Archives: Newsletter Post
Education, Entrepreneurship, and Character: Creating Leaders that are both Principled and Innovative
When Carole Basile became the Dean of the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University, she knew that something needed to change. Not only were less and less undergraduates majoring in education, but even those who graduated hoping to become teachers were now leaving the profession. According to a survey conducted by the […]
Davidson College Deliberative Citizenship Initiative
College campuses have become another battleground in the culture wars, but at Davidson College, the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative (DCI) has committed to forging a different path by bringing together students, faculty, and community members to cultivate active listening, humility, empathy, and curiosity as they practice talking about difficult issues across differences. Even the name – […]
Education Rooted in Virtue
In March 2023, Josh participated in a Virtues & Vocations workshop with the inaugural cohort of Integrating Virtue Together. A version of this reflection originally appeared in his weekly newsletter, The Absent-Minded Professor. The recent rise of artificial intelligence tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has renewed the conversation about the value and purpose of education. Is […]
An Immense World by Ed Yong
Dolphins use echolocation to “see” the world around them. Using only sound, they can create pictures of objects that they are then able to recognize when they see those same objects visually. But this way of seeing doesn’t just stop at the skin. When a dolphin “sees” someone swimming in the water using echolocation, they […]
Yuval Levin Explores the Responsibilities that Come with Elite Education
While acknowledging Americans’ discomfort with the idea of “elites,” Yuval Levin maintains that inevitably an elite class exists, and that universities play a key role in forming them. In “Character, Responsibility and Elite Education,” he explores the role and responsibility of higher education in forming the character of the people who are likely to be […]
Character in Times of Crisis: Creating Business Leaders in the Wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis
Following the 2008 financial crisis, Professors Mary Crossan, Gerard Seijts, and Jeffrey Gandz at Western University set out to discover what went wrong from a leadership point of view. What caused the financial oversights at so many large corporations that led to the catastrophe? Meeting with over 300 global business leaders, Crossan, Seijts, and Gandz […]
Why Boredom Matters: Education, Leisure, and the Quest for a Meaningful Life by Kevin Hood Gary
Boredom often prompts us to look for something, anything, to distract us. And now, perhaps more than ever, those distractions are always close at hand. Whether it be our phones, laptops, or TVs, there have never been so many convenient, enticing ways to escape. But fleeing from boredom is a fraught affair. Leaning on technological […]
Patrick Smith on the Virtue of Solidarity in Healthcare
Inequality is killing us—some of us more than others. David R. Williams, a professor at Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health and world-renowned researcher on the social determinants of health, studies just how racism and its intersection with class and gender have detrimental health effects. In a recent talk on “How Racism and Inequality Makes […]
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Oliver Burkeman had tried every time-saving life hack in the book. Author of a productivity column at The Guardian, it was his job to find ways to help people make the most of their time. From experimenting with the Pomodoro Technique to scheduling his entire day in 15 minute blocks, Burkeman felt he was on […]
Educating for Moral Leadership Across the Professions
When Joseph Gutierrez started studying at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of Education, he was focused on understanding organizations. He cared about justice, but was not sure how exactly that would play out in his work. When he was invited to participate as a fellow in the Cal Turner Program for Moral Leadership, that changed. “I was […]