Category: Flourishing

In the spring of 2019, word reached the inmates at M.C.I.-Shirley, a medium security men’s prison in Shirley, Mass., that Boston College was starting a bachelor’s degree program inside the facility. 

The prospect seemed unlikely to Nurudeen Alabi, who had been incarcerated for more than a decade, beginning when he was 17. He was first acquainted with the carceral system even earlier as a child, and felt fairly confident he understood how it worked at this point. A bachelor’s degree, and certainly one from the likes of B.C., prestigious by any standards, was not in the cards for guys like him.

“Being somebody that’s incarcerated, you have limitations,” Alabi said. “You’re limited to what you’re capable of doing, even though you could possibly do more. Just being in that mindset, I never thought college was anywhere near my future.”

It’s this very narrative that B.C. aims to break down. The B.C. Prison Education Program (BCPEP) is designed to provide incarcerated people a second, or sometimes first, chance at recognizing and cultivating the value they still have to offer the world. Grounded in the university’s most central principles, Jesuit values, the initiative has quickly distinguished itself based on just how far it’s willing to go to affirm the humanity of those others would prefer to ignore. 

Degrees earned through BCPEP come with no asterisk. The students are considered B.C. students in full and promised the same level of rigor as their traditional peers. They take many of the same classes, taught by the same longstanding professors. What’s more, any students who complete their prison sentence before their studies are guaranteed to be able to continue their program, post-release, on B.C.’s main campus in Chestnut Hill, Mass. 

“By Boston College just going in there, offering not a certificate but a real degree, helping them to realize that they matter, we are taking care of the whole person,” said Sister Jeanmarie Gribaudo, a B.C. faculty member whom one colleague described as the “den mother” of BCPEP. “I think that this is like hand in glove with the Jesuit mission.” 

Today, BCPEP is the largest provider of higher education in prison in Massachusetts. Since Alabi’s cohort, another five have followed, and the admissions process for a seventh is now underway. To apply, students must have a high school diploma or its equivalent, in addition to writing a personal essay, taking a reading analysis test, and completing an interview. This past semester, for the first time, the program expanded to a medium security women’s prison, M.C.I.-Framingham, in Framingham, Mass. 

Of the 110 total students BCPEP has admitted so far, both men and women, around 20 have been released and moved over to the Chestnut Hill campus to continue (or complete) their degrees. In 2022, after 15 years in prison, Alabi became the first BCPEP student to go free. In 2025, he was the first to walk at commencement on the outside. This spring, he started a new job at the New England Board of Higher Education advocating for prison education expansion across the region. 

Granting opportunity

The road of prison education in America has been far from linear. Policy, like public perception, has had a tendency to flip flop on the question of whether education, and especially higher education, is a right or a luxury, as well as who is deserving of either. Is incarceration for punishment or rehabilitation? 

In the early 70s, incarcerated people became eligible for Basic Educational Opportunities Grants, now known as Pell Grants, for the first time. They could receive federal financial aid to put towards a higher education without taking out a loan or risking debt. And as students found a way to pay, the number of prisons with degree-granting programs shot up, from 237 in 1976 to 772 in 1990.

The boom didn’t last long. By 1994, President Clinton was ushering in a new period of restriction, eliminating Pell-eligibility for the incarcerated once again. Then, like now, many wondered why criminals should receive for free the kind of education many more lawful, middle-class folk couldn’t afford themselves. Rehabilitation for those who have committed heinous offenses can be a hard pill to swallow, especially for victims and their families. Programs started to shutter, like in New York, where nearly 1,100 incarcerated people earned a college degree in 1991, compared to 141 in 2011. 

At the same time, evidence was mounting for the most prevalently cited justification for prison education: reduced recidivism (and, thus, saved tax dollars). In 2013, the RAND Corporation published the definitive study on the matter, estimating those who participate in education programs to be 43 percent less likely to recidivate. By 2016, an Obama-era pilot effort had reinstated Pell grants for the incarcerated enrolled in certain partner colleges, or “experimental sites.” Those partnerships expanded under Trump, and in 2023, the Biden administration oversaw the return of Pell-eligibility for inmates across the board.  

As BCPEP wasn’t among the Pell-supported “experimental sites” when it began in 2019, it relied on other funding. The primary donors were an anonymous couple, who had ties to B.C. and were already supporting the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) out of Bard College, a longtime leader in the prison education space. The couple helped engineer a relationship between B.C. and BPI, still affiliated today, which gave way to the original launch of BCPEP. 

As it stands, support for BCPEP continues to come from a mix of sources, including the anonymous donors who started it all, along with other individual contributors, private grants, and state and federal funding. Though more difficult, being forced to be self-sustaining from the beginning may have ultimately been a blessing. Even now, federal support is helpful but not the difference between the program’s survival and collapse. 

Patrick Conway, the BCPEP director, offered another benefit of more involved fundraising: It requires a greater investment of time and resources from the university, which in turn reinforces its value for the initiative. That buy-in, he said, keeps BCPEP from “being perceived as a very peripheral program, rather than part of the core mission.”

‘They read everything’

On the walls of the classroom at M.C.I.-Shirley hang all manner of B.C. swag. Photos of campus are posted beside pennants beside a picture one BCPEP student drew of the B.C. eagle. 

“I told them the first day that this was like an embassy,” said Susan Roberts, a veteran of the B.C. English department now dedicated to teaching at BCPEP in her retirement. “In this room, this is Boston College.” 

