Each semester at Radford University, students from courses across the university gather in the Artis Center for a conference-style showcase unlike most academic events. They come not to receive grades or hear lectures, but to present original solutions to some of the world's hardest problems: climate change, food insecurity, homelessness, democratic erosion. Students, community partners, alumni judges, and faculty circulate, ask hard questions, and push back. The students are the authorities.

A common refrain in education at every level is simple: pay attention. Hidden within this practical command is a transcendent truth: that, as Simone Weil stated, “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” and the precursor to love.

As advances in technology have monetized attention, there can be a temptation for the conversation to focus on distraction and devices, missing the deeper call to practices fundamental to human flourishing.

But there is also a movement within higher education to become a prophetic voice at this critical moment. For instance, the Franco Family Institute for the Liberal Arts at Notre Dame declared “attention” the research theme for the year, and is hosting a symposium in April with leading artists and thinkers on the theme “How Should We Hold Attention?”

Similarly, the Educating for the Virtues of Attention (EVA) initiative at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is asking what it would mean to educate not just with attention, but for attention itself. EVA is a three-year, campus-wide initiative led by philosopher Michael Vazquez that aims to respond to what he calls a widely recognized “crisis of attention” while refusing to frame the problem only in negative terms.

It’s Saturday on a farm outside Tempe. A math major and an English major from Arizona State University are weeding a row of carrots and chatting about where they grew up, while two students from the school of business are turning a compost pile nearby. Afterwards they gather with the rest of the student volunteers for a conversation about sustainability and care, and what that means for how we should live our lives.

This is a reality at the Arizona State University ASU Farm, an interdisciplinary center designed to integrate character building directly into the student experience through sustainable agriculture.

Why do good engineers make bad ethical choices?

“This question has been at the top of my mind for a long time,” said Jesse Pappas, Assistant Professor of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. “My suspicion has been that many students and professionals aren’t taking ethics personally enough, so it’s not internalized as part of their identity.”

The clinical psychology student recited the facts of the case as if it were a formula. That’s what she had been trained to do, what her peers and professors expected. There was probably a time when this student wondered about the complex and human questions that might lead a person to the moment of diagnosis, but if those questions remained, they were hidden behind the unemotional, analytical veneer demanded by professionalism.