I had the good fortune to be able to attend the "Students & Leaders" forum at my school where William Raspberry, one of my favorite columnists, spoke. The most important lesson I gleaned from his talk was that being a thoughtful person is a type of leadership. If you express your thoughts to your peers, you will often find that many people have been thinking about the same things, but were too timid to express themselves. In this way you will be a leader because you will lead others by inspiring them to be more open and, perhaps, more thoughtful.

This is, according to Raspberry, the type of leadership he does as a journalist. His job is to provide the public a service, a nonpartisan, disinterested look at important issues that answers the question "What makes sense?" The answer to this question will, hopefully, lead the reader to reflect on the issue and be led to "rethink settled thoughts." This is not the conventional view of leadership, but it is an intellectual type of leadership. Its goal is not to make others "think what you think, but to think as you think." This way of thinking leads others to look past "prejudices and preconceptions" and to embrace change.

Intellectual leadership is an under looked but very important public service. A leader of opinion influences the thoughts of the public about significant issues. In theory, the opinions of the public influence the actions of our elected leaders. And the actions of our elected leaders affect the public. A journalist serves an important role: to inform the people about their government and the government about their people. This ability to influence a great number of people is why intellectual leadership is just as important as the more conventional type of leadership.

I feel I learned a very important lesson from Mr. Raspberry's talk. I am in the process of broadening my horizons and discovering the world. One of the ways I expand my world is by being an avid reader of the opinion pages and following what goes on in the world. I often have my own opinions about what I read, but have never written in to the editor or to the columnist to have my own opinion be heard. I now know that intellectual leadership is not an offshoot of conventional leadership, but an entirely different entity; and I realize that my opinions would not simply be a card in a suggestion box, but an integral part of the dialogue that is the basis of intellectual leadership. In short, I learned that my opinions matter.

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