Arts and Sciences leadership major debuts at Ohio State

Arts and Sciences leadership major debuts at Ohio State

Program leverages liberal arts to give students distinctive educational experience

What do Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Elena Kagan and President George W. Bush have in common? They were all history majors in college. According to Scott Levi, chair of the Department of History at The Ohio State University, this choice contributed to their successes in life.

"History majors in disproportionate numbers end up finding their ways to leadership roles," he said. "Roughly 19% go into education. The rest go off to pursue all sorts of careers. And whether it's law, politics, business, or whatever, they tend to meet with success."

The reason for this is that history, like the other liberal arts, teaches students how to think, Levi said.

"We teach our students to think historically, to understand the ways that complex historical processes lead to change over time," he said. "It's not just one thing shaping an outcome. If you can get students to understand how multiple historical processes, each with varying weights of importance and each evolving at different rates of speed, converge to make something momentous happen … you've equipped a student with a skill set that is just as applicable in the boardroom as it is in the classroom."

With this in mind, Levi set out to create a leadership program in the university's history department. Realizing that the program could extend beyond any single department, he worked to create a new interdisciplinary major with a group of university colleagues, including Robin Judd, Piers Turner, Eric MacGilvray and Andrew Martin.

Five years later, the program has blossomed, growing beyond the department into a freestanding major in the College of Arts and Sciences, with the liberal arts at its core.

"Careers change so much over the years," said Levi. "The liberal arts help students learn how to learn."

Students can enroll in the major starting spring 2025. The major includes 12 credit hours of core requirements and, after those courses, majors will pick a specialization: politics and law, leadership in society (with thematic pathways that focus on civics, arts, health or sports), business and markets, military and security studies, social justice and civil rights, and science and innovation (with pathways that focus on the environment or innovation).

"What you have here," Levi said, "is the full representation of the strength of the College of Arts and Sciences. Thirty-eight departments, 900 faculty. These are six strengths that we have now … So, we'll ask students, 'Where's your interest? What's your passion? Where do you want your career to go?' We can help them get there."

In addition, students will take a selection of skills courses, which will depend on their specialization. Internships, ROTC deployments, and university programs like the Mount Leadership Society may also contribute to the major.

"It's an opportunity for students to get credit for co-curricular activities," Levi said. "Students are incentivized to go out and take advantage of these opportunities, build their networks, get experience."

The major culminates in the senior capstone, which includes an independent research project. While the capstone project is created by the individual, they will be in a class with students from different specializations.

"We'll have students doing social justice and civil rights working alongside students doing business and markets and military and security studies," Levi said. "They'll be in small seminar groups, studying the core principles of leadership as they advance their own projects. At the end of the semester, they'll walk out with a tangible product, something they can use as they're finding their way into their career."

It is not lost on Levi that the university's motto - disciplina in civitatem, or education for citizenship - echoes in the major.

"'Education for citizenship,' this is what we do," he said. "The major lives in that mission. Ohio State is a land-grant university, dedicated to serving the interests of the citizens of Ohio. We are taking students from across Ohio, giving them the opportunity to get a great education at an affordable price. And now they can maximize their opportunity to rise into leadership roles wherever they come from, and wherever their career takes them."

Levi's program is an ambitious one. And, as far as he knows, it's the only one of its kind in higher education. He doesn't want to keep it a secret, though.

"This is a distinctive liberal arts leadership major. I want the rest of our Big Ten colleagues and other R1 universities to see Ohio State doing this. I want them to copy us," he said. "With the addition of this new major to the other leadership programs we already have in place at OSU, this can be 'the Ohio State way.' This is how Ohio State does leadership."

In addition to the new major, Ohio State offers several other leadership programs, including at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs, the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences, the Fisher College of Business, and the College of Education and Human Ecology.

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