Cultivating Moral Ambition | Institute for Social Concerns

YEAR IN REVIEW

Cultivating Moral Ambition

McNEILL COMMON GOOD FELLOWS

Architecture major Adam Scott ’27 is using insights from affordable housing design in Singapore and Japan to improve housing in the United States. As a McNeill Common Good Fellow, he spent several weeks in Japan and Singapore learning about sustainable design before embarking on a multi-day walking project along the Eastern Corridor from Providence, Rhode Island, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Walking the whole 379 miles gave him insight into patterns of disinvestment in low-resource communities and ways that these communities could incorporate insights from the models in Singapore and Japan. “The walk had given me something statistics alone could not: an embodied, emotional understanding of spatial inequality,” Adam said. “The neglect was palpable in cracked sidewalks and abandoned lots, and so was the human cost—in every inhaler carried, every elderly person afraid to sit outside on a hot day.”

One of 14 fellows from the inaugural 2023–24 cohort (and 37 students overall), Adam is conducting research for his capstone project as he enters his third and final year of the fellowship. The McNeill Common Good Fellows program is empowering talented undergraduates like Adam to cultivate their moral ambition and use it to engage the work of justice in whatever their chosen field of study and future vocation—and to do so with kindness, humility, and compassion.

Supported in part by a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation, the three-year fellowship hones students’ sense of moral purpose in the world by inviting reflection on questions of meaning, vocation, faith, and the good life. Fellows explore such questions through shared coursework, community engagement, faculty-mentored research, and a bit of adventure. Through practices of contemplation and action and the art of dialogue and debate, students learn the tools of justice making.

Embodying the legacy of the Institute’s founding director, Rev. Donald P. McNeill, C.S.C., the fellowship selects sophomores from a highly competitive pool of applicants from across the University. The goal of the fellowship is to create a community of graduates working in all professions who have a strong sense of moral purpose, a well-honed entrepreneurial mindset, and the courage to lead even in the most fraught of times.

“This fellowship has provided me with resources to devote to the pursuit of justice and peers and faculty members that have given me different ways of approaching problems, growing my moral ambition exponentially.”
– KYLAN HINEGARDNER, 2023–24 McNeill Fellow

The fellowship begins with two multidisciplinary seminars, creating a common foundation in the theory and practice of justice rooted in Catholic social tradition. Fellows then collaborate with community partners around the globe to conduct mentored research for eight consecutive weeks. In their junior year, fellows design a final research project that will serve as their senior capstone project, meeting regularly with peers and mentors to develop it. Finally, in their senior year, fellows meet monthly for a discernment workshop to consider life’s next steps.

While peer institutions have begun providing courses and programs aimed at promoting purpose or happiness in their students, Notre Dame is uniquely positioned to offer students meaning and purpose through the pursuit of the common good, guided by Catholic social tradition. Through McNeill Common Good Fellows, the Institute provides a model for how this can be done.

This spring the program admitted its third cohort of 12 students selected from almost 300 applicants.