Month: February 2024

Identity, Work, and Purpose

Posted on by Ella

Clayton Spencer served as the President of Bates College from 2012 to 2023. A lawyer by training, Clayton was the vice president for policy at Harvard for seven years, and she has also served as chief education counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources.

“Purpose in Work and Life” by Clayton Spencer first appeared in Virtues and Vocations: Spring 2024.

Thinking About Work

When I arrived in Lewiston, Maine in the summer of 2012 to become the eighth president of Bates College, I was captivated by its grand landscape of manufacturing. Enormous mill buildings, most now quiet, line the city’s river and canals, their perfect rectangular forms, huge courses of impeccable brickwork, and row upon row of tall, symmetrical windows embodying the very essence of the industry they made possible. The number and sheer scale of these buildings speak to the might of Lewiston and its sister city Auburn as a textile and shoe manufacturing hub well into the twentieth century. The beauty and precision with which these structures were crafted reflect “industry” in a different sense—namely, the diligence and skill of the human beings who built the mills and ultimately worked within their walls.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that I had landed myself in a world whose deep logic involved “work.” Work as a beacon of hope for generations of French-speaking Canadians who saw in the mills of Maine the promise of a paycheck and a means to build new lives. Work as a source of vibrancy and community in a new country. Work in its most concrete form—making things.

Yet, I was charged with the seemingly cerebral task of leading an excellent undergraduate college devoted to the liberal arts and justly proud of its strong academic culture. How, then, was I to think about the work of the liberal arts in this particular setting? To be sure, a liberal arts education is not primarily about making things, but might it, in fact, involve making?

I found a compelling starting point in the words of Peter Gomes—Harvard professor, theologian, long-time minister of the university’s Memorial Church, and, as it happens, a Bates graduate. He died in 2011, after forty years spent sharing his wisdom with successive generations of Harvard undergraduates. About the aims of a Harvard education, he famously said: “We put the making of a better person ahead of the making of a brighter person, or a better mousetrap.”1 According to Gomes, we do this by helping students figure out what kind of life they wish to lead: “What is my purpose? How can my life be better? How can I help to make a better world? These are the questions worth asking, and college is one of the few places that allows you, even requires you, to do so.”2

The Logic of Purposeful Work

If motivating and equipping our students to live lives of meaning and contribution is a core purpose of the liberal arts, then work is central to the project. Whatever a person’s particular interests, choices, or constraints, most people wish to figure out a way to stay healthy and happy, to nourish human connection, and to leave the world—or at least their corner of it—better than they found it. For many people, this means, among other things, finding work that contributes to an overall sense of fulfillment, while also furnishing the practical and financial means to sustain a life.

The most important dimension of the Purposeful Work approach is the sense of agency and confidence it fosters in students.

Which is why preparing students for work and career should not be—as it has been for far too long at many excellent colleges and universities—an afterthought relegated to the waning months of senior year. (Remember the binders of banking jobs?) Nor can it be addressed by tactics alone—online hiring platforms, access to alumni networks, job shadows, internships, or industry info sessions. These practical tools are important, but only as part of a framework that locates questions about work where they belong—at the center, not on the outskirts, of the project of the liberal arts.

Purposeful work, as we came to think about it at Bates, is not a kind of work. It is not found “out there” inherent in a particular type of job or career. It can be paid or unpaid, within a family or for an outside organization, part-time or full-time, manual or intellectual, artistic or managerial. It is not “do-gooder” work, though for some individuals it might be. Rather, purposeful work is about aligning who you are with what you do and how you choose to move through the world.

Because life is a journey and we evolve over time, even as the world and ourworlds also evolve, the answers to the question of how we wish to live our lives change over the lifespan. But the essence of the exercise—learning to navigate the dynamic relationship between “self” and “world”—remains the core pursuit.

In a liberal arts setting, we give our students a great deal of choice about which courses they will take, what they will major in, and how they will populate their college experience outside the classroom. We also do our best to give them the tools to approach their choices with self-awareness, diligence, and discernment so that they can carve out a path, in college, first, and ultimately in life, that will be authentically their own.

The concept and methodology of the Purposeful Work program are built on these core principles. It is not, for instance, about exhorting students to “find their passion.” Just as purpose is not found “out there” inherent in certain types of work and not in others, it also does not typically reside within a person as a pre-existing passion waiting to be liberated. Unless, perhaps, you are Albert Einstein, or Toni Morrison, or Yo-Yo Ma.

For most ordinary mortals, purpose tends to emerge in the “doing.” This is how Richard Courtemanche, a handsewer in one of the shoe factories of Lewiston, described his purposeful work.

An average handsew[er], back in those days, in the ’60s, would probably do about twenty pairs a day. A good handsewer would do around thirty pairs a day, as he was considered to be fast.

A real fast guy, we’re talking, you know . . . thirty-five to forty pairs. I would do around sixty pairs a day, for many years. Myself and Vern, Vernon Daigle, locally, were probably the fastest handsewers. That was unheard of, what we could do. We did it because it was, it came natural, what other people would do, unnatural. So he was a good man. I learned from him, because he used to handsew 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, then after that, I loved it.3

Richard Courtemanche did not start with a passion for shoemaking that he unleashed on the world. Rather he waded in, he paid attention, he learned the skills, and then along the way he discovered that he was really good at stitching shoes. Only “after that,” did he come to love his work. In other words, the passion did not precede the engagement with work, it was the other way around.

Learning a set of skills or a base of knowledge is a fundamental aspect of identity formation, of becoming fully 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.”

For our students, most of whom have a luxury of choice that Richard Courtemanche could only dream of, purpose emerges (or not) as you try different things and get your hands dirty. But this only happens if exploration is paired with reflection. The Purposeful Work team at Bates works with students beginning in first-year orientation to ease them into the notion that the starting point for making life choices is understanding who you are and what matters to you. The staff use various tools and strategies to help students gain an awareness of their interests, strengths, and values—what brings them joy, what kind of things they know they are good at, where they are, or are not, confident in their abilities, what sorts of things they might like to try, and how much risk are they willing to take, to name a few examples.

Unquestionably, the most important dimension of the Purposeful Work approach is the sense of agency and confidence it fosters in students as they make their way through various cycles of exploration, reflection, and adaptation. These elements are specific and concrete, and students internalize the process. Based on what you’ve figured out about yourself, what kinds of work would you like to explore? Once in an internship or a job shadow, how was the experience for you, and do you wish to pursue it further? If it feels like the right field, but the wrong role, you refine your choice for your next opportunity. If the experience does not feel right at all, you move on, consciously rejecting pathways that do not align.

Learning a set of skills or a base of knowledge is a fundamental aspect of identity formation, of becoming fully human.

Not only is the Purposeful Work program built on the core values of the liberal arts, it also reinforces them. The emphasis on self-knowledge as the starting point, and the structured approaches used to develop it, puts students in the habit of making conscious choices about many aspects of their college experience—whether in the classes they choose, the activities they jump into, or the leadership responsibilities they take on. Students begin to think of their college experience itself as their “purposeful work” during the undergraduate years, even as they look toward how they will find it after graduation.4

This well-scaffolded approach is proving to be powerful for all students. It is particularly important, however, for students who may be the first in their families to go to college or have not had much exposure to a broad range of careers. From the beginning, Bates conceived of the Purposeful Work program as an important piece of its equity promise to all students. Bates is committed to providing broad access to the education it offers, and it has become much more intentional about supporting all students for academic success and full participation in the college experience. Purposeful Work adds another piece of the puzzle. A well-thought-out and well-executed approach to helping students bridge from college to work and career ensures that all students—not only those whose parents are able to connect them to networks of opportunity—have the skills and confidence to seek out career opportunities commensurate in scope and ambition with the education they have received.

Testing Our Assumptions

Bates developed its Purposeful Work program based on the intrinsic logic of a liberal arts education. Yet, the link between finding purpose in work and overall fulfillment resonates far beyond a particular set of colleges and universities and the students who attend them.

In the fall of 2018, Bates partnered with the Gallup organization to conduct a survey of nationally representative college graduates, of varying ages, career stages, and types of higher education experience, to examine how they think about purpose and work.5 Since the mid 20th-century, Gallup has explored global measures of well-being in terms of five interrelated elements: purpose well-being, social well-being, financial well-being, community well-being, and physical well-being. In examining the relationships among these, Gallup identified purpose (defined as liking what you do every day and learning or doing something interesting each day) as the most important element given its disproportionate impact on one’s overall well-being.

