Virtues & Vocations is a national forum for scholars and practitioners across disciplines to consider how best to cultivate character in pre-professional and professional education. Virtues & Vocations hosts faculty workshops, an annual conference, and monthly webinars, and engages issues of character, professional identity, and moral purpose through our publications.
UPCOMING
Situated
Guest: Angela Duckworth
Monday, October 12, 2026, 12:00 pm ET
Angela Duckworth is the Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and faculty co-director of the Penn-Wharton Behavior Change for Good Initiative. She will join us for a conversation about her new book, Situated, and the relationship between character, community, situational factors, and success.
After Shock
Guest: Rana Awdish, MD
Monday, November 16, 2026, 12:00 pm ET
Rana Awdish serves as Clinical Professor of Medicine at Wayne State University School of Medicine and at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine. She will join us for a conversation about rehumanizing medicine, drawing from her new book, After Shock: Learning to Reinhabit My Body After Illness, which is the follow up to her bestselling memoir, In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope.
Sports & Character
Guest: Nina King
Monday, December 14, 2026, 12:00 pm ET
Nina King is the vice president and athletics director at Duke University. King, who serves on several ACC and Duke University committees, was selected as a member of the 2025-28 USA Basketball Board of Directors and serves on the Board of Directors for Women Leaders in Sports, the National Association of the Collegiate Directors of Athletics, and the Collegiate Women Sports Awards. King will join us for a conversation about character and sports.
UPCOMING
Our annual conference will take place held May 10-12, 2027 at the University of Notre Dame. The annual conference is a cross-disciplinary, cross-professional convening on cultivating character in the classroom and on campus, with a particular focus on professional education. Registration will open in early 2027.
We hosted conferences on Higher Education & Human Flourishing in 2024 and 2025 at the University of Notre Dame. For those who were unable to attend or who would like to revisit the conversation, we are pleased to offer the following resources:
Cover artwork: “Night Symphony” by Arthur Poulin
Interview
Danielle Allen is one of the most consequential public intellectuals in American life today. As we developed this issue, it became clear that discussions of what we owe and to whom are tied up in a vision of shared flourishing and mutual happiness, ideas that Allen has dedicated her life to exploring. We sat down with her for an expansive discussion,which has been edited for length and clarity.
Good Education
Negotiating the Boundaries of Dialogue for Democracy in Higher Education
Rachel Wahl
In discussions of political and ideological issues in the classroom, Wahl suggests, the educator also bears some responsibility to advancing the civic aspect of the university’s mission.
Good Medicine
Joshua T. B. Williams
The termination of my Career Devopment Award was not just a “stop-work” order on a creative project to leverage community voices to decrease vaccination disparities; it eliminated 75 percent of my salary, derailed my formation as a pediatric-scientist, and pulled the feather right out of my faculty cap.
Interlude
Reclaiming Responsibility in Professional Formation
Karen E. Bohlin
Of all the virtues, responsibility is the one I have always kept at arm’s length.
This month we are launching the fall 2026 issue of our magazine, Virtues & Vocations: Higher Education for Human Flourishing. Read some reflections on the issue from Suzanne Shanahan, Leo and Arlene Hawk Executive Director of the Institute for Social Concerns.
Emily St. John Mandel’s new dystopian novel, Exit Party, takes place in the near future and considers two outcomes of a national crisis. In one version, the United States has devolved through civil war into several independent states and regions run by militias. In the other, the nation has become an authoritarian surveillance state. By bending physics and our imaginations, the author creates a world where two realities and two versions of characters exist simultaneously.
For years, Erhardt Graeff, Associate Professor of Social and Computer Science at Olin College of Engineering, taught about democracy and technology. His students studied social movements, digital media, civic technology, and the ways people organize to shape public life. Now Graeff teaches through democracy.
