If Dumbledore does not encourage educational anarchism, and represents perhaps only a lesser version of Umbridge’s degree of surveillance, what views on school leadership are the Harry Potter books sending out by condemning the evil Umbridge and celebrating Dumbledore as the ideal headmaster? The main message, I believe, is the ideal of moderation. Dumbledore’s principalship overlaps to some extent with the temperate leadership advocated by Eric Hoyle and Mike Wallace (2005, p. 185) in response to the growingly managerial tendency in education:
Moderation is our prescription for what we regard as the excesses of managerialism. Of course, we recognize that moderation is hardly a rousing slogan. It clearly lacks the ‘can do’ appeal of many of the current texts on leadership and management. Our advocacy of compromise, tolerance, negotiation, contingency and balance is a far cry from the popular transformational rhetoric, and it would surely be ironic to unfurl a banner that read: ‘Moderates of the world unite!’
In the course of the Harry Potter series, Hogwarts is subject to an increasingly managerial atmosphere, as the Ministry’s interference with the school is intensifying. Dumbledore represents the type of school leadership that strives to counter managerialism, the extreme form of which is incarnated by Umbridge. Although Dumbledore does not fulfil all the characteristics of an ideal temperate leader listed by Hoyle and Wallace (2005, pp. 187–188), two of them are particularly prominent in his style: first, reducing leadership and management, and second, developing trust and accepting risk.Footnote 4 Hoyle and Wallace (2005, p. 188) maintain that
[t]he key function of temperate leadership and management is to take the strain and absorb the stress. They take the strain through structures and routines that relieve teachers of non-teaching tasks and create spaces in which teachers can maximize their professional contribution. Temperate leadership and management also absorb stress. There is ample evidence that much teacher stress arises from a required participation in accountability procedures, particularly those that include completing paperwork and attending meetings. The reduction of these activities is likely to reduce stress, increase satisfaction and thereby enhance the quality of teaching.
Compared to Umbridge’s micromanagement, Dumbledore definitely adopts a laissez-faire policy in regard to administering teachers. As far as readers can see, he grants teachers free reign within their classrooms without management procedures, such as lesson inspection and appraisal. Whether Dumbledore’s policy enhances the quality of teaching is doubtful. While some teachers (McGonagall, Flitwick, Lupin, Sprout) are capable, others are incompetent (Lockhart, Trelawney, Hagrid). Yet, Dumbledore’s non-interference does not result from irresponsibility, but rather from a deliberate strategy to display trust in the teaching team, which is another quality of a temperate leader, even if it implies taking risks. As Hoyle and Wallace (2005, p. 193) note, such risks “can take many forms, including career risks for the headteacher,” which indeed applies to Dumbledore.
Researchers on school leadership also speak of a structure-consideration binary, where “structure” refers to “the extent administrators provided staff and materials necessary for effective instruction and student learning” and “consideration” to “the extent administrators developed mutual trust and respect, and shared norms and values among school staff necessary for positive and productive social relations” (Griffith, 2004, p. 333). While some may advocate a combination of the two and regard a distinction as unnecessary (Finnigan, 2010, p. 180), I argue that the Harry Potter books celebrate in particular the consideration aspect of principalship in presenting a headmaster who is able to acquire the teachers’ loyalty by respecting their individualities instead of evaluating them according to standardised specifications. Although Dumbledore could have strived for a better balance by paying more attention to teaching quality, Rowling has chosen to leave no ambiguity about the desirable qualities of a school leader. According to John Lambersky’s study, one of the factors that affect teachers’ morale is whether the principal would defend them (2016, p. 398). The good rapport between Dumbledore and the Hogwarts teachers is best exemplified when Umbridge dismisses Trelawney in The Order of the Phoenix. Although Dumbledore cannot reverse Umbridge’s decision, he does not shy away from protecting Trelawney by keeping her within the Hogwarts grounds and appoints Firenze the centaur to take up her post so that Umbridge cannot evict Trelawney under the pretext of having to spare her lodgings for a new teacher. Other colleagues also show their support by escorting Trelawney back to her tower against Umbridge’s will.
In contrast, Umbridge’s extensive surveillance over the teachers and the imposition of “accountability measures that are predicated on low trust” (Hoyle and Wallace, 2005, p. 193) do not bring about smooth and effective administration. Although most of the teaching staff do not dare to directly confront Umbridge or contravene her administration, they adopt a strategy of “passive noncompliance, as they grow increasingly ‘helpless’ to assist Umbridge in managing the chaos that we are led to suspect they are helping to cause” (Barratt, 2012, p. 91). Her leadership is in discord with what they believe to be good education. Ironically, Umbridge has pronounced that “progress for progress’s sake must be discouraged” (Rowling, 2003, p. 192), and yet the teaching staff must deem all the new Educational Decrees and modifications she makes to be “changes for change’s sake.” As Bruce Johnson argues, promoters of change in schools should “[appeal] to teachers’ sense of moral purpose” (2004, p. 276). There is no reason why the other teachers would want to cooperate when they do not see any moral purpose in Umbridge’s administration.
