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
Responsibility – Virtues & Vocations fall magazine launch
Guests: Rachel Wahl and Ryan Juskus
Monday, September 28, 2026, 12:00 pm ET
Ryan Juskus is assistant professor of the practice and faculty director of NDBridge at Notre Dame’s Institute for Social Concerns, where he teaches courses on social thought and environmental justice. Rachel Wahl is Professor in the Department of Leadership, Foundations and Policy at the University of Virginia’s School of Education and Human Development, and Director of the Good Life Political Project as well as a Faculty Fellow at the Karsh Institute of Democracy. They wrote essays for the fall issue of Virtues & Vocations, and will discuss the issue, which explores Responsibility.
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.
In his article about joy and engineering, Cameron Kim, Assistant Professor of the Practice in Biomedical Engineering and the Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies at Duke University, reminds us that curiosity and joy are integral elements to learning. Read more.
I read my first Tana French novel almost 20 years ago. It was her debut, In the Woods, that would become part of a series of six murder mysteries—the Dublin murder squad. I picked it up off a table at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill as my children whirled about me, whining ever more loudly that the store was boring. I bought it so I wouldn’t leave the store empty-handed and defeated. I’m not generally a murder mystery person, but the Dublin connection intrigued me. Instantly, I was hooked.
When Anna McEwan arrived as dean of the Orlean Beeson School of Education at Samford University in January 2020, she inherited a vision statement promising to graduate students who were not only professionally competent but also people of excellent character. Her first question to faculty cut straight to the gap between aspiration and practice: "I know you measure competence—test scores, pass rates, licensure rates—but how are you addressing excellence in character? We all know that's difficult to measure, but what are you doing intentionally to address that side of the coin?"
