Virtues & Vocations: Conversations on Character and the Common Good, Part 8: A Conversation On Purpose w/ Greg Jones & Clayton Spencer

A Conversation on Purpose with Clayton Spencer and Greg Jones

As part of the Virtues & Vocations series Education for Flourishing: Conversations on Character & the Common Good, we are pleased to welcome Belmont University President Greg Jones and former Bates College President Clayton Spencer to discuss "Purpose in Higher Education." Virtues & Vocations is a national forum housed at the Center for Social Concerns at Notre Dame for scholars and practitioners across disciplines to consider how best to cultivate character in pre-professional and professional education. Learn more at virtuesvocations.org.

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Transcript

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Hi, everyone. Welcome back to our monthly webinar series, Conversations on Character and the Common Good. This is our final conversation of the academic year. This series is part of the Virtues and Vocations Initiative, a national forum that's housed at the Center for Social Concerns at the University of Notre Dame, supported by the Kern Family Foundation. I'm Suzanne Shanahan, Director of the Center for Social Concerns and the host for this series. Virtues and Vocations hosts conversations between scholars and practitioners across disciplines to consider how best to cultivate career and moral purpose in higher education and the professions. This webinar series is one way we facilitate those conversations. Another way is through our biannual magazine called Virtues and Vocations. Virtues and vocations, higher education for human flourishing. This month we are thrilled to bring these two parts of our initiative together through an extended conversation with two authors from our recently released issue on purpose. This issue included 10 often deeply personal essays from scholars who were in their 20s and in their 80s from a range of different disciplines hailing from across the country. We hear, for example, from Drs. Jim and Peggy Pluzogin about how they have reimagined their personal and professional purpose in light of Jim's ALS diagnosis. We hear from former Mendoza Business School Dean Carolyn Wu about her journey in the pursuit of the good. We hear from philosopher Sabrina Little on running and human flourishing. This issue also included an interview with Stanford University professor and early architect of scholarship on purpose. Bill Damon, as well as a reflective essay from his long term collaborator and partner in this work, Howard Gardner. There's a link in the chat to an online version of the magazine, as well as a link if you would like to request a print copy. Today's conversation will run till So about 1240 and then we'll open it up for questions. You can submit a question anytime through the Q& A mechanism, and I'll pose them directly. With that, I'd like to welcome our guests for today's conversation, a current and former university president, L. Gregory Jones and Clayton Spencer. Greg Jones is president of Belmont University. He is the author or editor of 19 books and has co authored more than 200 essays and articles. He is known for books on forgiveness, Christian leadership, and social innovation. His most recent book is the co authored Navigating the Future, Traditioned Innovation for Wilder Seas. Clayton Spencer served as the president of Bates College from 2012 to 2023. She came to Bates from how Harvard University, where she spent more than 15 years on the university's senior leadership team. As former chief counsel to the US Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, Spencer worked for the delay U. S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, directing education legislation and policy in the Senate, including federal student aid, science and research policy, the education budget, and technology in education. Welcome. It's truly an honor to have two such, important higher education leaders, both who are focused on human flourishing. Thank you. Great to be with you. Thank you. and if you're both game, I'm hoping we can have a rather open ended conversation exploring your essays, possible connections between them, and how you got thinking about them in the first place. So with that, I'm hoping we can start with a quick A bit of a question about your own journey. your two university presidents. was this something you have aspired to since an early age? how did you come to these roles and the particular ways that you have approached this kind of leadership? So maybe we can start with you, Clayton, someone who's had many sort of meandering paths through her life. Great. I am a poster child for the exploration and reflection required to pursue your purpose authentically in the world. I didn't exactly start out there. So a lot of people say, did I always aspire to be a college president? I want to say, absolutely not. but I should also say, That my father was a college president throughout my entire growing up from age, 2 to 28. it was in there somewhere. and, but I, about my Miranda, meandering career, I thought I would be an academic. And it took me a little while in graduate school to realize I didn't want to spend my life in the archives and, studying religion, which was my chosen field, the sort of global study of religion. So I decided I'd shoot off and get a job. I got a job and I'm like, wait a minute, I like The intellectual professional side of things and I'm just the lowest person on the totem pole. So then I said, I got to go to law school. So I went to law school and then I'm like, if I'm going to be a lawyer, I better figure out how to try a case to a jury. So I became a federal prosecutor, which is the least, the least relevant, possible job choice I could have made. I did not like it at all for reasons we can discuss if anybody's interested, but I doubt it. You probably have better things to do. so when the opportunity came up to return to education, which was the only thing I really understood and loved intuitively, Senator Kennedy was looking for the person to run education for him. He was the chairman of the committee. in charge of it. So I trooped off and