Listening to the Lessons of the Rivers in Passau, Germany

There is a particular kind of disorientation that has nothing to do with jet lag.

I arrived in Passau in the blue-grey light of early morning, where the Danube, the Inn, and the Ilz rivers converge in a confluence so ancient and unhurried that the city itself seems to lean into it — the way a person leans into a truth they've been circling for years. I came as MCAD's director of creative leadership, there to explore, to teach, to learn, and seek new perspectives.

German academic culture is not shy about its inheritance. In lecture halls with raked seating and formal stillness, knowledge moves in a particular direction: from the one who knows toward the ones who are becoming. It is an architecture of expertise. I watched professors hold the room with a kind of authority that felt almost gravitational — earned through decades of scholarship, worn with quiet pride. Students pushed back, in the tradition of philosophical disputation stretching back centuries. The debate was the pedagogy.

I respect this.

What I witnessed in Passau was a system that produces formidable thinkers. It is built on a kind of protective distance. The professor protects their authority by standing apart. The student protects themselves by performing competence. And the space between them — the electric, vulnerable, generative space where real learning happens — goes mostly unoccupied.

Can good teaching be reduced to technique? I think it comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher, from the willingness to let your inner life show up in the room. "We teach who we are." In the MACL program, we take that seriously. We ask students to bring the parts of themselves still being figured out, the creative practices without names yet, the questions too close to the center of who they are to ask safely anywhere else.

This is not a technique. It is the theology of presence.

There is something I kept returning to in Passau, to the location where there are three converging rivers. Each arrives at the confluence carrying its own color, its own temperature, its own history. The Danube is grey-green. The Inn runs cold and glacial-blue. The Ilz, dark and tannin-rich from the Bavarian forest, arrives from the north like a secret. For a stretch just below the old city, you can see all three distinct currents moving alongside each other before they finally give themselves over to become one.

As I reflect on the lessons of these rivers, I surmise that this is what relational, decentralized leadership looks like to me. Not the erasure of difference. Not a comfortable egalitarianism where no one knows more than anyone else, rather its the willingness to bring your particular current — your color, your temperature, your history — into genuine contact with the currents of others.

At home, the Mississippi does not have the existential gravitas of the Danube... but I will bring home the memory of three rivers that somehow manage to arrive at the same place from entirely different directions and find, in the confluence, something none of them could have become alone.

That is what we are building here within MCAD's Creative Leadership program. We're aiming to be in be in flow with one another, not perfectly, but with intentionality and with love for the work.