And the Rest are Communists

After spending the weekend with an old friend who had recently left Portland to pursue her masters in New York City, I came down with a bad case of grad school jealousy. As she told me about her inspiring peers and professors, her fabulous classes, and her campus job offering tuition remission, my resolve to suffer my way through business school for the next two years started to ebb away. What if, in my compulsion to martyr myself on behalf of the nonprofit industry, I had sold myself incredibly short? What if there was a program out there with people who were passionate about the same things as I am who I could learn from and study alongside? Panicked, I desperately began searching the internet for news of a program that was well ranked and offered courses in nonprofit finance and management.

One of the first schools to pop up was Brandeis. I had thought about attending Brandeis for a brief time when I was considering undergraduate colleges, but had been turned off by its dismal location and seemingly East Coast attitude. Now here I was, looking at its MBA in Nonprofit Management, reading its claim to "create agents of social change" and trying to imagine driving across the country with two screaming cats in tow. Some part of me reminds myself not to base my entire future on the fear of moving my cats, while another part of me begs not to have to leave Portland myself.

My scheming is cut short by the fact that I have to go to class. When I arrive at my social responsibility class, I look around, noticing that my peers' faces are finally beginning to crystallize and I am able to put names to 4 or 5 of them. I scrutinize them, thinking, "Who would be in my classes at Brandeis? At Yale? Would there be people like you?" I reflect on the little I know of these people so far. At least one of them works for a nonprofit. The girl who seemed so callous on the first night, asking why people didn't move out of nursing homes if the care was so bad, asks tonight "What is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce?' A small part of me sneers at her naivety, though after our professor explains, I realize I didn't really know either.

Another student who I had written off the first night begins to talk about her experience on a basketball team, quitting because of the negative team energy and because she was getting shoved into lockers. My heart softens towards her. Another student brings up the Madoff scandal and says that the reason it made her so mad was because he ripped off so many non profits. My professor admits that it made him mad because it ripped off Sandy Koufax, his childhood hero. I share a smile with a boy wearing a Dodgers sweatshirt, as I remember my own brother and father idolizing Sandy Koufax as well.

In class tonight, we are discussing the "Parable of the Sadhu," an ethics case so elementary that I hardly want to engage in the discussion. We have read about how a team of privileged American mountaineers found a dying holy man atop a mountain they are climbing in Nepal, and we are supposed to discuss what we would have done in their place. Would we have stopped climbing to rescue the man, in effect losing a climbing opportunity of a lifetime? Or would we have forged ahead, doing the bare minimum of caring for him before returning to our quest, as did the men in the story.

Identifying as an ethical person, for me the answer is clear. I roll my eyes as my peers iterate various obvious perspectives, and it is some time before I finally ask myself if the answer is so obvious. The issue really in question is about "diffusion of responsibility." Who will act when there is no clear leader appointed? Who will take responsibility when others could just as easily step up? What if the example was not about rock climbing, but about something I cared about and had worked hard for? Would I stop in my tracks, undoing months of hard work, to help with something that wasn't my problem? When put that way, I realize the answer is less clear.

I remember when I first started working at In Other Words we had just received a grant from a prominent local foundation and all the people who had worked hard for months outlining the project and drafting the proposal had just left. The work of carrying out the project and measuring its success fell to no one. As a new manager, I knew that something had to be done about it, but already overwhelmed with a huge amount of work and knowing little about grants, I did nothing. No one else did anything about it. The grant period ended and we had no project, no evaluation, and no report. We had effectively destroyed our relationship with the local foundation. My inaction had hurt the organization I cared so much about, and even though it was not "my responsibility," I could have taken care of it.

"What fixes the problem of diffusion of responsibility?" my professor prompts us. "Clearly outlining roles and responsibilities," one student offers. Communication. Training. Education. Business school, I wonder? Isn't that why I am here? After all of the situations I could have handled better, but lacked the skills or knowledge needed, I finally checked myself into graduate school with the intention of learning what I could to become a better leader. I reflect on my crisis of only a few hours ago, and think that maybe where I'm at right now is exactly where I need to be. I have already learned from the students who I so quickly rejected and in the class that I deigned to be a part of. Earlier in the week, to demonstrate a probability problem, my statistics professor had used the proportion of democrats to other political parties in Portland. "All the rest are communists anyway," he quipped. That's right, I realize, even in business school, this is still Portland and under it all, we at least share that.