The Bates/Gallup study was designed to build on the existing research related to purpose well-being by specifically examining the extent to which college graduates seek purpose in their work. The findings were striking. Eighty percent of college graduates say that it is very important (37%) or extremely important (43%) to derive a sense of purpose from their work. Yet less than half succeed in finding purposeful work, and purposeful work was found to be particularly important to the younger workforce. Reflection and self-understanding are central to finding purpose—graduates who align their work with their interests, values, and strengths are three times more likely to experience high purpose than those with low levels of reflection. Finally, graduates with high purpose in work are almost ten times more likely to have high overall well-being. Only 6% of those who have low levels of purpose in their work have high levels of well-being, whereas fully 59% of those with high purpose in work have high well-being.

I offer this study not as the definitive word on a topic as deep and rich as “purpose.” Rather, I mean to describe the impulse we had at Bates, as we moved forward in developing the Purposeful Work program, to pressure-test our assumptions with a broader audience not necessarily steeped in the goals and methods of a liberal arts education.

Concluding Thoughts

We live in a world defined increasingly by complexity, uncertainty, and rapid change, where a college graduate can expect to have multiple distinct jobs before the age of 50. It is no longer sufficient or even plausible, therefore, to prepare our students for work or career based on the availability of a particular kind of first job, or on the notion of “career” as a stable and well-defined pathway through life. Instead, the ability to sustain work over a lifetime will increasingly depend on individual agency that combines the content knowledge, cognitive skills, and interpersonal abilities required for employment with a mindset of informed self-determination and adaptability.

Far from being irrelevant to preparing students for work and career, these are precisely the strengths that a liberal arts education brings to the table.

The Purposeful Work program at Bates reflects the efforts and contributions of many, including faculty, staff, students, parents, alumni, and outside experts. It began with an idea and generative discussions on campus, followed by the appointment of the “Purposeful Work Working Group” that crafted its report and recommendations in 2013-14, further program development led by a small design team reporting to the President, and the creation of the Center for Purposeful Work in the fall of 2018.

To find out more about the Bates Center for Purposeful Work, visit https://www.bates.edu/purposeful-work.

To learn about other efforts across higher education focused on the education of the whole person for growth and transformation, visit https://thecte.org.

Notes

  1. Gomes, Peter, Never Give Up! And Other Sermons Preached at Harvard, 2008–2010, ed. Cynthia Wight Rossano, Cambridge Memorial Church, Harvard University, 2011, p. 21.
  2. Ibid., p. 41.
  3. Richard Courtemanche, “Portraits and Voices: Shoemaking Skills of Generations,” Exhibition, Museum L-A, Lewiston, Maine (2012).
  4. Almost half of Bates faculty have formally integrated aspects of Purposeful Work into their classes, and all Bates students at this point engage with the program over the course of their college, many in multiple ways.
  5. The final report of the Bates/Gallup survey may be found in full here: bates.edu/purposeful-work.

Looking for meaning in college? Try discussing a great book.

Posted on by Ella

Andrew Delbanco has argued that, as innovations go, the American university is a pretty distinctive one. Right up there with abstract impressionism and fast food.

But Delbanco, a professor of American Studies at Columbia University, worries that higher education has increasingly moved away from one of its core obligations: to help students think deeply and collectively about life’s most profound questions. 

Instead, he says, “colleges and universities — without quite saying so — have begun to think of themselves more and more as vocational training institutions.”

The fate of higher education has long captivated Delbanco, author of the 2012 book College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be. And to be fair, as he notes in College, folks have been complaining about American higher education pretty much as long as it’s been around. 

In 1776, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband that professors too often shirked their teaching duties; the state of education, she said, had never been more dire.

Still, for all the hand-wringing, colleges and universities in the US have been distinguished by their willingness to allow students to explore various interests, rather than — as in many other countries — immediately hone in on a very specific course of study. It’s an environment where folks from Condoleezza Rice to Bill Bradley have encountered people and ideas that changed their lives.

“Young people want an experience of self-discovery,” says Delbanco. “They want to figure out what they’re going to do with their lives. And it’s a betrayal of the American promise to expect young people to know exactly what they want to do, what they’re fit for, and what their life is going to look like at the age of 17 or 18.”

Delbanco has spent more than 40 years as a professor, penned books on everything from Herman Melville to the Puritans, and received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama. But he says he’s not concerned that fewer students now major in the humanities. Nor is he surprised that young people are drawn to science and technology.

What does worry him is that while a student is pursuing a degree, they “should be having an experience in college that allows for some kind of reflection, that allows for learning… Learning how to listen to other people with different points of view. Learning the difference between an argument and an opinion. Learning that debating with somebody is not the same thing as fighting with that person. And the classroom where those lessons are most likely to be learned is the humanities classroom.”

But as college sticker prices have skyrocketed, haven’t the humanities become an increasingly unaffordable luxury? No, Delbanco argues. “One of the things that employers are telling [colleges and universities] is: We want people who can actually work together with people with whom they disagree. We want people who understand that there are multiple perspectives on the world.” 

“It’s a betrayal of the American promise to expect young people to know exactly what they want to do, what they’re fit for, and what their life is going to look like at the age of 17 or 18.”

“In an increasingly diverse society, in an increasingly global economy, we don’t only want people who can code or do actuary tables. We want people who can work productively with other human beings, and who can think creatively.” 

“And as the humanities majors have been emptying out, general education becomes all the more important. Because it’s going to be the only place where students will have an experience of reading a great novel or seeing a Shakespeare play or grappling with a philosophical concept.”

Beyond that, as institutions diversify, there are more opportunities for students to splinter into identity-based groups and organizations. Foundational humanities classes provide a place to transcend those differences, a place where everyone comes together around a common text.

Over the last few years, a wave of schools have brought back core courses designed to engage with questions around meaning and purpose. In 2020, for example, Stanford instituted a requirement for first-year students: Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE). The program echoed a century-old compulsory course introduced at Stanford in the 1920s, amidst the backdrop of global and national upheaval (post-WWI realignments, women’s newfound right to vote, and an enormous surge in foreign-born Americans).

“An educational model that leaves no room for a core curriculum shaped by the demands of 21st-century democracies leaves students woefully ill equipped for dealing with disagreements,” Stanford’s Debra Satz and Dan Edelstein recently noted in The New York Times.

In his role as president of The Teagle Foundation, Delbanco has sought to support these sorts of efforts around the country — at Stanford, Vanderbilt, Purdue, and nearly sixty other schools. It’s worth keeping an eye on, he says, “because I think this could be the beginning of a real change.”

Melinda Zook, a history professor who leads the Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts program at Purdue, agrees. “This should have always been the job of the liberal arts… To me, the point of college is to challenge you.”

The Cornerstone Program requires that first-year students — who, at Purdue, often plan to major in engineering, computer science, or business — take a sequence of two courses on transformative texts. There are usually about 30 students in each class, and texts can range across time and place, from Plato to Frederick Douglass to Virginia Woolf. 

But Zook emphasizes that great texts only come alive in the hands of great teachers. So when she preps professors — who are drawn from the ranks of liberal arts faculty — she tells them to “create the class you always wanted to teach. So it gives them a lot of flexibility, and you know it’s going to fill up. It fills every time.” 

Zook notes that while technical knowledge can become outdated, certain skills never will, like learning how to think, communicate, and interact with a wide range of people. One day, she recalls, “I’m walking back to the parking garage, and I bump into one of our basketball players, who you cannot miss because he’s so tall. And he’s in transformative texts. And he says to me: ‘who would have thought Plato would have been so relevant?’”

“We in the liberal arts! We thought of that,” she tells me, laughing.

But Purdue’s program has a significant, additional upside, says Zook. It creates a space in which a faculty member gets to know a small group of students. “One of the things that we do at Cornerstone is we use it as sort of a hub, where we have eyes on the students. We know their names. We know how they’re doing. And none of their other classes do, because they’re huge.”

Zook notes that, while there was a mental health crisis among students prior to the pandemic, it has gotten much worse. And building strong relationships with faculty early on can be crucial to getting students the support they need.

In Delbanco’s view, a small class that tackles big questions around a text or piece of art “can become a safe space where you can trust the teacher to teach you like a person… The teacher is not in the room fundamentally because he or she wants to show off how much they know about a given subject. They’re not in the room on behalf of the discipline. They’re in the room on behalf of the students.”

