Virtues & Vocations

YEAR IN REVIEW

Cultivating Character

Virtues & Vocations is a grassroots character movement committed to our shared flourishing through the cultivation of virtue in professions. This aspirational, cross-professional learning community understands thriving professions are the backbone of thriving societies and knows professional excellence requires both competence and character.

Virtues & Vocations is rooted in the University of Notre Dame’s founding commitment to vocational formation and guided by the storied tradition of distinctively multi-disciplinary virtue education and scholarship. Virtues & Vocations meets students, scholars, and practitioners where they are—whether character curious or character committed, whether an aspiring physician or a veteran engineer—and accompanies them on their distinctive character journeys.

Highlights of the movement this year included the publication of two additional issues of the captivating magazine, Virtues & Vocations: Higher Education for Human Flourishing, which published issues on the themes of “Generosity” and “Civility, Courage & Conviction.” Shared with scholars in 34 states and four countries and widely accessed online, each magazine features essays and interviews from scholars and practitioners on character, meaning, and purpose, infused throughout with original art that provokes thoughtful reflection.

“The Institute For Social Concerns has built something rare: a convening that fearlessly crosses disciplines, avoids surface fixes, and fosters the critical reflection our professions—and our world—urgently need.”

– GURU MADHAVAN, Norman R. Augustine Senior Scholar/Senior Director at the National Academy of Engineering and author of Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World

The Institute also hosted 62 scholars—nearly double the number from previous years—for multi-day Integrating Virtue Together (IVT) workshops, even adding a second workshop to accommodate the number of excellent proposals. From anesthesiology to architecture, the diverse faculty—selected from an increasingly large pool of inter- national applicants—revised a course they will teach in the upcoming year so that it intentionally cultivates virtues.

In addition to 10 webinars on topics from generosity to mindset to leadership, the Institute hosted 150 scholars and practitioners from around the globe for its second annual Higher Education & Human Flourishing conference. Focusing on the professions and cross-profession dialogue, the conference featured sessions on scholarship and best practices for promoting character in engineering, medicine, teaching, architecture, and business. Attendees left the three-day conference reinvigorated by the robust exchange of ideas and call to change the world through professions of character.

“Virtues & Vocations is leading the way in how hope and creativity can find their way into the small as well as the scalable aspects of contemporary university life, thereby creating the conditions for virtues and vocations to be less a topic of social concern but rather more of a social norm across disciplines.”

– EMILY HUNT-HINOJOSA, Wake Forest University’s Program for Leadership and Character

This year Virtues & Vocations turned its focus to the Notre Dame community of professions. As part of a three- year Character and the Common Good grant through the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University, 18 faculty participated in workshops to integrate character into their courses, focusing on virtues from justice to humility to curiosity. This expansion enables the Institute to partner with faculty in Notre Dame’s School of Architecture, College of Science, College of Engineering, and the Mendoza College Business. These four schools teach 80 percent of Notre Dame undergraduates, so the reach of this work is significant.