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.

This is the Wicked Festival, and its founding director, political scientist Paige Tan, is blunt about what it demands of students.

“The idea is to give students a venue to show themselves as authorities on their problems and solutions. I’m not interested in just twiddling our thumbs and thinking about how we could change the world if we were so inclined,” Tan said. “I want them to actually change the world.”

Started in 2021 from a faculty book group on Paul Hanstedt’s book, Creating Wicked Students: Designing Courses for a Complex World, the festival has since tripled in size. This past fall, over 700 students from 23 courses across six colleges participated. At the Wicked Festival, students have presented their problems and solutions through posters, videos, audio clips, and even banned book readings. Members of Radford’s Wicked Problems Society have taken their work to United Nations conferences in Lisbon, Berlin, and Belgrade.

The Wicked Festival is just one of the initiatives housed at Radford’s Highlander Center for Character and Public Impact, developed by a team of philosophers and political scientists

“We’re seeing students who will say, ‘Yeah, I did this for class. But when the class is over, I’m not done,” said Heather Keith, Founding Director and one of the philosophical engines behind the Center. She hears students say, “I want to keep working on this project without credit because I think it’s the right thing to do. It’s become part of who I am.'”

That last phrase, “it’s become part of who I am,” points to what Tan and Keith see as the deeper purpose behind the festival and the conviction that solving hard problems requires not just skill, but character.

“We were noticing that while we were giving students academic, disciplinary-based skills to solve wicked problems, if students didn’t care, weren’t motivated to act, didn’t understand the needs of stakeholders through empathy, and couldn’t persist in the work, they weren’t able to have meaning and find flourishing in their service,” says Keith.

The center organizes its work around four “focal virtues”—active hope, humility and moral courage, care and empathy, and practical wisdom—all framed through a concept Keith,Tan, and their colleagues philosophers Steven Fesmire and Guy Axtell, and political scientist Tay Keong Tan have borrowed from philosopher William Throop: skillful habits.

For Tan, this framing was a revelation. “What I learned was that these were things I could teach and assess—breaking the virtues down into things like the motivation to act on the virtue, the knowledge of the virtue, and the skills to practice the virtue. Those things were all really transformative for me.”

Keith and Tan have found that when students approach the Wicked Festival in a way that engages their intellect while cultivating virtue, the effects of this work can last much longer than the semester or even academic year. A team of first-year students researching homelessness in the city of Radford was so galvanized by the experience that they kept going after the class ended, forming a student coalition to continue the work. Another group created a new food access pipeline for people recently released from prison. 

All of this points to the fact that the Highlander Center’s deepest goal is not compliance or credentials, but character that endures beyond any single course. As Keith puts it: “My goal is that when students walk across our stage at graduation, they are better prepared and more willing to put their shoulders to the wheel to solve the real problems of our time.”

Radford’s Highlander Center for Character and Public Impact was launched in 2025 with support from the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University.