The two aforementioned characteristics of a temperate leader embodied by Dumbledore (reducing leadership and management, and developing trust and accepting risk) can also be seen in his treatment of students. Although school rules are retained as necessary guidelines of behaviour, Dumbledore often exercises discretion in their execution. Rules, as part of the surveillance system, require the active enforcement of those who hold power if disciplinary effects are to be achieved. At Hogwarts, however, the headmaster acknowledges that “even the best of us must sometimes eat our words” (Rowling, 1998, p. 243) when he decides that Harry and Ron do not have to be expelled, and should even earn 200 house points apiece for their heroic deeds in the battle against Tom Riddle in the Chamber of Secrets, in spite of the countless school rules they have broken. The fact that Filch has to ask Dumbledore to remind the students that magic is prohibited in corridors for “the four hundred and sixty-second time” suggests that the headmaster is not really serious about the rules (Rowling, 2003, p. 190). Given his magical prowess, Dumbledore could strictly enforce the rules if he wished. In fact, his delivery of the Invisibility Cloak to Harry in The Philosopher’s Stone already symbolises his approval of necessary covert actions and also implies his demurral of rigidly enforced school rules. The act also displays his trust in the student, which he well knows entails risks. He wants Harry to take risks too—and this is one of the character traits that Dumbledore helps his students develop.
The discipline that Dumbledore hopes to foster in his students is not based on external behaviour (as in the Foucauldian docile body) but on internal values. As Torbjørn L. Knutsen (2006, p. 204) notes, Dumbledore “does not cultivate the rules as much as the values that inform the rules. He cultivates in each student the spirit of the law, even if this means that the letter of the law sometimes must be broken.” Richard F. Bowman (2016, p. 103) approves of this kind of education and argues that “[c]ultures characterized by blind obedience or a system of rewards and punishments place governance outside the individual through sets of rules. In contrast, inspiring values-based self-governance places the structures of governance in students’ and colleagues’ hands.” Values-based self-governance differs from the regulation of the minutest details as Umbridge intends, but it is not “self-chosen” as Wolosky (2014, p. 296) believes it to be. It is still incorporated within a reward-and-punish system of schooling where the ideal headmaster is the standard of judgment. At the end of the first two books, for instance, Dumbledore actually dishes out a great number of house points to reward Harry and his friends for their actions, as well as the values behind them, which the headmaster approves of. Many school rules still apply and are maintained by surveillance technologies such as house points and the prefect system, and they can only be broken when they contravene some higher values that are at the heart of Dumbledore’s discipline.
In addition, Dumbledore further justifies surveillance by drawing on the discourse of safety. In The Half-Blood Prince he actually orders that, in light of imminent threats from Voldemort and his Death Eaters, Secrecy Sensors be used to scan students entering Hogwarts, not unlike the metal detectors installed in some schools in our world. Researchers of surveillance in schools have noted that the discourse of safety, propagated by school shootings and terrorist attacks, is an influential force behind the surging demand for techno-surveillance (Hope, 2015; Taylor, 2012).
The deciding factor accounting for the success of Dumbledore’s discipline and the failure of Umbridge’s, then, is really the degree to which surveillance is extended. Students do resist surveillance under Dumbledore’s leadership. For example, Draco Malfoy and his gang regularly taunt Harry and his friends whenever they escape the teacher’s gaze. In The Philosopher’s Stone, Malfoy even uses the surveillance system to his own advantage when he challenges Harry and Ron to a midnight duel and then tips off Filch to trap them. As Hope (2010a, p. 239) has suggested, “[i]nsofar as surveillance technologies add to the risk of apprehension, they are not only tools of social control but also devices that might heighten the excitement of performing illicit acts.” Resistance and deviance are inevitable, and Dumbledore does not attempt to curb the inevitable, or else he would have severely punished Fred and George for all their mischiefs.
Umbridge, in contrast, does not tolerate deviance. Her managerialism in school is comparable to Japanese corporatism, and “like the concept of kaisha this requires loyalty and compliance, with heavy penalties for dissent” (Morley and Rassool, 2000, p. 180). The intensification of surveillance is then met with an unprecedented amount of resistance, the climax of which is signalled by the mayhem engineered by Fred and George, with sparks and exploding firecrackers flying everywhere in the school. This is proportionate to the extent to which “technologies of control are perceived by students to be overly restrictive, educationally limiting, and inherently unfair” (Hope, 2010a, p. 241). Umbridge fails because she does not master the art of moderate control.