somehow convinced him that despite being a, one summer intern in college, I was qualified to do his lead job in his chairmanship. I talked myself into it. Then I had to figure out how to do it. And after that, I, our family wanted to move back to Boston. And Harvard hired me and I spent 15 years there, again, getting a lot of secondhand smoke from presidents because I worked for four different ones, because there were some presidents in quick succession while I was there. And then after that, I said, you ought to stop just standing around college presidents and figure out if you know what to do, how to do this job yourself. So that is my very meandering, and stylized version of my career. And every step of the way, except possibly trying criminal cases, which I really didn't enjoy because I didn't enjoy the ultimate purpose of it. It was not my purposeful work. every aspect has been. An amazing learning experience and mostly very joyous. So I have loved my life and loved my work. So what more can somebody ask? Wonderful. So Greg, kindergarten, aspiring to be a president? No, not at all. not aspired to be in education either. originally, what, Clayton and I have in common as fathers who were educators. my father actually was one of my predecessors as Dean of Duke Divinity School. And, he unexpectedly died of a heart attack while I was in college. And it set me on A set of questions, because I admired my father greatly. And, so when I got to graduate school at Duke, after he had died, what I focused on in my doctoral work was actually, how you could, help form and nurture, I was trying to puzzle through that. Alistair McIntyre's After Virtue had just come out. and so I wrote my dissertation around Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas on what I called formation and moral judgment. And that was really what I Nurtured my interest. I wasn't sure I wanted to be an academic full time and got more and more drawn into leadership questions. First, as a young person leading a Center for the Humanities and the kind of ways in which the humanities, especially in the liberal arts more generally, tried to form character as well as an imagination. and that kept drawing me into administrative roles. I think I was invited to go back to Duke as Dean of the Divinity School because they maybe wondered whether it was in the DNA since my father had done it. And, I just kept getting drawn more and more into those questions. so I began to entertain the question of a presidency, but also, thought it was perhaps much too, just day to day management, and I was much more interested in the larger horizons and questions, and quite frankly, frustrated by the ways in which, a lot of the discussions seem to, be too narrow. And, technical rather than some of the broader questions around character, the common good flourishing. and had actually, gone to Baylor, with a view to the broader university setting that, didn't work out for a variety of reasons. Thought I'd put it all to, to rest and was going to spend my 60s, doing advisory work for foundations and then got, invited to consider, coming to Belmont and Felt like a really good, fit and an opportunity to try to work at a university wide level on these questions of character, common good, flourishing. Wonderful. So Greg, maybe we could start with you. In your essay, you talk about the need to reimagine higher education. and much of what you're doing at Belmont is inconsistent with, your recipe for how we need to think about doing that. So maybe you could. Talk a little bit about why we need to reimagine higher education and what you propose as the critical steps moving forward. Yeah, I think that, for, there's a much longer history of kind of higher education, becoming, too focused only on one model and that model really was, the research university, the very, very modern version of the research university. And I had noted that, there was. Less clarity about the purpose, for in general of an institution, or of how to foster that sense of purpose, among undergraduates. And it became, articulated, Clayton's essay talks about, the role of the liberal arts. And I think that larger horizon of both character formation and purpose had been either sidelined or had been put into kind of false opposition. That it's either in loco parentis of a really problematic sort, or it's, we're not going to ask that question at all. and I think that the, the horizon, that Julie Rubin outlines in her, remarkable history of the 20th century and higher education on ethics and the marginalization of morality, I just kept seeing ways in which, young people were yearning for that larger sense of. purpose and a sense of character and the need to really, bring those together. I also include in that an entrepreneurial mindset, that sense of, looking toward the future, what I talk about in terms of tradition to innovation and what I've discovered. and particularly with Google and then the, emergence of AI, the old model of just conveying information and sometimes called the sage on the stage and that sort of thing. Was, increasingly irrelevant and obsolete, and yet we were stuck in old, patterns. And, they, the need to reimagine is to, in some sense, go back to an older model. In a new key, and that's what I mean by tradition to innovation that's preserving some really terrific things that have been part of the liberal arts for a long time, alongside the new key of how do we adapt and focus on the future. I somewhat jokingly although I've increasingly come to believe it that too much of our conversation around higher education is about how to prepare for 1995 in case it comes back again. And that's not going to happen. And, the larger questions, whether you look at it in terms of how parents are assessing the value of higher education, which had dropped precipitously, even before this year's turmoil of this spring's turbulence. I think the question of What value proposition does higher education offer? I think that the real value proposition is less about the credential that somebody receives the day they graduate than the kind of person, the kind of skills they have to navigate a rapidly changing job market as well as world that we face and helping people