At the embassy, students all pursue an applied liberal arts degree, which involves two key components: a traditional liberal arts curriculum, with classic subjects like English, history, philosophy, and theology; and a “professional core,” spanning courses in entrepreneurship, design thinking, and strategic leadership, to map the liberal arts skills onto modern work environments. There are also non-academic offerings, including an annual 5K, reflective retreat, and classical music concert series. Soon, for the first time in Massachusetts, BCPEP will facilitate paid internships, with salaries of $25 per hour, for two students to work for the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison from inside M.C.I.-Shirley.

To ease the transition to college, students tend to take two classes their first term. From there, they’re guaranteed at least three per semester. In total, nine to 11 courses run usually any given fall or spring, Conway said, along with another three to five over the summer. Though pacing varies, the typical time to graduate sits around four and a half years, he added.

As advertised, the courses at BCPEP closely resemble those offered on the main B.C. campus. In the past, Roberts has taught Studies in Poetry and Apocalypse Narratives. She, like other colleagues, described basing the content on classes she’d taught in Chestnut Hill, while making adjustments to appeal more to potential interests of an incarcerated population.

Many BCPEP teachers reported being nervous, or at least uncertain, to be teaching in a prison for the first time. In the end, they were universally impressed with what they found. Intellectually, they said, the BCPEP students are on par with their traditional peers. In terms of their eagerness, the inmates tend to be legions beyond the reference point.

“They read everything. Everything you give them, they read,” said Brian Harrington, a B.C. alumnus and the former chief marketing officer of Zipcar. Now teaching entrepreneurship at BCPEP, he often brings guests into class to talk about their successful careers. Uniformly, he said, they tell him his students are the most engaged of any they’ve addressed.

Part of the students’ dedication to their education, Harington imagines, stems from their having the time for it. At the very least, prison is boring, BCPEP teachers and students agree. The hunger to learn is wrapped up in a desire, and a need, for engagement and stimulation of any kind.

“I believe my class gives them agency in a place where hopes and dreams are crushed most days.”

Of course, there’s something deeper going on, too. “I believe my class gives them agency in a place where hopes and dreams are crushed most days,” Harrington said. Especially given the practical aspect of his course, where students develop their own idea for a business, they might begin to imagine the possibilities for a future after prison. 

Anthony Baye graduated from BCPEP this spring and was released from M.C.I.-Shirley a few weeks later. Despite being free now, he spoke to a universal way the program, and particularly its professors, lift up students, no matter the length of their sentence.

“It’s just the level of care and respect that we get from faculty that matters most to me,” Baye said. “In prison, you feel like nothing you really have to say matters; you’re always going to be a second-class person. But when you’re in B.C., they treat you no different.”

It will come as no surprise to know there are still plenty of challenges with teaching and learning in prison. When BCPEP began, students had no access to technology and handwrote all their assignments. While there are now laptops that include Microsoft apps and a modified version of JSTOR, basic gaps in digital tools or knowledge remain a barrier. It’s difficult, Harrington said for instance, to teach modern marketing to students who have never seen or used Google Reviews. 

Susan Roberts added that students’ lives outside the classroom may impede their academic progress. One of hers was recently forced to withdraw after a prolonged period in solitary confinement. Others have missed class or been pulled out early because their lawyers came to visit. A few weeks ago, she submitted final grades for two students who never handed in the last assignment; she didn’t know why not. “There’s a whole infrastructure of the prison that we have no access to, and no interaction with, that can be very interruptive,” she said.

Tensions between the inmates can present another point of concern. In the early days of BCPEP, Baye said, those not involved or admitted could seem resentful of those who were and accuse them of thinking they were above the rest. In general, Nurudeen Alabi said being a BCPEP student made him feel vulnerable among the other incarcerated because they knew he needed to stay out of trouble. He didn’t want to be perceived as weak; he also couldn’t do anything to risk his spot in the program.

Over time, though, both Baye and Alabi reported feeling like BCPEP spurred a broad culture shift at M.C.I.-Shirley for the better. For one, as Alabi mentioned, wanting to be or remain in the program encouraged good behavior. For another, as the program grew, more and more students brought their education outside the classroom, continuing those conversations, and sharing content with others. 

“It went from guys talking about selling drugs or doing dumb stuff to, ‘Yo, what did you get on that paper? Oh, I’m so excited to talk about X, Y, and Z next week,’” Baye said. “It just changed the conversation and the tone and the mood around camp.” 

“Guys were talking about doing the right things — positive stuff — as opposed to all the B.S. that got guys there in the first place.”

Eagles Bridging the Gap

When Alabi was released in 2022, he was free but not unburdened.

He struggled in the transition back to a life on the outside that had changed drastically since he’d last known it as a teenager. He needed to find employment and housing. He needed to learn to drive and figure out how to afford a car and then insure it. He needed to learn how to pay taxes. He needed to learn how to use Google. “That Google helped a lot,” he recalled, with a laugh.

When it came to his education, a whole other host of specific changes and challenges emerged. He was still discovering Google, let alone mastering the whirlwind of online tools commonly used in college classes today. He needed to create an email address. He needed to know how to submit assignments through Canvas and post on discussion boards and take online classes and tests and search for library books. 

As the first of BCPEP’s students to make it onto the Chestnut Hill campus, Alabi navigated reentry largely on his own. B.C. had yet to build much in the way of infrastructure to support students’ transition, so he enrolled in a program at nearby Tufts University specializing in just that. 

Alabi recalled his hesitance to take full advantage of B.C. opportunities, even as Conway encouraged him to do so. “He’d always say, ‘This is your campus, too. This is your campus, too,’” Alabi said. “And I never understood why he’s saying [that]. In my head, I’m like, ‘This is not my campus. I’m just a visitor. I’m lucky to be here.’”

