Category: Flourishing

An end goal for learning and life.

Putting Purpose to Work

Posted on by Mollie Ames

There were a thousand things different about them and one, at least, the same. They were nonprofit directors, HR officers, consultants, psychologists, journalists, researchers, quite a few university administrators, and even a college sophomore. All of them, it turns out, believe work should feel meaningful—maybe so they can be happier or help others be happy, maybe to boost their company’s bottom line or general productivity. Whatever the reason, around 150 of them from all over the country showed up in Lower Manhattan last week to explore bringing this vision to life.

The draw was the first annual conference of the Initiative on Purpose and Flourishing (IPF) on its home turf at New York University’s Stern School of Business. The theme of the March 27 event, “Purpose and Flourishing in the 5-Generation Workplace,” captures elements of the new initiative’s evolving focus, including wellbeing and career and an emphasis on the rising generation of workers. Just eight months since its founding, IPF is shaping up to be what might be called a think tank-plus, encompassing research, teaching, partnerships and events. And true to its business school sensibilities, it aims to translate theory to reality, bridging academia and practice.

“I love that this conversation can lead to actionable plans, programs, new ways of thinking, new ways of teaching,” IPF Director Suzy Welch said in her opening at the convening on Thursday. “We can help our young people, but also everybody, have ideas about how to find their purpose and live it and help organizations be a part of that process.”

“We can help our young people, but also everybody, have ideas about how to find their purpose and live it and help organizations be a part of that process.”

Suzy Welch, now a professor at Stern, unknowingly laid the foundation for IPF when she was still in school herself. Working as a crime reporter after college, she developed an interest in business journalism that led her to Harvard Business School. There, scholarship criteria had her studying around the clock to keep her grades up and debt down. “It made me an unpleasant student,” she said of her academic diligence. She remembered a peer chastising her for not attending a graduation party and, he told her, ‘not valuing fun.’ Incredulous at first, she started to wonder if he wasn’t right. Did she value fun? What did she value at all?

“I had no idea. I had never had those thoughts before,” she said. “I was growing up in a time where we did not sit around talking about those things, like what is the meaning of life, how do we flourish, what is purpose.” These new questions would guide her personal and professional life up to, and including, when she started teaching the class on them—literally. Before she launched the initiative, Welch designed a course called “Becoming You: Crafting the Authentic Life You Want and Need,” which she described as “a journey of self-discovery” and a chance for students to explore “a first cut at what their purpose might be.” 

Students responded to the material, and “Becoming You” earned a waitlist of hopeful participants. But something was missing, Welch found. She wanted to push the ideas beyond the classroom and individual students. She envisioned uniting thinkers and leaders in not only academia but business and nonprofit spaces, who were already tackling these issues—purposeful work, effective leadership, productivity—but on their own. “There should be a sort of a center where we all get together and talk about this,” Welch told then-Dean of Stern Raghu Sundaram. He agreed, and so began the plans for IPF.

An important step in getting this project off the ground was the addition of Senior Associate Director Dustin Liu to the IPF team. Liu joined from Stanford University’s Life Design Lab, where he was the associate director. The Life Design Lab promotes the work of “Design Your Life” (DYL), a Stanford course teaching students how to apply design principles to figure out their values and plot their futures. DYL, Liu said, is centered on “developing mindsets and behaviors through a particular framework”—the DYL framework—whereas IPF is an “umbrella” exploring various frameworks across jobs and institutions.

Liu said to think of IPF’s focus as a two-by-two matrix: “individual purpose” and “individual flourishing” on one edge and “organizational purpose” and “organizational flourishing” on the other. Liu and Welch, like DYL, are interested in how to help students thrive. They also want to home in on how people’s wellbeing influences the wellbeing of their workplace, and vice versa. “Those of you who are academics in the classroom know that when you look into the faces of the students, there’s a crisis,” Welch said at the IPF convening. “But it’s not just students.”

If the energy at the conference is any indication, IPF has identified a gap many are eager to help fill. The event brought into tangible focus the people IPF aims to connect and the concepts and practices they hope to promote. Audiences heard from, to name a few, a business professor about generational stereotypes that create divisions in the office where there could be alliances; a psychologist about the communication strategies that can cultivate more functional work relationships; and a corporate leader about management styles transforming employee productivity and retention. Many attendees worked in student-facing roles, and many within that group had a background in DYL. But not all. 

Whatever experience they arrived with, these like-minded people, having found each other at last, filled the conference room with the joyful buzz of early morning introductions and boisterous chatter that lasted all day. They didn’t sound like a group that will be keeping what they learned to themselves. 