prepare for. Lifelong learning, I think, is way more important than, than most of us tend to focus on. Wonderful. thank you for that, Greg. Clayton, I wonder if you could talk about, the kinds of, things that you were doing while at Bates, because I think they, they resonate well with the kind of diagnosis that Greg has offered us. Absolutely. Greg just talked about the value proposition and how in the view of parents and increasingly the public, the value proposition isn't working out on one end because of the high cost of education. On the other end, what are they producing? Can our, our children, if you're a parent, get jobs? So when I arrived at Bates, it was shortly after the 2008 9 crash, which was really severe and destabilizing for, for families, for individuals, and for our economy. And the trope then, even though we didn't call them tropes and we weren't really on the internet all the time, but the little narrative there was, I paid all this money for education, my kids living back in my basement being a barista. And I had to stand up there like every new president and give an inauguration speech. And I thought, you know what, we can't dance around this. And especially the liberal arts, because people's reflex is to think about Is to think about, let's figure out a better way to get jobs. And they use very short term instrumental ways of thinking about that. And I personally believe that the liberal arts, a comprehensive, integrated education where you learn about. All different fields where you realize that the problems in the world, to Greg's point about the future and an entrepreneurial mindset, are not going to be solved in the silos of different disciplines. The problems we face out there as we see every day now, how complex and interconnected they are. what if we embrace this? So I stood up in my inauguration speech and said, we are no longer gonna consider work as, a topic beneath the, beneath the appropriate concern of the liberal arts. And the liberal arts is not learning for learning sakes. It's learning to live a life of meaning and contribution, and we should. Embrace that. And what you have to realize is that everybody's source of meaning and contributions, they're all different. how do you embrace the problem of, or the joy, the mission, the core mission of the liberal arts? Don't leave it to bank binders at the end of senior year, which is what my, that was my college's version of, How to prepare students for work. You, you focus on your art history and whatever else, and then go to the bank binders. How do you create an integrated approach? And that's what we, what became the, the project of Purposeful Work at Bates, which is, It was enormously fun to design. It's involved the whole campus community and now 100 percent of our students have various purposeful work experiences, and I'm happy to go deeper on what that is, but I want to make sure. that's just by way of introduction and the origins of it. Wonderful, thank you for that. Clayton, could you talk a little bit, so you become a president in 2008, this concern around the value proposition is really front and center. but you're also at a liberal arts college with a very strong set of traditions. how did you bring together, The sort of faculty and those committed to perhaps a more traditional view of the liberal arts with this effort around a value proposition. Was this challenging, or did 2008 create a moment for you? Yes, just a minor detail. I started in 2012, but it was after we'd gone through 2008 9 and that whole period. I never say, there, there are several words I never say out loud. I never say the word change out loud because everybody's scared of change unless they're driving it. but that doesn't mean I'm not after change, but it's not change. For its own sake. There can be change agents who are just destructive. so the question is what is the work we're here to do and how are we going to do it? So I also wouldn't say a word like value proposition out loud except to my trustees and say Purposeful work is a value, is a proxy for the value proposition of the liberal arts. And why is that I think it's based on a core commitment belief that, the key to human happiness is meaning, connectivity with human beings, with important problems. The idea that you are able to make a contribution to make the world a better place. It's not about a hedonistic pursuit of happiness per se. and it's great when psychology went from all pathology towards theories of happiness and well being. And what we did, and there was a lot of enthusiasm for this in a liberal arts faculty and community, was that meaning and purpose are really core to human, that sense of human fulfillment. everybody wants to think that it matters that they were here on this earth. So what did they accomplish? What did they contribute Who did they love? and then, if you're going to care about all of that, most people are going to spend a lot of time working just as a practical matter, so you look for meaning and fulfillment in your work. You look for love and connection in your life, and everybody from Shakespeare to Tolstoy to everybody else has focused on love and work as the two biggies. So it presented that way, starting from a philosophical commitment. it seemed intuitive to a liberal arts, a liberal arts college to embrace that. We have practical sides that I'll come back to. they're very practical things, but I would call them the tactics. The essence is Put work where it belongs as one of the central pursuits of human life and make sure that you align your work with who you are and what matters to you. And then I'll tell you more about how we do that. Great, thank you. Greg, I wonder, Taking on the mantle at, Belmont almost a decade after Spencer, how did you approach, what you were trying to achieve? coming, from deep roots in Aristotle and Aquinas, what's the first thing Greg Jones does arriving at Belmont? I spent a lot of time listening and learning about what the culture already at Belmont, was, and it was a culture that was receptive to themes of character and purpose, and that was a great blessing. There wasn't the kind of resistance that, I encountered at times, at Duke, in the broader university