The arrival of one more student from M.C.I.-Shirley opened up Alabi’s experience. With a partner by his side, he felt more at ease using various resources, like the dining hall or the library. He started attending B.C. events, likes sports matches. “If it’s interesting, I’m gonna go and be part of the program, be part of the school,” he said.

As more BCPEP students have made their way over to Chestnut Hill, the structures and community of support have grown as well. Alabi serves as a mentor and guide to other formerly incarcerated students. There is a course dedicated in part to easing their transition, along with a team of BCPEP staff organized to look out for the students and ensure they’re on track. “I honestly think that what we do on campus is just as transformative as what we’re doing on the inside,” Conway said.

Deepening relationships between BCPEP and traditional B.C. students has been a particular focus of late. Alabi is one of the founders of a student group called Eagles Bridging the Gap, designed to connect the two groups. He said it’s been gratifying to see others seek to broaden their understanding of what the formerly incarcerated are really like.

Sister Jeanmarie Gribaudo described how having insight into the incarcerated experience will help all B.C. students help the world. “The kids from Boston College, they’re extraordinarily academically gifted, and they need to know about these issues because they’re going to be the ones in boardrooms and everything else, where they can speak up and make a difference,” she said. 

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

Amanda Christy was searching for something and so, it seems, were her students. As a faculty member at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, she was frustrated by her students’ lack of engagement and their reliance on A.I. even for basic work like classroom discussion. She was tired of persuading them of the value of their liberal arts education when they bemoaned not being in business classes. There were days when she thought, “What are we even doing here?” 

The burnout Christy was experiencing was soon replaced with renewed energy after she participated in a faculty learning community sponsored by the L.M.U. Intellectual Character Initiative. The initiative seeks to embed six intellectual virtues (“The Virtues of the Lion Mind”) into L.M.U.’s pedagogy and culture — helping students cultivate cognitive habits that lead to critical thinking and active learning. 

Christy designed a whole course around two of the virtues: intellectual curiosity and intellectual courage, introducing her students to the concepts, providing self-assessments, and assigning them curiosity journals in which they wrote from the heart in free-form style. At the end of her experiment, Christy found that her classroom had transformed into an active community of reflective learners. 

“The goal shifted from just learning the content to learning how to be good thinkers,” she said. “It was kind of utopian.”

To Dan Speak and Jason Baehr, the co-directors of the initiative, experiences like Christy’s are the ultimate outcome of the Intellectual Character Initiative. They hope that by inspiring and empowering faculty and academic leaders to focus on intellectual character formation, they will influence how students learn and grow.

Furthermore, Baehr is a highly regarded educational theorist who, in addition to publishing widely on the application of virtue epistemology to education, founded a public charter middle school in 2013 in Long Beach, Calif. The Intellectual Virtues Academy, as this school is known, was built from scratch to help students practice and develop virtues such as curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, and courage. The idea for the L.M.U. Initiative began to take shape when Speak, who serves on the board of directors for The Intellectual Virtues Academy, noted the irony of the deep impact of Baehr’s research and academic vision outside but not inside L.M.U. In 2024, they teamed up to create the blueprint for the L.M.U. project.

Their idea was brought to life thanks to a $943,668 grant from the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University’s Center for Leadership and Character. The Center is funded by the Lilly Endowment to seed and steer innovative character education initiatives in schools throughout the country. Like most start-up ventures, the L.M.U. Intellectual Character Initiative is moving in many directions, and no one is exactly sure where it will land. Speak and Baehr are nonetheless pleased with the energy and activity it has already prompted on campus. 

“The goal shifted from just learning the content to learning how to be good thinkers. It was kind of utopian.”

In this first phase, it is both concept and practice, with university lectures on the virtues themselves and introductory modules for first-year students. A large part of its focus is on faculty training through summer workshops and learning communities. Speak said the initiative has three main delivery points: students, faculty and leadership. “We hope these concepts will take root so that they become part of the whole culture of the university,” he said. 

Speak and Baehr believe that the Virtues of the Lion Mind align nicely with the school’s Jesuit mission, which holds dear concepts such as truth, reflection, and discernment. However, they hope these beliefs will, over time, become as prevalent in the school’s pedagogy and culture as they are in its mission statement. Indeed, everything about the three-year initiative is designed to resonate with a campus grappling with a number of realities that exist across higher education, including a decline in the humanities, R.O.I. pressure, viewpoint polarization, and students who report to lack meaning and purpose. 

The leaders’ first cultural hurdle was to carefully choose the six intellectual virtues they found most relevant to an L.M.U. education. They arrived at: curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, intellectual autonomy, intellectual courage, and intellectual perseverance. “Curiosity gets the learning process started,” Baehr said. “We’ve also identified two pairs of virtues that complement and constrain each other. Intellectual humility helps us own our intellectual limitations, while intellectual autonomy compels us to own our intellectual abilities. Similarly, open-mindedness disposes us to give a fair hearing to alternative perspectives, while intellectual courage helps us have the courage of our convictions. Finally, intellectual perseverance keeps the process of inquiry going even when obstacles arise, as they always do.” 

Asked why the initiative feels particularly relevant at this moment in time, the scholars described the need to navigate what they call “a polluted information landscape.” “We need to be appropriately skeptical and cautious, but we also need to be trusting of the right sources, and in today’s digital world, that makes significant demands on who we are as thinkers,” Baehr said. “Intellectual virtues equip us to do this responsibly and competently.” 

Another issue the initiative addresses is polarization and the inability of all parties to give a fair hearing to another’s point of view. “We can’t have a democracy, if we can’t listen to and learn from one another,” Baehr said. “Here is where intellectual humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness come to the fore, but also a certain amount of intellectual firmness and courage to engage in public discourse with appropriate confidence and firmness.” 

