before I ask you any questions, because people who use this interview might not know who he is, I’ve seen him described as a business-oriented virtue theorist, spent most of his career at the University of Texas at Austin. By the 1990s, early ‘90s, he was publishing in the general area of business ethics, just one example, Ethics and Excellence: Cooperation and Integrity in Business, 1992. One of your early book chapters called “Honest Work,” appeared in Twenty Questions, 2nd edition, and he’s one of the editors. Two years later, you’re publishing “Honest Work,” in Above the Bottom Line, 2nd edition, edited by Robert Solomon, and so on. So, how would you assess his impact on you? 

Ciulla: Robert Solomon, well, first of all, he is the author of 42 books ranging from Hegle to Sartre to Nietzsche to business ethics to… 

Scarpino: Actually, I looked him up, but I didn’t want to put all that detail in here. 

Ciulla: Yeah, I mean, he is, in philosophy, considered one of the top philosophers. He is also probably the greatest human being I’ve ever met. When Bob and I met, we just hit it off as intellectual friends. He’s a little gnome of a man. 

Scarpino: How did you meet him? 

Ciulla: We met him through this guy at Hackett, the editor at Hackett. I’d written this review for Hackett Publishing and it was a very funny review. Then I met this friend of Bob’s, who was the philosophy editor at Hackett, and he said to Bob – Bob was interested in work – so he said, “You really should meet this person. She writes on work and does this stuff on work.” So, I met Bob and we just hit it off intellectually. We just had a lot to talk about. Over the years, he and his wife, Kathy, we’ve gone on vacations, we’ve had all sorts of adventures with them. We’ve gone to New Zealand with them and all sorts of places. 

Scarpino: So, this is not a guy who pirated your notes from Harvard and… 

Ciulla: No, no, this is like, this is really probably, except for my husband, my best friend, and we were always sharing each other’s work. So, he is really the sort of intellectual kind of friend that I’ve had and he was just, he just knew how to be a good friend. When we did “Honest Work” – I’ll tell you why we did this book. It was going to be just me and Bob. So, I went down to Austin and our idea was we would get together for a long weekend and we’d have lots of good wine and food and we’d bring – I think I brought my husband, and Kathy was there too – and we would do this book. But the reason why was because I was getting – in Europe in particular, business ethics became this sort of corporate social responsibility. It wasn’t about people anymore, and I said we need a book about people. So, we did this textbook, and whenever it does the narratives, it’s in the “you” – so we’re always talking to the reader, the questions are all to the reader. So, we did this book and then his doctoral student was Clancy Martin, who’s the third author. Clancy is now a full professor and he’s quite a good philosopher too. But over the years, especially after email, we read each other’s work, we commented on each other’s work, he’d come up and visit, he and Kathy would come and visit. He’s really my intellectual best friend. He knew everything about philosophy, we both liked to write, we both thought a lot about writing in accessible ways. So, yeah, I mean, and then he died in an airport – did you read? Did you read my obituary of him? 

Scarpino: I did. I did. 

Ciulla: Yeah, so then you know, that tells you the whole story. 

Scarpino: So, Honest Work: A Business Ethics Reader, Oxford Press, 2006 – who did you hope would read this? 

Ciulla: Well, it was written for business students and talking to them. I didn’t want them to talk about – you know, a lot of these courses taught in business ethics and business schools, they just read one case study after another and yeah, it’s fun to talk about case studies; that’s not about you. We wanted to turn everything around to be like about you. It’s done really well. We just finished our fourth edition and it’s their second-best selling business ethics test for Oxford, Oxford University Press. So, it does really well. Part of the reason it does well, in fairness, is it’s cheap because Oxford is nonprofit, because you can buy like a little text like this and it costs $100 in business ethics. Ours is 720 pages, and the last edition was like $78, which is really, really cheap. So, I think it’s partly that, but it’s also got a lot of selection. So, there’s a lot to pick from. We shortened everything. There’s a lot of my stuff in there, there’s some of Bob’s stuff. We have that whole chapter on “The Good Life” and most books don’t do that. I think the teachers that like it are pretty committed to it because it’s got a lot of – the cases are short, a lot of them are. The cases in there, by the way, I have also worked with companies for years and I always do a case exercise where they tell about something that happened to them and I take those cases sometimes and fictionalize them. So, all the cases in the book are real that I wrote. They’re told to me by somebody. So, a lot of people like those cases because they’re quick and easy to do. But, yeah, that’s who it was for, but it all sorted out kind of as a lark. And I have to say, you know, well, you got a little bit it in the obituary. I mean, we would just have so much fun. Bob was like a workaholic maniac. I mean, he wrote so much so often. I remember one time I decided I was to cull him out, so we took him tubing. And to put a workaholic maniac in a tube on a river in Virginia, it’s hilarious. But it was good fun. 

Scarpino: Because he was at UT-Austin. 

Ciulla: Yeah, yeah. He was at UT. 

Scarpino: Tubing is kind of a way of life in that part of Texas. 

Ciulla: I know, but he had never been tubing. He had never been tubing. 

Scarpino: He didn’t find time to do that. 

Ciulla: No, and the only other time he would stop everything was when you sat him down to dinner and then the whole world fell away. He loved to eat. It was fun to cook for him, and we used to always have good times cooking for him, so, yeah. 

Scarpino: Was he a mentor or just a friend? 

Ciulla: I can’t say he was a much a mentor as a friend. He was almost like, more like my brother, an intellectual brother in a way. I think that’s the best way to describe it. He was older than me; he was 10 years older than me. Maybe, sort of a mentor, but really, we were kind of equal because the thing was that we were – he was so looked up as this sort of up high thing that we were kind of more of the same level with each other. I actually helped him as much as he helped me because there was nobody else to read his stuff, except for Kathy, his wife. She’s also a philosopher, and they did tons of stuff together, but there were some areas of his work that I always was the one reading. And he read a lot of the stuff that I did in my areas of work because he really was interested in my stuff on work. So, when he was doing anything on work, it was always to me, or business ethics, it was always to me. But yeah, I mean, the four of us had such great fun and, of course, I’ve seen Kathy several times since he passed away. But yeah, yeah, he was an extraordinary human being. I mean, so I would say in terms of just somebody who understood how to be a friend, he was that guy. So, maybe he’s a mentor in that way. 

Scarpino: You earned your PhD, the date I have is 1985, but you indicated that may be off. 

Ciulla: I finished in ’84, yeah. 

Scarpino: So, Temple philosophy, when you earned that degree, where did you imagine or hope that your career was going to go? 

Ciulla: I had no idea. 

Scarpino: I think that’s a little hard to believe. 

Ciulla: Well, no, I mean, so the Harvard Business School thing was, I thought well that’s going to be interesting. 

Scarpino: Well, let me back up then. Why did you apply to the Harvard Business School? I mean, you’re a philosopher. 

Ciulla: Because what they described they wanted was what I had sort of been doing. So, yeah, so it was one of those things that I didn’t think I would get, but I was applying for things – because I really thought I was going to do the politics thing. 

Scarpino: You mean work for politicians? 

Ciulla: Yeah, yeah, as a congressional fellow, because I had the interview and, you know, the whole thing. So, I applied and then I kind of forgot about it, but the application was pretty easy because it sounded like what I was doing. So, I explained the whole thing about the course and what the course was about and how many years I had taught it and how it had been successful and all of that, and… 

Scarpino: Your course on work at LaSalle? 

Ciulla: My course on work, yeah. And apparently they were really interested in it because the other thing is, here I’m at LaSalle and Temple; and I learned later, I mean, it was like most of the applicants were all from the Ivy League schools and all of these fancy places. But they were – what I loved about Harvard Business School back then, which you know how academia has become such a class system, right? 

Scarpino: Yes, it has. 

Ciulla: What I loved about Harvard was it was so arrogant that they didn’t care. If you looked at the faculty back then, the PhDs were from the University of Kansas and places like that. So, here I was and all these other fancy schools and people with these fancy backgrounds, but they just picked what they thought would be good because they didn’t have to please anybody. You know now, there’s this arms race that goes on. And I really liked that about them because when you looked at the faculty, the institution as a whole was weighty and medieval and it had this cast system of senior professors. That was all there, but the individuals there were absolutely delightful, fascinating, smart people from all different kinds of backgrounds. It’s changed because now they fall into the same trap. But I used to talk about the pedigreed people. So, I was an unpedigreed one, but the pedigreed ones went to Harvard undergraduate, graduate and taught there. There were those people, but, then there were people like me. 

Scarpino: You have a PhD in philosophy; were you also applying for jobs in philosophy departments? 

Ciulla: Did I apply for one? I might have. No, I don’t think I did. 

Scarpino: You earned the PhD in philosophy, you take the job at Harvard, did you think at the time that that was going to be a stepping stone to an academic career? 

Ciulla: Yeah, I think I did; yeah, I think I did, but I didn’t know if it was going to be in business schools or not. I just thought, well, I’m at Harvard. 

Scarpino: Did you think maybe you were taking a risk by going to Harvard, by going to….? 

Ciulla: Well, I’ll tell you. I knew I was taking a risk. You know what my advisor told me? He said, “If you leave now, they’ll never let you back in philosophy.” 

Scarpino: Did that worry you? 

Ciulla: No. I sort of didn’t quite believe it, but, I mean, I think he’s right, but I’m not sure. 

Scarpino: So, there were not very many jobs in philosophy… 

Ciulla: No, there were hardly any. 

Scarpino: … so what were they going to let you back in to? 

Ciulla: Yeah, that’s true. I mean, having been told my entire career there’s no jobs in philosophy and having had one, but I thought, yeah, I thought Harvard Business School would definitely was definitely help me somewhere down the line. I didn’t know if I’d end up in business schools or what, but then, yeah, I started doing business ethics and thought that probably could be something. 

Scarpino: So, one more time, you’re marching to the beat of your own drummer and really hadn’t become socialized into the… 

Ciulla: No, no, I hadn’t, yeah, I hadn’t done that. 

Scarpino: … professional philosopher mindset in the academy. 

Ciulla: Right, and then you see with Wharton, they came to me because there weren’t that many people in business, and I was at Harvard. I knew being at Harvard – I mean, the weird thing about being at Harvard is like here I was just starting in business ethics, I’m getting invited to conferences mainly because they want to show somebody from Harvard is there. I am perfectly aware of this. But you go to a place like Harvard, it opens all sorts of doors for you, even if you’re not very good. 

Scarpino: You taught this course on business ethics, and did you create it at Harvard? 

Ciulla: No, no, I didn’t teach it at Harvard; I taught it at Boston University. 

Scarpino: Okay, that’s because they wouldn’t let you do it. Okay. 

Ciulla: They wouldn’t let me do it. Yeah, they wouldn’t let me teach at Harvard. Yeah, no, you had to be on the faculty to do that. So, I never taught at Harvard, but I did at Wharton. 

Scarpino: You were at Harvard from ’84 to ’86… 

Ciulla: Yeah. 

Scarpino: … as a writer, cases and notes. You taught at Boston College where they actually did let you teach business ethics… 

Ciulla: Yeah. 

Scarpino: … so did you develop that course in business ethics for them? 

Ciulla: Yeah, yeah, I did, I developed it for them. I looked at a bunch of models of how it was done. It was a very eclectic course, so it required you to know strategy, and several other areas. I mean, there have been many times in my life where I’ve just sat down with a stack of books. At Harvard Business School, I had a stack of books on my desk and I just started reading about management and business ethics. When I went to Jepson School, well, I didn’t know anything about leadership. It was the same; stacks of books, and then you start reading everything. So, I’ve spent my life just sort of reading all that stuff. 

Scarpino: It works though. 

Ciulla: It does; it’s amazing what you can learn from books. 

Scarpino: you’re teaching this course on business ethics that they wouldn’t let you teach at Harvard and they did let you teach at Boston, so did any of that have anything to do with leadership? 

Ciulla: There was some management to it, a little bit, yeah. And of course, knowing some of the management literature helped. Then, of course, at Wharton I taught organizational behavior, and a lot of that’s background literature related to leadership studies too. So, I had to learn that too. Yeah, there was a little bit. 

Scarpino: So, ’86 to ’91, you were at Wharton, jointly appointed in legal studies and management departments. Why did you end up there? I mean, did your appointment at Harvard run out and it was not renewable, or…? 

Ciulla: Well, so at the end, there’s this moment of truth where they decide whether the postdocs would do it. The only job that I could do there wasn’t a business ethics job; it was organizational behavior. I said, “Well, this is ridiculous; I don’t know anything about it. Harvard Business School, you’re going to have somebody in organizational behavior who’s never studied it?” So, I met a man named Tom Dunfee, who was the Chairman of the Department at Wharton. He came to me and asked me if I wanted to go to Wharton. I loved Philadelphia, so I said sure, and so I went. I sort of got in the backdoor of Wharton. I was a senior fellow. 

Scarpino: Was it a tenure track job there? 

Ciulla: It wasn’t tenure track. I was a senior fellow. Diana Robertson, who’s there now, full professor, she, she came in the same way. She stayed there longer, but her husband taught there too. I went in as a senior fellow and started teaching business ethics and management and developed their required course, which was really a challenging thing. It was a module course, and did that until I ended up going to Jepson. 

Scarpino: With some time out to go to Oxford. 

Ciulla: Yeah, went to Oxford and met my husband, which is the most important thing. At Oxford, by the way, some of the research… 

Scarpino: Why were you both at Oxford? I mean, you mentioned it, so I’ll ask you. 

Ciulla: Yes, my husband is Dutch, he’s from the Netherlands, and he was on a British Council grant to do research. He’s a chemist. So, he was doing chemistry there and we were housed in the same college, and so he was just in the building away, and so I met him in the college there… 

Scarpino: In Green College. 

Ciulla: … at Green, yeah. But he actually, he wasn’t working at – Green was actually the medical school and they had sociology and a couple other things. So, I was invited to Oxford because Margaret Thatcher wanted to change the healthcare system. This is very circuitous, but – and I’d met someone who did medical ethics there, named David Cook, and he knew about my work in business ethics. I was basically invited to Green College to explain management to the faculty. 

Scarpino: Were you teaching business ethics? 

Ciulla: No, I wasn’t teaching – I taught a bunch of seminars to other groups, but it was – what was I doing? Well, it was business ethics, yeah. It was business ethics, but then I was also doing seminars for the faculty to explain management because they thought that by modern management techniques, they would ruin the value system of the British healthcare system. It’s very Monty Python. 

Scarpino: I can see that. 

Ciulla: And then I taught in the Tropical Forestry Institute, and that was business ethics. 

Scarpino: What is the Tropical Forestry Institute? 

Ciulla: The Tropical Forestry Institute is an institute that was put together because of all the colonial – if you think of colonialism, part of what they were taking was forestry stuff. So, they have an institute there and they have a program for people from former colonies who are forest managers who come, and I did a business ethics course for them. 

Scarpino: The students in your class were… 

Ciulla: From all over. 

Scarpino: … professional people from all the various countries that had been a part of the British Empire. 

Ciulla: Right, right. Oh, we had people from Bhutan and India and all these different places. 

