KLI's "Responsible Leadership" is a Charade
Updated: Sep 26
Built to serve the community, Henry Kravis’s flagship institute now trains students for the corporate ladder
Henry Kravis ‘67 founded the Kravis Leadership Institute in 1993 to fill a gap he saw in higher education: “There isn’t really a leadership institute in not-for-profit [service].” This past spring, that institute sent its student employees to Las Vegas to shadow a slot machine manufacturer. Between those two dates, CMC accomplished a billion-dollar fundraising campaign in the name of “responsible leadership,” but has yet to answer the question: responsible to whom?
Part 1: Our Obligation
CMC touts responsible leadership as one of its core values. What does responsible leadership mean for CMC? In the first case, “responsible leadership” is the title of a massively successful fundraising campaign, through which CMC has been able to raise over one billion dollars in the past decade — the first liberal arts college in history to do so. With this money, CMC has invested in campus expansion and overhauled student programs, promising to develop responsible leaders in their academic and career journeys. In this same timeframe, CMC has moved from forty-ninth to sixth in the Wall Street Journal college rankings, which are based on post-graduate outcomes.
Like any college, CMC is a business, and we, as its students, are both product and consumer. As in any market, successful businesses must have a competitive advantage. CMC has carved its place among prestigious institutions with the promise that students graduating from this college will be responsible leaders, and no part of the college is more poised to fulfill that promise than CMC’s flagship Kravis Leadership Institute. When a product does not fit consumer expectations, the consumer and business both suffer. We must then critically scrutinize the “responsible leadership” concept CMC, and KLI in particular, is selling us.
In order to form a reasonable expectation from which we can scrutinize our product, we need a clear understanding of what responsible leadership means. You might expect to find an operative definition on CMC’s fundraising website, but you won’t. The mission statement of the Kravis Leadership Institute (KLI), which also includes the term, does not provide a definition either:
“Our Institute’s mission is to be a premier academic center for the promotion and understanding of responsible, innovative leadership and to provide unique opportunities for CMC students to develop as outstanding real-world leaders in the public, private and social sectors [emphasis added].”
The opacity of the term works in both CMC’s and KLI’s favor. It is more useful, from the perspective of education-as-business, to hold the concept in a hazy, goal-oriented future tense. It is less important to create an actionable capacity for responsible leadership than to attach an abstract goal to an educational identity. This, in turn, makes it difficult for the student consumer to judge the nature of CMC’s product. After all, what student doesn’t want to be a “responsible leader”?
Thankfully, KLI’s eponymous founder Henry Kravis, does provide an operative definition of responsible leadership:
“We set up the leadership institute… to get more and more students to understand that there is a lot they can do, and in fact build a real career in the not-for-profit world. [Students] should, as an obligation, give back to help their community, to help the less fortunate [emphasis added].”
Kravis provides us with a solid foundation for defining this term. It’s the capacity for this obligatory form of responsible leadership that KLI should instill in its students — the capacity to use one’s position and skills for the betterment of the community in which they are situated, even when doing so offers no material reward. For example, responsible leadership in business entails minimizing negative externalities, such as pollution or job loss, from impacting the community. It also asks that businesses go further than their bottom line by, for example, creating and sustaining dignified, well-paying jobs. Responsible leadership does not require all of us to be obligated to full-time charity work, but it does demand that we invest pro bono time or raise funds for our communities.
In KLI’s years before CMC’s responsible leadership campaign, Kravis’s definition was front-and-center. KLI’s 2005 Business Plan Competition led to the founding and funding of SOURCE Nonprofit Consulting. SOURCE is a student-run organization founded to connect CMC with the Claremont community, “offering students and nonprofit leaders the opportunity to work collaboratively to solve real community challenges.” SOURCE still operates today with funding and administrative support from KLI, providing wide-ranging technical, media, and strategy expertise to nonprofit organizations in the city of Claremont and the greater Pomona Valley. SOURCE helps students fulfill their obligation to our Claremont community, teaching their members technical skills and business acumen, and using those skills to solve problems local organizations bring to them.
How effectively SOURCE operates to cultivate responsible leadership is beside our current point; the fact that they correctly aim at CMC’s core value is laudable. Responsible leadership is a capacity, and capacities are built by sustained, frequent practice. Henry Kravis carries this understanding as well. He wanted service to be required of every student. When that requirement failed, KLI was built to habituate responsible leadership:
“And I kept hearing from college presidents ‘It's a nice idea but we can't make them do that.’ I said, ‘Well, if they go to Harvard they gotta be in Cambridge. They come to Claremont, they gotta be in Claremont,’ so forth. That's a choice, so just list that as one of the things that's required here. I didn't get very far, and so then we set up the leadership institute.”
Just as CMC teaches us to become great writers by writing, great athletes by training, or great researchers by doing research, SOURCE aims to create responsible leaders by practicing responsible leadership in the four years we’re here. While we students answer to professors or coaches, SOURCE students also answer to the needs a local organization has expressed to them — their effectiveness in meeting these needs measured by the organization itself.