Speak and Baehr said that the growth and ubiquity of artificial intelligence loomed large over their thinking about the project and prompted the late addition of “intellectual autonomy” to the Virtues of the Lion Mind.

“We knew the A.I. stuff would be an issue,” Speak said. “So, we identified intellectual autonomy as a way to frame how students and faculty ought to think about A.I. This intellectual virtue involves thinking for yourself. When you exercise it, you are making the ideas and knowledge your own. The knowledge didn’t just pass through you. You got to the point of understanding by your own agency.” 

Practical Virtue

One of the advantages of the initiative is that it provides a language and pathway for a variety of stakeholders on campus, from Amanda Christy’s need to reinvigorate her classroom, to the university librarians who, in service to enlightenment, have embedded descriptions of the virtues in their basic “how to use the library” modules.  

For Father Dorian Llywelyn, the virtues promise to awaken fundamental principles of scholarship and learning, and perhaps, a resurgence in Jesuit spirituality. A theologian and historian, Father Dorian leads the Center for Ignatian Spirituality at L.M.U. and sees his role there as connecting Jesuit values to the academic pursuits of the university. 

As part of his work, Father Dorian said he seeks to reach people who have diverse beliefs with some kind of common platform. 

“I want to give people something of use and value that somehow belongs to them, and they belong to it,” he said. “That is why I was particularly interested in the work of Dan and Jason. What they are doing is 100 percent in keeping with the tradition of Jesuit education, but it rearticulates it in a way that is relatable to many who may see religious terminology as a barrier. Even though they are not coming at this from a distinctly Christian or Jesuit viewpoint, there is great synergy there.” 

Father Dorian recently hosted a weekend retreat for people involved in the initiative. Each participant took personal time to ponder what the work might look like in their respective roles. He also sat in on the faculty learning community and came away feeling the virtues could help address some of the lingering ills within higher education, including siloing and what he called “misguided zeal” among faculty. 

“Intellectual humility works against indoctrination because you can’t be doctrinaire when you are intellectually humble,” he said. 

On the faculty learning communities, he said, “bringing people of all different disciplines together to share their diverse viewpoints is what we should be doing all of the time. Doing so is an intellectual delight that raise us up and brings out the very best of us.” 

In supporting this work, Father Dorian can’t help but wonder if the virtues initiative might ignite a resurgence in the interface between academia and spirituality, something that has fallen away over time in most Jesuit institutions. 

“What is it to be a thinking person of virtue but also a thinking person of faith?” he asked. “My area of interest is trying to articulate that relationship better.” 

With champions like Father Dorian, Speak and Baehr hope that the Intellectual Character Initiative may eventually become an integral part of both the academic and co-curricular life of the university. But there is a long way to go before it transforms from an overlay — a program — to part of the DNA. As cultural change theory dictates, it will be the accumulation of small developments that will eventually move the needle in that direction, which is why the experiences of individual students may be the most promising. 

In describing what she learned in Amanda Christy’s class, a young woman wrote in her curiosity journal, “Curiosity helps you question your own assumptions and it pushes you to see different perspectives which can make you more thoughtful when facing problems in the world. Curiosity isn’t about knowing every fact but putting yourself out there to learn and grow. In all, that kind of curiosity is something I’ll carry with me far beyond this class.” 

You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

On a weekday morning during spring break, a group of first-year and second-year college students gathered around a patient whose condition began to change. The patient’s blood pressure was rising, breathing growing shallow. Sudden drooling. 

It wasn’t a real patient. Behind the scenes, an instructor controlled the simulation using a mannequin. But the patient’s recovery wasn’t the point. The students’ introductory glimpse to the field of medicine was.

For some students, this might have been a confirmation: Yes, this is exactly what I want to do. For others, the realization could have been a cooler response, which would be just as important: Maybe this isn’t for me.

That moment — of clarity, uncertainty, or recalibration — is what Tufts University hoped to spark with its new JUMP-IN pilot program, a weeklong, immersive experience designed to help primarily first-year and some second-year students step, however briefly, into the lives they think they want. Ask a room full of first- and second-year college students what they want to do after graduation, and many will have an answer: Doctor. Lawyer. Engineer. Ask them what those jobs actually look like, day to day, and the answers may resemble vague impressions, a composite of jobs observed on television and heard about through friends and relatives.

This gap — between aspiration and understanding — is not just anecdotal. Surveys from organizations like the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) and Gallup have consistently found that while students feel pressure to choose a career path early, many lack meaningful exposure to what those careers entail. At the same time, research suggests that students who engage in experiential learning — internships, simulations, project-based work — are significantly more likely to feel confident in their career choices and to secure employment aligned with their interests after graduation. In other words, it’s not just about choosing a path. It’s about trying it on to see how it feels.

“We wanted students to begin to think about linking their interests to their academic learning to their career goals,” said Ellise LaMotte, the associate provost for student success at Tufts. The goal is not to arrive at definitive answers in a single week, but to develop the tools — and the self-awareness — to start asking better questions.

And just as importantly, students are encouraged to recognize when the answer might be, no thank you. “We did not want this program to just confirm what students already thought,” LaMotte said. “If someone came in thinking, ‘I want to be a doctor,’ and left realizing they didn’t —that was just as powerful.”

Learning by Doing 

Each JUMP-IN participant spends the week in one of five tracks, including pre-med and dental pathways as well as global policy, nutrition, and engineering-focused design. What unites them is a commitment to experiential learning. “The charge was that this needed to be hands-on,” LaMotte said. “The majority of the time was spent with them doing something.” 

