When you deal with human beings in leadership situations, you deal with what is essential to the study of leadership, namely, moral and ethical issues. Through the study of lives, one finds out how individuals have confronted specific actions and decisions relating to leadership positions. James MacGregor Burns, December 4, 2004

This three-unit experimental elective offers graduate students the opportunity to study leadership as seen in the lives and actions of selected U.S. presidents. Students in this course will exam matters of leadership as posed by historians, journalists, leadership experts, and the president themselves. The overall purpose of the course is too abstract “lessons of leadership,” if any, and to test the proposition that presidents should be “leaders of character.”