Looking back ten years (or nine in the case of UW-Whitewater), one finds at the helm of Whitewater’s public institutions leaders who so very much embodied Old Whitewater: Steinhaus, Brunner, Coan, Telfer (beginning in ’07). They were the perfect representatives of Old Whitewater, where Old Whitewater is an attitude, not an age: narrow, grandiose, mediocre, producing little more than self-praise and ceaseless exaggerations about sham accomplishments. 2006-2007 was the high watermark of Old Whitewater.
To these officials, it must have seemed that their outlook would continue, unquestioned and unchallenged, forever. Newspapers were still seemingly strong and unquestionably fawning, the Banner was just beginning a servile boosterism of all things official, and together these few leaders advanced in unison a one-city, one-view, one-way perspective.
Ten years on, each one of the officials named is gone from the offices they then held, each of them having left in disappointment and failure. (On the university side, the full measure of the mess that Richard Telfer left behind is only now spilling out.) These failed leaders were once treated as tiny deities within the city; when I started writing in 2007, it was common to meet even educated people who spoke about them in reverent tones.
(I, in fact, do believe in God; I’ve just never felt – and never will feel – that He holds local office in Whitewater.)
There are undoubtedly a few who still cling to those now-gone officials as giants, but then there are probably a few who believe that Americans never landed on the moon, or believe against all evidence that Carrot Top really was funny.
These failed few from a decade ago may be gone, but they’ve left another problem behind: as they were poor examples, so they offered too little to subordinates by way of good mentoring. So many of the people under the leaders of a decade ago lacked good examples of leadership. They may have learned what not to do, perhaps, simply by watching mistake after mistake at the top. That’s not much, though.
The truth is that today’s leadership class had few positive examples from yesterday’s leadership class. They’ve come to office at a disadvantage. Sometimes, there really is an evident problem with mistaking office-holding and being credentialed for insight and understanding. The sound mentoring today’s leaders never received would have been a big help; it’s not clear that they see how much they’re missing. (Even if they do see what they’re missing, at least a few of them don’t seem to know what to do about it.)
Whitewater still struggles with the effects of our last decade’s mistakes and poor choices.
A mentoring gap is among the ill effects today’s leaders inherited from yesterday’s leaders.