wondering, what role character or purpose plays in a, education. So that was, really desirable. We, spent some time reworking some of the language around our mission statement, not changing it dramatically, but just honing in a focus on it. And then, my wife and I, decided to teach a class that would be open across all the colleges of the university, called What's Your Why? And it was designed to foster conversation across disciplines and colleges around that sense that Clayton was just talking about work, a purposeful life, and to bring in people from a variety of vocations, from health and from entertainment and music and business and teaching and different, vocations to talk about their trajectory and how they discovered it. One of the things we've now taught the course, each year that I've been here. So we've done three versions of it. All the guests we've brought in, ranging from people who are only six or eight years out of college, all the way to people in their eighties, the one thing that's been in common is that none of them are doing what they thought they'd be doing when they were 18. And so there've been lots of twists and turns, and they end up talking about things like friendships and relationships and family and those who helped them, when they hit a. A brick wall, or they, something didn't work out and they needed to make a pivot. And to ask the larger question about their why, became really significant. One of our guests said, it's not just what's your why, it's also who's your why. And that's been really remarkable. We had a person, who was a very successful leader in the film industry out in Hollywood. Who talked about taking longer to finish college, took him six and a half years. And one of the students asked the question, what did your parents think about that? And they said, he said, it was awkward for a while, six and a half years rather than four. But he said, but here's what my parents and I discovered. And he said, you can never be late on the timeline of your own journey. And I heard about 150 pin clicks as every student wanted to write that phrase down. And so what we've done is try to foster a conversation across disciplines and across colleges about the development of character, the pursuit of purpose, Nurturing an entrepreneurial mindset and how all of those go together in what I call in the essay formation for flourishing. That we want to be focused on the future, have that sense of a journey, that question of purpose, the relationships you forge along the way. And then character and the virtues. The other thing that I'd add that emerged along the way is mental health issues are now a big topic. they've been booming, they've been developing as a concern for over a decade, but COVID intensified them. And there's, and most conversations among university presidents tends to be in a kind of reactive or responsive mode of hiring more counselors or how do you deal with people in crisis and suicide ideation. There's actually something to be fostered in a proactive sense of Developing the relationships, nurturing the questions, what Susan and I say in the What's Your Why class is, this is not a content heavy class where you're going to learn, and be assessed on a lot of the details. You'll be doing that in major classes and other kinds of things. We want this to be questions that help give you a sense of how to orient. Who you are and what you want to become over the longterm. and so the ways in which we do that, and because we've got a lot of creatives at Belmont and preparing for careers in entertainment and music, even if they're in healthcare, they tend to carry around guitars, but we do a showcase at the end and to see them express in a variety of creative media, sometimes essays and poems, sometimes videos or songs being written, That, that journey has become, a way of framing questions that, that seem to make a difference for how they think about a larger and longer term focus. Great. One of the things you talk about is entrepreneurial mindset. and Ray, you have this notion of tradition to innovation. Could you talk a little bit more about that? as lots of conversations about character and purpose don't bring in that dimension. So can you talk about why it's so important? Yeah, I think that, it's partly what the liberal arts do at their best is cultivate that imagination, that is about the future, and it's about innovation. Sometimes we think, that we need innovation as if it's just making stuff up, and that's not, very fruitful. I distinguish That sort of notion of innovation from, what might be characterized as a good jazz combo, the difference between a jazz combo and a middle school band concert, that nobody wants to go to, including the parents, that, the imagination, the improvisation, innovation, similar kinds of words needs to draw deeply on the past, that, the genius of Miles Davis, And his, quintet was how steep they were in traditions, life giving traditions. and that's what, reading, great literature, whether it's philosophy and other non fiction or whether it's, the Bible, whether it's, great religious texts, whether it's fiction, whether it's contemporary fiction, but there's something that enlivens the imagination. And I think that's really crucial. and that's what we mean. An entrepreneurial mindset is not about becoming an entrepreneur. Some people might, it's about that orientation and that notion of tradition to innovation is about retrieving the best of the past for the sake of the future. Yaroslav Pelikan. says, tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. We all know the bad forms of traditionalism. What we need is the enlivening of tradition that stirs the imagination. And that notion of imagination, I think is so crucial, for where we are. Because one of the things that happened with COVID and George Floyd and all those things happening at the same time was a kind of deadening of the imagination or what I now sometimes say, our culture is suffering from an imagination deficit disorder, that we're afraid to imagine a bright future. And some things like AI or political polarization contribute and intensify that rather than stirring it. And the image that, that I carry around with me, I've, I've often