Scarpino: Was that a challenge? 

Ciulla: Oh, a real challenge because they were all corrupt as hell. Yeah, I mean, you’re in some of these countries, back then especially, and you manage the forests; do you think these people are on the up-and-up? It was a fascinating challenge though. It was a lot of fun because the other great joy I’ve had, and I’ve been really fortunate, is I’ve taught so many foreign audiences in different parts of the world that, yeah, I just loved it. You learn all sorts of stuff from your students. 

Scarpino: How did these people, some of whom had been engaged in all kinds of shenanigans and corruption, take your… 

Ciulla: I don’t know. 

Scarpino: … take the gospel of business ethics? 

Ciulla: I don’t know if they took it too seriously. I did have some interesting conversations with the forest manager of Bhutan, because you don’t hear much about Bhutan, but who really liked his kingdom and thought they had it all right there and stuff and really hated the West. So, that was really fascinating to me. But, yeah, I don’t think they took – you can teach an ethics course, but it’s not going to make people ethical. I don’t think some of them were buying it, but I was doing my job. 

Scarpino: So, you get your degree. You’re at Harvard, you go over to Boston, you’re at the Wharton School – you’ve been trained as a philosopher from BA through PhD, now you are entering on a career that has you in business schools. Did you ever feel as though you’re sort of coloring outside the professional lines when you were doing this? 

Ciulla: I rather liked it. I never stopped feeling like a philosopher. I’m still always a philosopher, but it was sort of, I mean, it’s being a Socrates boss for, you know, you’re in the marketplace… 

Scarpino: That’s true. 

Ciulla: … and, to me, that’s always been the fun part is that I kind of like being the outside agitator. I still remember at Harvard, you know, philosophers, we don’t play nice. So, when someone gives a talk, you go at the speaker, right? The first speaker at Harvard, I just laid into him and everybody’s looking at me like what! I wasn’t mean, I just was sort of tearing apart several of the things that he said. 

Scarpino: Do you remember who it was? 

Ciulla: I don’t remember who it was and I can’t remember what it was about. All I remember was like everybody was looking at me like who is this kid? Of course, also there’s a gender thing; you’re one of the few women in the room; you’re the youngest… 

Scarpino: You were probably younger than most of them. 

Ciulla: Probably younger, yeah, and so this young woman and everybody’s like, “This is a postdoc? Well, we’re all real polite to each other.” Because the other thing is management back then was highly uncritical. So, being a philosopher, every field I entered, especially leadership studies, you come in criticizing what people have done before, and that’s what I did at business schools. But, yeah, I knew I wasn’t – and at that point, I thought, you know, probably not going to get into a philosophy department, but I don’t care. 

Scarpino: Were you good at selling yourself, I mean, marketing your professional services or point of view? 

Ciulla: I must have been or else nobody would have bought it. Yeah, I think so and I met a lot of people. I helped a lot of people. I was always helping people with their courses and I think that was – I always tell people it’s really important to help other people, not because it’s reciprocity, but it just creates this network of people that you know. And I’m outgoing, so would go to conferences and things like that. I also was always doing something different. So, if anything, it maybe wasn’t that I was so fabulous, but I was doing something different which maybe marks you off from other people. So, that probably helped too; you show people something in a different way. 

Scarpino: When you began working in these business schools, you never really considered that you were taking a professional risk? I mean, your advisor told you once you walk out the door, you can’t come back. 

Ciulla: Well, no, I sort of knew it. 

Scarpino: Yeah? 

Ciulla: Yeah, I knew it was a risk, but when I was young, I was not risk-adverse. You might have been getting that drift. 

Scarpino: Well, I mean, I was going to ask you if you thought of yourself as risk-taker, I mean in a calculated way; I don’t mean in a mean way. Some people take risks because they don’t know any better and some people take risks because it’s a means to an end. 

Ciulla: Right, I mean, just taking this last job, here I was 65 years old in a very comfortable place and I had to go and take a job without tenure because they hadn’t made the tenure decision yet, at a business school where most of my publications don’t count because they’re not in the top four management journals. In the long run, that is the biggest risk I have ever taken, in retrospect. When I look back, I get the heebie-jeebies thinking of it because it would have been like throwing everything away. I mean, I’m sure Richmond would have taken me back. 

Scarpino: Well, I mean, you’ve been with – we’ll talk about Jepson either today or next time, but I mean, you’ve been there for years. 

Ciulla: Yeah, yeah. They might have taken me back, but I realized, in retrospect, because especially how weird business schools are, that that was an enormous risk to take. At least it worked out. 

Scarpino: Do you consider yourself a boundary pusher? I mean, do you do it in a calculated way? 

Ciulla: I think I am, yeah. I’m happiest doing that. Yeah, I’ve never wanted to conform because, I mean, what’s really fun is coming up with things that are new and not being like everybody else. Going to Harvard was like being in an intellectual candy store for me because there were so many weird things. The way they thought about things and did things was so different. And I had so many things to say about it because it was like all this new stuff. If I had been in a philosophy department, we would be debating the same stuff, but the longer I wasn’t in one, the happier I was and the thought of going into one would have been somewhat boring, because in a business school, they’re thinking a certain way and you’re thinking that it all seems strange, and then you talk to them about the strangeness and they sort of find it kind of interesting because they haven’t thought about it that way. I find it interesting because I haven’t thought about things that way. So, I think it kind of creates a different kind of relationship. As long as you’re respectful and nice to people and have a sense of humor about it, it seems to work out. But, yeah, I am a boundary pusher, yeah. 

Scarpino: At that point in your career then, you went to Jepson in 1991, but I want to ask you some sort of bigger picture questions. We’re also going to run out of time here pretty quick. I read a commentary – we already talked about Kenneth Goodpaster, but I’m just going to use something that somebody wrote about him. It was a commentary on his Conscience and Corporate Culture written by William C. Frederick who… 

Ciulla: Yeah, I know him too. 

Scarpino: … distinguished scholar, for anybody who doesn’t know, and Professor of Business Administration, University of Pittsburgh from 1963 through the mid-1990s. So, Values, Nature, and Culture in the American Corporation, 1995; Corporation, Be Good! The Story of Corporate Social Responsibility, 2006. So, he writes this, this commentary on Goodpaster’s Conscience and Corporate Culture. The reason that I said a little bit about Frederick is so people who listen to this interview will understand that this man had the credentials to say what he said. 

Ciulla: I think he just passed away, actually. 

Scarpino: I don’t think that I saw that when I looked him up. I mean, I looked him up enough so that I feel like… 

Ciulla: This is Bill Frederick at Pittsburgh? 

Scarpino: Yeah. 

Ciulla: Yeah, he just passed away. 

Scarpino: He said: “During the last half-century, American business ethicists have laid down the conceptual foundations of inquiry into the normative practices of large business corporations. The major theoretical contributions include, in more-or-less chronological order, Norman Bowie’s Kantian capitalism, Robert Solomon’s Aristotelian virtues, R. Edward Freeman’s stakeholder claims, Thomas Donaldson’s and Thomas Dunfee’s integrated social contracts, and Sandra Rosenthal’s and Rogene Buchholz’s pragmatism. Interestingly, all authors are formally prepared philosophers except for Dunfee’s legal grounding and Buchholz’s managerially oriented education.” 

Then if you skip ahead, he said: “Now comes Kenneth Goodpaster, yet another philosopher, whose Conscience and Corporate Culture adds a distinctive foundation stone to the continued quest for social justice, human rights, and virtuous behavior within the corporate workplace,” and so on and so forth. 

And then he wraps it up this way. He says: “Building a house of philosophic inquiry roomy enough to accommodate the many vexing problems and issues arising from business behavior takes many hands and diverse skills, as the earlier Big Five conceptual theorists have shown us. We can make that the Big Six now, as Goodpaster’s foundation stone of corporate conscience is cemented firmly in place.” 

One thing occurred to me when I read this, even though I didn’t know about your relationship with Goodpaster until I stepped into it, but two of the people he names as the Bix Six you worked with. 

Ciulla: Yeah, well, I know all of those people, yeah. Ken was working on the corporate – so this issue of can a corporation have a conscience was a big debate between Goodpaster and a guy named French, and he was working on that when I doing it. The other, but, you know, he wasn’t – I might tell you about this another time, okay? Yeah, let’s let… 

Scarpino: I was actually going to go in a somewhat different direction. I don’t want to have you; I’m not really asking you to trash somebody. But one of the things that Frederick said in doing this review of Goodpaster’s work, he said: “He adds a distinctive foundation stone to the continued quest for social justice, human rights, and virtuous behavior. It’s about time,” he says, “for the field has been theoretically adrift just as global dynamics threaten to rip asunder the Western-oriented stream of business ethics theorizing and advocacy.” The thing that struck me about that – so he’s writing this in 2007 – was he right when he said that the field has been theoretically adrift just as global dynamics threaten to rip asunder the Western-rooted system of business ethics theorizing and advocacy? 

Ciulla: Well, what happened was, so all of those names, and I’m surprised he didn’t mention Pat Werhane because she’s the other main person. I’m not surprised. There’s no women in that list… 

Scarpino: No, I noticed that. 

Ciulla: … except for Buchholz’s wife. Yeah, Pat Werhane’s the other big one because Pat Werhane – Pat Werhane and Tom Donaldson was Pat Werhane’s student? I’ve forgot how it worked. But, anyway, she’s ... 

Scarpino: But I mean, I did enough looking into this guy to figure that he probably had the academic credentials to say that the field was theoretically adrift… 

Ciulla: Oh, no, he’s right. 

Scarpino: … and I thought that would be a good way to bounce that off you and see what you think. 

Ciulla: And he’s writing in 2007. 

Scarpino: Yes. 

Ciulla: So, business ethics started out by philosophers and the Business Ethics Quarterly, the main journal. So, those names there are really, Richard DeGeorge – did he mention DeGeorge? 

Scarpino: Yeah. 

Ciulla: Okay. So, Richard DeGeorge is the teacher of Tom Donaldson and Pat Werhane – I don’t know if she was, it was several – anyway Richard DeGeorge is one of the big founders. You look at them generationally, right? So, I’ve worked with most of those people, but not as a student, but on various projects and things like that. I think the field is expanding. So, philosophers started it out and now what’s happening in the field is that there’s a whole mix of people who are social scientists. One of the things I’ve learned from business ethics that’s relevant to leadership studies is I’ve watched that field develop and the interdisciplinary nature develop. So, leadership studies starts out with social scientists and now we’re trying to bring in the humanities people. Business ethics starts out with philosophers and then the social scientists come in. When the social scientists come in in this world, they dominate because the social sciences are held – you’re a historian, you know this story, right – it happens in all the fields. So, now the behavioral ethicists are getting involved in business ethics, etcetera. But it was, in the early days – I’ve been on the Business Ethics Quarterly editorial board since it started, so for 27 years or so. In the early days, the articles were fascinating. So, Goodpaster’s was part of it, and Goodpaster is quite good, yeah. So, his, that debate was there. All the foundational stuff was going on. It was all kind of relevant, new, important. Then people got off – it patterns the Academy. So, they worked in business schools, some of them start to sell out a little bit to the business schools. So, they looked different, there’s more case studies, there’s more stuff related to management, it becomes a little less philosophical, which is not a bad thing, I mean, because again, it’s how do you begin to put these things together in an area of applied ethics? So, I don’t know if we’re really adrift. He might be a little pessimistic. I’m just trying to think what was going on in 2007. I don’t know if it’s really adrift. And then CSR, Corporate Social Responsibility, that’s part of business ethics. It had been dormant for years. It had actually been around in the late ‘70s and even in the ‘60s. Then it disappeared and business ethics became this philosophy thing. Then it came back with a vengeance in Europe. The Europeans are really into CSR, and I think CSR’s going to be a bigger thing because of how messed up everything is politically and socially because that’s more the social and political parts of it. 

Scarpino: By everything, you mean in Europe, United States, the world in general? 

Ciulla: Yeah. I’m running a conference on this in the fall about what businesses – do they have to step up when society gets really screwed up and political leaders are really screwed up? What’s the role in business in this context? So, I think it’s an important area. But yeah, I mean, I don’t know if it’s that adrift. It’s just changed radically from the days that he remembers, which were the good old days, we always look back on them. I think it’s just different and more diverse. I don’t think it’s adrift. 

Scarpino: When philosophers enter this area of business ethics, were they writing in such a way that what they had to say was accessible to business people or were they writing for each other? 

Ciulla: It was sort of in the middle. It depended. Solomon’s stuff was always readable. Ed Freeman’s pretty readable. But these are the foundational works, so I don’t think we’re adrift, it’s just that when things are new, you can write the foundational works. That’s really the key to what I did in leadership studies, is when there’s no leadership ethics, you get to write the foundational works. 

Scarpino: And you did that. 

Ciulla: And that’s what I did, yeah. So, that’s what makes my career a lot different than people in conventional established fields, is that you write the reference works and you write the sort of – you lay out what the problems are. 

Scarpino: Do you ever worry that leadership studies will become a conventional established field and will be weakened by that? 

Ciulla: I don’t think it will necessarily be weakened, but you still need people to do new things and, because what happened, I mean, in some of my more scathing critiques of leadership studies, I will point out the fact that if you want to make a name for yourself, you make a questionnaire. 

Scarpino: Yes. I’ve seen some of that. 

Ciulla: So, you got transformational leadership, authentic leadership, and then they replicate. I mean, the ethical leadership questionnaire, there are thousands and thousands of papers that use that questionnaire. That’s where you start reaching dead ends because no matter how many times you give that questionnaire, it’s not really clear that our knowledge of leadership increases if there’s 5,000 studies. 

Scarpino: I’ve been doing this for a long time, not as long as you, but I’ve interviewed a lot of people from a whole range of backgrounds. One of the things that’s really clear is that leadership is an incredibly complex human endeavor. Is that really the kind of human activity that’s subject to questionnaires and social science dissection? 

Ciulla: I think that you can test out historical hypotheses and I think that could be interesting, but no matter how many times you give a questionnaire and you get the data and you synthesize it with other things, this is why, even the greats like Bernie Bass who do that kind of research, and Jerry Hunt, these are real empiricists, all kept saying we’re not getting anywhere. Well, yeah, you just keep spinning your wheels. It got to a point, actually, with ethical leadership, I mean, and it’s a perfectly fine paper, it’s a perfectly fine theory. I kept getting so many papers to referee, I said, “You have to stop sending them to me. I don’t think the theory’s good; I don’t think this is going anywhere, so I can’t be fair to these papers,” because I was getting like 80 a year. And I didn’t think that really the journals should be – they have so little space that that’s what they should be spending their space on, but I know that other people disagreed, so I just took myself out of the equation on that. 

Scarpino: What do you mean when you thought that the theory wasn’t good? 

Ciulla: No, I mean, well, I think that their original work is fine. It’s a study, they use a questionnaire, they talk about it, that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s done right, it’s perfectly fine. But to have these endless numbers of replications and variations on it… 

Scarpino: Basically off the same questionnaire? 

Ciulla: Yes, it didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. So, you’re going… 

Scarpino: Just so people who are not familiar with the field understand, the name of that questionnaire is? 