In the Design Problem Solving (D.P.S.) track, that meant building structures out of melting Oreos — an exercise in material constraints and creative thinking. It meant working with modeling software, experimenting with 3D printing, and tackling real-world challenges. An open deck on top of the Tufts library was enclosed in glass so that it would be a safe place for students. But that design choice had an unexpected consequence: Birds were now flying into the glass. “One of the design flash challenges was: How can these students in this D.P.S. program for the week help to give some solutions to this problem?” LaMotte said. “So, it was a little tech heavy. But if you are somebody curious about how to solve problems, it would be appealing.”

For some, the experience was exhilarating. For others, it was clarifying in a different way. “There were students who realized, ‘This is harder than I thought,’ or ‘This isn’t what I imagined,’” LaMotte said.

In Global Policy Lab, students became senators in a climate policy simulation, debating legislation on a mock Senate floor at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate in Boston. They explored the role of drones in international security and engaged with local officials on immigration policy. 

In the Pre Med Connect track, students practiced suturing and patient care, responding to dynamic simulations that required quick thinking and teamwork. In the Dental Bridge track, students performed tooth wax-up modeling, simulation shadowing, suturing, and align impressions. In the Beyond the Plate track, students conducted “nutrition myth labs,” explored food systems, and visited facilities researching lab-grown meat. Across all tracks, students were asked not just to absorb information, but to apply it — to make decisions, test ideas, and reflect on outcomes.

For some, the experience was exhilarating. For others, it was clarifying in a different way. “There were students who realized, ‘This is harder than I thought,’ or ‘This isn’t what I imagined,’” LaMotte said. “And that’s valuable.”

Building Belonging through Shared Exploration

If JUMP-IN is about career exploration on the surface, it is equally about something deeper: connection. The program, piloted this spring break with 94 first-year students, was intentionally designed to reach those who may not yet have found their place on campus.

“Some of them knew each other,” LaMotte said. “But there were some who didn’t know anybody — and those are the folks we really, really wanted to get in touch with.” The challenge is a familiar one. The first year of college is often framed as a time of discovery and belonging, but for many students, that sense of connection doesn’t come easily. Social circles can feel closed, academic interests uncertain, and the path forward unclear.

From the moment students arrive, the program nudges them toward interaction. They are encouraged to sit with people they don’t know. They work in teams. They share meals, experiences, and, by the end of the week, reflections.

Even small moments matter. On the first day, one student resisted moving from a table where he sat alone, confident that others would eventually fill the space, and they did. Over the course of the week, LaMotte watched him gradually open up — participating more, volunteering, engaging in ways he hadn’t at the start.

Those shifts, while subtle, are central to the program’s purpose. By the end of the week, 96 percent of participants said they would recommend JUMP-IN to a friend, citing connection and community as key reasons. And perhaps more significantly, 84 percent reported feeling more comfortable reaching out to mentors, advisors, or faculty — a critical step in navigating both academic and career pathways.

Measuring What Matters

By traditional academic standards, a weeklong program like JUMP-IN might be difficult to evaluate. There are no grades, so the metrics that matter are different: curiosity satisfied, realism gleaned. It’s hard to measure some shifts in attitude because they might only appear downstream later — in the form of keeping one’s eyes open more keenly or an increased willingness to make inquiries of someone who does something you just might want to know more about.

At the most immediate level, student feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. In addition to the 96 percent recommendation rate, students reported gains in career clarity, networking skills, and confidence in seeking support.

Thirty-two percent said the program led them to change their academic plans — a striking figure for a cohort just beginning their college journey. Another 38 percent reported feeling better equipped to leverage networks and support systems. Even exposure to research — a domain often reserved for upperclassmen — emerged as a meaningful outcome, with 17 percent of students reporting new experience in that area.

But the longer-term measures may prove even more significant. Tufts plans to track JUMP-IN participants and their progress over time, examining retention rates, academic trajectories, and career outcomes. Do students who participate feel more connected to the institution? Are they more likely to persist, to pivot when needed, to engage with mentors and opportunities? “We want to follow them along their path to figure it out,” LaMotte said. “They were in the JUMP-IN program and were interested in engineering; now they’re in political science. Why did that happen? Without surveying them to death, we would like to determine if JUMP-IN helped them make that change. Did they get support they need to be successful?” 

Lessons from the Pilot

Like any new initiative, JUMP-IN’s first iteration revealed areas for growth. The first was critical: using faculty to design and lead the program. “It took us a minute to figure out that faculty needed to run this and not staff. And once we made that decision, it made more sense because this is their area of expertise. Once we got faculty involved, we were able to really develop programming.” 

The most consistent feedback from students was the need for more unstructured time. The schedule, while engaging, was also intense. By midweek, small signs of fatigue had set in. “It was too structured,” LaMotte said. Future versions of the program will likely include more downtime and social activities — opportunities for students to build relationships outside of formal programming. “We need to give them more time to just connect and be with each other.” 

There were also logistical challenges, from coordinating transportation between campuses to managing meals while the campus is closed. But these are solvable problems, LaMotte noted, and, in some ways, evidence of the program’s scale and ambition.

Demand exceeded expectations, with 124 students applying for 100 spots. Plans are already underway to expand the number of tracks and increase capacity.

Perhaps the most ambitious aspect of JUMP-IN is what comes next. The program is envisioned not as a standalone experience but as the first step in a four-year developmental arc. Tufts plans to introduce sophomore, junior, and senior versions of JUMP-IN, each tailored to students’ evolving needs.

The first-year program focuses on exploration and connection. Future iterations may emphasize deeper skill-building focused on leadership, entrepreneurship, negotiation, navigation, along with civic impact and career development.

