What Harrison Ford told our graduates

Last week, Harrison Ford stood at Mountain America Stadium just down the road and told ASU's graduating class something worth repeating:

"Stand up for someone who can't stand up for themselves. Bring people together who weren't talking before. Build something that didn't exist yesterday. That's leadership. That's what moves the needle."

He wasn't talking about politics. But he might as well have been.

What Ford described — almost word for word — is what leadership scholars call servant leadership. The idea is simple and uncomfortable: The leader exists to serve the community, not the other way around. Power is a tool, not a reward. The measure of a good leader isn't what they accumulated, but what they built for others.

Ford also drew a distinction that voters would do well to borrow. Passion, he said, gets you out of bed in the morning. Purpose lets you sleep at night. It's a useful question to ask of anyone seeking your vote this fall: What are they passionate about — and what is their purpose? Those are not always the same answer.

As elections approach at every level — local, state, federal — it's worth applying that filter. Local elections especially. School boards, city councils, county commissions. These are the offices closest to your daily life, and they are often decided by the smallest margins. A few dozen votes. Sometimes fewer.

The graduates Ford addressed last week are stepping into exactly the world he described — messy, complicated, full of problems that need people willing to do the unglamorous work of bringing others to the table. That's true whether you're 22 and just handed a diploma, or a longtime community member heading to the polls.

Servant leadership isn't a partisan idea. It's a standard. And election season is the right time to hold candidates to it.