Ciulla: Yeah, it’s the Ethical Leadership Questionnaire; it’s 10 questions. 

Scarpino: Yes, okay. 

Ciulla: One of the questions is: Do you think your manager is ethical? As a philosopher, your head explodes. I mean, what does that mean? So, I mean, there are values to these things. I would never say that there aren’t, but the point was if you’re refereeing journal articles and you say how much space do you want to give to that versus something that might be new, I will always go with the new. 

Scarpino: What do we really have to do to understand leadership and leadership ethics? 

Ciulla: Oh, God. Leadership is part of the human condition and, as part of the human condition, you have to study all the humanities. Then once you have that – you see, I think that the humanities is the foundation for the empirical studies. So, we need to understand – well, the book I have in the future, I don’t know if you want me to talk about it, but the book I have in the future is really the history of the idea, which gets to why do we have leaders, and what does it mean in human history to look at it? So, it’s more like my work book. My work book is the history of the meaning of work. This would be the history of the meaning of leadership, but yeah. I mean, we have to understand how it’s played out. What I always tell my students is human beings haven’t changed. You see leaders doing the same stuff they’ve been doing for a long time, and so human nature hasn’t changed, ethics hasn’t changed, it goes in cycles and cultures. You can look at it and sometimes seem to get everything right and then it all falls apart. So, yeah, we have to study all the aspects; studying leadership is studying humanity and you can’t study it without the humanities. 

Scarpino: Most leadership programs don’t do that. 

Ciulla: I know they don’t. Yeah, because studying leadership, unfortunately, is really studying management. And some of it’s studying the skills you need to be a leader, public speaking, whatever, but they’re not really reaching the intellectual skills. 

Scarpino: Do those skills really add up to leadership? 

Ciulla: No, not at all. No, not at all. I mean, the idea of perspective, one thing I think we could agree is leaders have to have perspective. The one quote I always liked is Chester Barnard who said “leadership is the art of sensing the whole.” Right? So, leaders look at the big picture. How do you look at the big picture if you don’t know any history? I look at my business students, I look at my business students and I wonder how in the world can you be in business, especially international business, if you have no understanding of history? How do you do that? 

Scarpino: For a historian interviewing you, that would be a good place to hit stop. 

Ciulla: I think it’s a good place to stop, yeah. 

(END OF RECORDING) 

Scarpino: Today is Thursday, October 25, 2018. My name is Philip Scarpino, Professor of History at Indiana University/Purdue University, Indianapolis, IUPUI, and, Director of Oral History for the Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence, also at IUPUI. I am interviewing Dr. Joanne Ciulla in a conference room in the Hilton Hotel, located in West Palm Beach, Florida. This interview is a joint venture undertaken by the Tobias Center and the International Leadership Association. 

This is the second interview with Joanne Ciulla, the first one having taken place in June 2018 in Indianapolis. 

Both of us are attending the annual meeting of the International Leadership Association. 

There’s a biographical sketch with the first interview, so I am not going to repeat that information here. I will note that I am interviewing her in large part because she is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Leadership Association. 

Alright. What I want to do is ask your permission to record this interview, to transcribe the interview, and to deposit the recording and transcription in the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives where they may be used by patrons, including posting all or part of the recording and the transcription to the website of the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives, and the same considerations for the Tobias Center and the ILA. 

Ciulla: Yes, that’s fine. 

Scarpino: Thank you very much. 

For the benefit of anybody who is using this, this is the second interview. The last time we talked about your youth and education, the PhD you earned in philosophy, we talked about your dissertation, Work and Virtue, we talked about your highly-regarded first book, The Working Life. We also talked about philosophy and the humanities and business ethics and leadership. I’m going to do my best to pick up where we left off. 

Ciulla: Okay. It’s only been a few months. 

Scarpino: I listened to the last recording and it was lovely, and anyway. I’m going to start with some general questions about leadership. Then I want to talk to you about the Jepson School because you were there at the birth, so to speak. Did you get a chance to catch your breath and everything? Are you okay? 

Ciulla: I’m going to get some water. I just took my shoes off, so we’re halfway there already. 

Scarpino: I’m going to get my – if you are more comfortable in this other chair, that’s fine. 

Ciulla: Yeah, I might move over so I can kind of spread out. Yeah, I’m a little bit sweaty. We came racing back here and, of course, it’s warm outside. 

Scarpino: No, I… 

Ciulla: I got that email and I went like oh, no. 

Scarpino: My wife doesn’t get around all that well. So, I walked over to that Square and bought some sandwiches and brought them back, and I had taken my jacket off and I was sweating when I got back. It was below freezing the night before we left Indianapolis. 

Ciulla: Alright, let’s go. 

Scarpino: Here we go. 

Ciulla: Do you think we should close that door? 

Scarpino: I’ll get it. Yeah, this will pick up the sound from the corridor. 

Ciulla: Yeah, there’s a weight room right near us too. 

Scarpino: They actually have the ILA Yoga Room. 

Ciulla: Yeah, they do, they do. I saw that. 

Scarpino: I mean, it’s a nice touch, but I have never seen a conference do that before. 

Ciulla: Oh, no, the ILA’s done things like that, and they have meditation and all sorts of new-age things. 

Scarpino: Alright. Have you had a chance to catch your breath? 

Ciulla: I’m fine now. Yeah. 

Scarpino: Alright, okay. Thank you, thank you for doing this. 

Ciulla: Oh, it’s my pleasure; it’s my honor actually. 

Scarpino: … I know you’re busy at the conference. 

Alright. So, the first general question is that, you know, you’ve obviously spent much of your career conducting research on leaders and leadership and writing and publishing about those topics and teaching classes that we talked about last time, and so, in order to kind of get some insight into your thinking about leadership and leadership ethics, I’m going to ask some open-ended questions. The first one relates to the fact that you earned your PhD in 1984, right – I said ’85 last time – and for the first few years after you earned your PhD, you were publishing at a pretty impressive clip, but to summarize, there were topics such as work and business ethics and gender. Then in 1993, you published what I believe was your first piece on leadership, “Visionary Leadership” in Business and the Contemporary World, fifth volume, 1993. Then after that, the direction of your publications changes pretty rapidly. 

So, what I’d like you to do is to talk about the intellectual journey from philosophy to leadership and leadership ethics. How did you get from A to B? How did you get from your degree to the rest of your life? 

Ciulla: Well, I mean, in some people’s lives there are these seminal moments. Mine happened to be in a faculty meeting, which there are very few seminal moments in a faculty meeting. 

Scarpino: My mother told me not to jump on other people’s straight lines, and I’ll let that one go. 

Ciulla: Well, I didn’t think you could keep a straight face. So, I was teaching philosophy and I developed a course called “Philosophy of Work and Culture.” That became the most popular philosophy department course. But the seminal moment was a faculty meeting where the philosophy department realized nobody wanted to take their courses. So, we had this course on “Love and Human Sexuality,” which they liked, and we had a course on “Death and Dying,” which they liked. And so, me, being a smart aleck, youngest person in the department, the only and first woman in the department, just threw away a line that was, “Well, why not a course on work because that’s what you do between sex and death?” I was really joking around, and then actually, I stopped and I said, “Well, actually, that’s a good idea; maybe we should have a course on work.” So, there’s labor history courses, there’s courses on philosophy of labor that were Marxist, but there were no courses on work and there were no courses of the kind I eventually envisioned, which involved more the Max Weber, labor history. I did a lot of history – economics, people like Galbraith and other political economists, and then of course, all the political philosophers who talk about work, from Aristotle on down the line. So, this course became a really big course. We went from one section to seven. Then I hired my colleagues from the graduate school to come and help teach because none of the faculty wanted to teach it because back in the ‘70s, the mid- ‘70s, nobody taught interdisciplinary courses. It just wasn’t what was done. Meanwhile, I was still in graduate school. So, this is the same time I’m in graduate school, but I had an office at LaSalle, teaching there like mad, sometimes four courses a semester. 

Scarpino: And this was a faculty meeting at LaSalle? 

Ciulla: It was a faculty meeting at LaSalle. I’m a full-time PhD student at Temple at the same time. Eventually, I started teaching it, it became popular, and it was really meaningful to teach it to adults because we had a lot of – I’d teach it in the night school – so, we hired these other people to teach it. It became a big course. Then I thought, well, you know, I might as well write my dissertation on work, and nobody did that back then either. In the school I was in, as an analytic philosopher, you wrote on epistemology or logic or some more traditional philosophical field. So, this was like a really weird thing to do back then, but I got somebody who was a political philosopher – he was a Marxist – and he became my advisor. Then some of the more famous people – Joe Margolis and Elizabeth Beardsley – they were on my committee. So, I put together a committee and I wrote my dissertation on work. Well, so then I was trying to decide what to do when I got out of that. I didn’t know if I even wanted to stay in academics; I didn’t know. So, I ended up applying for two things. One was a congressional fellow where they actually asked for a philosopher, and the other was the Harvard fellow in business and ethics. The Harvard fellow, I mean, I kind of did on a lark, I kind of didn’t care either, but one of the things I think I mentioned in the last thing is I never planned things and I was kind of a carefree person compared to the way people are today about careers. So, I just applied on a lark and then I almost forgot about it because I thought the congressional fellow – I was a finalist for that – and I thought that was, in a way, kind of cool that they wanted a philosopher advising a congressman. I ended up being a finalist for the Harvard fellow. I went up there and I interviewed and I was a smart aleck there, which is what they told me was one of the reasons I got it because I wasn’t too reverent about Harvard Business School. I remember the one question that their one ethics guy – his name was John Matthews – and he was a very senior guy there and so he was like putting me on. I didn’t know it, but I was talking about my stuff on work and how workers feel about their jobs and meaning and all of this stuff. He said, “Well, you know, if you want to do research on that here, how would you get people to talk to?” I said, “Well, I’d go through the unions.” He said, “This is Harvard Business School; we don’t go through the unions.” I just sort of turned and like – I had no filter in those days – I just turned and said, “Well, maybe you should.” He, apparently, when they finally hired me, told me that was kind of what sealed it for them was the fact that I wasn’t too reverent and they wanted people who thought independently. When I was at Harvard, I sat in on the MBA courses, worked for one year with Ken Goodpaster, and then worked with another fellow in the marketing department – I’m trying to remember his name, in marketing. Then there’s a decision point, because they use us to recruit for faculty. I didn’t want to teach there because I didn’t think teaching by – I did a lot of research on the case method when I was there – and I didn’t think teaching solely by cases would be fun, plus it was very corporate in the sense that you have these groups, everybody teaches the same thing. To me, teaching, you know, I had been teaching for nine years by the time I got there; and to me, teaching was designing courses. That was my great joy. So, of course, I ended up going to Wharton – they invited me; I didn’t, there wasn’t a job opening. So, then I taught the MBA elective in ethics. Then Tom Dunfee and myself designed the first required MBA business ethics course at Wharton. That was a really big deal and it was a module. It was about, I think we did it for seven weeks, but it was punishment because I had to teach a whole lot, which meant you’re teaching the same thing over and over. That was a big deal because I got it graded pass/fail, where a lot of business schools don’t even grade it or don’t have it as a real course. I was there for a while, and then I got the phone call and the phone call was from the University of Richmond. I was sitting in my office one day and there was a fellow – I had been at a conference at the Darden School, and I had given one of the talks there. There was someone from Richmond who had seen me give the talk and it was just, it was one of these weird things of fate because they said well – they called me and they said, “I saw you give this talk and thought you might be an interesting candidate for this job.” This person, by the way, wasn’t on the faculty. They knew an associate dean on the faculty who was helping organize the school. So, I said okay, and I had just gotten married. I went to Richmond in ’91; I got married in December of ’90. I was kind of thinking okay, well, maybe I’ll do something different now because Wharton wasn’t tenure track. I was a senior fellow there. So, went to Richmond and discovered, my God, they want you to design a whole school from scratch. I thought how cool is that? So, I got the job there. I was the first person hired for the Chair in Business and Ethics, I mean, in Leadership and Ethics. Then there were three other people hired. One person didn’t do much, but the three of us basically sat down and we had these amazing sessions where we just made it all up. It was great fun. I think one theme through my career is I love making up new courses and I love – I’m going to talk about this tomorrow – I love putting together areas of knowledge to try to understand something. So, I’ve been interdisciplinary to my core basically. 

Scarpino: So, you did not think of yourself as a scholar of leadership until you got the call. 

Ciulla: No. 

Scarpino: Somebody else did, or thought you had potential. 

Ciulla: Somebody else did. Well, you know, it’s ironic, I mean, how fate works because I used to write for Psychology Today and I used to do review essays. One of the review essays that I was given, way back then, was Warren Bennis and Burton Nanus’s famous book Leadership. Well, I hadn’t studied anything on – I wrote the most smart aleck review of their book and because I wasn’t used to reading your popular business book kind of thing – you know how in business books they’ll write, you know, because they talked to people in business or whatever, and “Mark and Joe, well, they had this kind of issue or whatever,” I wasn’t used to that. I just thought it was ridiculous. Then I said – and they kept writing about Mark and Joe, and I remember writing “both of whom seemed to have been dropped on their head as children.” I have always wanted, I mean, because I knew Warren Bennis. I’d always wanted to show him that to get a good laugh, because I know he’d think it was hilarious. 

Scarpino: Later on, because I know that you knew Warren Bennis, did he ever realize you were the one who wrote that review? 

Ciulla: No, and it’s funny because we shared an office at the Kennedy School when we were both – they had these visiting positions, and we had a great time – but I forgot to tell him that, but that happened a long time ago. Then there was this other essay I did that you referred to, that was a long time ago, and that one’s sort of more just serendipity. So, no, I never thought of myself as a leadership scholar or studying leadership or any of those things until, of course, I got to the Jepson School. 

Scarpino: The thing that got you tapped was your interest in business ethics? 

Ciulla: Sort of, yeah. Now, in business ethics, my work was a lot historical. The talk that this one fellow saw came from my looking into the history of cases and it was on casuistry. It was a lot of medieval history. And what I went into, which it was really fun research – as a historian, you can appreciate this – I went and looked at the old Spanish casuists who had cases. The Spanish casuists, wrote these books of cases and they were all sorts of practical things that had to do with business. So, I looked into those. I looked into medieval canon law, where there’s wonderful cases on it; penitential manuals. So, it’s a wild paper because it’s basically history, and that was the paper I gave because my approach to things has just always been historical. I mean, I’m a philosopher, but to me what’s really exciting is understanding that strand of humanity that’s related to ethics and how we think about the world. That’s why, you know, I may write a philosophical paper, but it’s usually got quite a bit of history in it as well. 

Scarpino: So, 2011, you wrote a chapter for, I believe, a book commemorating the 20th Anniversary of the Jepson School. The title of your chapter was “The Jepson School: Liberal Arts as Leadership Studies.” I’m going to actually ask you something about this later on, but in that chapter, you said the following: “People often think of a leadership school as some sort of a training program. Yet when you think of it, the very idea of leadership training is an oxymoron. Training implies development of a skill in conformity to certain practices and procedures. Leadership would seem to be the opposite of this.” 