“We want it to grow with students,” LaMotte said, “and integrate JUMP-IN into the ethos of the undergraduate experience at Tufts.” 

In that sense, JUMP-IN reflects a broader shift in higher education — from viewing career development as a late-stage concern to embedding it throughout the undergraduate experience.

Capping the week, LaMotte was gratified to find the best evidence of the program’s success: In a session at the end where participants broke into sub-groups to share experiences, there was a buzz of animation in the room as students reflected on: what brought them joy, if their career focus changed, what skills they need to learn next, and how Tufts can further support them. For some, the experience reinforced a sense of purpose. For others, it raised new questions. But for all of them, it transformed an abstract idea — being this thing — into something tangible, complex, and real.

That transformation may be the most valuable outcome of all. Because the goal of programs like JUMP-IN is not to provide answers but to create encounters with possible futures and versions of themselves. In a higher education landscape increasingly defined by uncertainty, that kind of clarity — earned, and personal — may be just what students need to begin.

On a Monday evening in March, a few dozen students at the University of Pennsylvania trickled into a darkened classroom. Their professor, Justin McDaniel, greeted them at the front of the small lecture hall with two reminders: to pass in their phones and pick up the books they’d be reading that night. As the group traded in their tech for texts, McDaniel introduced their first author: Carson McCullers, a literary prodigy who wrote her first masterpiece at 23 and was dead by 50 following lifelong illness and chronic alcoholism. McDaniel said she was his “biggest crush” growing up. 

This is the tenth year that McDaniel, the chair of Penn’s religions department, has taught Existential Despair, a literature course that meets once per week for seven hours straight. Between roughly 5 p.m. and midnight, students typically hear a lecture on that day’s writers before settling in to read a book (or three) about human despair and concluding with group discussion. The lights in the room go off during those 11 p.m. conversations. No devices are allowed, ever. Only McDaniel knows what the reading will be before class starts. The rest can only expect it to be depressing.

Those skeptical that any students would be drawn to this dark experience will be shocked to learn it’s one of the most sought-after classes at Penn. This semester, McDaniel said, he fielded more than 500 requests — 80 more than last year — to fill 45 spots. The course’s general mystique no doubt contributes to its appeal, as would the lack of graded assignments. Arguably the most discussed reason for the class’s success has been its format forcing Gen Zers, with their ever-shrinking attention spans, to “read again.” But the urge to reclaim a childhood love of reading may offer only a partial explanation. By embracing a new and unusual approach to learning, and maybe even living, students are participating in an intensely present and explicit quest for meaning.

Choosing Despair

Students in Existential Despair read provocative texts from around the world and across time periods — from McCullers’ “The Ballad of the Sad Café” to contemporary French novelist Marie NDiaye’s “Self-Portrait in Green” — whose central experiences with despair compel readers to turn inward. In contemplating characters’ struggles with isolation, anxiety, and grief, McDaniel’s students end up questioning what they themselves want from this short and often cruel life. What really matters to them? And who do they want to be?

When he first started teaching Existential Despair, McDaniel was already well aware of young people’s hunger for meaning. For one, he’d devoted part of his own 20s to living in remote Thailand as a Buddhist monk. More recently, over the last 24 years and across three universities, he’s taught another unconventional but highly popular course, Living Deliberately, which is an introduction to monasticism. In addition to weekly lectures, the class requires students adopt certain elements of the ascetic lifestyle, like waking up at 5:30 a.m. and adhering to restrictions in their dress, drinking, and communication. For one month, they make a vow of silence, meaning no speaking or technology use whatsoever.

The last time McDaniel ran Living Deliberately, there were 200 people vying for 14 openings. He characterized the applicants as typically non-religious but envious of those who are, and looking for “something real and something dedicated” to guide their lives. “In a chaotic world, in a very highly competitive world,” McDaniel said, “students often seek order; they seek predictability.” 

Young people don’t want to simply settle for a fate that’s defined by “joining this club, aiming for this promotion, deciding on the Lexus versus the Acura.”

Increasingly, students’ reasons for enrolling in Existential Despair seem to mirror those for Living Deliberately. In the beginning, McDaniel said, he chalked up the interest in Despair mostly to its “weird and cool” structure — the midnight meetings, the lack of syllabus or tests or papers. But lately, he’s noticed a particular drive among students to be better read and to get off their screens. They seem eager for a new and more purposeful way of engaging with the world. 

Kayla, a senior taking Existential Despair this semester, said she was first pulled toward the class because it was as different a learning experience as she could imagine. With an eye toward her impending graduation, the engineering major had been feeling herself “grinding away” and wondering whether there wasn’t more she might want from her life. For the last year and a half, she’s gone as far as to embark on what she called a “personal crusade,” trying to rediscover old hobbies, including reading, and reduce her technology dependency. “Just because school is a little soul crushing,” she said. She’s just recently traded in her iPhone for a flip phone. 

Existential despair, as a phenomenon, is one way of framing this kind of restlessness with the status quo. We all confront the precarity of our mortality at some point, McDaniel said, adding that Buddhists believe life is just a series of distractions to avoid that most fundamental and disturbing truth. “Because we know it’s just getting up, eating, and going to sleep. We kind of know it,” McDaniel said. “And that’s why we’re desperate for gossip or we’re desperate for award shows.”

But the Kaylas of the world aren’t ready to cede their lives to the distractions. She, like many of McDaniel’s students, would rather pull back the curtain on the darkness of being alive and learn to sit with those feelings. Because, however unsettling, wading in promises something elusively more meaningful than turning away. Especially as they move further into adulthood, McDaniel said, young people don’t want to simply settle for a fate that’s defined by “joining this club, aiming for this promotion, deciding on the Lexus versus the Acura.”