The Teagle Foundation now seeks to envelop even younger people in this effort to read great authors and ask big questions. Their “Knowledge for Freedom” program offers grants to colleges to create on-campus, humanities-focused programs for local, low-income high school students. And there are now more than 30 such programs around the country.

Delbanco sees the program changing kids’ lives. And, he says, it’s a way of “reminding them that when you go to college, you should expect this kind of experience. You should be able to ask yourself questions about justice, about how society should be organized, about what kind of life I want to lead.”

Understanding Languishing and Flourishing with Dr. Corey Keyes

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The following is a transcript of LearningWell Radio Episode 1: Understanding Languishing and Flourishing with Dr. Corey Keyes. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts.

Marjorie Malpiede: This is LearningWell Radio, the podcast of LearningWell Magazine, covering the intersection of higher education and lifelong wellbeing. I’m Marjorie Malpiede, the Editor of LearningWell and your host today. Our first guest for our first episode of LearningWell Radio is Dr. Corey Keyes, the renowned sociologist and psychologist who has introduced groundbreaking work in the areas of flourishing and languishing. Welcome, Corey.

Corey Keyes: Hello and good morning.

MM: As a faculty member at Emory University, Dr. Keyes taught The Science of Happiness. He has a new book coming out called Languishing, and it’s actually available this week. Corey, let me say, I knew that you were a brilliant sociologist and psychologist, but I did not know that you were such a talented writer. Your book is really terrific.

CK: Thank you. I appreciate that. I take great pride in trying to write in a way that communicates the nuances and stories behind the numbers of our science.

MM: Well, I have to say that is exactly what my reaction was. I loved your opening, where you take us back to your teenage years and you’re listening to Jackson Brown’s “Running On Empty.” Loved that song. And of course, the reference to the King Biscuit Flower Hour. That was awesome. What a throwback. But the whole book is like that. It’s really very enjoyable to read. So anyway, big thumbs up for me as one reader, one reviewer, but let’s get into the book a bit and give a little bit of a preview for our audiences. First thing I’d like to ask you is, what motivated you to write this, Corey? You’ve been publishing for a long time, but this is really something special.

CK: Well, for a long time I’ve had a passion for advocating for better treatment and approaches to helping people with mental illness, and especially trying to get people invested in preventing it in the first place. Because I know we’re all on the same page when we hear again and again in the news that there’s a crisis in mental illness and that it’s growing. And the fact that I continue to hear about this crisis and that it’s growing, has led me to feel I’ve heard this enough, because the problem is nothing is changing. And I’ve waited and done the science for 25 years on promoting positive mental health in order to prevent, and I’ve felt that the science was solid enough, that there was enough there to write a book. And my dream is that this begins to encourage public health systems and systems like higher education, not the least of which I would also hope in public K-12 education, to begin thinking about prevention by promoting flourishing. So, my book is about trying to change the discourse and introduce another way to deal with the crisis of mental illness by promoting good mental health.

MM: Yeah, and it really does come across very loud and clear in the book. Reading it, it’s clear that it’s about the reader, so it will be about the person who could be benefiting from this information, but it’s also about all the sort of systems and institutions that influence what you describe as flourishing and languishing. I think my next question, for people who think they know the term but really don’t, I think commonly don’t, is how would you describe languishing? Because it’s not always what people think it is.

CK: No. And in fact, I think sometimes the simple descriptors don’t do it justice, because people will use the words either, “Meh,” which Adam Grant did in his New York Times op-ed, or “Blah.” And I don’t think those two terms do it justice, because I want to get back to the way I measure it, which is 14 questions that constitute measurement of the presence of good mental health, which I refer to flourishing, and languishing is the absence of some of these very important things. So to languish is not only to have lost a sense of interest in life or you’re not feeling happy or satisfied, but along with that, at least six or more things are missing in your life, like a sense of purpose, a sense that you’re growing as a person, a sense of self-acceptance that you like most parts of your personality. There’s some social components, like a sense that you are making contributions or you will make a contribution to the world or your community, a sense of belonging to a community, a sense of coherence, which is that you can make sense of what’s going on in the world around you. So, languishing is a constellation of things, but it’s the absence of functioning well, combined with the absence of feeling anything good or not feeling much of anything about your life. So in that sense, languishing is a lot more than just, “Blah.” It’s the absence of what makes life meaningful and gives you a sense that you matter and so forth.

MM: So, something you say in the book is interesting to me and it gets to that same sense of, do we really understand the language around this? So you say, “Don’t be fooled by feelings.” Explain that a little bit and how people may not understand if they’re languishing or flourishing.

CK: I think there is this obsession, and I think we in this country are particular leaders in the obsession with happiness, or what I would call the emotional part of flourishing, what I call the emotional wellbeing. This gets a lot of attention, and indeed, every year there’s what we call the World Happiness Report, which measures things like life satisfaction, “Do you feel satisfied or do you feel happy about your life?” And we rank countries based on the happiest and think they’re doing really well, and those countries that aren’t very happy. But flourishing is so much more feeling good. And I argue that if you focus only on and prioritize only feeling good, it will not be your North Star. ‘Cause I think of flourishing as my North Star because it’s what kept me in recovery from my own mental disorders of depression and PTSD, and it’s where I feel most at home. If you only prioritize feeling good without functioning well, you will not be doing well. And not the least of which is there are college students, a lot of them, about 20%, that would meet the criteria for flourishing in terms of happiness or feeling good, but they’re languishing when it comes to the criteria of functioning well. That means they have low levels of either psychological or social wellbeing, or both. And they have five times the rate of mental illness as those students who are flourishing. And by flourishing, I mean they’re functioning well. They have six or more of the criteria of functioning well every day or almost every day, combined with feeling good. So that in and of itself suggests that feeling good is not enough of a criteria or it cannot be considered a gold standard alone for doing well in life or even be considered mentally healthy. It’s not the feeling good, the feeling happy that’s really driving the benefits of flourishing, it’s the functioning well. Purpose in life, belonging, contribution, mastery, growth, and acceptance, all those good things that represent that we’re doing well in life. And so I always argue, put functioning well first and you will feel good about a life that’s meaningful and has substance.

MM: I think that’s so interesting because so many of us just think about the standards around feelings, happiness, or sadness, or excitement, or motivation, and we are not really thinking about the processes behind that. So that’s a really interesting way of looking at it. And is this really what you’d call your dual continuum model, that you can be mentally ill and mentally healthy at the same time?

CK: I review, in one of the chapters, an array of evidence that supports what I call the dual-continuum model, not the least of which is the research on the neuroscience of emotions. Now, I didn’t do this research, but I’ve reviewed it, and a lot of it is focused on negative and positive emotions, sadness in particular, and happiness. What they found in the brain is that sadness and happiness share some things in common when it comes to being activated in our brain, but they have a lot of distinctive things that go on. So when we’re feeling sad, the fact that they don’t overlap completely, meaning that when we’re sad, happiness isn’t completely downregulated in our brain, that’s not the case. We can feel both sad and happy at the same time, because they don’t share everything in common when it comes to activation in our brain. And I was writing about this very thing in my book when I realized that Susan Cain was about to publish a book as I was writing my book, and she wrote a book called Bittersweet. And I was writing about the fact that you can have bittersweet moments and feelings precisely because the brain is wired in the two continuum when it comes to just emotions. You can feel a little happy and a little sad at the same time. And on college campuses, I used to love teaching this particular part of my Happiness class during the spring semester when I had almost all graduating seniors. And as we got closer and closer to graduation, it became clear and clear that they understood this because they were feeling poignancy and bittersweet about their time at college and the fact that they now were about to leave it. They felt happy because they had accomplished something worthy of their effort and they felt sad because they were leaving behind something meaningful. So it goes much deeper than that. And mental health and mental illness belong to separate continuums. They’re correlated. But not correlated so strongly that the absence of mental illness means that you’re automatically flourishing. So, there is very strong evidence in a lot of that research I’ve done and done with colleagues, even at the genetic level, showing that we inherit two sets of genes. One set is what I would call risks, genetic risks for mental illness, and then there’s flourishing or positive mental health, which is also equally heritable as things like depression. But there’s only a modest overlap of the genetic variance or the genes for mental illness and mental health. So that means you can inherit a low genetic risk for something like depression, but the absence of genetic risk for depression doesn’t mean that you’ve also inherited a high genetic potential to flourish. But it also goes the opposite way, Marjorie, you could inherit a high genetic potential for depression, but you could have also inherited a high genetic potential for flourishing. And we now know that genes alone do not determine our outcomes. It requires environmental activation of a lot of our genes. So as I like to say, when you’re in that situation where you’ve inherited high genetic risks along with high genetic potential, you ask yourself the version of the negative wolf and the bad wolf, which one wins? The one we feed. Right? So there’s very strong evidence of the dual-continuum model, and that makes the case very strongly that even if we could find a cure, and we’re not anywhere close, even if we could cure all mental illnesses tomorrow, it wouldn’t necessarily mean everyone’s mentally healthy, and we could have just left them in another equally bad condition, languishing.