used. A story of the 12 spies in the book of Numbers in the Hebrew Bible. and in the 12 spies, 10 of the 12 come back and they say, we need to go back to Egypt. Only two really want to trust the future. And so I've often talked about that story. And my dad used to say that, that every organization has a back to Egypt committee in it that wants to go back to some imagined, past, even if it was miserable, But what really caught me was reading a book on numbers by Aviva Zornberg, a Jewish scholar in England. And she says when the Israelites decide they want to go back to Egypt, she says they suffered a death worse than physical death. It was the death of their imagination. And when I first read that, I just had to put the book down and take a deep breath and ponder. She said it was a death worse than physical death, the death of the imagination. And so when I talk about an entrepreneurial mindset or that phrase tradition to innovation or think about imagination. It's so crucial to lean into a more bright, a brighter and more hopeful and more positive future. And I think the, that's part of what, your term around the common good aspires to is how do we leave things better than we found them right now? There's too much focus on not caring about that or actually just wanting to tear down for destruction's sake. Thank you, Greg. As you're talking about this notion of imagination, I'm also thinking of Jonathan Lear's notion of radical hope. that way of approaching the world and the future. Clayton, In your description of purposeful work at Bates, you described how now all students engage with this program in some way, shape, or form. Can you talk about the evolution of it and how it grew over time to be so pervasive at Bates? Sure. I'd like to Greg's approach, I mentioned that the approach that we took, which was to start with philosophical conversations about the importance of work, the dignity of work, the function of work, and shaping a life that is and a person in shaping their work. So it felt very much part of the liberal arts. So one set of our faculty got grants to incorporate the questions of purpose and relationship to future work were related in their classrooms. And then we spent a lot of time on design, meaning that everybody, every institution of higher education in the country has internships, job shadows, people who come in and talk about work. Those are all tactics. That is not a vision. That's not a program. So separate out strategy and tactics. And I was particularly vigilant about. The language we used in putting together the case for purposeful work. We had a faculty committee that worked on a set of ideas, but then we really had to reduce it to, how do we think and talk about this? I just want to say a couple things that people think when they hear, oh, you have a problem in purposeful work. That must mean that there are certain kinds of work that's. Purposeful in certain kinds it isn't. No. Your purposeful work is whatever aligns with you, what you're interested in, what your strengths are, what your values are, and how you want to move through the world. So it's a question of alignment. It is not do good or work. You can, working for Goldman Sachs can be your purposeful work, hand sewing for the new Mainers who are coming in are, are, we have, A large population of African, immigrants into this area. It can be anything you want. It can be working for an organization. It can be being an artist. it can be being a forest ranger. Whatever work you figure out aligns with who you are and what matters to you. It's also not a question of finding your passion. because unless you're Albert Einstein or Toni Morrison or Yo Ma, you probably don't have a passion that's in there just bursting to come out fully formed like Athena from The Head of Zeus. So here, if I could digress for one second, I want to tell a story that totally bowled me over. When I first came to Lewiston, it Lewiston and Auburn, these two cities in Maine, Lewiston is the second largest city in Maine of only 34, 000. That's the second largest city in Maine. Paired with another city, Auburn, we call them, we like to call them the other LA. and Lewiston and Auburn together, were the fifth largest manufacturers of shoes in the early 20th century. So I went to the Lewis and Auger Museum and I'm confronted with an oral history project showing pictures of some of the workers and some of what they said. And I was completely bowled over by a guy named Richard Courtmunch, who said the following, I'm quoting him, An average hand sewer of shoes back in those days in the 60s would probably do about 20 pairs a day. A good hand sewer would do around 30 pairs a day, as he was considered to be fast. A real fast guy, we're talking, 35 to 40 pairs. I would do around 60 pairs a day for many years. Myself and Vern Daigle locally, were probably the fastest hand sewers. That was unheard of what we could do. We did it because it was, it came natural. Which it didn't always to other people. So he was a good man, Vern. I learned from him, because he used to hand sew quite a few years before me. I used to watch and I'd say, I can do the same thing. And then from there, I picked up the tricks that my dad used to show me. Then I picked up some others. And then after that, I loved it. His passion emerged in the doing. So it wasn't Yo Ma. It was, I think Yo Ma probably had a cello in his hand when he was three, so maybe it emerged in the doing too. But that's the essence of what purposeful work is. How do you figure out how to scaffold the experience of our students? So that they begin by knowing who they are. Learning a set of skills and a base of knowledge is a fundamental aspect of identity formulation. that's why college is such an important piece of that. it's part of forming your identity and becoming human. I can sew shoes. This is what I do. This is who I am. I am proud of it. Myself and Vern. That was unheard of what we could do. our goal in Purposeful Work was to translate this starting point. Who am I? What matters to me? Now, Richard Cormach did not have a choice. He immigrated from the Maritime Provinces of Canada with his family, where there was no work, and was born into shoe stitching. But even