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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
Higher Education & Formation
Chris Higgins
Monday, August 26, 2024, noon – 1pm
Chris Higgins is the Chair of the Department of Formative Education at Boston College. He recently published Undeclared: A Philosophy of Formative Higher Education with MIT Press. We will have a conversation about the purpose of education and how universities can educate for flourishing.
Educating for Good
Angel Adams Parham
Monday, September 16, 2024, noon – 1pm
Angel Adams Parham is an associate professor of sociology and a senior fellow with the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Virginia. She is the author of The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classical Literature. We will consider how questions of moral purpose and character are integral to education.
Higher Education & Democracy
Helene D. Gayle, MD, MPH
Monday, October 7, 2024, noon – 1pm
Helene D. Gayle, M.D., M.P.H., began serving as the 11th president of Spelman College on July 1, 2022. A pediatrician and public health physician with expertise in economic development, humanitarian, and health issues, she previously worked in leadership roles at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and was the president and CEO of the international humanitarian organization, CARE and the Chicago Community Trust. We will have a conversation about her work at Spelman and how higher education can promote democracy and the common good.
Generosity & Medicine
with Sneha Mantri, MD, MS and Abraham Nussbaum, MD
Monday, November 4, 2024, noon – 1pm
Sneha Mantri, MD, MS is a physician and director of Medical Humanities at Duke University School of Medicine. Abraham Nussbaum, MD is a physician, Chief Education Officer at Denver Health, and an author of several books, including the recently released Progress Notes. Mantri and Nussbaum wrote essays on generosity for the fall issue of the Virtues & Vocations magazine. We will discuss their essays and others from the issue, American healthcare, and medical education.
Character, Leadership & Professional Education
Sanford Shugart
Monday, December 16, 2024, noon – 1pm
Sanford “Sandy” Shugart served from 2000 to 2021 as the fourth president of Valencia College in greater Orlando, Florida. He is a senior fellow with the Aspen Institute and the author of Leadership in the Crucible of Work: Discovering the Interior Life of an Authentic Leader. Our conversation will consider the broad landscape of higher education — and particularly pre-professional and professional education for flourishing within community colleges — along with issues of leadership and character.
We will host our second annual conference May 20-22, 2025 at the University of Notre Dame. More details will be released in the fall.
We hosted a conference on Higher Education & Human Flourishing from June 3-5, 2024 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: “Over the Rainbow” by Stephen Conroy © 2021
Reimagining Purpose
L. Gregory Jones
Higher education as an industry needs to be re-imagined. The challenges we face are too numerous to think we are just dealing with a series of complicated problems that can be attacked one at a time. Rather, they are complex problems that require creative solutions.
Howard Gardner
As I enter my ninth decade and reflect back, I am reminded of several years ago when my friends Bill Damon and Anne Colby asked me about my sense of purpose. . . As I look back now, I can see many ways that my curiosity, though internally motivated, blossomed through collaborative relationships and still seems generative in new and sometimes surprising ways.
A Case for the Liberal Arts
Clayton Spencer
If motivating and equipping our students to live lives of meaning and contribution is a core purpose of the liberal arts, then work is central to the project. Whatever a person’s particular interests, choices, or constraints, most people wish to figure out a way to stay healthy and happy, to nourish human connection, and to leave the world—or at least their corner of it—better than they found it.
Carolyn Woo
The search for purpose inevitably turns our sight outward to the needs of the world and how we can make life better for others near and far. Yet, ironically, the journey must start with a focus on the self. To figure out our calling, we must first probe what we wish to offer and why. Before attention to others, purpose is first and foremost the giving of self: of our talents, training and education, efforts and persistence, attention and discernments, imagination, aspiration, and passion.
In his reflection on "Training Happy Warriors," James E. Coleman, Jr. discusses ways he engages law students to cultivate a deep sense of purpose. "We tell our students that they will face many opportunities in their careers to act with courage and integrity, sometimes against prevailing winds," he said.
Through three sections – work, worth, and work that’s worthy – the authors explore issues around work and purpose, and give readers ways to think about their own work and the role they would like it to play in a meaningful life.
In 2016, Cynda Rushton started exploring what could be done to help nurses prepare for the moral distress and suffering that they would inevitably face as part of their work in healthcare. And the leadership at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing was on board. Dean Patricia Davidson knew how many nurses leave the profession within their first year of work, making it clear how important emphasizing the role of resilience is in preparing nurses for their careers. From there, the Mindful Ethical Practice and Resilience Academy (MEPRA) was born. Through MEPRA, nurses learn to be mindful, clarify their values, and exercise self-stewardship, all skills which then strengthen their moral resilience and help them confront the ethical challenges they face in acute care settings.