MM: So, Corey, let me just say, what I love about your work is that it gives people hope, and it looks at these issues in a way that not just destigmatizes them, which you’ve done, but also allows people to give themselves a bit of a break around this. But let’s talk about Languishing and why you wrote this, because so many people are languishing. And you talk about the pandemic and how that obviously accelerated these issues, but also, they weren’t the cause of them. In fact, I think one of the things you say is, because we were sort of sliding into languishing, it was harder for us to be resilient to what happened in the global pandemic, if I got that right? But let me ask a few questions again about the mental state and how people can get out of it. So you talk about why languishing is really a risk to your mental and physical health. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

CK: Sure. In fact, I list at the very beginning a lot of evidence that supports, I call it the 13 reasons why you want to take languishing very seriously, and why we want better mental health and flourishing. Not the least of which I haven’t focused as much on physical health, there’s a little evidence I review when it comes to aging, but the one in particular that really stood out for me is this very strong body of evidence that has to do with what’s called the conserved transcriptional response to adversity. Not my words. That’s the words that some biologists and geneticists gave to this genetic propensity we all have. And the CTRA is activated when we experience adversity, and it’s not healthy for us, because when that CTRA, forgive the abbreviation ’cause it’s a lot to say, is activated, it downregulates antibody production, which is not good. We want antibodies for our immunity, immune responses. So when the CTR is activated, antibody production is suppressed and inflammation is accentuated or activated. Again, inflammation in and of itself is not good for us. And so researchers have been looking for things that actually buffer, mitigate the CTRA when we are experiencing adversity. And here is the amazing thing about the distinction between feeling and functioning when it comes to flourishing. Feeling happy and satisfied has no relationship to modulating the CTRA, but when you have higher levels on functioning well, that is, that goes into my measurement of flourishing, higher levels of particularly psychological wellbeing, people then have a much more modulated or controlled CTRA response. It means that if you are functioning well and you are experiencing stress and demands and adversity, you are protected against the CTRA. And if you aren’t functioning well, higher psychological wellbeing, the CTRA is activated very strongly when you experience adversity. So that’s just one very strong physical underlying genetic /physical response. It’s deeply connected to the functioning well part of flourishing, not the feeling good.

MM: So, if I’m understanding this correctly, it’s almost like you can strengthen your flourishing muscle, so to speak. Right? To have some of what is happening in terms of the languishing and the conditions and elements around that, you can influence or even prevent it. Correct?

CK: Yes. In fact, there’s two studies I reviewed that I just love, one of which is in the work. And you can think of college, a university setting in the same way you can think of a workplace. And this particular study was done in Australia, and they asked workers, “Yes or no, are you currently working in a high stress or hostile, if you will, work environment?” That was the beginning of the study. And then they measured psychological distress over time, and they measured at time one their level of positive mental health. What was remarkable, is over time, if you were flourishing, working in a high stress or high conflict work environment did not result in any more distress than compared as those who are working in a low stress, low conf environment. But if you were languishing and working in a high stress and high conflict work environment, you had a markedly higher increase in distress over time than if you were flourishing. So flourishing in the work settings protected you from having stress and conflict undermine your mental, emotional life. And then there was this second study that I reviewed that followed people over a three-week period and every day asked them whether they had experienced any of several sources of stress, things like the typical sources of stressors, like there’s conflict at work, you had an argument with your boss or your spouse or your friend and so forth. What was amazing about this study, was if you were flourishing, you experienced the same amount of sources of stress as those who are languishing. And in fact, in a three-week period, 84% of the days of those three weeks were filled with sources of stress. So most days. You only had three days out of the three-week period where you didn’t have any source of stress. So everyone was experiencing stress, but then they measured negative mood that day. And here’s the remarkable thing, if you were flourishing and you experienced source of stress, you’re much less likely to have negative mood as a result of it compared to those who are languishing. If you’re languishing, those sources of stress resulted in a much more negative and foul mood at the end of the day than if you are flourishing. So it’s not like if you’re flourishing, you don’t have bad days, you have as many bad days, if you will, or sources of stress at least as those who are languishing. But again, there’s something about flourishing that protects you from having bad things really result in bad feelings. Again, we don’t know why, but then again, I go back to the following thing. Did we not need to know how smoking caused cancer in order to prevent cancers from smoking? No, we just needed to know that smoking caused cancer. And here, I’m not so interested in how flourishing protects us, just that it does, and we need more of it in our students and we need more of it in our lives, in the workplace.

MM: So Corey, I’m completely convinced that flourishing is the goal, and I think to learn how to get into that state of flourishing is part of what you do in the book, and I want to get to that. Am I correct in saying that there are kind of two elements here to unpack? One is, and I love that you do this, you talk about in your book the propensity for society to consider whether you’re languishing or flourishing to be a matter of personal responsibility. It’s either you do it or you don’t, and it’s all about you. But you do point out that many times our systems are failing us. Can you talk about that in the context of higher education?

CK: I couldn’t help but be the sociologist because I’ve been living a lot of my life in both in psychology and sociology, and I’m amazed the amount of work that’s been published in positive psychology, and psychology in general, that simply ignores the power of context and institutions and culture and values and so forth. And so it was clear to me. I talk about my own personal experience. Before I was adopted at the age 12, things were horrible for me. And I was going in one direction and it was in the wrong direction. I was in detention more than I was anywhere else after school, and I was not doing well and so forth. And when I got adopted into my grandparents’ home, it was a 180 degree change, and it was remarkable to see and I still marvel at it. I went from being in detention to honor roll student, every semester, to quarterback of the football team, playing basketball, in the choir. Something in me changed, but it was because I was transplanted in a place where I could flourish. And so I knew that was the first time I experienced flourishing. And in my dedication to my book, my whole book was dedicated to my nana and papa, who when I experienced that, they gave me the seeds of flourishing because I never forgot that. And so it’s clear to me that people are really struggling, even people in high-level professional jobs like medicine. And I write about one op-ed that just floored me, but this was not the only doctor who’s lamenting the fact that they’re having to work in a, they call, a corrupt, profit-driven institution that’s demoralizing them. Because they have to cut corners and they can’t do the things that they want to do and need to do as doctors to help their patients because hospitals are sitting on massive profits, but they’re cutting corners. And what’s happening to people is they can’t live their values. And when that happens, when they’re demoralized, you start to destroy the person that came to you with values and dreams of using their work to do good. And when you prevent people from doing and living their values to do good things through their work, you begin to destroy them. And that’s what languishing is often described as, “I’m dying inside,” or, “I feel dead inside.” Now, I won’t say that higher education is doing the same, but I do worry that, I think, there’s a lot of, well intentioned leaders, people who want students to find purpose and live their values, but I saw this firsthand, we’re grooming our youth to value one thing, money and power, by everything is boiled down to grades. And I know you’re going to say, “Well, what do we replace grades with?” But grades are all that matter because that’s all that matters to us. And at first, I was frustrated as a professor. I would’ve kids coming into my office crying because they had an A minus or a B plus. Something is wrong with what we value in higher education.

MM: LearningWell Magazine examines the intersection between higher education and lifelong wellbeing. So not just how we experience college and what happens to our mental health at college, but how college influences our wellbeing over time and over your lifetime. So obviously, it is a great conversation for anyone who cares about any of those issues. Not to put you on the spot in terms of specifics, but if flourishing is the end goal for our students, and we’re faced with the mental health crisis that we all know and are working hard to address, shouldn’t we, and what could we be doing to really try to promote flourishing on college campuses?