that, with no choices unheard of to the college students who were graduating, he learned that he was good at it. it filled his soul, and he was proud of the product, etc. So we built a program that starts with our individual students and, meets with them, counseling, what are your interests, strengths, and values? But then we pair it with internships, job shadows, all the normal tactics, but we do it in a way that focuses on exploration, reflection, Adaptation. I've got a great, this will be a very short story. We had a city kid from LA who came to Maine and Bates, probably because he thought it was going to be rural, not realizing he'd come to the big city of 34, 000 of Lewiston, Maine. But in any event, all he wanted to do his whole life was work on a farm. So through Purposeful Work, we connected him with a local beautiful farm in this beautiful country, out in the country, not too far from Lewiston. And he worked on that farm. And our, our internship program is cohort based. So students go out, do their different internships, but they're connected always, all summer, to Bates. We ask them to reflect on their experiences in different ways. And then we require that they come back and present, in lunchtime talks of basically 10 to 15 minutes each. about their summer experience, what they learned, and did it help them, find their purpose? And this student, whom I came to know very well, he goes, I suppose you can say it helped me find my purpose because I've checked one big thing off the list. I am never, ever going near a farm again. The smell was enough alone to get me off it. And I wanted to do a whole bunch of different things. He joined AmeriCorps, et cetera. And, so that was his experimentation that was slightly different from Richard Courtmanch's. So anyway, we worked very hard on program design. It reported directly to me in those four years. We worked as deeply on the philosophy and the language of it as on the tactics, and then ultimately married the two. We tried different modules, and I, we don't have time to go into the, all the details, but. That was the process, and I think it felt very organic to the community, and it felt very, again, the staff, this is an interesting piece, who had been working in the Career Counseling Center, were so excited by Purposeful Work that when Purposeful Work became the organizing principle of, of the Career Development Center, which is now the Center for Purposeful Work, Almost no staff left, and they are so excited and so energized, and our students, it's one of the highest scoring things in their experience, because it's working with them on their journey, and it's all about alignment. How do I figure out who I am and maintain it over time. Fantastic. Grega, I want to talk to you a little bit about, perhaps some of the challenges in conversations about purpose, with college students. I worked throughout the year with a group of fellowship students. The fellowship is called Call to the Common Good, taught a course called Pursuing Purpose and the Common Good. And, Recently, just at the end of the year, had a conversation with a student, who was suggesting that, that purpose and a conversation about purpose was really creating another burden on students, that, he was incredibly stressed, purpose was now something else he had to be good at. And in fact, had a conversation with his girlfriend, who told him his top priority was to get a job that would enable him to live in Manhattan, in a lifestyle that she would appreciate. and he wondered if purpose was commensurate with living in Manhattan at a lifestyle his girlfriend would appreciate. and so in a very earnest conversation, described the many challenges, right? And I think he's, someone who's struggling with the kind of imagination you're talking about, but how do we prevent purpose from becoming another requirement of young people that adds to the mental health stress, that adds to the sense of, I need to make trade offs between financial well being and doing something meaningful in the That's a great question. I think if any of this character, purpose, entrepreneur, if it becomes one more thing to do, then it just becomes a burden, in that sense. And, young people, Today, often just have these incredibly long lists and, you're supposed to participate not just in sports and, arts and everything else, but, the whole process of building a resume to get into college is, creates a kind of frenetic sense that I think contributes to those mental health issues that people experience. I think there's a big difference between purposes, one more thing to be good at, or one more thing to do and a different way of framing. The whole way you approach life. And that's where what I talk about in the essay is whole person formation that pays attention to not just what you're thinking, how you're feeling, the broader things that matter in life. And I do worry a lot about that notion that, that you can only fulfill purpose if you're succeeding in a particular kind of job or living in Manhattan or, getting on the, the hamster wheel of achievement, which can become really, distorting. I loved, the story that, that Clayton was telling about, hand sewing and those sorts of things, because, there's, there is a fulfillment in. Discovering a purpose that actually may not be your day job, but may be the way in which your day job contributes to a broader sense of how you think you can contribute and leave a legacy. And we spend a lot of time having these people who've been successful talk about the twists and turns and that they didn't have it figured out. And for us at Belmont in a Christian environment, we have a lot of students who are trying to figure out what God's plan is for them. And they think there's this one thing, and they get very anxious because it's a different form of the burden, because they haven't gotten that one plan figured out. So we use, Dave Evans and Bill Burnett's Designing Your Life and the Odyssey planning of different scenarios. And to say, think about the most likely scenario, which may be tied to your major and what you think you're, your vocational trajectory. Then think about something that's an alternative to that. And then what would you do if money was no