Here’s the question: If leadership is not a skill that one can learn in training, a training program, then what should individuals be learning in a leadership program? 

Ciulla: Right. Well, we had talked about this a lot. The more I was at the Jepson School, that is a question that I felt I really wanted to answer because it affects how you design courses, how you design curriculum, how you even approach your students. The answer I came up with is that, so what is it you need to know to do leadership? Yeah, I mean, being able to speak well is obviously a nice thing to have, but there’s great leaders who don’t speak well. But you need a couple of things that come from liberal arts. One is perspective, and you get that from studying history and art and other things. You need perspective on humanity and people. Obviously, you need to know how to work with people. That’s more of an intellectual ability as a skill, though I think there probably is a skillset maybe related that somebody, some consultant can teach. Then the third – well, there’s actually four. The third is critical thinking, which, of course, became part of our curriculum. Then the last one is actually the will and the sense of responsibility, that you’re responsible; because as soon as you’re taking responsibility for what goes on around you, it’s inevitable that the only way you can actually fill that responsibility, in most human settings, is to take leadership. So, one of the things we felt very passionately about at the Jepson School was creating this will. That included everything from building in service kinds of activities, the ethics courses, how we hired faculty, people that said, “Look, leadership’s not about you; it has nothing to do with you. It’s about everybody else and it’s about the fact that you’re not going to sit and watch things go by, or you’re not going to have great ideas about how to make things better and not try to implement them.” So, those are the things that I think are so fundamental that once you get those, yeah, you want to learn to be a better speaker, you can take a course in that. Psychology is a double-edged sword in leadership studies. When we first were starting the Jepson School, the faculty, a lot of the faculty hated us. We were not welcome. The faculty that really was nervous about us was psychology because they thought we were going to teach people how to manipulate people and, yeah. By the way, the historians were supportive; they got it. But they were worried about that, and what you want to do is have a profound understanding of people. So, the sort of normative parts of it all have to do with understanding people, developing empathy in people, but this notion of responsibility is fundamental to being a good citizen. And citizenship, that was to me the primary goal of a leadership program. If you think of the world today, good citizenship is highly lacking because when you don’t have good citizens, if you have bad citizens, they get the leaders they deserve. 

Scarpino: I was going to ask you a question that I had intended to ask you later, but when I look at the literature that I could find on the creation of the Jepson School and mission statements and all the stuff that I could pull offline, it seemed to me that in the beginning, you were in the business of training citizen leaders. Is that an accurate conclusion? 

Ciulla: Yeah. That’s close, yeah, yeah, because you want to start by saying, look, at a minimum, you want your students to come out being great citizens. That’s the minimum, and then you build on top of that. But if you can’t get that, the rest of it’s sort of irrelevant, especially in a democracy because again, it’s not about you; it’s about where you are in society and the obligations you feel, and citizens are people with obligations. I studied citizenship, and maybe you did too when you were in elementary school, I had citizenship classes. 

Scarpino: I remember that. 

Ciulla: Yes, we never liked them, but they were there. 

Scarpino: For the benefit of anybody who’s going to listen to this or use this interview, I talked to several people last summer who helped me understand your career. Among them were Terry Price and Ronald Riggio. Terry Price holds the same Chair, the Coston Family Chair in Leadership and Ethics, that you formerly held at the Jepson School. 

Ciulla: I know. When I left, I said, “Terry has to have this Chair.” 

Scarpino: He was very nice, he was very helpful, and I’ll tell you later on about some of the things that he sent me. Then Ronald Riggio is the Henry R.Kravis Professor of Leadership and Organizational Psychology atClaremont McKenna College. So, opposite ends of the country, bothvery helpful. When I talked to both of them separately, and they toldme they hadn’t talked to each other and I believe them, both of themsaid that prior to the Enron scandal in late 2001, there was not a lot ofattention to ethics in leadership studies. Do you agree with thatconclusion?

Ciulla: Absolutely. Well, I mean, my first, probably my most cited article is called “Leadership Ethics: Mapping the Territory.” That was published 

in ’95. It was actually finished in ’92, but in those days, the publication life was enormous in journals because it was all by paper. That article was – to write that article, I did massive searches. In those days, it was really hard – you remember, that was real research; you didn’t have the computer that just gave you all the things. 

Scarpino: There was no Googling. 

Ciulla: There was no Googling, and I found – but we did have some computerized search, I mean, but it was huge. I looked at 1800 articles to find where’s the literature and, man, I came up with a few that were workable, the rest were platitudes, but I’m talking about serious academic articles. There were empirical studies and they were usually Kohlberg studies. They looked at stages of development and they applied it to leaders, and some of those were cross-cultural. So, I found a handful of those. I found a lot of just amateurish management professors writing how leaders should be ethical, kind of stuff. I mean, but they’re really, really – I mean it was stunning because the only place I could find good stuff on it is ancient literature and – the ancients, I mean, Greek democracy inspired huge amounts of stuff on ethics and leaders, and the Romans had stuff on ethics and leaders. So, you look at even somebody like Plutarch, Ismailia, Plato, Aristotle, they’ve got a lot to say about leadership. But in contemporary times, nobody was looking at it. So, it was kind of fun. 

Scarpino: I’m going to ask you a general question that I’m going to divide into two parts. I’m going to divide it in two parts based on my reading of your record. The general question is: What constitutes good leadership? But given your interests and what I’ve read about you, I’m going to divide it in half. The first half is: What constitutes good leadership in terms of effectiveness of the leader? 

Ciulla: Right, right. Part of what I tried to do in making a dichotomy between ethics and effectiveness was to say we have to destroy the dichotomy and so… 

Scarpino: We’re going to get to that part. 

Ciulla: … right, and so in terms of effective leadership, the question is: Well, how well does a leader fill his or her responsibilities? But responsibilities mean both technical job responsibilities and moral responsibilities. So, leaders who were effective are effective at filling their responsibilities, but then we want to look at, well, that also involves a whole variety of other things: How do they fill them, how do they treat people to get them done? You can fill your responsibilities ethically and effectively in terms of getting – from a utilitarian point of view in terms of what gets done, but how you do it, there’s a whole question of ethics in that. That’s where I came up with in my later work, just these three questions of doing the right thing, the right way, for the right reason, which meant there’s several levels to what it would mean to be effective. 

Scarpino: So, the other part, or the second part is: What constitutes good leadership ethically and morally? 

Ciulla: Right. Well, and I mean, that’s what I mean by overlapping. The background to this, my approach, is really Aristotelian. The Greeks, when they talked about arête virtue, were talking about excellence, but it was both technical and moral at the same time. That was exactly what I was moving towards in terms of leadership is a notion of technical excellence that was related to moral excellence. So, the Hitler problem that a lot of people have written about, when I talk about the Hitler problem, what I was saying there is that’s what happens if you only have a notion of effectiveness as getting the job done, gets the job done. Well, he got the job done, but he didn’t get all the jobs done. I mean, he lost the war and all those things and that’s good, but getting the job done. Of course, that applies in business too because we have a whole history of people who, you know, I think of Al Dunlap, Chainsaw Al, who worked for Sunbeam and he worked for Scott Paper. He made the stock price of companies go up by going in and firing a lot of people, and they called him Chainsaw Al. He was at Scott Paper and then he went to Sunbeam and at Sunbeam – well, the guy didn’t really know how to run a business, period – but he went to Sunbeam and when he went there, the stock jumped up because very effective, he raises the stock price, very narrow notion of that. Then he was there a while and he did something phenomenally stupid, which was he put out those grills, those barbeque grills, in December. He had them shipped to stores. I mean, it was like one of these like really dumb management things that was kind of his fault in a weird way and, of course, they lost a huge amount of money and he got canned. So, having notions of effectiveness that have in them notions of ethics is really important in terms of how we think of leaders. 

Scarpino: If you put those together, and given the fact that you spent most of your professional life teaching in one capacity or another, how do you describe successful leadership to your students? 

Ciulla: Well, I say it’s ethical and effective, obviously, that’s the first point, but I don’t know if I stand there and give them a description of what that looks like. It gets back to, you know, in the European literature, there’s a whole strand of literature on responsible leadership, and that’s Bavarian. The Germans like to write about it. They also use Habermas to talk about it. There’s this whole tradition. So, instead of talking about ethics, they center it around responsibility. I would say that this notion of responsibility is core for both concepts. You know, you’re responsible for the organization and you’re responsible for the people in it, and that responsibility is both technical and moral. Now, the proof of all of that is in the details though, right, because you can be responsible towards people, but not responsible towards business and vice versa. That’s why a lot of the titles – if you look at a lot of my articles or talks – are about the ethical challenges of leadership because I’ve always gone at leadership, not by what’s a good leader because I just think that’s a boring question, but why is it hard to be a good leader? When you understand why it’s hard to be a good leader, I think you have a better chance of avoiding the pitfalls because, in general, we kind of know what a good leader is like. We don’t really need all these books with platitudes in them. We kind of know this… 

Scarpino: But they sell in airports though. 

Ciulla: Oh, they do, yeah, yeah, and they’re inspirational. That’s why people like them. They’re self-esteem books, they’re inspirational books, but what we need to know, people need to know and I think is really important in education, is why it’s difficult to be a leader. What are the challenges? What do you need to understand about yourself? What do you need to understand about the job of a leader? That’s where philosophers like Plato are absolutely brilliant. I mean, when Plato writes that leading is not in your self-interest and gives this marvelous example of why if you’re a just person, leading is not fun because people get mad at you when you’re fair. People get mad at you when you don’t give them special – you know, just think of students, they get mad at you when you’re not – when you’re behaving fairly, they get mad at you because they’re not getting a special exception. Everybody wants to be an exception. So, if they say, “Why can’t I hand in my paper next week?” and you say, “Well, everybody’s paper is due this week,” well then, you’re not fair because you’re not giving them this advantage because they’re special. 

Scarpino: Is that one of the pitfalls of leadership, is figuring out how to be fair with…? 

Ciulla: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, how to be fair with people and the realization, the pitfall is don’t expect to be liked. Plato says, you know, “If you’re a just leader, your friends and family are going to be angry at you, you’re going to have lots of responsibilities which are going to tear in different directions.” So, you can’t make everybody happy leading, and that’s a fact everybody knows, but they know it, but they don’t know it. They think I’m going to be the leader and that’s going to be great; everybody’s going to love me. 

Scarpino: That is one of the pitfalls of leadership, is trying to make everybody happy. 

Ciulla: It is, it is, and you have to be comfortable with not making them happy. That means you have to have a profound commitment to doing what’s just and fair and right within the job, and that’s taxing because it means people are going to beat up on you. 

Scarpino: How do you know that? What’s just and fair and right? 

Ciulla: Right, well, it’s going to depend on the situation. 

Scarpino: Yeah. 

Ciulla: Yeah, obviously, but, you know, trying to treat people equitably, equal cases in an equal way, trying to be consistent so that you’re not making one deal with this person and one deal with that person. Things like that are basic parts of fairness, but that’s where I think having this sort of sense of self and sense of moral commitment, you have to be able to do what’s right regardless of what happens sometimes. 

Scarpino: When you think of leaders or leadership, do you consider people who are effective, like a dictator or a demagogue, but not necessarily moral or ethical, do they fit in the room in which you put other leaders? 

Ciulla: Then that gets to the definition question in a way. So, Jim Burns would say that people like that are tyrants, and the Greeks called – Greeks had different, actually a wonderful variety of words for leaders depending on all sorts of things. So, yeah, so he would say they’re tyrants. I would say they’re leaders because they’re doing the job of a leader. We understand them as leaders. They’re leaders by their position. They’re leaders by their authority. They’re leaders because they have the power and they get people to do things, whether by force or by persuasion. So, they’re all leaders. I mean, just because you’re a leader doesn’t mean you’re good, and that’s the big problem with the definition debate. 

Scarpino: Well, I realize what I was doing by asking you that, but Jim Burns actually started something when he wrote that about who was a leader and who wasn’t, and we were kind of headed that way. Do you think leadership is a cultural construction? 

Ciulla: Yes, yeah. 

Scarpino: So, if leadership is a cultural construction, do the ethics of leadership vary from one culture to another? 

Ciulla: No, and that I think is historical. That’s an empirical question. So, it’s not like my opinion. 

Scarpino: Whichever answer, whichever way you go, I’ll ask you the other side of it. 

Ciulla: Okay, good. Well, so, let me give you an example. I mean, I’ve worked all over the world. I worked in the Middle East for a while and I’ve spent a lot of time in South Africa and places like that, and I’m doing ethics, I’m teaching ethics, so I’m talking to people all the time. In regard to leadership, you have to make some distinctions. The cultural construction of leadership has to do with the implicit models of leadership that people carry with them, what are leaders supposed to be like? Then there are a whole lot of issues of style. For example, in Asia, one thing about leaders is leaders often don’t talk much. It’s the power of silence that they have. We can look at all those cultural artifacts that are certainly constructions of how they think of the leader. But what’s interesting is when you get to the ethics of leaders, then there’s a slight difference because there are, I think, norms that cross culture and cross history have always existed. We do think that leaders are supposed to be responsible for certain things. What those things are and what that responsibility means will vary. This is the same broad question you asked about cross-cultural ethics, is every culture had some rules for when you kill people. Every culture has some rules against stealing, notions of truth. What that means in a culture, for example, truth may look different and there may be norms in terms of, you know, maybe it’s socially appropriate to tell white lies about social things. I would never deny that cultures are radically different, but I think there’s fundamentals of leadership. This is why I find some of the historical parts so interesting, that, you know, you go back and look at old ancient texts in particular and you see people behaving and thinking about leaders in the same way we do today from a moral point of view, even though, you know, the whole context is completely different. That’s why I love the David and Bathsheba story so much and talk about that in several articles. 

Scarpino: Which you wrote about, yes. 

Ciulla: Yeah, and wrote about because there’s this one part of that story that is amazing in terms of that thread that goes through history. There’s this part where King David invites home Uriah, who’s the husband of Bathsheba, tries to get him drunk so he’ll sleep with his wife to cover up her pregnancy. Uriah says, “How can I do that when my men are at the front?” There you see an example of the moral obligations of leadership that resonates across history. And it’s ironic in the story because, of course, David should be at the front. 

Scarpino: Right. 

Ciulla: And there’s lots of examples. I mean, I’ve looked at Gilgamesh, I’ve looked at a variety of other interesting ancient tales. There were some Chinese ones I looked at a while ago. I just got a new book. When I was in India, I got a book that was one of their sort of sages, and you find the same stuff everywhere. I mean, there’s certain moral things we expect from leaders. It doesn’t mean any of these leaders live up to them. 

Scarpino: I’m going to jump ahead and ask you a question I was going to ask you later. When we talked last time, one of the things you said when you were talking about teaching and leadership was that you tell your students that human beings have not changed very much… 

Ciulla: Right. 

Scarpino: … and that basic ethics have not changed very much… 

Ciulla: Right. 