The First Year Frontier is another example of KLI adhering to Kravis’s definition of responsible leadership. If you’ve never heard of the First Year Frontier, that’s because it no longer exists. A 2012 collaboration between KLI and ASCMC, First Year Frontier was a two day off-campus excursion of leadership programming, workshops, and activities. Taking place in Frank G. Bonelli Park in San Dimas, up to one hundred freshmen joined upperclassmen, trained staff, and Claremont graduates from Pomona Hope, “a community-driven, faith-based non-profit… empower[ing] people of all backgrounds… to work together toward personal and community transformation.” This program set students off on the right foot, reminding them, as Kravis noted, that when they come to Claremont McKenna College, they are situated within and reliant upon Claremont.
In both aiming students at that obligation and equipping them to fulfill it, the KLI of the recent past clearly took steps in line with Henry Kravis’s definition. Our modern KLI, however, fails the legacy of its predecessor.
Part 2: Leadership Without Responsibility
Over the past decade, KLI has lost its community-facing, not-for-profit pursuit. It fails its staff by focusing their research on technical and psychological abstractions of leadership and by tasking them to host events and activities that aim to improve individual personality traits and bolster career development without answering to the community.
KLI’s research teams — which staff about half of its student employees — are entirely focused on data and literature analyses, attempting to reconstruct the concept of leadership from ideal speech patterns, motivational techniques, and statistically positive correlations. Of the six research teams this past spring, all of them prioritized technical and psychological abstractions of leadership; they focus on some component of leadership and study it in isolation from the people it is for, the ends it ought to serve.
Research team descriptions, from the Fall 2025 & Spring 2026 Illumine
KLI’s research — its findings the same year after year — hardly ever reach the broader student body, much less our Claremont community. Of course, not all programs have to immediately interface with the community. For example, SOURCE trains its students in web design, but uses this technical skill in service of the community. The question then turns on whether KLI students employ the understanding gained from their research on how to speak, how to write, and how to organize oneself in an actual practice of responsible leadership. Only one of KLI’s 44 student employees is a member of SOURCE, supposedly KLI’s flagship for not-for-profit service. If responsible leadership is not exercised through SOURCE, where is it applied?
In an interview with KLI director Professor David Day, Day argued that KLI does habituate responsible leadership — as KLI defines it, rather than as Kravis does. Day pointed to KLI’s Leadership Competency Model, a map of specific, concrete actions KLI students can take to foster their core competencies of “Courage,” “Creativity,” and “Collaboration.”
Under the monikers of “D-Crew” and “Mentorship,” KLI tracks these practice activities, allowing students to bill hours toward their completion and funding any expenses accrued along the way.
On each of these maps, it is immediately clear that there is a chasmal difference between responsible leadership as Kravis and the modern KLI understand it. For Kravis, responsible leadership is relational: to someone, for something. Responsible leadership isn’t about success, it’s about seeking out, and then addressing, what your community needs. When you fail, your community holds you accountable and you try again.
For the modern KLI, leadership is individualistic. It is a trait profile to optimize. Look at the codes beside some of the activities: “Make a list of commitments or responsibilities and schedule a time for each of those needs (C-7)”; “Ask a friend about their opinion on a controversial topic. Honestly try to understand their perspective without worrying about who is right or wrong (O-9)”; “When you disagree with someone, try to take their perspective and understand why they feel how they do (A-8).”
However, let’s take these activities — as elementary as they may sound — seriously. For example, understanding a friend’s view on a controversial question is difficult and a student who attempts this activity in earnest is better for it. But notice how the activity begins. It starts with a student who decides they want to be more open. Observe, too, that the friend is interchangeable. In fact, the practice activity works just the same with any friend and any topic. Finally, notice who decides whether the practice succeeded: it’s the student, whose honest effort is the only measure of success. That friend may be better off for having been listened to, but this good is incidental. This good is the byproduct of an individualistic personality development exercise that was never for that friend. The student is accountable to no one.
Furthermore, the Competency Model is like a tree, the activities connected to a branch fostering that branch’s “competency.” On the branch for being “supportive,” “if someone asks you for a favor, do it,” and “give money or volunteer time at a nonprofit organization,” sit side by side. One nonprofit service activity is where Henry Kravis’s definition of responsible leadership has ended up: a single action item among dozens. His definition is absent even from the branch labeled “responsible action,” in which no activity points to a community. The model does not make a value judgment on which of these activities a leader ought to choose, “development” measured as checked boxes, accountable to no one who would benefit from their activities. As Day put it, that choice is left to a student’s “self-selection,” so that each student is “the architect for [their] own bespoke developmental system.” But when CMC students are inevitably confronted with glittering career prospects and outsized financial gains, the Competency Model’s atomic habits will not prepare a student to regularly commit their time and money to serve the community as responsible leaders after graduation, let alone in these four years.
Just look at the activities the Leadership Competency Map has encouraged.