CK: Well, the second half of my book talks about what I’ve come to call the five vitamins for flourishing deficiency. And those five activities that flourishing people do more of than people who are languishing, which is they prioritize some form of helping others. They prioritize learning something new and growing personally, they prioritize spiritual or religious activity, they prioritize socializing or connecting warmly and belonging, and they prioritize play. Now, those five things I was just thinking about this morning before we got on, and it occurs to me that you would think that those five things are already happening on most college campuses, maybe not as much play, but wouldn’t you think every day a college student learns something new and sees him or herself growing? And I see it that college students connecting and socializing every day, not everyone perhaps engages in spiritual or religious activities, but many of them do and so forth. My question becomes, if many of the students are doing those five things already, but they’re not flourishing, what is it about colleges that may prevent those five activities from being as beneficial as they could? ‘Cause they are for adults who aren’t in college or who are after college. And I wonder sometimes if it’s just that students, like many of us as adults, would read a book like this and say, “Well, let me fit in some of these things in 5 or 10 minutes of my busy day or my busy week.” And I didn’t write it that way. In fact, I was sometimes encouraged by people around me saying, “Well, just tell people what they can do in the 10 minutes they have if it’s a typical day or a busy day.” And I was like, “No, I’m not going to do that. That’s not the way this works.” Because people who were really benefiting from those activities did more of it in that day. They helped more. They didn’t just help someone. They engaged in more helping behavior that day and they had a much better day and they stayed flourishing. And if they were languishing, or in the study, there were some people who were depressed who did more of each of those vitamins. And they didn’t have to do all five, by the way. They just picked one and they did more of that day. Even if they were languishing or depressed, they had a better day. And over time, they moved away from languishing or depression, and inch by inch closer and closer to flourishing over time. So those five activities aren’t things to just do as a sort of 5 minute or 10 minute exercise, like breathing or taking a couple deep breaths, or meditating for a minute and quieting your stress response. These are things that have to become important parts of each day. And that’s why I’m convinced, even if people on college campuses or administrators read the book and say, “Wow, I think most of my students are doing these five things, or at least three out of the five, but they’re not flourishing.” Well, it’s because their priorities are much more related to one thing, study, study, grades, grades, degrees, degrees, and the next step.

MM: So it’s almost like if institutions, colleges, and universities really made flourishing their North Star, that would really change the conditions by which students could be working to engender their own flourishing. Would you say that’s right, Corey?

CK: Yes. I could imagine a university prioritizing and measuring this and taking it just as important as GPAs and resumes, and that they prioritize those five vitamins to such a degree that they counted in the same way that taking a class is given credit and you get graded. ‘Cause that’s the one thing I learned, if students don’t get credit, they don’t think it’s important because they infer the institution doesn’t think it’s important. And so somehow, I think we need to teach these things and value them to the same degree, and measure them and monitor them in the same way that we monitor grades and provide that. And my dream, as I said in some of my writings, as when a student walks across that stage to get their diploma, we can tell them, to the same degree, that their flourishing has grown as a result of being here to the same degree that their knowledge and GPA reflects their learning. When that happens, I’m convinced students will get the message. They will learn about their own wellbeing, their own mental health, and what it means to them that the institution values it as much as they do, and that this is what you’re given as your journey through adulthood from this institution. Not just a degree, but a sense that your wellbeing is something you need for this journey.

MM: That’s awesome. So Corey, we have learned so much today, and obviously I would encourage our listeners to read the book and learn even more. When you think about all of the important messages here, who would you say you wrote the book for?

CK: Well, you will notice that this is part memoir because my research was, as I said, me-search for a better way. And I wrote this, forgive the phrase, but it’s part of my heart, for all of the lost souls. And there are many of us, and I think many of us are lost without knowing it. And there is this poem I want to read to you, this is why I wrote it. And it’s a poem written by Athey Thompson, and it’s taken from her book, A Little Book of Poetry. And I wish I’d seen this poem before I finished the book because it would’ve been the way I ended it, but here it goes. “I shall gather up all the lost souls that wander this earth, all the ones that are broken, all the ones that never really fitted in. I shall gather them all up and together we shall find our home.”

MM: Well, that needs to be the last words for the interview. That was amazing, Corey, and I thank you so much. So, we’re talking to Dr. Corey Keyes. His new book will be out at the end of February, it’s called Languishing, and it will be an important experience for anyone who reads it. Corey, we are so excited that you came and talked to us today and shared all of your wisdom. I am so grateful. Thank you so much.

CK: Thank you for having me.

Ian Elsner: This has been LearningWell Radio, a production of LearningWell, for more information about our work, go to learningwellmag.org. And if you like what we’re doing, leave us a rating or review. LearningWell Radio is engineered by me, Ian Elsner. Thanks so much for listening.

Find Your Purpose, if You Know What That Means

Posted on by Ella
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Purpose is a ubiquitous word these days on college campuses. From solicited statements on applications, to alignment with one’s major, to leadership and career development, purpose is popping up in nearly every domain in higher education. There is an entire field dedicated to purpose in the social sciences and abundant research as to its benefits, and yet, what does purpose really mean to someone who is 18, or 20 or 25? 

Answering that question and applying it in the university setting has become the life’s work of Anthony (Tony) Burrow, a developmental psychologist and professor at Cornell University who runs the Purpose and Identity Processing Lab. He and his team of doctoral students are building a foundation of scientific evidence, measurement, and translation that informs the understanding of purpose so it can be incorporated into people’s lives, particularly adolescents and emerging adults. 

“Research on this topic is growing and the evidence so far is clear that having a sense of purpose promotes health and wellbeing, longevity, stronger relationships, and even increases one’s earnings,” he said. “But too few of us on college campuses are familiar enough with this literature to use it effectively to engage students in courses and experiences.”

Part of the problem is the varying definitions of purpose and the way young people are assumed to know what it is and how to incorporate it into their lives. From Aristotle to Einstein to Stanford’s William Damon, brilliant thinkers have put their mark on the term. But the rest of us, particularly the college students who are frequently asked about it, may only know it as a good thing to have or strive for without any practical application. “There is a tendency for people to assume everyone shares a similar understanding of what is meant by ‘purpose’, but when you really dig into things, people don’t always mean the same thing,” said Burrow. 

Burrow teaches a class called “Translating the Science of Purpose” to help decipher different interpretations of purpose. It starts with examining the deep body of literature around purpose: “its scholarly definitions, its demonstrated role in life’s outcomes, and what it is related to or unrelated to.” The second part of the class examines how we communicate about purpose, a powerful term that’s fluidity can be used to anyone’s advantage as often happens with political narratives. A collective sense of purpose can be called upon to evoke hope and change or a return to making things great again. 

“Purpose isn’t so much a north star as it is perhaps a compass.”

Burrow says exploring identity is an important step to understanding purpose, (hence the lab’s name), though, as a developmentalist, he is less concerned about who you are in the current moment than who you will eventually become. “We’re trying to unpack how people understand themselves,” he said. “How is that when people start to engage with the world around them, they are able to internalize some features to say ‘that’s me—that’s who I am.’ Yet, in other cases, engagements do not become meaningful aspects of ourselves? The intricacies of identity processes are fascinating.” 

For young people, these questions are particularly important, and often vexing. Burrow gives an example from his own background. “My grandfather grew up on a farm, with relatively few options of vocation available beyond being a farmer himself; and indeed he became one. For him, his identity and role were perhaps foreclosed due to lack of options. By contrast, identity may be much more of an asset today. For example, most universities offer long menus of majors and minors for young people to choose from. How should we expect they successfully navigate these choices if they don’t know something about who they are? Today, identity may be more of a requirement for navigating the experiential landscape.” 

Burrow says identity and purpose are linked, but identity is often confused with purpose when, according to Burrow, it is actually codified by it. “Identities are important because they reveal insights into a person’s motivations, interests, values, and goals,” said Burrow. “But alone, those things can be static and fixed in a particular time. Whereas a sense of purpose can organize and orient aspects of your identity toward the future, and make clearer the broader intentions that drive your behavior and decisions in everyday life.’”

Part of how the lab team defines and communicates about purpose comes from studying what they believe it is not. It is associated with altruism which is often an avenue on the purpose infrastructure but it is not a prerequisite to having purpose. Researcher William Damon defines purpose as a generalized intention to accomplish something meaningful to the self with consequences to the world beyond that. While Burrow respects the definition of his friend and colleague, he sees the prosocial aspects of this definition as but one type of purpose, among many other types available to people. A purpose could be imbued with many contents and motivations for pursuing it. Some of them will be socially desirable and others may be less so—but we shouldn’t diminish the impact of purpose for the person holding it by calling it something different. 

“By purpose, I don’t necessarily mean one role, or singular interest, or one ultimate value. Instead, purpose can be thought of as being capable of taking stock of all of those things when we put them together. It is a center of gravity for the various aspects of who we are and where we are heading. What does that look like? It looks bigger than merely setting goals.” 