object? and just that process of odyssey planning, turns out to be a real breakthrough where all of a sudden students now don't feel like they're obligated to have it all figured out. And to hear from people whether they're 26 or 80, that they've been able to Make pivots and twists and turns. And I think the other piece of it is find friends. Maybe it's not this guy, young man's girlfriend, who doesn't seem like she'd be particularly helpful in broadening his perspective, but we long for friends or mentors who will ask questions that unsettle us in really fruitful ways. And sometimes that can be in a partnership. It can be in different kinds of, environments. I think part of what we're trying to do at Belmont is create a culture and it sounds like Clayton that's what you did a lot of debates in doing a creating a culture across campus, where there's new language and new ways of asking questions that open up a horizon that becomes. Really pretty powerful. when you leave space for that kind of an environment, it becomes less of a burden and more of an opportunity. And I just love our showcase that we do at the end of each semester in the What's Your Why class, because students tell me that this is the first time they've actually let their imagination unfold. Kind of open up about what they want to contribute and how they want to grow, and it may some, it sometimes has changed their major, sometimes it has confirmed, but it just leads to a more holistic approach to how they think about their post college hopes and environment. and one thing I would, one way I think about it is that If you spend a lot of time on the scaffolding of the experience, as you do in the content and the experience of your course, purpose is not an extra thing. It's actually a powerful, the seeking of purpose. It's a powerful methodology that they internalize. And then they use it for choosing their classes, choosing their majors. The other thing I would say is that when we started it, I had so many young alums come back to me saying, can you open this up for us because we didn't have anything like this. And I feel like it's saying, do I have to worry about my health? Bad stuff about your health will, will out. If you're leading a life that doesn't bring you fulfillment. that's gonna start popping out one way or another, so it's better to learn early how to, the joy of taking it, straight on. what you described as, the alumni has been really fascinating. we developed as part of our purpose focus some work with alumni. an alumni mentoring program and asked alumni to come back, into the, to mentor students. And I'm not sure who benefited more. We were envisioning is the way it was going to benefit the students. The alumni just found these conversations so enlivening for them. And that was really powerful, whether they were Older alumni in their 50s and 60s, or whether they were alumni who were just five or 10 years out. I, one of the things I found is that, notion, of people who aren't so far removed from each other, having a conversation opens up space that's really pretty powerful. And the other thing I would say is having people together, which is one of the reasons we have very strong cohort. structure in our various aspects of purposeful work is it makes you braver. Yeah. It makes you braver. It's solidarity. And I think that's a huge, I think for our program students sense of skills and confidence in pursuing their journey is greatly increased by these various, Non-high stakes things they do to figure things out. Suzanne, you're back. I am back. So the electricity is back on. although not fully, which is why it's blue here. maybe we can just turn to a couple of audience questions because they've been teeing up. So the first one is Peter Drucker wrote culture eats strategy for breakfast. How does university leadership engage well beyond typical strategic dynamics to help elevate and create a deep and lasting culture on campus? That's a great question. I just add real quickly, that's a lot of what we're about is cultivating that culture. we've done purpose workshops for faculty and staff at the beginning of each semester, just to inspire a conversation to encourage. new language, in that the, encouraging faculty to do, work with each other in creative ways and to open up conversations. I couldn't agree more that culture, does eat strategy for breakfast. And that, the culture will enable the kind of work that Clayton described the purpose for work project to take hold, and gain traction rather than just being yet one more program that doesn't work. That ebbs and flows. it's whether it finds soil to really, flourish. And that's about finding champions and nurturing it, helping cultivate language that is enough unfamiliar that people have to pause to think about what does that mean? Wonderful. Thank you. Clayton, did you have anything to add? Just one little point. I also believe that culture beats strategy, but that goes into the how of introducing new ideas into a community. It's not the weather. We all know we need to be growing, vibrant, changing, adapting, staying relevant to the youngest generation we're dealing with, as well as honoring the, the alums who are coming back to their 50th reunions. But we've got to be preparing students for the world they're walking into, which is just changing fast. It's a, it's full of complexity and uncertainty. So we have to do that. So it's the how. And I don't think academics spend as much time talking about the how. As the what and the why. And I think they're all important. You have to understand why am I doing this work? Why does it matter? And how are we going to get it done in a way that is organic to the organization or college or university you're leading? Great, thank you. so here's a question for Greg. Greg, you had mentioned that not everyone in higher education is open, to questions of purpose and character. Do you find that there is now more openness to purpose centered programs within higher education now that there are many parents are, that many parents are starting to question the value of a college degree? Yeah, I think, I sense that there is a lot more traction, and I think that there's more interest and it's emerging, in varieties