This past spring, in an effort to be “courageous,” KLI students “tr[ied] new food” at the Chinese restaurant Din Tai Fung, billing the expense and logging work hours for the time it took. Similar motivations have led to the funding and billing of Topgolf trips and retreats to Airbnb mansions in Malibu. Asked whether students had ever proposed an excursion to volunteer in his nearly decade-long tenure, Day replied, “not that I’m aware of.” KLI’s Leadership Competency Model invites students to ask, what does this do for me? rather than what does it do for others?
This failure does not fall on the students. They choose from what KLI puts in front of them.
Consider the activities put on by KLI’s institute assistants for the larger student body, such as the Leadership Coaching Summit hosted last spring. For this event, KLI partnered with LLM Consulting Group, which “create[s] custom solutions for critical organizational issues including leadership, management, strategy, organizational design, talent management, and team efficacy.” If the aims of this KLI partner organization sound quite different from the endeavors of earlier KLI partner Pomona Hope, that’s because they are. LLM Consulting Group understands leadership much in the same way as the modern KLI; its coaches work from the Leadership Competency Model and KLI research output, Day said. This is not to say that LLM’s coaching discourages non-profit and philanthropic work. Students could very well apply these lessons to service, but what was the student takeaway printed on the Illumine? “It was inspiring to hear from leaders and professionals about how leadership coaching has shaped them and helped them grow as leaders in their careers.”
This past spring, we also saw KLI’s most glaring disregard for responsible leadership. KLI piloted its Inside Leadership Initiative, through which KLI student employees shadow corporate leaders. For its first visit, the team went to the International Game Technology (IGT) headquarters in Las Vegas. IGT is a multinational corporation that produces slot machines and other gambling technology. This initiative takes its student employees, who have thus far studied leadership as abstractions, and sets them to shadow a company that builds machines designed to encourage gambling addiction. Recall the first half of responsible leadership in business: preventing one’s negative externalities from affecting the community. IGT’s business model is the negative externality. Of all the corporate leaders KLI might have chosen for its pilot program, it chose the one which profits when communities lose. What kind of behavior does that inculcate in students?
The most disheartening part of this programming is that an “Inside Leadership Initiative” could bolster our collective capacity for responsible leadership on campus. In its current form, however, this initiative is emblematic of the misalignment between Henry Kravis’s definition and the modern practice of KLI. The Competency Model is KLI’s chosen method of operationalizing “responsible leadership.” But it can do better — for its students and the community.
Part 3: Toward Responsible Leadership
Imagine if KLI championed a different vision. Instead of partnering with consulting firms and multinational corporations, KLI can partner with local community and student-run organizations. Instead of reporting on data analyses and literature reviews to closed-door board meetings, research assistants could engage with the local community to present research and solutions to the residents and organizations who ask for it. As a student body, we would work collectively to truly foster Henry Kravis’s vision of responsible leadership.
We all stand to gain. Student employees at KLI will, for one, engage in the tangible experiences which cultivate the kinds of skills and habits associated with responsible leadership, properly understood. As that work becomes visible, it draws in students otherwise uninterested, who then build the capacity themselves. This would, in turn, foster CMC’s competitive advantage in the market, measured not as one’s ability to secure a high place in a corporate hierarchy, but as the capacity to serve others.
Second, students may come to recognize the sense of personal fulfillment associated with habitually building the capacity to answer the needs of a community. As CMC has risen to sixth in terms of job placement outcomes, it has displaced pursuits that do not further that end. The result is that — much in the same way as KLI research assistants — we amass technical skills without the necessary application toward responsible ends, or, in many cases, any ends at all. With proper aim and effort, fulfillment of one’s obligation to their community, a lifelong pursuit, can begin here at CMC.
There are already some promising starts. KLI’s Leadership Dialogues provide a space for KLI student employees to share in open discussion with the larger student body; last spring, its topics were “Privilege & Leadership,” “Leadership During Crisis,” and a senior panel on “Leadership Journeys.” KLI is also widening the membership of its advisory board. Professor Day has confirmed that a 2004 alumnus and vice president of the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation will join KLI’s board.
If we aim to reorient KLI toward its original mission of promoting responsible leadership, events such as these are the first step down that path. With leadership properly understood, KLI student employees may share the findings of their research and engagement with the student body and surrounding community. But this is only the first step. These conversations must manifest as concrete actions taken, information shared, and relationships built. However, as we see from SOURCE and the First Year Frontier, this direction is possible.
And it is necessary. KLI’s current identity is the result of flawed institutional choices backed by tremendous financial investment, all pointing inward to aimless work and self-congratulation. If these resources were instead directed toward responsible leadership, CMC could begin to fulfill its promise to students, donors, and the Claremont community. This process starts with KLI, and it ends with all of us.
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Editor's note: In a good-faith attempt to address the Kravis Leadership Institute's concerns, this article was temporarily hidden on September 13, 2026 while the author supplemented his argument with additional information. Though the opinion of Mr. Goldstein does not represent that of The Forum nor of the Salvatori Center, The Forum editorial board stands by Mr. Goldstein's original piece as factually accurate and free of misstatements. The original piece can be found here.