Goals often get used interchangeably with purpose, but Burrow cautions against reducing them to synonyms. Whereas goals can be accomplished, doing so does not lend itself easily to knowing what ought to happen next. It is a sense of purpose that can help align goal pursuit and clarify that once a goal is achieved, which goals ought to follow. 

For Burrow, purpose is a continuous prospective state of mind – or, an intention – that propels you forward but is not ever actually accomplished. This is consistent with the theorizing of other purpose researchers like Todd Kashdan and Patrick McKnight, who articulated that purpose isn’t so much a north star as it is perhaps a compass. That is, it is a personal resource that allows you to move steadily forward through life in the direction you intend to set course. 

“To apply purpose in a practical way, the question we should be asking students is not ‘what is your purpose?’ but ‘when do you feel most purposeful?’”

On its web site, the Purpose and Identity Processing Lab states,“We believe everyone has the potential to cultivate a sense of purpose,” with links to research papers that chronicle how it can be done in a variety of settings. Burrow believes weaving purpose more thoroughly and explicitly into the tapestry of student experiences is critical work for colleges and universities. 

“Those of us privileged to work on college campuses have a front row seat to the development tasks of adolescence and emerging adulthood– observing how students answer questions like ‘who am I? what is my place in the world?, what will I contribute to it?’” said Burrow. “Without more intentionally engaging students’ sense of purpose we are leaving something important on the field. If we bother to ask students to articulate a purpose statement in admissions, why wouldn’t we ensure that we follow-up with them about how well we are helping them pursue it throughout their studies? To me, this seems absolutely vital.”

But fuzzy interpretations of purpose have allowed institutions to drop the ball on this. Evoking the term throughout the college experience might be good messaging but without the work behind it, purpose is more of a platitude than the self-organizing benefit Burrow describes. To apply purpose in a practical way,he believes the question we should be asking students is not “what is your purpose?” but “when do you feel most purposeful?” The question for colleges should then be “under what conditions on this campus do people feel most purposeful?” That way, patterns of behaviors and routines that lead to purposefulness can be identified, replicated, and more strategically integrated with course contents and experiential opportunities. 

Burrow says that Gen Z students are ripe for this kind of intervention. He and his team run the Contribution Project where students at Cornell, and now neighboring SUNY schools, offer ideas on who or what they would contribute to if given $400 to pursue their idea. One student identified buying plane tickets for their roommate’s parents who couldn’t afford to come to graduation. Expecting a handful of students to sign up when he first introduced the idea, Burrow was pleasantly surprised that close to 200 students responded. He now invites administrators, faculty and staff to participate in an end of project showcase event to provide a window into the ways students see themselves contributing. “We could be building classes and programs around what students showed us they want to do in the world. Above and beyond their role as students, leveraging their emerging identities as contributors may provide inroads into deepening their learning and connections with key concepts.”

Transformational Learning

Posted on by Ella

In 2011, a consortium of faculty members at Washington University in St. Louis responded to what they saw as a glaring disjunction between theory and practice. The university was conducting research on mass incarceration, offering courses and hosting guest lecturers on the topic—but no campus program existed to address mass incarceration in their own community. The lives of incarcerated individuals were a subject of academic study, rather than an area of tangible change. Their concerns led the faculty members to found the Prison Education Project, a competitive liberal arts degree program for incarcerated students in the Missouri Department of Corrections. The project launched its first courses in 2014 at the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center, a men’s prison in Pacific, Missouri. 

The United States incarcerates more of its population than any other democratic nation, including those with higher crime rates. Missouri’s incarceration rate is even higher than that of the United States—meaning that Missouri, along with the 23 other states whose incarceration rates exceed the national rate, imprisons more of its population than any democratic nation on earth. Black Americans are overrepresented in our nation’s prisons, making up 37 percent of the prison population compared to 13 percent of the general population. Alongside race and ethnicity, education is one of the most decisive contributors to mass incarceration. 30 percent of incarcerated Americans have not attained a high school diploma or equivalent degree, and fewer than 4 percent hold a postsecondary degree (compared to 29 percent of the general population). High school dropouts are 3.5 times more likely to be arrested than adults who completed high school. The correlation continues in the reverse for those who have been released.  

“We have a huge body of research, decades-long, longitudinal studies that tell us that, yes, people are far less likely to go back to prison if they receive a college education,” says Kevin Windhauser, PhD, the director of the Prison Education Project at Washington University, who noted that students who enroll in postsecondary education programs while in prison are 48 percent less likely to be reincarcerated. 

While much of the discourse on the impact of prison education programs emphasizes reduced recidivism, Windhauser says that the benefits for individuals go beyond crime reduction. “I think focusing only on recidivism is a relatively reductive way to look at it. While we offer something to incarcerated students, incarcerated students make our university better. Our students are admitted to WashU, which means if they’re released and still working on their degree, they can continue their degree. And our students show up on campus bringing new perspectives, life experiences, and personal knowledge. They make the campus richer. They make discussions richer.”

According to Windhauser, prison education programs can improve the mental health of incarcerated students and enrich the learning environments of participating colleges and universities. He began teaching at Taconic Correctional Facility in Westchester County, New York in 2017, when he was a graduate student at Columbia University. He felt that the program was “doing something that I thought a university, especially a big, very wealthy university, should be doing: using its educational mission to reach people who traditionally have been kept out or denied access to those kinds of spaces.” 

“Our students show up on campus bringing new perspectives, life experiences, and personal knowledge. They make the campus richer. They make discussions richer.”

While many state and federal prisons have historically offered vocational training, the Prison Education Project’s liberal arts model sets it apart. “The ethos from the beginning was to create a liberal arts college in prison,” says Kevin Windhauser, “Missouri has, like many states, something of a tradition of vocational education in prisons, trades work in prisons, job training in prisons—but a liberal arts degree, especially a liberal arts degree from a major R1 university, was just not something that was on offer.” 

As an English professor in the program, Windhauser has taught courses on subjects ranging from introductory composition to Shakespeare, Milton, and Melville. Often, he says, reading the Western canon is yet another form of social capital that incarcerated people, often victims of the school-to-prison pipeline, have been denied. In part, he says, incarcerated students enrich discussions of literature due to their distinct perspectives and skills: “People who are incarcerated are often really great noticers, because it’s a space where you have to notice things. Just to stay safe in there, you have to be a very good noticer, and it means that there’s some incredible, intuitive close reading ability. With a lot of the literature I’m teaching, I’m bringing out that skill which is already there, and so I find that really exciting.”

Since 2017, Windhauser has seen higher education in prison expand into larger and better programs. “My first course in 2017, I taught once a week in a three-hour block. My students had nothing but pencil and paper and whatever readings I could print out and give them. It looked as close as I could get it to a college course. In all honesty, it may have looked a little bit like what a college course looked like in 1970.” Now, says Windhauser, his classes at the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center more closely resemble their on-campus counterparts. Students have laptops, Canvas accounts, and utilize research hubs like JSTOR. Windhauser holds regular office hours to ensure students receive individualized attention and support. Class sizes typically range from 10 to 20 students—in part to align with the program’s commitment to a liberal arts education, and also because college in prison requires focused attention on each individual student, who is attending college amid unique logistical, personal, and environmental challenges.

These distinct challenges include limited privacy, time constraints, and loud living conditions. “One of the most common misconceptions people have about college in prison,” Windhauser says, is that incarcerated students “have a lot of time on their hands.” It’s a sentiment he hears often when describing his work to outsiders. On the contrary, he says, “Missouri, like many states, requires every incarcerated person to have a job. So our students, like a lot of students on any given campus, are balancing work with study. They’re often balancing being parents, parenting from a distance, parenting by phone and by visit. They are balancing concern for others. They’re often mentoring other people or doing informal peer support work. They are dealing with environmental disruptions. A lot of people do all of their homework with music blaring in headphones, and that’s not necessarily because they love that. It’s because they’d rather have that than the din of everything going on.”

For some, a liberal arts education in prison can be a step toward healing the trauma of incarceration, giving students a sense of agency in an otherwise chaotic world within the prison walls.

Mental health and the psychological toll of incarceration also affect students pursuing college degrees in prison. “Nationwide, there’s increasing attention being paid to mental health challenges faced by college students. And I think a lot of the mental health challenges faced by incarcerated college students are somewhat similar. Yes, there are a lot of unique challenges to the space and people’s lives and the trauma of incarceration, but there are also a lot of very familiar challenges if you’ve ever taught on any college campus. There are people who are really concerned about academic performance, really worried about their GPA. There are people who are really frustrated to not be understanding something, or anxious about an exam or a particular subject. So you have this pairing with all the familiar concerns, and then they’re back-loaded with all of the unique concerns to that space.” 