Scarpino: … and what occurred to me and when I thought about it afterwards and relistened to the recording was that that’s probably true, but the word that you used a little while ago, context does change. So, I mean, the world we live in now, rapidly changing, based on technology and information, interconnected, interdependent, all the things – how do people who basically haven’t changed and ethical systems that basically haven’t changed function in a leader or follower capacity in a rapidly changing context? 

Ciulla: Right. Well, there’s two things. I mean, first of all, ethics is a lifelong project; it’s not like you learn it all at once. But the stuff, the basic stuff you learn when you’re a kid, doesn’t change much. I mean, that’s why you have fields of applied ethics. That’s why it was astounding there was no leadership ethics because applied ethics are helping you to deal with these rarified contexts of medicine, of law. I’m getting interested in the ethics of innovation and technology. How do we navigate them? We have the Hippocratic oath, well that was before you had machines that you could unplug. So, those things need to be worked with. We need to understand the context. Things like blockchain and bitcoin, those are new technologies that are going to have an effect; they’re disruptive technologies. How do we begin to deal with those? And there’s where you do need to make changes because none of that would have been relevant back then. But in terms of duties and obligations to each other, responsibilities to society and stuff, those kinds of notions, they’re still there. We just have to figure out what to do with this new stuff and put it in that context. 

Scarpino: So, a little bit different text. In 2012, I had the opportunity to interview Edgar Schein, who also won a Lifetime Achievement Award from ILA. In talking to him and doing my background research on him, he’s got this quote that just appears everywhere when you run a search on his name. The quote is: “The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture,” and by culture he meant organizational culture. I want to read Schein’s quote back to you again and then ask you to respond. Based upon your decades of studying and teaching about leadership, how would you complete Schein’s statement if I said, “The only thing of real significance that leaders do is…”, and you fill in the blank. 

Ciulla: Okay, alright. I didn’t know this was a test. Read his again though. What did he say? 

Scarpino: He said: “The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture,” by which he meant organizational culture. 

Ciulla: Right, he meant organizational. 

Scarpino: But you’re not him and you have different views of the world and of leadership; and I’m wondering if you were going to complete that statement, what would you say? 

Ciulla: Well, I don’t know if they always create it. I think the thing of importance is that leaders do bring people together and coordinate their activities towards a goal that can either be theirs or a common goal. The difference – see, that’s the other tension in the leadership literature, is most people are writing from business and they’re writing about managers, and that’s very much a business manager quote. But I think the elements of leadership is it’s somebody or some group of people getting some other group of people to work together to achieve something, some kind of thing, and that’s going to depend on what business you’re in, it’s going to depend on what context you’re looking at leadership, whether it’s a volunteer organization or whatever. So, you know, part of the role is to bring people together to do that. In terms of the human condition itself, the role of leader – you need coordination because we’re pathetic. We can’t live on our own. We have to coordinate and work with each other because we can’t produce our needs by ourselves, not anymore. 

Scarpino: Do you think most of the leadership programs that function, say in the United States today, are interested in the human condition? 

Ciulla: Probably not. I would hope – well, the Jepson School would be, I think Marietta would be, some of the liberal arts, I think the Kravis program at Claremont McKenna would be, but those are all liberal arts programs. 

Scarpino: Realizing that nobody fits a stereotype – I’ll qualify what I’m going to say but – do you think that there are differences in the way men and women lead? 

Ciulla: Not necessarily. I think if you were looking in general – I mean, we could look at individual leaders and say they do. One of the most interesting pieces of research I read on women leaders is that they tend to lead differently if they’re leading women. So, women leaders lead women, then you see a difference in the way they lead compared to the way men might lead in a typical organization. 

Scarpino: Why do you think that is? 

Ciulla: I’m not really sure. I do know, and again, I’m not a scientist, and by the way, I’ve never really studied much on gender and leadership, so this is not my area. But I just noticed that sometimes when I do work with corporate work and very rarely am I in a room with mostly women, it’s usually mostly men, and throughout my career, very rarely have I been in rooms that were – I mean, the ILA has a lot of women in it, but my professional organizations in philosophy, there’s hardly any women in it. So, I’m used to being around men. So, I know when I go into an organization and I’m doing a seminar or something and it’s mostly women, it feels completely different, and I may behave differently because of it. It’s kind of like a little less stressful in a way. But, you know, again, I’ve never run an organization of women, so I can’t tell you, but this was some kind of empirical research on it. 

Scarpino: I’ll state the obvious. You spent your entire professional career as a professional woman, so you know, I mean, I assume that part of your research was your life but… 

Ciulla: Right, right, it is. But yeah, no, it’s just that I’ve only done – have I done anything? I don’t think I’ve ever published anything on women leaders, though I have looked at them and thought about them and thought about myself in various contexts. But again, my whole background, I’ve been pretty surrounded by men. I was once accused, and I won’t say who accused me, but it was somebody in the ILA, of belonging with the men’s group. But I think it’s because in philosophy, philosophy’s really, analytic philosophy is very tough. You go through graduate school learning to fight with people. And if you’re the only woman in the room and fighting with them, you come out – and it’s also my personality. I’m not, I’m not a touchy-feely kind of person. My students are sometimes quite surprised because I tend to be a very tough teacher. So, someone like me, do I lead like a woman? I… 

Scarpino: I thought I was really careful not to say that. 

Ciulla: No, I mean, I don’t know. I mean, I run an institute now, so I do actually manage people. 

Scarpino: I mean, I’ve asked most of the people that I’ve interviewed that question and most of the people say no, but, so, and you obviously have a great deal of experience as a teacher, and you’re a leader and a scholar. 

Alright, so I want to talk about Jepson. You were there from 1991 through 2016. I’m going to start again by referring to that chapter I mentioned at the beginning that you wrote “The Jepson School: Liberal Arts as Leadership Studies.” You said the following in that article. You said: “The Jepson School is as much about liberal arts as it is about leadership studies.” I’m wondering why was the Jepson School as much about liberal arts as it was about leadership studies? 

Ciulla: Well, that’s from Aristotle. So, when Aristotle talks about the liberal arts, he says the liberal arts are the subjects you study to learn how to make good choices in a free society. That’s what’s behind that quote, and it’s a really profound statement because it’s like learning for what. And now, I’m in a business school now, so what I’m seeing happening from their point of view in terms of education, and I went into a business school partly to be a fly in the ointment because I think what’s happening there is, you know, everything’s training people for jobs and a lot of liberal arts schools are training people for jobs, and a lot of parents send their kids to college and they make them go to business school. First, I do not believe students should major in business as undergraduates. I’m going to put that on the table. They can take an accounting course and they can take maybe statistics or finance, but it’s ridiculous, and because there’s so much they need to learn to do exactly what Aristotle said is to make good choices in a free society. As a result, they get very clipped liberal arts programs and then they go to business school. I see the MBAs and I see the students now, they know nothing about history, they’re not educated people. And going back to the goal of citizens, how do you have citizens if they don’t study the liberal arts? This whole idea of usefulness, people don’t quite understand that usefulness doesn’t mean learning a trade because even if we tried to teach them a trade, it’d be obsolete by the time they got out. I mean, nobody knows jobs that well, except for something like accounting maybe, but very few courses are like accounting. So, when we put the Jepson School together, what’s really interesting in terms of positioning with the business school and liberal arts, is we kind of were in between the two because students came to us, and we got a lot of women who don’t want to go to business school but maybe wanted to be entrepreneurs or whatever, and we kind of tried to get the best of what they wanted. I mean, we’re training people for jobs, that’s for sure, but the pedagogy we used, they learned how to present themselves, which you have to do when you go to work, and by studying leadership, they got interested in practicing it. So, what’s interesting – and we didn’t foresee this, by the way. It was like one of these duh, that they’d want to actually practice leadership, but our students ended up leading all the organizations. I mean, there were times when they literally were the head of every single organization on campus because they were studying – we never taught them how to lead. They studied leadership and they got interested in both the desire and they also saw how to do it because they were studying it. They were taking courses in psychology and history and everything else. 

Scarpino: So, the original goal of the program was not to teach leadership, it was to study leadership. 

Ciulla: Yeah, and we always emphasized don’t call us the leadership school; we’re the school of leadership studies, but what we discovered is if you study leadership, you’ll want to do it and you don’t need to have training per se. Training is pedagogy that everybody in liberal arts should have. They should all know how to stand up and speak in front of people, they should all know how to present themselves. Employers loved our students because they were ready for the workforce, but we introduced things that have become commonplace. If we go back to ’91, nobody had a required internship in a liberal arts program, nobody had required service learning with courses in them. Of course, now everybody, it’s ubiquitous everywhere across it, but in those ways, we were quite groundbreaking and doing them – Dick Couto, who unfortunately passed away, he was big on service learning. He understood experiential education. When we formed the school, that school owes a lot to him because he had the knowhow to do it in a serious way. And again, people just weren’t doing this stuff. 

Scarpino: He came out of that service-learning background. 

Ciulla: Yes, yeah, and he’s a political scientist and of, course, he was very, very committed to that. He, I think, is a really important founder of the Jepson School and what it is. But of course, now people don’t even notice because the whole university does it and everybody has service learning and stuff. 

Scarpino: For the benefit of users of this interview, I’ll point out that you spent 25 years at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond, ’91 to 2016. You’re a founding member of the faculty. You were also at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania from 1986 to ’91 where you had joint appointments in Legal Studies and Management Departments and held the title of Senior Fellow. 

We talked about the time you spent at the Wharton School when we visited last time, but what we didn’t talk about was how you got from the 

Wharton School to Jepson, but we did that at the beginning. For anybody who’s listening to this thing and skipping ahead, we’ll say we’ve already done that. But they invited you, and why did you decide to accept employment there? You had a job; it was not a tenure track job, but… 

Ciulla: Yeah, yeah, I had a job and I knew also that in terms of future earnings it would be a lot less at Richmond. My colleagues said I was nuts going there. Well, because it was so exciting. I mean, they were saying to me, “The four of you are going to design a whole school, the entire curriculum.” We designed all the documents for the school, we wrote the tenure documents for it. So, basically every minutia of a school we did, and then we hired all the faculty. Then over the years I was there, I was very central to hiring all the deans. I never wanted to be the – every time we had a search for a dean, usually somebody’d nominate me to be the dean. I never wanted to be the dean. 

Scarpino: I understand. 

Ciulla: No, not because of that, but because I spent so much time outside of the school sort of evangelically spreading the word all over the world, and nobody else in the school was doing that or could do it the way I could. So, I thought if you really want to build this institution, nobody’s going to hear about us unless somebody goes out and spreads the word. I traveled almost incessantly when I was there, and now people know about the Jepson School all over the world. 

Scarpino: So, you started in ’91… 

Ciulla: Yeah. 

Scarpino: … you had three colleagues, which we’ll talk about in a minute – Dr. Howard T. Price… 

Ciulla: He was the Dean. 

Scarpino: … was the Dean. He had experience with leadership programs in the Army and at West Point. 

Ciulla: Yeah. 

Scarpino: The colleagues were Richard Couto, Karin Klenke and William Howe. 

Ciulla: Right. 

Scarpino: Just for the benefit of anybody using this, I did interview Richard Couto for about five hours at his home in Virginia. 

Ciulla: Oh good, lucky you, yeah. 

Scarpino: It was a privilege to spend time with him. 

Ciulla: Oh, he’s an amazing human being. He really was. 

Scarpino: Just to get this on the record, what were the disciplinary backgrounds of Couto, Klenke and Howe? 

Ciulla: Okay, so Couto was political science; Klenke was industrial psychology; and Howe was education. 

Scarpino: Again, just for the benefit of people who might use this, I did a little bit of background on this; and prior to the founding of the Jepson School, there was little in the way of leadership studies offered in colleges and universities in the United States. I mean, I found some places that were studying leadership, but they weren’t doing leadership studying. Ohio State comes to mind, University of Michigan. San Diego State becomes the first doctoral program in leadership studies that I could find in 1979, University of Richmond first undergraduate program in 1992. I’m pretty sure West Point was teaching leadership, maybe the other service academies, but it wasn’t common. Alice Jepson, Robert S.Jepson, Jr., in May of 1987, announced that they are going to give$20 million to the University of Richmond.

Ciulla: Which meant something in those days. 

Scarpino: It was a lot of money, and I mean, I assume people who are listening to this understand that $20 million isn’t to spend; that’s an endowment. Mr. Jepson was involved in writing a kind of founding document that went through a number of drafts and, because I’m going to refer to that, it’s on the Jepson School’s website called “Notes on the Founding of the Jepson School of Leadership Studies: An Abridged Draft Number 4.” It appears to have been adopted in the fall of 1988. Trustees of the University of Richmond approved the creation of the school in October of 1988 and held groundbreaking for the Jepson Hall in October of 1989. 

Did you ever have a chance to talk to Mr. and Mrs. Jepson about… 

Ciulla: Oh, I know them well. 

Scarpino: … why they decided to put their money into leadership? 

Ciulla: Well, it’s kind of hilarious because everybody at Richmond tells a different story. 

Scarpino: I would assume if you had $20 million to donate, you could pretty much do what you wanted to with it. 

Ciulla: Well, no, and so that document was not written by Jepson, it was written by a faculty committee prior to coming. We used to call it the fourth doc – we had a funny name for it – the fourth document or something like that. There was a phrase in there, “for and about leadership,” that that’s what the school would be, and it’s a nice way to put it. When I drafted the first philosophy statement of the school, the first sentence of it was that the Mission of the Jepson School is to educate people to take on the moral responsibilities of leadership and service to society, and then we unpacked the for and about. So, he came up with it, but Jepson did two things. Jepson understood that he’s not an academic. I mean, that’s why he’s successful. Part of his business was to buy failing businesses and make them prosperous. 

Scarpino: Yeah, so he was a successful businessperson. 

Ciulla: He was a successful businessman and he understood that you don’t go being the know-it-all when you want to make something. He’s an amazing guy and I have loved knowing him. So, he decided that, you know, there’s a lot of problems in business and everywhere else because he’s seen failing businesses with bad leadership. So, he had the general idea for the school and then he turned it over – we had an excellent President named Rich Morrill, fabulous guy – and… 

Scarpino: Morrow? 

Ciulla: Morrill. 

Scarpino: Morrill, okay. 

Ciulla: Um-hm, like the mushroom. 

Scarpino: Okay. 

Ciulla: … not like ethics and morals. He was really a sharp guy, and so he turned it over to – we also had a Dean named David Leary – and they put together a senior faculty group. They kind of started working through it and it’s a very useful document because it’s about the liberal arts and it’s really thoughtful of what we would do. So, we had that document to start with and it was a foundation, but Jepson knew, you know, he used to bound in and I still have wonderful memories of, it was like July and I just started there and so when I got to the Jepson School, many times in my life, at Harvard Business School and when I started at Jepson, I spent months with these stacks of books on my desk because it’s like, oh my God, I’m in a business school, I’ve got to learn stuff about management, so I’d start reading. At the Jepson School, I had a stack of books about leadership and I just started reading about leadership, and Bob Jepson came in… 

Scarpino: So, when you started there, the stack would have been a little smaller than it would be now. 

