Abstract
From their inception in the high Middle Ages, universities understood their essential mission as involving the formation of their students’ character, the inculcation of moral and intellectual virtue. Education was envisioned as being “led out” toward divine truth, and students were presumed to need certain excellences of character to make such a passage possible: honesty, courage, justice, humility, docility, and wisdom, to name a few.
Many observers of contemporary higher education lament that this mission has been forgotten, neglected, or perhaps replaced with a very different kind of character education that focuses on resume building and career placement. Indeed, contemporary “multiversities”—far removed from the theologically centered universities of yesteryear—are pushed and pulled in so many different directions that the mere mention of virtue formation strikes many ears as passé.
There are promising signs, however, that robust character education is alive and well in 21st-century higher learning. A broad range of academic disciplines and research programs are focused on the nature of the virtues and vices and how character might be shaped in the context of schools, families, and faith communities. Furthermore, there has been significant attention paid recently to how pedagogical practices across the disciplines might be directed toward virtue formation.
Some of the most vibrant work on character formation is occurring within Christian higher education, and this special issue on “The Character of the University” captures a selection of essays devoted to the challenges and opportunities of forming students in virtue in the present age.
Perry Glanzer examines how moral philosophy taught in early American colleges and universities depended on the idea that humans are created imago Dei: virtue formation involved the acquisition of creaturely analogues of divine virtues. Yet this account of virtue changed dramatically, as later moral philosophy assumed that the point of forming virtue was to support liberal democracy. As Glanzer argues, moral educators at the end of the 20th century eventually were left with an impoverished set of random virtues related only to students’ professional and civic identities.
Samuel Youngs draws upon theology, psychology, philosophy, and literary theory to explore teaching as a uniquely narratival and virtue-formative practice. To teach, he argues, is to tell a story, to create a world; it is not, in many ways, primarily about conveying information. In particular, he discusses four narratival-pedagogical approaches that might serve the tasks of cultivating specific intellectual virtues, such as courage, curiosity, tenacity, humility, diligence, and honesty. Youngs suggests that Christian reflection is needed to consider not only the best kinds of stories teachers might tell but also the virtues that students might learn through such narratives.
Donald Roth considers character formation through the lens of nine narrative metaphors drawn from the Bible: ambassador, builder, exile, harvester, messenger, pilgrim, slave, soldier, and steward. He explains how a certain approach to course assessment can help students to examine their own narrative identities in light of these Scriptural metaphors. In addition, he suggests that this approach can help institutions to develop a revealing picture of student character formation.
Gerda J Kits, Roy Berkenbosch, and Joanne M Moyer focus on how hope might be cultivated in the classroom. They observe the troubling ways that so many of today’s students experience depression and anxiety. Classrooms, they argue, can foster hope by showing students how to live in biblical hope rooted in the transformational work of God in human history. Accordingly, the authors set out a theological framework for hope that might serve a variety of hope-inspired classroom practices.
John Houston Boyles and Amanda Jo Pittman’s essay studies the perceptions of vocation held by college juniors at a Christian university and how institutions that aim to form students for a sense of calling might introduce them into theologically grounded visions of life. Boyles and Pittman find in their research with students a latent individualism and underdeveloped sense of the vocational implications of Christian community. As a response, they seek to reorient students’ understanding of vocation in three ways: reflecting on their own embeddedness in the body of Christ, participating in the body through mentoring relationships, and imagining their vocational journeys as part of a body shaped by Christological hope.
Bryan Sokol, Steven Sanchez, Bobby Wassell, Leah Sweetman, and Ashlei Peterson observe that civic engagement programs in higher education depend on a robust conception of character formation; they focus especially on the rich tradition found in Catholic, Jesuit higher education that emphasizes a commitment to faith and justice. The authors suggest that recent insights in moral psychology and civic education help to illuminate the vision of justice found in both the Jesuit tradition and the ideals of American democracy. Then they examine how a center devoted to service and community engagement and a new undergraduate core curriculum at Saint Louis University are attempting to be expressions of Catholic, Jesuit commitments to form “men and women for others.”
Finally, Andrew Hansen shows, through the example of the Anselm House’s Colin MacLaurin Fellows Program at the University of Minnesota, how the project of theologically rich moral formation might proceed in secular settings, different in significant ways from both Christian colleges and universities and traditional campus ministries. Notable is the program’s formation of Christian community that unites a vision of moral, spiritual, and intellectual formation within the Christian tradition but in the setting of a public research university.
These articles, several of which were presented at a major symposium in 2019 under the auspices of the Institute for Faith and Learning at Baylor University, represent the depth and range of Christian reflection on the project of character formation in higher education. Furthermore, they demonstrate the vitality of this continuing effort and how it might faithfully proceed in the future.