For some, a liberal arts education in prison can be a step toward healing the trauma of incarceration, giving students a sense of agency in an otherwise chaotic world within the prison walls. George Putney, an alumnus of the Prison Education Project, is currently pursuing a Master of Social Work degree in the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. “It gives you a sense of purpose while you’re in school,” Putney says of the program, “and it extends that sense of purpose to when you exit.” 

Putney is a statistical outlier—he entered prison with a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree. While incarcerated, he began informally mentoring some of the students in the Prison Education Project. The former PEP director asked Putney to join the program, which he did, taking classes and working as a teaching assistant. The program inspired him to pursue his MSW, which he plans to use to work with formerly incarcerated people to try to assist them in some of the major areas of need, including housing, employment, healthcare, and general reacclimation to society. Putney currently works with a St. Louis organization that provides housing assistance, trauma counseling, and substance abuse training to formerly incarcerated women in Missouri.

“I think it allows a person to reach potential that they didn’t know they had. And I only say this anecdotally, but I think it allows people to reintegrate into society in a much more effective manner, where they actually have opportunities and hope of being successful.”

References

Hemez, Paul, John J. Brent, and Thomas J. Mowen. 2019. “Exploring the School-To-Prison Pipeline: How School Suspensions Influence Incarceration during Young Adulthood.” Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice 18 (3): 154120401988094. https://doi.org/10.1177/1541204019880945. 

National Center for Education Statistics. 2016. “Highlights from the U.S. PIAAC Survey of Incarcerated Adults: Their Skills, Work Experience, Education, and Training: Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies: 2014.” https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2016/2016040.pdf. 

Prison Policy Initiative. “Getting Back on Course: Educational Exclusion and Attainment among Formerly Incarcerated People.” October 2018. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/education.html. 
Widra, Emily, et. al. Prison Policy Initiative. “States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2021.” September 2021. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2021.html#methodology.

Digging Deep with David McGhee

Posted on by Ella

David McGhee has an interesting way of looking at the world. In talking with the Chief Executive Officer of the Steve Fund, it is clear he strives to see beyond popular narratives and predetermined judgements. In his new role, he hopes to bring together “unlikely allies and unusual suspects” to continue to address the issues to which he has dedicated his career – poverty, equity, and the flourishing of young people. 

The Steve Fund is the nation’s leading organization focused on supporting the mental health and emotional wellbeing of young people of color. McGhee believes his previous work in government, community service, and philanthropy prepared him well for this work which he calls “the crisis of our time.” Since its founding in 2014, The Steve Fund has been a major influencer in higher education’s ability to understand better the determinants of mental health issues in young people of color and their unique help-seeking behaviors, with research and recommendations such as the Equity in Mental Health Framework, which they created with the Jed Foundation. 

McGhee plans to strengthen the organization’s commitment to transformational change by focusing on outcomes as opposed to outputs, the former being the more sustainable result. To get there, he wants to expand the Steve Fund’s partnerships with people and organizations that he says need to be part of the conversation but may not have been invited in. He talks of enabling a set of conditions that make any strategy possible. It is an approach that McGhee learned early on as a young black man navigating poverty on his way to achieving his own personal outcomes.  

David McGhee

Marjorie Malpiede: What was your career trajectory before coming to the Steve Fund? 

David McGhee: My background is primarily in philanthropy. It really set the direction for the course of my career. After earning my undergraduate degree in public administration and public policy, I set out to work in the nonprofit and government sectors focusing on child wellbeing and also influencing public policy. Having come from concentrated poverty myself, I bring to this work a commitment to transformational change so that opportunity becomes systemic, not random or transactional. This is where my passion lies. 

Early on, I was an intern in the executive office of Michigan’s first female governor, Jennifer Granholm. I had an opportunity to meet the governor, and we were in her office, and I remembered something she had on her wall. It was a receipt from a lawn care service she had employed when she was running for Governor and the lawn care provider had written on it, “Don’t forget the little people” and she framed it. I was just an intern, but I actually believed I had the most important job in the executive office. From 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM every single day my job was to open every piece of mail addressed to the governor, read it, either route it to their proper department or craft a response on behalf of the governor. That job helped me develop an understanding of rural poverty as opposed to urban poverty. I knew what urban poverty was. That was my lived experience. But this helped me understand residents’ concerns throughout the entire state, which in many ways is applicable across the country. Those things really stuck with me. 

Following my internship, I was offered a job with the governor which I respectfully declined. Many people thought that I was crazy but I came back to my local community in Detroit to work at Big Brothers Big Sisters and I did that for seven years. In the neighborhood I grew up in, if you wanted out, you either played sports or you sold drugs. I had had the opportunity to go to college and it was important for young kids in my neighborhood to see that. From there I had an opportunity to work for a member of Congress and I learned a lot. I knew the amount of money that sat in the federal government and how hard it was to trickle down. I knew what nonprofits needed. And then I found my sweet spot in philanthropy. I worked seven and a half years in private foundations, and spent about a year and a half in family foundations, working for a high net-worth family in Seattle, Washington.

MM: Now that you are at the Steve Fund, what are your main priorities?

DM: The Steve Fund exists to promote the mental health and emotional wellbeing for our young people, and, in our case, young people of color. I’ve also layered in not only promoting, but really protecting the mental health and emotional wellbeing of this population. And we do so in three ways. One is by transforming environments. We know young people will occupy environments, whether it’s college campuses, or employer partners, or the community. How do we make sure that we can support the transformation of environments so young people feel as if they belong? Two, we provide resources and skill-building to ensure that families, caregivers, and young people themselves actually have the tools and resources to navigate this life at this moment. And then lastly, we shape the field by normalizing the conversation around mental health. How are we removing the stigma around it? 

My job is to strengthen these assets by creating a set of enabling conditions that are really ensuring that there’s organizational efficiency and effectiveness. We are one organization in this entire ecosystem contributing to the overall mental health and emotional wellbeing. So how do I make sure that we can manage every aspect of our organization towards a unified whole and achieve the results through performance efforts? How do we commit to organizational learning and agility? We need to be flexible. We need to be nimble and responsive in this moment. 

I think the term diversity has become so politicized that we need to ask the question in a different way: Is there any population that faces a disadvantage in achieving what this institution sets out to achieve?

And then importantly, how are we catalyzing and supporting strategic partnerships? How are we bringing together unusual suspects and unlikely allies? How do we establish, encourage, and engage in partnerships that build continuity, otherwise unattainable on our own? And this to me means being willing to go into places other organizations may not be willing to go, to have conversations other organizations may not be willing to have, and to have those conversations with different audiences that some people may shy away from. 

MM: What, in your opinion, are some of the things young people of color need in order to thrive in these environments? 

DM: What do I believe young people need? If there was a magic wand that I had, then I could identify a handful of things that would contribute to better outcomes – but I might start with agency, readiness and connection. I think young people would benefit from agency to be able to make decisions on their own to feel empowered. I think they need to be prepared to take advantage of opportunities presented to them, and I also think that the environments they go into need to be ready. I fundamentally believe that when we want to work towards the power of achieving outcomes, they’re achieved in one of five ways. Either change behavior, shift attitudes, create better conditions, improve knowledge, or equip people with more skills. If a young person enters an environment that has prioritized these things, at least some of these things, I think that they are set up for success.

To really understand this better, we are continuing to rely on one of our strengths – and that is to use survey research to examine the attitudes of both students and families. We think it’s an important time to ask these questions coming out of the pandemic and the post affirmative action decision. It also allows us to explore different issues within different population groups that maybe we hadn’t thought of before. For example, I’ve become fascinated by the lack of data – or at least what I’ve been exposed to – around student athletes. Have we thought through what it might mean for a young person whose skills and gifts and talents have earned them a college scholarship, but they now find themselves in a campus environment that’s totally different from the environment that they were reared in? What does it mean for an inner city Chicago student to now be at the University of North Dakota? Just using that as an example, or vice versa. What does it mean for a standout high school student in Iowa to find themselves in New York City? Some of it is different by race for sure, but some of it is also situational.

Another area that’s rarely explored is the different generational issues among students of color. There’s some first-generation college students whose families see this as such a phenomenal opportunity that a lot of the skills and the resources and support they have are beyond measure, right? However, depending on your environment, there’s a level of stress and anxiety for non-first generation college students. What if I’m a fifth generation college student and everyone in my family had a history of performing at Yale and then I’m here and my experience is not quite the same? 

