History-Maker Gives Views on Leadership

Ted Landsmark, president of Boston Architectural College, gave a presentation to the Westminster community Feb. 26 in Werner Centennial Center titled “From Prep School to the Presidency.” His talk focused on leadership and included references to the famous 1976 Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph that showed him being attached by a man with an American flag on the steps of Boston’s Government Center.

The photograph taken by Stanley J. Foreman, then a photographer for the Boston Herald American, came to symbolize the racial tensions over court-ordered busing of schoolchildren.  At the time, Dr. Landsmark was a Yale-educated attorney on his way to a meeting about city construction projects when he happened upon the crowd.  He was assaulted and his nose broken, but he was not speared by the flag.

Dr. Landsmark began his Westminster presentation by telling students that he was more than a victim in the photo, he was a boarding school student himself at one time and was shaping his own identity. He said that preparedness for leadership involves seizing opportunities when one least expects them. “At that moment, I had to rely on a bunch of things I had learned at a place like this,” he said in reference to his attendance one year at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire. “I had the opportunity to emote and say something stupid or draw on resources I picked up in my education and say something smart to get people to think more fundamentally about whether a group of kids thought it was okay to kill me.  I love Westminster’s motto, ‘Grit and Grace.’ That is what I had to demonstrate that day.”

He went on to tell the students that every one of them is destined to assume some important leadership role in the world they go into.  “The very nature of who you are and in being at this school will make you a leader he said. “You are already on your way.” He then added that mostly likely this leadership role would happen unexpectedly.  “The reality is your success in being a leader will not be so much from planning as your preparedness of what to do,” he said.
As future leaders, Dr. Landsmark told the students the world in which they will be required to lead would be different from the world in which their parents led and from the world in which they may expect to lead.  “In five years, there will be new developments to link you to worlds you can’t imagine and those worlds will be more complicated and diverse than today,” he said. “Leadership is about clarifying your identity with people you hope to serve and sharing values important to you.”

He then cited the values he feels are important for future leaders: treating people you are leading like you expect people to treat you; realizing that with privilege comes a societal obligation to share what you know; and giving up leadership when it stops being fun, because that is when you make fundamental mistakes.

Dr. Landsmark, who has earned a B.A., M.Ev.D., J.D., D.F.A. (Hon.) and Ph.D., is also a student of 18th- and 19th-century African-American art, about which he has lectured extensively.  The Boston Architectural College, where he serves as president, is an independent, professional college located in Boston’s Back Bay, offering bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture, interior design, landscape architecture and design studies.