of settings. I do think that Clayton's question about the how, remains to be, that's where the devil's in the details. And I think there's now openness to these questions, but the question, but the real challenge is going to be, will people be willing to give up and prune things to, to create more space for those kinds of questions to be asked? and that's where, I think a lot of work has to be done, to move away just from tactical questions to deeper questions about purpose. Great. Clayton, here's one for you. how does character contribute to meaningful work and more broadly purpose in life? we often think of virtue when it comes to being an ethical person, but how does virtue connect with these questions of meaning and purpose? I think it connects quite directly in the concept of authenticity. because I don't think you can find your purposeful work unless the journey you're taking is authentic to you. You're exploring in good faith. You're trying to figure things out. And if you're doing that is already an ethical pursuit. And the, I think, good character, virtue, good faith, honesty, openness, all of those things are required to do good work in the world, good work for yourself, good work for your family, anywhere. and because, I think it baits because we're basically helping, we're trying in purposeful work to give our students the compasses that they can learn to take where they want to go, but they're still going to have to figure it out. But if you're not trying to do that in good faith, if you're saying, oh, I guess I'm, my mom says I have to do purposeful work because it'll help me get a job and it can't hurt, right? If that's the way you're approaching it, you're not going to get much out of it. That's not the way most kids approach it because it starts with self awareness and everybody learns, loves learning about themselves. do I want to fix toasters or do I want to be on Wall Street or do I want to be on Wall Street or do I have to be doing something in public service that is just obviously so important and meaningful? So it's, I think we don't want purposeful work to be an ideology as an internalized that kind of intel inside for our students to lead with, to know how they're going to navigate their own evolving lives in an evolving world. But you can't do it if you don't do it in good faith. Great. By way of wrap up, I want to give you each a moment to speak to one or another issues. The first one, or first option is, clearly this is a challenging time for university presidents. What sage advice might you offer? or the second one, what is it you're most hopeful about in higher education? What are you seeing that really inspires and energizes, and gives you hope for the future? advice or hope? Greg? I don't know if it's so much advice as what I'm sensing is, and also hopeful, is that the questions that are being put, are ones that should compel us to a much deeper reimagining of the purpose of higher education, and that there's no one institution that should be the paradigm. It's not one size fits all. And that we ought to be exploring, innovative opportunities that draw on the deepest wisdom of the past in a new key that connect us, to deeper questions about our place in the universe and our relationship to the natural world, as well as questions about whether there is, a transcendent being, and if so, how that, is related, mutual intersections. I think that Sometimes, the old Chinese proverb about living in interesting times can be an opportunity for much deeper reflection, collaboration, and I hope that this will be an opportunity for us. I'm hopeful about the questions that students are bringing. Often it inchoate forms or the frustrations they're feeling and we've got to be able to channel them in life giving ways and I find it to be really fruitful at those intersections of character and purpose in an entrepreneurial mindset and what it really means to flourish. Wonderful, thank you. How about you, Spencer? I would say I'm going to take the first one. It's not as much advice as a confession. of my own that hopefully, in a question, I really struggled with the core question of what it means to be an institution centrally involved with truth seeking, whether, whether evidence based science, whether, humanistic exploration, understanding other people, other cultures. But also understanding the world in a way that is as precise and true and described as such as it can be. So I think there's a lot of discussion of transparency and I don't like that word because it suggests we're not all looking at the same thing that, that I'm, I've got a view and this is how it's going to be and I'm going to make it transparent to you. But I think Trying to get to a point, and this is a future point because we live in a different world. I'm not going back to an imagined point. I'm going to a future point. It also always alludes us to try to put front and center the truth seeking project of the university and how our students in their own truth seeking project about their own future. development and emerging into the world, how those things coincide. And I think we're very far away from that, given the intense polarization in our society, discourse, and politics. And universities, as we could have been seeing, in recent weeks, are both a microcosm, but also an intensifier of Those kinds of conflicts. I guess my hope comes in students don't put up with hypocrisy and dishonesty very well or very long, and they have energy and good ideas that are much more comfortable with lots of the methods and means of the world in the directions it's going. So I think there's always hope that the next generation is gonna help us get creatively into the future. but it's a real challenge that we aren't just yet. Thanks so much to the both of you. This has been an extraordinary hour, despite technical difficulties. I really appreciate, hearing you both elucidate more on your essays for the, Higher Education and Human Flourishing Magazine. But just also, I feel like I learned even more from each of you today. This has been such a lovely opportunity, and I'm so grateful that the both of you are such important leaders in higher education. Gives me hope for the future. So thank you.