Technology is of course one of the most obvious distractions for college students. And with the rise of A.I., they’re seeing the online universe expand at the same time that it seems to be becoming less trustworthy. “I’m not disturbed because I don’t trust it at all,” McDaniel said of the internet. “But they actually do trust it. And so for them, it’s like you’re taking away the world.” That’s part of the reason he thinks they want to invest more in their physical reality. “I think it’s really, really hard on them, and they’re craving, craving for something genuine.”

At Penn specifically, many who come into McDaniel’s class are also contending with the weight of an omnipresent achievement culture. Kayla spent the last four years devoted to her studies and chasing success in preparation for a career she isn’t sure will make her happy anymore. Grace Burke, a current first-year in Existential Despair, had been struggling to adapt to what she called Penn’s East Coast focus on “what you do,” as opposed to her own Mid-Western mindset that prioritizes “who you are.” In her first semester, she was rejected from all the extracurriculars she hoped to join and watched as her nice new friends seemed to be consistently more successful. “I just was very confused — found myself very lost — in what’s important about my identity in a very new place and environment,” she said. She’d started to question whether she was even at the right school.

Finding Humanity

In many ways, Justin McDaniel could be a character in one of the novels he teaches, starting with the fact that he’s, well, complicated. At first glance, his all-black uniform, resistance to eye-contact, and intense intellectuality might make him seem the quintessential brooding Ivy League philosopher. But as is so often the case, there’s more to uncover from there. His office door, for example, is the only one in its hallway covered in a colorful smattering of sticky notes, printed-out poems, even an endearing meme. Inside, his space overflows with floor-to-ceiling books and art. As a lecturer, he walks around the room engaging his audience in an excitable manner that often involves cursing about authors and/or students. “I see blank faces,” he said after introducing one writer in particular. “Oh fuck. Oh my fucking God. I’m about to get so angry.” He wasn’t, really.

For some, McDaniel’s unapologetic, unfiltered way of being and teaching is refreshing; for others, it’s off-putting. In Existential Despair, his irreverent commentary tended to elicit chuckles from his audience that sounded torn between entertained and uncomfortable. “I think he’s a very controversial person in general,” Grace said. For her, McDaniel was a main draw to the class because he struck her from the beginning as a professor worth learning from. “He’s very flawed, and we all are, but he’s very candid about it. And I think he would like to show us authors and people who are also very flawed and also very candid.” 

Several students commented on how McDaniel’s authenticity helps build an environment where everyone can let their guard down — where there’s not as much pressure to be or act the smartest. In interviews with course applicants, for example, he doesn’t seem interested in assessing their intellectual prowess. Instead, he asks them to create a drawing based on a poem he reads to them or to write a poem on the spot themselves. The general unpredictability of the class — the fact that students don’t know what they’ll be reading — also means they couldn’t prepare if they wanted to. They just have to be. Sometimes McDaniel makes other changes without notice. Once he held the entire session in silence. Another class they spent in a cemetery.

The books, though, are the primary teacher in this course. McDaniel’s bet is that by delving into the experiences of some of the most troubled characters in some of the darkest literature, students will gain perspective on themselves and the world. He’s not suggesting that the novels or authors he selects offer good life advice, just that there’s insight to be found in the human condition. “You learn from when things go wrong, and that’s what good fiction will give you. Film does it well, too, and music does it well. Art does it well. So it doesn’t matter the medium as much. It matters that it’s complex and thoughtful.” 

In McDaniel’s world, the places young people typically seek guidance — like their friends or the internet — will simply never measure up to the wisdom of a whole human history’s worth of art and literature. “I have no idea why you would spend $92,000 in tuition to get life advice from another 19-year-old,” he said. A similar way of thinking can apply to online content. “I can’t trust a video I see on the internet, but I can trust James Baldwin,” he said. “I mean, Somerset Maugham or Sheila Heti on relationships is much better than any junk advice you would get in the manosphere. It’s just better advice, even though it’s a hundred years old.”

“I can’t trust a video I see on the internet, but I can trust James Baldwin.”

Grace said one of her favorite reads in the class so far has been “In Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept” by the poet Elizabeth Smart. (Others mentioned “The Passion According to G.H.” by Clarice Lispector, “The Book of Illusions” by Paul Auster, and “A Sheltering Sky” by Paul Bowles.) In “Grand Central Station,” Smart details her obsession with her lover and fellow poet George Barker, with whom she had four children but never married. In total, he had 15 children with four different women, just one of whom was his wife. “It kind of knocks you flat, in terms of who are you to judge?” Grace said of Smart’s book. “She really committed to a path that she felt was right, and she carried that conviction every single day. And there’s just this sort of unwavering intensity to the book that I find really compelling.”

One common outcome for students in the class seems to be a sense of gratitude. For senior Gabe Agüero, the breadth of new experiences and perspectives he’s been exposed to have opened up a range of new possibilities to think about when it comes to his own life. Studying finance and A.I. at the Wharton School, Gabe had been accustomed to defining himself based on the career path, and ideally success, he was headed towards. “This is almost making me realize that there’s more to life and there’s more to appreciate,” he said. “It just kind of made me think more about what do I want for my life? And I still don’t have that answer, but it’s definitely making me reconsider, and it’s allowing me to see what I want my life to be in a completely new lens.”

For the most part, McDaniel said, he has no interest in what, precisely, his students learn. “I have no learning goals. I’m consciously against them,” he explained. Instead of outcomes, he’s focused on the learning process. That’s what education is all about, he insists. “It is about complexity. It is about negative capabilities. It is this conscious and unforgiving and unapologetic exploration of things we don’t know and the desire to keep unknowing.” 