Ciulla: It was, yes. It was a lot smaller, and finding serious books that weren’t airport books was really hard back then. And so, Jepson came bounding in and he said, “Let’s all go to lunch, I want to hear what you’re doing.” And he didn’t come in – he just listened. He wasn’t like, “Here’s what you should do,” or “you should do this” or “you should do that.” He just listened. Then what really drove everyone nuts is, you know how universities are very protective of their donors, so he’d be sitting at lunch and he’d turn to me and say, “So, what do you need?” And of course, I’m like, “Well, let me tell you what we need.” And you know the Dean’s like, “Don’t do that, don’t do that.” But he and I have had a very nice relationship over the years. I’ve always told him exactly what’s going on, good or bad, and he knows that, but he doesn’t interfere. His vision, I mean, the one most brilliant part of his vision, and probably Rich Morrill had something to do with it, was if we had become a program, we would have been cannibalized years ago. But making this an autonomous school – first of all, arts and sciences couldn’t get at us because I have to say, they really did not like us when we came in, but we were able to have a kind of autonomy so we didn’t get into their curriculum committees and everything else, so we could actually develop and grow as really a kind of incubator to start with. And that I think was one of the most brilliant, and then there were the bricks. Obviously, you need bricks. So, we had our own building that we built. Part of that money went to building the actual – have you ever seen a picture of Jepson School? 

Scarpino: I’ve seen a picture of it. 

Ciulla: Yeah, it’s beautiful. 

Scarpino: I’ve actually been on the campus. 

Ciulla: Oh, you have? Oh, okay, so you… 

Scarpino: When I went to interview Dick, Richard, the first day that I was there, he had worker people at his house and so he met me, and then the second day I went to his house when the worker people were gone. 

Ciulla: Oh, okay. How nice. 

Scarpino: So, A) $20 million is a lot of money, but B) as an endowment, you just don’t spend the $20 million. In the world we live in now, a million 

dollars generates around $45,000, so was there other money besides that endowment? 

Ciulla: There were five endowed chairs attached to that school. I had a chair in Ethics and Leadership that was the Coston Family Chair. There was a Robbins Chair. I can’t remember the names of all the other chairs – but, so we came in, I mean, here’s what was really powerful, we came in with five endowed chairs which meant we could hire five senior people and that was really, really important. We didn’t hire them all at once, and it was very hard actually. Hiring a Chair was really hard to do, to find the right ones. 

Scarpino: In other words, the startup money wasn’t just Mr. and Mrs. Jepson’s money, it was also the money to endow those five chairs. 

Ciulla: Right, right. 

Scarpino: Okay. 

Ciulla: And so… 

Scarpino: And that’s about at least a million dollars apiece, probably more. 

Ciulla: Yeah, it was more, yeah. 

Scarpino: Yeah. 

Ciulla: Actually, I used to call my chair the footstool because that had the smallest endowment, so the University had to kick in the rest of mine. But having those chairs was really important because you could immediately bring in senior people with experience to help guide the process because, you know, you couldn’t have started our school – I mean, Bill Howe was just getting his PhD. He didn’t play much of a role in it because he just wasn’t seasoned enough to know how to do it, but we had big fights putting that school together. That was not harmonious. Our Dean from West Point thought he was going to just tell us what to do and that’s not going to, as you know, that doesn’t happen in real universities. It might happen in the military, but it doesn’t happen there, and he was from the behavioral science department, so they were looking at leadership in a very narrow way. So, lots of interesting debates, but the irony is that the core courses of the curriculum we figured out in about an hour. 

Scarpino: Can you unpack some of those debates? 

Ciulla: Yeah. 

Scarpino: You don’t need to put names on them if you don’t feel comfortable, but I think people would like to know what you all talked about. 

Ciulla: Well, part of the debate was process because academics are on equal footing, but we don’t have ranks in academia. So, part of it was just having frank discussions. The other, I remember one in particular where I thought Dick was going to get into a fist fight with the Dean. It was simply over… 

Scarpino: He struck me as a kind of mild-mannered guy. 

Ciulla: Oh, well, remember, he was a lot younger back then. 

Scarpino: Alright. 

Ciulla: No, I mean, he’s a mild-mannered guy, but we were sitting in this little room that we had. It was a very small conference room – it didn’t have windows – and Dick wanted to use something about education that had to do with leader development or something in his course. Where we had the biggest debates were not over the curriculum. The biggest debates were over the intro course. Writing, doing an intro course in leadership studies is probably the hardest thing you could do, and there weren’t any. There weren’t any, but now you have Peter Northouse’s book and you have little textbooks that people have done, so they lay out the field. We’re laying it out from scratch. We had huge fights and part of it was, so Dick wanted to use this one piece and the Dean didn’t want to use it, and he was getting really frustrated because, you know, we had all taught for many years, so we were used to making our courses. We weren’t use to a dean telling us what to do. Some of the debates were over that. One of the debates in the curriculum that I lost was I wanted a history course as a core course. We ended up, for many years, having a course called Theories and Models, which was like the worst of both worlds because it was history and it was the social psychology, you know, the typical leadership literature. The problem was you create a course that no one person can teach. So, Karin Klenke, she would teach that course, but she didn’t know much history. Then eventually, but I will say, Tom Wren and Terry Price cracked that course and were able to learn the social science and then they had the history. But finding faculty, hiring faculty to teach a course like that is really tricky because you don’t do both as well as they ought to be done. So, we eventually split that off, but I always thought history should have been the core, but again, I was the only humanities person on the faculty. Everybody else was coming out of a social science. So, those were some of the big issues. In terms of actually our take on leadership, we didn’t really have too many diversions on it because none of us, having not been in leadership studies, were wedded to any theories or anything else. We might have been wedded to different pieces of literature we wanted in a course, but that was about it. 

Scarpino: When I talked to Richard Couto, I’m pretty sure he told me that he didn’t think of himself as a leadership person until he went there either. 

Ciulla: No, no, none of us did, none of us did. 

Scarpino: James MacGregor Burns was a founding advisor. He was named Senior Fellow at the Jepson School when it opened in the early ‘90s. I believe, since the first graduating class, every year the Jepson School gives the James MacGregor Burns Outstanding Student Award. 

Ciulla: Right. 

Scarpino: What role did he actually play in development of the Jepson School? 

Ciulla: The best way to explain his role, well, he got me there. 

Scarpino: Right. 

Ciulla: Okay, good PR, because they said they, they had hired him and they never explained that he wasn’t going to be there all the time, but that’s okay. I thought oh, well, this is pretty serious, Pulitzer Prize winning historian, okay, I can get behind that, I knew his book on Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox. So, he played that role and then he took us out to lunch. The role that Burns played is he would come and we would have conversations with him, individually. So, Gill Hickman would have them, Dick would have them, we’d just spend time talking to him. It’s very funny because Jim and I, I can never say Jim is a mentor. He was never a mentor because Jim and I would do nothing but fight with each other. We’d have all these debates. We had 20-year debates over public and private morality of leaders. That’s why one of these pieces I wrote in the book that honors him is about adultery in the U.S. Presidency because that’s what I wanted to do to prove him wrong, is that yes, it does affect actually your day-to-day leadership. But, so that’s what he did. He was just sort of, he was a muse, and when he’d come, he’d give classes and stuff and that was fun. Nothing really in curriculum development per se. 

Scarpino: So, having his name associated with the place was a good thing? 

Ciulla: He was there for us. I mean, in a way, it was sort of like he was this, he wasn’t a teacher, but he was a person who came and whenever he’d come, we’d each spend a few hours with him, and we’d talk research and talk about issues and stuff like that. It was actually a brilliant thing to do because here are a bunch of people who are not leadership scholars and we get to sit around and talk to Jim Burns. We all became dear friends with him. 

Scarpino: If you step back a minute and you think about the huge outpouring of leadership literature in the past 30 years or so, a lot of it cites Jim Burns’ book, Leadership, not sure if they actually read it but… 

Ciulla: No, they’ve read the first few chapters. 

Scarpino: … how would you assess his overall impact on leadership studies? 

Ciulla: Well, it’s huge, but I would argue he doesn’t get his fair due because everyone looks at Bass’ transformational leadership and Bass got it from Burns. So even like Europeans hardly know anything about Burns, they know Bass, but they don’t know Burns. I think his impact, I mean, is huge, but I think the reason why it’s huge is there’s an example of interdisciplinary, real interdisciplinary humanities, social science interdisciplinary work on leadership. I also think it’s huge because instead of starting at an experimental level to talk about leadership, he uses history as the dataset. So, he grounds it in real human behavior and action. By looking at political leadership instead of management literature, what he does is political leadership is just a whole lot harder than management because of kind of power and authority in a democracy, democrat. You also have to remember that the thing that nobody appreciates about him, and he would repeat almost all the time to me, is that he’s a conflict theorist in the Gunnar Myrdal tradition. Well, nobody knows that about Burns, but that’s what he argues and that he sees leadership as a kind of dialectic. So, in a lot of ways, he’s very much like Habermas, which I’m always pointing out to Europeans who don’t know anything about Burns, is that for Burns, it’s a dialogue about values that goes on between leaders and followers and it’s a mutual influence relationship. And of course Bass, because it’s management, it’s no longer mutual influence; it’s charismatic leader influencing other people. I don’t think – in the big picture of things, he doesn’t get the credit he ought to get, but also in the big picture of things, he had a huge influence because he really sets in motion. Because really through Bass, Bass generates all of this other literature that morphs into authentic leadership, and Jay Conger’s work on charismatic leadership, this all sort of comes into play largely out of Bass’ workshop in Binghamton, where he was. 

Scarpino: 1978 was when Burns published Leadership? 

Ciulla: Right. 

Scarpino: Do you think that as the field itself began to develop that people rediscovered that book, it’s like they turned around and found it, and him? 

Ciulla: Well, I don’t know. I dedicated my Ethics, the Heart of Leadership book to him because that came out in ’98. I don’t know if they’ve rediscovered it. I mean, part of the problem is people don’t understand how good the book is because it’s 700 pages long and they don’t read the examples because you really need to read the historical examples to understand what he’s about. They read the first chapters where he talks about his values and all that other stuff and Maslow and all that. But unless you get to the back, you don’t even understand why he’s talking about all this stuff. I think today, nobody reads a book, a big book. I’m sorry, they don’t. 

Scarpino: I think you’re right, yeah. 

Ciulla: Nobody reads it. They read journal articles, they’ll read a couple chapters, they’ll cite him. As somebody who reviews for a lot of journals, the other trend these days is you cite people, but you don’t really read them, you just know they talk about something and you cite them. 

Scarpino: As we’ve mentioned, Jepson was clearly breaking new ground… 

Ciulla: Oh, yeah. 

Scarpino: … in leadership studies. It was the first undergraduate leadership studies program in the U.S., so far as I know. Did you ever think that when you went there, you were taking a risk? A career risk? 

Ciulla: Oh, everybody told me I was, but I didn’t care. I mean, again, I just have never thought about successful career moves and things like that. It was just this is really cool, I get to make this school, and I’m going to make it really good. So I didn’t look at it as – I never look back. It’s just kind of like I’m going to do this. 

Scarpino: If I ask you to look back now, how do you feel about what you helped create? 

Ciulla: Oh, I’m very happy about it. I’m concerned about it because, well, a lot of us old folks have left and it’s our baby. In some ways it’s good we’ve left so that it can develop, but at the same time, I see where there’s dangers where it could go wrong. It’s well established, but you’ve really got to develop the young faculty so that they’re really doing leadership studies, and I have concerns about that. Terry Price is there and he’s the old guy now, which is funny because I remember when he was a young kid when we hired him out of his doctoral program. He’s the old man at the Jepson School, and Crystal Hoyt too, and they’re both, I mean, you know, I just remember them as so young, but Terry and Crystal know both sides of the field. You have to know – so when you go into the Jepson School, you have to learn the social science even if you’re a literature professor or a religion professor. And I worry that they’re not learning both sides of the field because it’s only then, even in my own work, where you really can start cooking because you know what attribution theory is and you know what implicit models of leadership are and you know that literature, and then you take that and combine it with history and philosophy and other things, and then you make something really interesting. So, that’s my biggest concern is, that they won’t learn the full field. So, we’ll see. I hope I’m just worrying for nothing. 

Scarpino: So, 1990-92, first four faculty members come on board; we’ve already talked about that. We talked about developing the curriculum. As you look back on, say, at least the first 10 years that you spent there and there were the four of you and then you brought new people on, did the faculty engage in true interdisciplinary collaboration? 

Ciulla: I don’t know if we collaborated. The other thing is, being an arts and science person, we tended not to write with each other. I mean, I’ve hardly written anything with anybody. 

Scarpino: That’s true, I mean, that’s my life. 

Ciulla: I think out of 180 articles, I might have coauthored six or seven, but that’s just how we write, but there was a lot of collaboration with each other for working on courses together. That’s one of the things we always did really well. I think if there were any disputes, it was often when we were hiring because we were hiring a lot. So, there could be debates over which candidate you wanted, but that happens everywhere. But, yeah, I think it was interdisciplinary and we all felt like –when I sat and read that stack of books, I was reading all the socialscience stuff and then, in my own research, looking into all thehumanity stuff. So, I made sure I learned both of those, but nowadayspeople don’t. The irony is that when we had that intro course, wechanged it and this might have been bad because we thought it wasjust too hard for somebody because to do the intro course, you have toknow the social science and you have to know the other stuff. So, weended up splitting it into Leadership and the Humanities and Leadershipand the Social Sciences, so now you didn’t have to learn both. But weused to bring in junior faculty. They’d teach the intro course, they hadto learn both. We don’t do that anymore, and I think that probably is abad thing.

Scarpino: So, ‘92-93, the university dedicated Jepson Hall, the first class enters the program. How did that first class get selected? I mean, I assume people applied, but you must have had more applicants than you had spots. 

Ciulla: Right. Well, we had this interesting discussion about like are we hiring, are we picking out leaders? Well, we really didn’t want to do that. So, I used to call it the bouquet of flowers, that you just would get a variety of people, different kinds of people. We don’t want everybody who was the captain of this team or that team or the president of this, and we got lots of them. We thought what would be more boring than a class of people like that? So, we basically decided on variety. The only thing we did that manipulated the system, because it was the first time, is we took some affirmative action on the men so that we had 50/50 men and women. 

Scarpino: So, you had more female applicants? 

Ciulla: We had more qualified female applicants. The female applicants were just a whole lot better than the male ones, but we decided we wanted to start out with half and half, just to kind of see how it goes. That was the only manipulation. 

Scarpino: How did it go? 

Ciulla: It went well. It went extremely well. And, we don’t have, at least to this day, a super scientific way of picking people. We don’t even interview them, which is the other curious thing about it. But it went really well because basically that class became our partners in designing the program. They were highly critical. They let it be known when we – I mean, our intro course was horrible. I can’t even tell you how bad that course was. 

Scarpino: Well, it’s my understanding that partway through the first time you offered that course, the students said wait a minute, time out. 

