Charisma and Craft: A Conversation with Eboo Patel

Eboo Patel, founder of Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), speaks passionately about work as a craft, and about the promises and pitfalls of charismatic leadership. Invoking such diverse sources as James Baldwin, William Carlos Williams, and The Grateful Dead, Patel discusses shifts in his thinking about leadership and listening as president of a non-profit over the course of the last decade. His forthcoming book explores the role of builders as opposed to critics, and he asks, how might colleges and universities help forge a new generation of builders? What can we do to help college students delve deeper into the complex problems of our time? What might students be able to accomplish, if we relieved them of our culture’s demand that they “make something of themselves,” and instead encouraged them to make something for others?