My alma mater sent me an email about how excited they are that they will be asking me for a lot more money than I will send them. I’m not going to be sending them any money, so someone else is going to have to chip in extra so that they can raise the $3 billion that they are hoping to raise.

But they are also planning to do wacky things with all this money that they are hoping that people give to them. This includes “a four-year leadership program for all undergraduates.”

The older I get, the less I know what is meant by “leadership.”

Several years ago I worked on a grant-funded project where probably more than half of the people were either PIs or co-PIs. This project had a lot of leadership. But there weren’t that many people who were actually doing the work.

Sometimes I think that we need a bit more respect for people with followership skills.