Leadership conferences are exclusionary and elitist

I first heard about the Canadian Conference on Student Leadership through a friend who, on March 3, was being asked to sit as a panellist on March 7. Though my friend was and is an excellent candidate for the position, the fact remains that four days prior to the panel of an event that has more than a year to prepare, the CCSL was soliciting the unpaid help of an undergraduate student to fill presenter seats.

My impression of the CCSL did not improve from there. Looking through the titles and descriptions of sessions taking place at this conference, many of them stood out to me as patronizing, self-indulgent, offensive and frankly useless.

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Take for example an Idea Exchange (read: presentation with an interactive component) named, I quote, “Gay, Straight, Bi or ?”. This session was apparently intended to provide attendees with “the tools and advice that you may need to interact and understand that individual or anyone else in that individual’s situation.”

Improper syntax aside, this description is problematic for a number of reasons, first and foremost being – in my opinion – the extremely othering tone. It immediately places the queer community as a completely separate breed, able to be lumped into one mass of “anyone else in that individual’s situation”. To clump the entire community into a tidy bunch separate from the attendees is by definition othering and in this case marginalizing. Though I suppose I should not have expected more from a session that reduces much of the queer community to a piece of punctuation.
But what stood to me most about the CCSL, time and again in various ways, was the prohibitive cost of attending.

Keeping in mind this is a conference aimed primarily at students from across Canada, the fee for student delegates and presenters was $365. Right then, right there, the CCSL is excluding an enormous demographic. Equivalent to many students’ rent for a month, groceries for two months, or utilities for a year, this fee is exorbitant. It restricts this event for ‘student leaders’ to ‘high-income student leaders’. It is elitist and classist, and I’m embarrassed by my University for hosting a conference as exclusionary as this.

Unfortunately, this is not a phenomenon restricted to one university or one organization. The CCSL is a mere example of how we’ve come to commodify ‘leadership’. This ‘leadership industry’, like many others, fabricates the need that it fills.

In the CCSL’s description of a session entitled “Leveraging & Showcasing your Leadership”, we find the following sentence: “Overcome the “I’m just a volunteer” syndrome, and find leadership in every position you’ve held.”
I found this to be incredibly ironic, as they lack the self-awareness to realize that the only reason this session needs to exist is because of the culture the CCSL perpetuates. We should already be putting stock into a variety of experiences, not just those with jargon-laden titles and nametag lanyards.

There is value in what you and those around you do for reasons other than what profiting parties tell you is leadership.