I think this notion of “unusual suspects and unlikely allies” can start with identifying the person you think is less likely to contribute to this conversation and creating a reason why they can contribute to the conversation.

MM: You strike me as someone who looks beyond the obvious or the commonly accepted. Would you say that’s true?

DM: Yes, though it is not to suggest that I’m right, but I actually think it comes from my experience: one, having to navigate poverty, because I always had to find another way. I just naturally had to find another way. But then it also came from my decade or so in philanthropy. Many philanthropic organizations throughout history were complicit or had simply gone along with current conditions. But many of our nation’s wealthiest foundations and their respective namesakes built their wealth by defying the odds — by not going with the status quo. Henry Ford said, “Many, many moons ago, if I would’ve asked the people what they wanted, they would’ve told me a faster horse.” 

How do we strike the right balance between, “yep, this is what’s presented. This is the status quo” to have we thought about, have we considered, there’s also a layer beneath that? If we don’t dig, we run the risk of not getting the full story. I think this notion of “unusual suspects and unlikely allies” can start with identifying the person you think is less likely to contribute to this conversation and creating a reason why they can contribute to the conversation. 

MM: Are you hopeful we can bring different viewpoints together in these polarizing times?

DM: One of the best leaders that I’ve ever known and worked for, a woman by the name of Tanya Allen, would often give this analogy around 70, 20, 10, especially when it came to coalition building and alliances. It was this notion of 70% of the things that we want for children, even if we’re on a different perspective or different side of the aisle, we can agree on. There may be 20%, depending on the day or the context, that we’ll never agree on, right? And there may be 10% that’s negotiable depending on what the conditions are. The problem is – oftentimes we start at the 20% as opposed to starting at the 70%.

MM: Issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) obviously impact the mental health of young people of color. What is your opinion on the way this is being debated in higher ed today? 

DM: I actually don’t think it’s a diversity issue that we need to solve. I actually think it’s a disparities issue, because the minority today could be the new majority tomorrow. I think the term diversity has become so politicized that we need to ask the question in a different way: Is there any population that faces a disadvantage in achieving what this institution sets out to achieve? In a college environment that exists to provide a high quality education, is there any population here that suffers from some type of disparity in their ability to receive that? And can we get to a place where we agree on minimizing those conditions?


To learn more about the Steve Fund, visit stevefund.org

Let Them Scream!

Posted on by Ella

On campuses and in communities worldwide, students and young adults are protesting in the name of justice. Over the past ten years, we have seen college students protest after officer-involved deaths of Black Americans, for climate justice, and for the rights of women domestically and globally. While the hearts of students and community organizers are warmed at the sight of students protesting, for many higher education administrators, campus protests raise concern. Concerns that students will destroy property, students will physically clash with other groups or campus police, or that students will disrupt the learning environment. In turn, many administrators attempt to quell protests before they get started. The irony is that many of our current higher education administrators were once student protesters themselves. Some were silenced by their administrators, while others persisted amid attempts to silence them. So why silence the efforts of today’s students? 

Students have been protesting and exercising activism strategies on college campuses since the 1960s. During the Civil Rights Movement, college students were involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and they were instrumental in their communities and Freedom Summer(McAdam, 1988). Students protested the Vietnam War and Apartheid in South Africa. Many students who participated in protests during the 1960s, 1970s, and early 2000s have become state and federal legislative leaders and higher education administrators. I argue that while many former protesters might not participate in protests or demonstrations anymore, many still participate in other forms of activism. They intentionally choosenot to support private sector businesses that do not align with their values (boycotting), sign petitions, donate their time and resources, and/or use their platforms and spheres of influence to advance justice whenever possible. 

Some of the Boomers or Gen X-ers, who serve in many higher education leadership roles, might say that the world has become more violent and that protesting on campuses can quickly get out of control. While these concerns might prove legitimate in some cases, these instances should be treated as outliers and not the norm. I offer that persons (administrators, parents and families, or community members) might be equating protests with riots. Riots specifically involve violent features such as the destruction of property and are often not connected to a broader justice-oriented goal. Conversely, many protests are peaceful and empowering spaces, including those that our current college students attend and organize. 

Late millennials and Gen Z-ers currently populate our campuses. The issues they are facing are not new, such as calls for racial justice among minoritized racial and ethnic groups, war, and the erasure of women’s reproductive rights. What is different is that the United States of America they are experiencing is the most divided we have seen in decades, and extremism is a constant presence in our socio-political environment. If the world they are facing is reaching such a critical point, why would we quell their voices? 

Dr. Samantha Smith

Research has shown that participating in protests can increase students’ sense of belonging, identity development, and positive mental health outcomes.

Allowing students to scream in the name of advancing justice is deeply aligned with the values of higher education. Research has shown that participating in protests can increase students’ sense of belonging, identity development, and positive mental health outcomes (Smith et al., 2023; Hope et al., 2018; Ballard & Ozer, 2016). In higher education, we want students to feel like they belong to a community. Participating in activism, such as protests, allows students to be in a community with other people who share their same values and can provide them with meaningful connections to others. Being in community with others can promote feelings of racial pride (Phoenix, 2020). Additionally, protests can act as a source of education and exposure that allows students to develop a sense of how they want to influence their communities during or after college. Students might also garner feelings of hope and empowerment(Smith et al., 2023; Ginwright & James, 2002). Hope and empowerment have been shown to be protective mental health outcomes (Griggs, 2017). Protests also provide an emotional catharsis for students (Smith et al., 2023; Ballard & Ozer, 2016). 

The elements of protesting that help to generate these positive attributes are the ability to gather around a shared cause and to freely use their voices at whatever volume they choose (Smith et al., 2023). Also, hearing from speakers or hearing the stories of others impacted by the subject of the protest enhances the communal experience (Smith et al., 2023). 

We must use strategies to help students engage in conflict with love and empathy in their hearts.

While many institutions might argue that students should use traditional forms of civic engagement to exercise their voices, I argue that activism and civic engagement are not in contrast. In fact, these two concepts must work together intimately to truly advance justice. Disruptive forms of activism, such as protests and demonstrations, are used to grab the attention of lawmakers and those in positions of power. Civic engagement can capitalize on the work of activism to increase voting and discourse with change-makers. Similarly, higher education administrators can support student protests and uphold institutional values. 

I hope today’s administrators who were once protesters, and those who still protest, will remember how it felt to scream for what they believed in. Administrators must encourage students to use their voices. However, with the increased knowledge and insight about the mental and physical toll of fighting for justice, administrators must also encourage students to practice self- and community care during and after protest participation. 

Supporting an environment where students are encouraged to engage in activism, such as protesting, does not mean we abandon the values of our institutions. We must denounce and challenge actions and ideas such as discrimination and bigotry. In some cases, we must acknowledge that there are two sides to an argument and that multiple truths can exist simultaneously. We cannot erase the pain of history. However, we also cannot allow difference and conflict to make us forget our humanity or believe that change is impossible. We must use strategies, such as restorative practices and intercultural dialogue, to help students engage in conflict with love and empathy in their hearts.

References

Ballard, P. J., & Ozer, E. J. (2016). The implications of youth activism for health and well-being. In Contemporary youth activism: Advancing social justice in the United States (pp. 223–243). ABC-CLIO.

Ginwright, S., & James, T. (2002). From assets to agents of change: Social justice, organizing, and youth development. New Directions for Youth Development, 2002(96), 27–46.

Griggs, S. (2017). Hope and mental health in young adult college students: an integrative review. Journal of psychosocial nursing and mental health services, 55(2), 28-35.

Hope, E. C., Velez, G., Offidani-Bertrand, C., Keels, M., & Durkee, M. I. (2018). Political activism and mental health among Black and Latinx college students. Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology, 24(1), 26–39.

McAdam, D. (1988). Freedom Summer. Oxford University Press.

Phoenix, D. L. (2020). Black hope floats: Racial emotion regulation and the uniquely motivating effects of hope on Black political participation. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 8(2), 662–685.

Smith, S. A., Arria, A. M., Fryer, C. S., Roy, K., Green, K. M., & Dyer, T. V. (2023). “It Just Felt Nice to be Able to Scream”: A Qualitative Examination of the Experiences of College Students Participating in the Black Lives Matter Movement. Journal of Adolescent Research, 07435584231202216.