Ciulla: Yep, yep. Yeah, we had a little rebellion which we loved, we loved, I mean, that was exactly – and so they became, I think, they were so empowered. And part of it, you know, making an institution – you know all the downsides of academia – but making an institution from scratch, even with our first dean who was military, but certainly the subsequent deans, we were always very, it became a very egalitarian place. We tried not to have this split between senior and junior faculty that you see. And with students, it was kind of like they’re our partners, not our clients or our whatever. That first class was really a partner and they really owned what was going on. Whether it was going on well or not going on well, they owned it. 

Scarpino: In the ‘92-93 year, you also brought on board Gill Hickman and Jay Thomas Wren? 

Ciulla: Yeah. 

Scarpino: How did they get selected? Why them and not other people? I’m not asking that you trash anybody, but you must have had more than two applicants. 

Ciulla: Oh, yeah, yeah. We had plenty of applicants. Well, I think… 

Scarpino: And I’ll just say, so the recorder knows and you do, I both know Gill Hickman and interviewed her at length. 

Ciulla: Yeah, right, because she was a winner of this award too. Well, so with Tom, it’s a funny story. Tom, the first round of hiring, applied to the Jepson School. The Dean did not like his application letter because Tom, being a really thoughtful, critical thinker, in his letter wrote, “Well, and there are certain questions I would have about how you develop the leadership program.” I mean, very intelligent, kind of on the one hand, on the other. Well, our Dean hated that apparently, and he didn’t make it the first time around in that original four, which I really wish he had. So, then the second time – he applied twice. So, he applied the second time and I read his letter, and it was the same kind of sort of thoughtful thing. The Dean said, “Oh, but he said this and this.” I said, “But that’s exactly the kind of person you want, is somebody who comes in with a critical eye and goes through it.” And so Tom came and we all fell in love with him and we had Tom. Then, of course, he did the great thing; he took our mess of an intro course and made it into the Leader’s Companion, he cut it down because our intro course was 600 pages long. It was ridiculous. That’s because we threw in everybody’s suggestions. We didn’t know how to teach this course. So, that was him. Then Gill came along and Gill brought a very different experience. She wasn’t a big publisher or anything of books back then. Gill is interesting because she didn’t come in with that. She was a full professor with very few publications, but the most interesting thing about Gill is that almost all of her publications came after she got tenure, and then she had quite a few. So, her trajectory is just different, but she was in administration before that. 

Scarpino: She also had a different life experience than the rest of you. 

Ciulla: Yeah, her whole life experience was different, but we thought that was a good thing too. Again, I think it’s kind of a dumb thing, it’s like biosystems with people. You say diversity is good and people think that’s political correctness, but it’s having the variety of ideas and life experiences and perspectives that are really, really important. And when you don’t know what you’re doing, that’s a good fallback position because we frankly always were saying we were making it up as we went along. 

Scarpino: We talked about the first course that you all put together and the pushback from the students, but when I talked to Gill Hickman about you, as opposed to interviewing her about her, she said that at graduation ceremony you said to the parents, “I’m the faculty member who made your students cry.” Is that true? 

Ciulla: Yes. 

Scarpino: So, what did you have in mind? 

Ciulla: We had criers all the time. Well, I taught critical thinking. Critical thinking is a really hard course and it’s a really frustrating course. I just wanted to push them because these kids, you know, they’re used to sort of being not very careful. So, you know, you’ve got somebody making them dot every I and cross every T and do everything, or you give them logic exams. Logic exams are really hard. I mean, it’s worse than math. If you’re not good in math, it’s like this mechanical thing that you don’t do well, when you’re not good in logic, it like makes your head hurt. So, it was a bit of a boot camp critical thinking, and people cried. They’d come in my office and cry. They just couldn’t do it. But at the end, they thanked me. 

Scarpino: They did do it. 

Ciulla: Yes, they did do it and, you know, our students did really well on law board exams because they had all the kind of logic and skills that you actually need to answer a question like this. Employers loved the fact that they took them, and most of them ended up writing better when they got out of it. I mean, it was the hardest course I’ve ever taught. It exhausted me, it exhausted them. By midterm, they hated me, they hated the course, they cried. But that was how I was teaching them. Maybe that’s not a good way to teach people, but it seemed to work. Then it got to be a joke because it wasn’t just me. So, then Terry Price came on. He taught critical thinking too. He had criers every semester too, so it wasn’t – part of it was really the course. Then Jess Flanigan came on and she had criers. It got to be this joke, did you have any criers this semester? 

Scarpino: I talked to Terry Price. I called him and I think he was in his office. He told me that when you retired, he made some remarks, and then he was nice enough to send me the remarks. 

Ciulla: They’re beautiful, aren’t they? 

Scarpino: Yes, they are. 

Ciulla: And they’re witty and clever. 

Scarpino: One of the things that I pulled out of that when I read it was, he said: “Joanne was also modeling how to teach not just ethics, but leadership ethics. I saw up close the ease with which she used moral philosophy and real-world cases to get students to think about its central ethical problems,” “its” being the world. Can you talk a little bit about how you used moral philosophy and real-world cases to get students to think about central ethical problems? 

Ciulla: Yeah, well, part of being a philosopher is that you live with these theories for years. So, beginning philosophers have a very hard time explaining things because they explain them the way they’re written in the book. When you live with them for a while, like Kant, who’s, you know, hard to read and stuff, my students would read parts of Kant, they like become your old friends, like they’re kind of your buddies. For example, I’ll give you a very concrete example. One of the things that helps you understand Kant is that for Kant, the only way it’s ethics is if it hurts. Now, my students all remember that because basically he says it’s not an ethical decision if it’s your natural inclination to do something, if you’re naturally kind or whatever. He said that’s not what ethics is. Ethics is about being kind when you don’t feel like being kind because you do it out of a duty. It’s just a lot of those kinds of things. So, what I would do is take the theories and pair them with cases and, of course, I worked a lot with different companies and government agencies at the same time. As a matter of fact, when we were, very beginning of the Jepson School, I did a huge job for J.P. Morgan in the U.S., Europe and Japan. Out of it, I extracted, they told me cases, so a lot of the cases from my practical work with companies are in my books. I’ve disguised them and made them – So, I knew a lot about these real things and I would pair them with the ethical theory. I’d look at the theory and say, “Well, this case has this particular dynamic and if you were to discuss this case, you would inevitably be making the same point that Kant is making here.” That’s how I went at teaching ethics and that’s how I put together my textbook. 

Scarpino: So, you were kind of marrying the Harvard case study system with philosophy. 

Ciulla: Yeah. I was kind of doing it that way, but I was doing it in sort of a reverse way because I was saying let’s take the case and see how it shows you the theory. So, in my book, you’ve got… 

Scarpino: As opposed to starting with the theory. 

Ciulla: … right, yeah, and saying okay, here are all these theories, now you’re going to apply them to a case. No, I’m just making people come up with the theories themselves and say, “Okay, well that’s exactly what Kant would say.” Or, you know, my favorite case was sleazy or stupid, and one of the questions you have to ask is: Is this guy in the habit of behaving this way? which is exactly the way Aristotle thinks about ethics. So, you get them there and then you can sort of move them into the philosophy sort of without it being alien to them. I actually learned that from my first, my first ethics teacher was really good at the University of Maryland. He taught a huge class of like 250 people and he was a child actor on Rin Tin Tin. Can you imagine? 

Scarpino: What was his name? 

Ciulla: Barry Curtis. 

Scarpino: Child actor on, well, I used to watch Rin Tin Tin when I was a little kid. 

Ciulla: I know, I remember it too. Barry Curtis, he was a Marxist and so you can imagine what a great teacher he was. But he had this sort of same way of like these are just buddies of mine and it sort of familiarizes – you want to make people feel really relaxed and comfortable about the philosopher, not like they’re these up in the air people. I learned that and it always stuck with me because I thought, oh, because he just makes them seem friendly. 

Scarpino: When I talked to Gill Hickman, she talked about the leadership ethics, the class on leadership ethics that became the capstone course at Jepson that you taught… 

Ciulla: Right. 

Scarpino: When you had students take that class and then they finished their studies and went on to graduate and I assume went on to careers, many of them in leadership positions, what do you hope they would’ve remembered from that course in five or 10 or 15 years? 

Ciulla: Well, I think some of the real basics that leadership is not about you, that leadership – I think one of the most important things is when you’re in a leadership role, you’re responsible for everything, even the things you don’t do. And unless you’re willing – because you’re going to take all the praise for the good things that happen, but you’re going to take all the blame even if you had nothing to do with it. Even if it’s some idiot in your company who does something, it’s still, there’s a sense in which it’s your fault. You need to know that upfront because any leader who doesn’t know it is going to be in trouble. And then the second, there’s some really basic Kantian things that, you know, first of all you have to keep yourself in perspective. The idea of thinking that you’re special, and Terry Price talks about being special a lot, you’re not special if you’re a leader, even though people will be telling you and treating you as if you’re special, to think you’re special or different from everyone else. Then also this wonderful – I used part of Paul Woodruff’s book; he’s a classics professor at Texas and he’s a philosopher and he wrote a book on reverence. Reverence is the virtue that keeps leaders from acting like gods because it’s the virtue that says you’re part of a larger whole. And so, I mean, I think those are some of the big things. Then, of course, the message: It’s really dangerous to want to be liked if you’re a leader; it’s morally dangerous. But it was a capstone because to study leadership ethics, you’ve got to talk about group dynamics, you have to talk about historical questions, you have to talk about leadership theories, a lot of the theories come into it. So, it is a way to sort of pull in a lot of what they learned in the context of ethics. 

Scarpino: So, 1999-2000, you were named the first UNESCO Chair in Leadership Studies at the United Nations International Leadership Academy, Amman, Jordan – what was that? 

Ciulla: Well, that’s one of those funny things where they came to talk to me because they were recruiting for a Chair and I gave them all sorts of advice and then they named me the Chair. There’s 50 UNESCO Chairs in the world and they’re in different fields and they’re connected to – I think there’s, back then, there were 10 United Nations universities. They’re more virtual than physical universities and so the Leadership Academy was started in Jordan by King Hussein and Queen Noor. After King Hussein died, Queen Noor was the head of our school. So, I got to know Queen Noor. What they would do is, and I got to do some of the recruiting in Africa, in Sub-Saharan Africa, they would go to different countries. So, I went to Nigeria, Namibia, then South Africa and you would recruit sort of 30 to 40-somethings who were in roles, and it could be in business or government or nonprofits, whatever, who were potential leaders. So, they would be nominated for this program, they would go to Jordan. At that time, we were in the University of Jordan, then we got our own building. The other head of the school was a guy named Majali, who was the Foreign Minister for King Hussein. Majali was a physician by training. So, they would come and you’d have 40 people, usually from 40 countries, but a lot of them from Middle Eastern countries, and we’d put on different thematic programs. I helped them design their library and I trained their staff. So, a lot of the stuff from the Jepson School I was kind of transferring. We did – one program was called Beijing Plus Five – I’ll be showing a slide from that tomorrow; I have a couple pictures from these places… 

Scarpino: Unfortunately, I’m interviewing Keith Grant while you’re speaking, so I’m really sorry it worked out that way. 

Ciulla: Well, I might be able to send you my slides because you’ll actually see pictures of these things. Beijing Plus Five was my favorite because these were emerging female political leaders. They came to Jordan and we did a program with them. Then we took them all to New York to the United Nations because they were all Delegates in the Beijing Plus Five Conference there. We had Mary Robinson talking to them. I mean, we would just get these amazing people to talk to them because it’s United Nations. Another program I did was on Conflict Resolution. We got Jerry Adams to come. I mean, if it’s U.N., you can actually get all these really cool people to be practitioner speakers. I was basically commuting to Jordan for a while. I would do like – well, I would have like a Monday-Wednesday teaching schedule or a Monday-Thursday, well, it’s usually Monday-Wednesday, and then I would fly to Jordan and I would come back on a Sunday. They always flew me business, so I could sleep on planes and things, but I did that for quite a while. Well, it seemed like a long time; it wasn’t that long, but I did it for a long time. I met Queen Noor and she would come and we’d have these nice graduations and things like that. But it was a remarkable program, and I will say the Women’s Program was the most fascinating. We had mayors – there was a night, we had one woman speak in our program who was a 19-year old female mayor of a town in Jordan back in 2000. We asked her, “Well, how did you ever get elected?” Jordan’s not really a democracy, it’s sort of, but at the local level it is. So, they do elect people to be mayor. She got elected mayor – how do you campaign when you can’t go to men’s things…? 

Scarpino: Right. 

Ciulla: … through sports clubs because apparently women could go to sports clubs. So, she worked her way through sports organizations and that’s how she campaigned. But, yeah, that was a remarkable experience. Also, the experience got me – that’s where I met the people from Desmond Tutu and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. 

Scarpino: Which you were also involved with. 

Ciulla: Yeah, for six years I was on Desmond Tutu’s Board. So, I met them on this one trip, recruiting trip. We were in Nigeria, Namibia and then South Africa and that’s where I met Chris Aarons who was Tutu’s right-hand man. Then they asked me to join the American Board, so I’ve gone back and forth to South Africa quite a bit over the years. 

Scarpino: What were the responsibilities of a Board member? 

Ciulla: Well, they had two Boards. So, we were the U.S. Board. Well, we had to raise money. And we did some programs because one of the things 

the South Africans didn’t understand – and a lot of these were prominent anti-apartheid people who had been in jail and then got out of jail and made mountains of money – is that they didn’t understand that you can’t raise money unless you do something. They wanted to build this Peace Center and this Foundation, but you can’t do it – so, what we ended up doing is, because we couldn’t get them to do it, is programs. So, we had to have like youth programs and we had to have things so that, so that somebody, I mean, we finally – right before I left we got a million dollars from Bill Gates Foundation, but unless you show them that you’re doing something, you can’t raise money. 

Scarpino: You’re not going to get money, right. 

Ciulla: They didn’t understand that because, I mean, being in a nonprofit like this was completely alien to them. So, they would come to Washington to one of our meetings and basically do a “show us the money,” and we would basically say, “Look, you really need to do stuff there so we can sell what’s happening.” So, we did some great programs and, you know, I got to know Desmond Tutu, and he came and we did a youth program here. We had these series of kinds of programs we did. I sent some of my students over to work with them in South Africa. We had a youth leadership development program. So, we had those kinds of things, but it was a real great learning experience because it’s extremely difficult. Then, of course, we couldn’t assert ourselves too much because then we would be accused of being colonialists, I mean, because these are the people who are in the movement. Fascinating, absolutely amazing learning experience in terms of cross-cultural negotiation, as it were. But we did raise money for them and they did get the land from the city in Cape Town. Actually, I haven’t checked lately to see if they ever got to building the Peace Center because the red tape was phenomenal. It was a very difficult thing to do. 

Scarpino: It must have been. So, what was Desmond Tutu like? 

Ciulla: Oh, he’s delightful. 

Scarpino: I mean, I’ve seen him on television, but that doesn’t mean anything. 