At the same time, McDaniel does have a vision whereby his middle-aged, former students better withstand their inevitable struggles. “I want my students, when they’re 45 or 55, when they’re dealing with a lot of these really existential problems, not to turn towards bourbon or hitting their spouse or screaming at their kids or storming out of a job or getting addicted to opiates,” he said. He imagines when they end up dealing with life’s least comfortable moments, his students might turn to books, or other resources, to move forward.

The most paradoxical aspect of McDaniel’s course may be that the distressing material his students read isn’t making them prone to hopelessness, or worse, defeatism. The effect is quite the opposite. “Some of the books we’ve read are quite disturbing in really sad ways. I’ve cried at some of the books,” Kayla said. “But no, I don’t find it depressing at all, and I don’t know if anyone actually does.” 

“I leave each class either reflective and pensive, or happy.”

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

Happiness today is most often associated with comfort, or momentary pleasure, but our founders envisioned something very different when they drafted the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, “the pursuit of happiness” may be the most misunderstood phrase in the national vocabulary. 

As we approach our 250th anniversary as a country, a new course at Arizona State University aims to clarify the term “happiness” and, in doing so, remind us of the virtuous ideals on which our nation was founded. “What the Founders Meant by Happiness: A Journey Through Virtue and Character” is a partnership between A.S.U. and the National Constitution Center, and course co-creators Ted Cross of A.S.U. and Jeffrey Rosen, the center’s C.E.O. emeritus.  

Based on Rosen’s book, “The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America,” the course explores how the study of classical virtue shaped the founders’ understanding of happiness, character, and civic duty. But in creating the course, Rosen and Cross hoped to do far more than correct an interpretation that has been misconstrued over time. The course engages students in getting to know our founding fathers and mothers who, despite their flaws, made the pursuit of virtue something that would guide the growth of the country.  

The course’s title, “What the Founders Meant by Happiness,” is revealed in the first part of the course, stemming directly from Rosen’s body of work as a constitutional scholar. “The founder’s happiness did not mean ‘feeling good,’ but ‘being good’ — not the pursuit of immediate pleasure, but the pursuit of long-term virtue — meaning self-mastery, character improvement, and lifelong learning,” Rosen said. 

The course draws reflection from learners about how the original meaning of happiness can be held for individuals and society today. 

“We hope that students and learners become reflective on not only what happiness means to them but which of those values and virtues they would like to adopt in their own lives and what implications that may have on how we interact with one another,” said Ted Cross, who leads Principled Innovation,a character education initiative at A.S.U. that places character and virtue at the center of decision-making. 

The open access, online course has 12 modules and is currently available at A.S.U. without credit (though Cross hopes that will change over time) and on the National Constitution Center’s website. Those who complete all 12 modules receive a certificate. The co-creators describe the course as “providing a framework to cultivate civic identity and character at scale, modeling how institutions can democratize character education while reinforcing civic flourishing.”

Rosen said the aim of this course is to shed light on a critical pillar of our democracy: holding dear a common understanding of what it is we stand for.

The second part of the course revisits the founders’ stories — from Thomas Jefferson to Benjaman Franklin to Phyllis Wheatley — revealing their moral sources for recovering happiness as the pursuit of virtue and self-control. Key to this telling is their humanness in borrowing their insights from philosophers like Aristotle and Cicero and their admission that their quest for moral fortitude often eluded them. It was the pursuit that mattered most. Explained in this context, Cross said, the content becomes relatable. 

While it stands on its own from a content perspective, the course itself reinforces the missions of both its founding organizations. As part of A.S.U.’s Principled Innovation, it fits nicely within the character education framework, which has been adopted by A.S.U. President Michael Crow as a foundational design aspiration of the university. The school is promoting the course not just to students but to educators at A.S.U. Prep, the university’s preparatory charter school, and other K-12 educators. 

As the nation’s only institution dedicated to increasing awareness and understanding of the constitution, the National Constitution Center has been marketing the course throughout the country, hoping to attract students and life -long learners alike to engage with all or some of the modules. The course is the latest addition to the center’s growing suite of educational resources initiated by Rosen when he was the president and C.E.O. 

Rosen said the aim of this course is to shed light on a critical pillar of our democracy: holding dear a common understanding of what it is we stand for.

“People should think as they will and speak as they will, but we need models to inspire us,” Rosen said. “We need exemplars. Without a consensus about our heroes, it’s difficult to invite people to envision happiness in this once familiar but now forgotten way.”

The course underscores another important tenant of democracy in America by examining the juxtaposition of freedom and self-control, once again illustrated through the intentions and practices of our founders. “I’ve always believed that democracy depends on political self-government,” Cross said. “Our founders set up a system that has many degrees of freedom, but it depends on individual citizens being able to manage themselves and interact with each other in virtuous ways.”  

The course was launched in February 2026, and the response thus far has been positive, in part due to an engaging storytelling format (a hook Cross said was intentional for younger learners). But time will tell if deeper meaning about virtue and self-control will come through for a generation often criticized as being isolated and self-absorbed. The co-creators believe the lack of moral exemplars this generation has experienced, both in popular culture and leadership, may actually increase the course’s appeal. 

“We know that young people want to be happy,” said Cross, who has taught courses in positive psychology. “My contention is if you learn to be good, you will also feel good, that there is a root to feeling good that comes through character development, purpose, and meaning.” 

Rosen agrees and sees the course as an example of a renaissance of character education in the U.S. 

 “We’ve had a tremendous reaction to the course thus far and we are hoping that this will be part of the movement for the cultivation of virtue that is increasingly strong in America today,” Rosen said. “There’s a hunger for this right now in this country.” 

You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.