It’s about time Baker University boarded the leadership train.

The university offers students multiple chances and opportunities to get involved in leadership organizations on campus, ranging from the Emerging Leaders Summit as a freshman, to being a Salon Student Leader as an upperclassman.

There have been plenty of chances to learn about leadership through experience.

But there hasn’t been anything formal about leadership in the classroom setting.

Sure, one can go on and on about how being a leader often happens outside the classroom. Which is true. But learning about leadership, different learning styles and about diversity can also happen in the classroom.

Baker hasn’t offered that opportunity to learn about leadership before. Until now.

Dean of Students Cassy Bailey and Director of Student Life Brett Bruner have worked together, with the help of others, to create and work on implementing a leadership minor at Baker University.

Schools like the University of Kansas, Kansas State University, MidAmerica Nazarene University, Avila University and even big-name schools like Harvard University, offer some sort of degree, emphasis or concentration in leadership.

Baker already has some of the strongest programs in the country and by adding this minor, students will be even more rounded in whatever their discipline is.

The neat thing about this minor is that each and every student at Baker can take it, and benefit from its use after they graduate.

Students who are interested in the minor will be required to do a 60-hour hands-on project to implement the leadership skills they’ve learned throughout their time in the program.

Students will still have the opportunity to be a part of organizations like Baker Farm Hands or Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

But they’ll have the training and the coursework to back them up.

Think for a second about all of the organizations at Baker University. There are a lot of them. Now think about how all of those organizations would be even better if the leaders of those organizations had training through a leadership minor.

We are all going to be leaders at some point in our lives.

And by implementing the leadership minor, it will allow students to leave Baker as confident, competent and responsible contributors to society.

And that’s what they want of us after all, right?