Ciulla: Well, first of all, he has a man giggle; he’s a giggler. He has a great giggle. I love his laugh. I remember I was meeting him in New York and I went up to his hotel room because we were all going to meet in his hotel room. I was the first person there and it was like, I was a little nervous. Here I am sitting in a hotel with Desmond Tutu. He wanted to do a little service, like a little religious thing. That’s what he would do in the morning. And I guess they’re Anglican, and so they were bringing some bread and a little wine because you’re supposed to do the bread and wine. I’m not religious, so, and I didn’t know the deal. Anyway, so he’s talking to me and he said, “Well, I’m going to do this reading,” and then he starts giggling. It was some ridiculous Scottish reading that had –I forgot what was so funny about it, but it was just kind of crazy. Hedecided to do it because he thought it was hilarious, and I thought, youknow – but he was interesting because one of the things that happenedto all – and I think, you know, in my studies on Mandela, I found this too–is they suffered and struggled and fought and fought and fought, andthen they won. And there was part of them that like just didn’t want todo it anymore, just kind of wanted to have fun. You see this a lot whenyou look closely at what happened to Mandela and you see it with Tutu.So, we were constantly having a little bit of a struggle with him because,you know, if we really wanted to raise – I mean, we got a million fromGates because Tutu met with Gates. All we had to do was send Tutu into meet with somebody and we would have gotten tons of money, butgetting him to do it – you know, and you can understand, they’re tired,they’ve had it, you know, it’s hard. So, part of our difficulty with him wasjust managing him and getting him to do some things so we couldactually raise money. But as a person, he’s every bit as warm andlovely. The other thing I really loved about him that he alwaysemphasized is he said, “Just because people are religious doesn’tmean they’re ethical.” We all know that, but to hear it coming fromsomeone like him is pretty profound. So, yeah, that was an honor toknow him.

Scarpino: I’m going to work on wrapping this up. 

Ciulla: Sure. 

Scarpino: I want to respect the two hours, but I always ask people this question that I’m going to ask you and it starts with – there’s been an explosion of literature in leadership studies in the last 30 years or so, but if somebody were to come up to you and say, “I’m kind of interested in this and I want to begin to learn,” what handful of things are the must-reads, as far as you’re concerned? 

Ciulla: I would give him Burns’ book. I would give him probably – that’s a tough one. I would give him Burns’ book. I would give him, actually, my “Leadership Ethics: Mapping the Territory,” even though that’s a critical paper, it kind of lays out what the basic elements are of reading the literature. I would probably give him – I would give him Bennis’ book on leaders because that’s got some basic practical things in it. There’s a really nice collection that I happened to be in, by John Antonakis, which I think is one of the most sophisticated collections, if they were like graduate students, and that’s called The Nature of Leadership. I would give them that. I would have them read Plato. I’d have them read The Republican, The Statesman – I don’t think you can do leadership without them. I’d have them read Cicero, On Duties. I 

would have them read Marcus Arelius, who I think is totally awesome on leadership. Who else would I have? 

Scarpino: That’s one that I haven’t read. 

Ciulla: Oh, mind boggling because it’s all about shared leadership because Marcus Arelius was a co-emperor, and he talks about it. It’s like mind blowing. So, I would have them read that. So many. There’s so many interesting – well, A Journey to the East, I would definitely have them read that. What else would I have them read? Well, Bass’ first book. I would have them look at that. Yeah, you need to look at Bass’ first book. I think that’s an important book. Who else writes a really good book on leadership? I mean, there aren’t a lot that I would say are – oh, well, I would have them read Machiavelli, of course. And I would have them read either Michael Walzer or Richard Hare or one of the other philosophers on the dirty hands problem because the dirty hands problem is important. Well, those are the quickest ones that come to mind. 

Scarpino: Well, it’s interesting to see what people – but Burns’ book is almost always on people’s lists. 

Ciulla: Yeah, yeah. 

Scarpino: I’m going to run some contemporary issues by you and see how you respond in terms of somebody with an expertise in leadership ethics. Then I’ll ask you a couple wrap-up questions and we’ll be done. 

Ciulla: Okay. 

Scarpino: The first current trend that comes to mind is the rise of populism. It was driven home to me because, you know, obviously, the journal Leadership, Keith Grint and (INAUDIBLE) co-found that, the most recent volume is a special issue entitled “Populism and Dissent.” The editors in there talk about the importance of this movement to leaders and followers. So, the question that I have is: How do you assess the rise of populist movements through the lens of your own understanding of leadership? 

Ciulla: Well, I mean, to me, understanding populism is less about the leaders and more about what’s going on with the people. So, my recent work, again, I’ll be talking about it a little bit tomorrow, the stuff I’m working on now in relation to that has to do with work on resentment. A philosopher named Max Scheler wrote about resentment in the 1920s, and the historical conditions for resentment were exactly the ones today. High levels of inequality was number one. I mean, and again, you have to think of this because this is when we see the onset of fascism in Europe. So, we have Nietzsche, who writes about it. Now, Nietzsche died in 1900. Then Scheler writes a whole book on it, on resentment. The historical conditions are the same and, more importantly, the inversion of values is the same. In other words, what happens in populism very often is people feel that certain things are not within their reach; and as a result, they decide they’re bad. The quick and dirty way to understand this is through the Aesop fable of the Fox and the Grapes. Okay, so the fox can’t reach the grapes, so he says, “Well, they’re sour.” So, populism I think – I don’t think leadership theories actually really explain it very well. I think history explains it. So, I mean, that’s why I immediately wanted to know, okay, so let’s go back and see what’s going on back then and try to understand that and people who were writing about it back then. Because, you know, like any presidential scholar, you never write about the president when he’s in office because you don’t know what it’s going to pull back. So, I think that the rise of populism is partly related to resentment. My friend in Venezuela, who wrote a book for my series, wrote a book called Leadership by Resentment. But what happens in populism is obviously things like resentment get cultivated, but the other thing about it is in terms of ethics and effectiveness, that they come to not care about ethics – and in American politics, nobody cares about ethics; they care about who get’s the job done, right? So, that’s one thing that starts to happen, but more importantly, and here’s what I’m really fascinated by, is that when there’s resentment, people are willing to hurt themselves to hurt their enemies. So, they go against their own self-interest. So, take it from a Democrat side, okay, so, because we always want to talk about Trump followers, but if, for example, the thought has crossed your mind – you know, he had this great meeting with Kim Jong-un and if the thought ever crossed your mind that oh, God, I’d really hate it if he actually brought about peace, then you’re actually wishing for something against your enemy that’s not in your self-interest. We have a whole lot of that going on, so you have people supporting political leaders who do not support their self-interest, but are against their enemy. That’s an old dynamic. We understand that dynamic. In retrospect, when we look at Trump, it’s going to be a lot more about his followers because he’s just an anomalous odd human being, but the real question is: Why is anybody following him? So, I think we’re going to learn a lot in studying this period. I’m afraid to pontificate too much about the present because… 

Scarpino: Well, I realized in asking that question, it sort of invites somebody to talk about President Trump, but this isn’t the only populist movement in the world. 

Ciulla: No, no. It’s not, it’s happening everywhere. I first saw this, this dynamic of wanting to do something that hurts yourself because it hurts your enemy, I saw it in the Middle East when I was working in Jordan because people – remember after 9/11, some people said the U.S. did that so they could – well, I mean, that’s the mentality that you would harm yourself to harm your enemy back then was an unthinkable thing for most Americans to have in their mind. It wasn’t unthinkable in the Middle East. It’s not unthinkable in Russia. As a matter of fact, the Russians have an expression, “I would rather gouge out my eyes than see my neighbor get ahead.” 

Scarpino: The second sort of current trend that really strikes me as having some leadership elements to it is the explosive development of artificial intelligence. Sage Publications, which is familiar to people who do leadership studies, actually hosts what they call a microsite on their website and it’s about artificial intelligence. 

Ciulla: Ha, cool! 

Scarpino: The introduction says: AI industry could top $1 trillion in 2018, almost $4 trillion by 2022. As well as being a feat of engineering and computing, there are a significant amount of social and moral implications that need to be considered. This microsite brings together cutting-edge research across many of these disciplines to help bridge the gap between the mechanical and technical elements of AI with the philosophical and ethical questions that it raises, which of course, has to do with leadership. 

So, the question is: What do you think about the place of leaders and followers in a world that increasingly… 

Ciulla: AI, yeah. 

Scarpino: … AI? 

Ciulla: Well, it’s the ethics of algorithms. 

Scarpino: Exactly. 

Ciulla: Well, actually, I’ve started doing a lot more of this in my class. One of the really interesting examples is just because you can do something with AI doesn’t mean you ought to. There were these two Stanford scientists who very misguidedly tried to make this point because they tried to create facial recognition so people could use it – it was a facial recognition system called gaydar. It could tell if somebody was gay by markers in their face. They got all these pictures off of, I guess, Facebook or social media. They coded all the markers and they created this algorithm, and they had a fairly good success. Well, so you create that, and they were trying to make a social point, but, of course, you can imagine what a horrible thing it is. Should things even exist? – is the question that we’re not asking beforehand, we’re asking it after. Then, of course, the electric car trolley problem is a really big one as well. I mean, who decides whether you hit one person or five people in an electric car. So, I don’t think they thought it through. Then, of course, we have the sociological problem that the people running a lot of these companies are a bunch of kids who have not been particularly well educated in anything other than what they do. So, I think that is almost – the human problem is almost bigger than the technology problem, that you have people who don’t even know how to think about this, but they do know how to make gaydar, but they don’t know how to think about it before they make the gaydar. 

Scarpino: You’ve been doing this for a long time. As you look back on the field of leadership studies and compare the way it is now with the way it was when you entered the field, what encourages you the most? 

Ciulla: There’s more humanities in it, so that encourages me. The Europeans are doing some interesting work in it that’s slightly different, so they’re bringing in critical theory. Some of that’s incoherent, but – a lot of it’s incoherent – but the ones who write coherently about who bring in critical – so, it’s broadened, it’s generally broadened. I think there’s still pockets where the literature’s horrible, but a lot of the social sciences has gotten a lot more rigorous. The interesting thing about empirical studies is that the more rigorous it gets, often the less it says because of all of the parameters of doing it properly. 

Scarpino: It gets narrowed down. 

Ciulla: Yeah. So, often there’s a lot of studies that are – because I referee it extensively for the Leadership Quarterly which, unlike Leadership, it’s got much more quantitative studies in it, and they say less and less. So, what’s interesting is, as the social science methodology gets better in leadership studies, the contribution gets narrower and smaller. 

Scarpino: The follow up question I was going to ask you was: As you look back on the field of leadership studies and compare the way it is now with the way it was then, what discourages you? 

Ciulla: What discourages me? It’s still amateur hour for a lot of people, meaning that there’s a whole lot of people who – I’m going to get in trouble here – there’s a lot of people who teach it or are teaching it in places who really haven’t studied it, but are often consultants and other people who have experience in it, but there’s no framework. And, of course, part of educating people in any subject is you need a kind of, let’s call it a taxonomy – I don’t mean it literally – but you need a way of framing things in terms of solid research and some kind of disciplinary background. The lesson I learned at the Jepson School, and I mention it in that article, is when we hired people, we did not hire people from leadership studies because we wanted people to have a discipline. So, the best leadership literature will come from people who actually have a discipline in a regular field because leadership studies is not a discipline, it’s a field of studies. So, people need to know how to do that field of studies from some rigorous background. When you see people –I remember when we did a special issue for the Leadership Quarterlyon leadership and the humanities, a bunch of social scientists werewriting history papers and we sent them to historians and they gotrejected. Well, I mean, people don’t understand, there’s actuallymethodology in doing history, there’s method to doing literature, there’seven method in doing philosophy. I mean, it’s conceptual analysis, atleast analytic philosophy there is. So, unless you have people whoknow that, they don’t even have a good basis to get off the ground, andso “let me tell you how I did it in Cleveland” kind of leadership. Weused to get people who would apply for jobs because they thought theywere great leaders or they had wonderful leadership backgrounds.There’s a role for people like that in a program, but not teaching acourse.

Scarpino: As you look back on your career, what are you proudest of? 

Ciulla: The Jepson School. 

Scarpino: Is there anything that you’d do over if could, in terms of your career? Or is there anything about your career about which you have regrets? 

Ciulla: Not really. No, I’ve been pretty happy with it. As I said, I never planned it and I don’t think I ever looked back and said, “Oh, gee, I should have gone here instead of going there.” I don’t think – I can’t think of anything that I did like that. Yeah, no, I don’t think so. 

Scarpino: Do you consider yourself a work in progress? 

Ciulla: Oh, God, yeah. I’m starting my second career. I mean, who takes a new job at 65? 

Scarpino: You have a point. 

Ciulla: Yes. 

Scarpino: Professionally, who do you look up to? 

Ciulla: Who do I look up to? 

Scarpino: Who inspires you? 

Ciulla: In leadership studies or just…? 

Scarpino: Well, let’s start with that, and then you can go to generally. 

Ciulla: In general? Well, I mean, in my lifetime, I think Richard Hare. He was an Oxford philosopher. I think of all the people, he probably had the most influence in terms of how I think, how I write, sort of just how to do it. The other person who was awesome was Sam Vaughan. Sam Vaughan was a very famous editor at Random House. In my book, The Working Life – he was William F. Buckley’s editor and Leon Uris’ editor. He had edited a whole lot of the greats – and he took me on and basically taught me how to write a book, in the old-fashioned way. We would have these letters and long discussions. He would take me to fabulous lunches at the Four Seasons in New York. It was a trade book and this was still the old days of publishing, but I probably learned the most from him about writing. From Hare, about how to think. Those are two people that I really look up to. In terms of today in academia, well, I mean, I sort of look up to Burns even though we didn’t agree – and his career advice, I would never have taken. I mean, I just thought it was not for me. So, sometimes he would try to give me that and then I would explain to him why he was wrong, but that was what was so wonderful about our relationship. It was always this kind of wonderfully good-spirited, I mean, not mean at all, but let’s have fun and argue with each other kind of relationship. I guess those are the people who inspire me. Aside from that, I mean, one thing that happens when you study leaders – I did this huge intensive study for three years when I was at Fort Hare of Mandela, and I was reading his own hand-written stuff he was writing in prison – is that the more you study leaders, the more you realize that they’re human beings like you. And so, I mean, what’s – and that doesn’t denigrate leaders; it basically says, well, it’s interesting how someone can navigate their own humanness to actually do certain things. You know, he’s a highly flawed man who in some ways didn’t have the kind of perfect leadership skills we think that all leaders are supposed to have, but everybody goes at it in a different way. So, you have to admire us because we’re just highly flawed as human beings. The funny thing about leadership is it requires you – it puts you in a job where having flaws is a real disaster. That’s why in my text, I always say “leadership is morality and immorality magnified” and yet, you know, people do it. So, I admire people who can sort of go to work and get the job done every day. 

Scarpino: Is there anything that you wanted to say that I haven’t given you a chance to say? 

Ciulla: I don’t really think so, no. You ask good questions. 

Scarpino: Thank you. 

Ciulla: You’re welcome. 

Scarpino: Before I turn these things off, thank you very much. 

Ciulla: Okay. 

Scarpino: Now, let me make sure I actually get them turned off this time. 

(END OF RECORDING)