Purposeful Information  

Posted on by Mollie Ames

For more than a decade, colleges and universities have been relying on the Healthy Minds Study to help them understand the mental health of their students and those at other schools throughout the country. Indeed, this annual indicator and benchmark has become the bellwether for the state of college student mental health, capturing the dramatic increase in the prevalence of mental health issues among college students beginning around 2014.   

But as important as this survey data continues to be, the Healthy Minds Network’s principal investigators, Drs. Sarah Lipson and Daniel Eisenberg, stress that surveillance is only the start of a larger public health approach to helping every student on campus thrive. This mindset has led to strong partnerships with institutions and non-profits working to understand how mental health data can be interpreted and applied, particularly when it comes to policy changes and institutional investments.  

The latest example of this research-to-practice approach is a new report by the Healthy Minds Network, UNCF (United Negro College Fund), and the Steve Fund on the mental health and wellbeing of students at Historically Black Colleges and Univeristities (HBCUs) and Predominently Black Institutions (PBIs). Released earlier this month, the report, “Flourishing: Bolstering the Mental Health of Students at HBCUs and PBIs,” ties Black students at HBCUs to better mental health outcomes than both Black students at Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) and a national sample of students of all races. 

Akilah Patterson, the study’s project manager and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, said she was unsurprised by the results. Citing the strong sense of community HBCUs foster as a reason for students’ apparent wellbeing, she said, “nothing can really replace that.”

The concept and funding for the study came from UNCF, a major advocate and donor to HBCUs and their students. It partnered with the Healthy Minds Network to lead data collection and assessment, while the Steve Fund, a nonprofit promoting mental health among young people of color, contributed expertise.

Between spring and fall 2023, more than 2,500 students from 18 different HBCUs responded to a tailored version of the Healthy Minds Study. They answered questions from the standard Healthy Minds Study, along with a “Black College Mental Health Module,” added to provide insight into the Black college student experience.

The results suggest relatively better wellbeing among HBCU students across a number of scales. HBCU students report to be flourishing more (45% compared to 38% of Black students at PWIs and 36% of students nationally) and experiencing more campus belonging (83% compared to 72% of Black students at PWIs and 73% of students nationally).

The results suggest relatively better wellbeing among HBCU students across a number of scales.

While loneliness is endemic among students everywhere, significantly fewer students at HBCUs (56%) are experiencing “high loneliness” than Black students at PWIs (58%). Students at HBCUs are also less likely to keep negative feelings to themselves (74%) than Black students at PWIs (86%) or students nationally (83%).

Patterson said the wellbeing of HBCU students is an understudied area. “It’s not that it hasn’t been studied at all,” she explained, “but it hadn’t been studied in this way, on such a large scale, and also using some of the measures we chose to use.” 

In addition to insight into how HBCU students are already thriving, Patterson’s study suggests their institutions have room to improve support. Financial anxiety, for example, is the most reported stress factor among students at HBCUs. Twenty-three percent of HBCU students, compared to 18% of students nationally, say their financial situation is “always stressful”—an indicator correlated with greater risk of having one or more mental health problems.

Students’ financial struggles can be difficult for their institutions to tackle, Patterson said. But she hopes research like hers, and other projects going forward, encourage the kind of investment in HBCUs that, in turn, provides relief for the students. Empirically, she added, she believes the research “speaks for itself.” 

“We’ve been doing the work. HBCUs have been very committed for decades to the success and excellence of their students, and that’s not going to change.”

The Flourishing Factor

The spirit of this latest report from the Health Minds Network reflects an evolution of sorts for the data leader, along with many of its peers in the mental health research community. Their stronger focus on “flourishing” allows for greater examination of the many determinants that comprise mental health, such as financial wellbeing. 

In its 2023-2024 report, the Healthy Minds Network made headlines with news of slight improvements in student mental health, which had been trending negatively for several years. Lipson was particularly inspired by the 6% increase in student flourishing for several reasons, including the fact it is an outcome colleges mayhave some level of control over. 

“The web of causation for flourishing is much wider and often within an institution’s control,” she said. “When we think about what goes into flourishing—a sense of belonging, decreases in isolation, maximizing our built environment—there are levers here that institutions can pull, maybe not all of them, but more so than depression or anxiety.”

Flourishing has many definitions but is most often associated with healthy growth in a variety of domains. So anyone can flourish, with or without a mental health diagnosis. Additionally, while anxiety and depression are still alarmingly prevalent, not all students will experience either. From a public health perspective, flourishing is an outcome that is relevant to the entire population.  

Lipson said what is important about this measure, and indeed all of this research, is it helps administrators understand where to spend time and money based on what the evidence suggests is the best investment. To this end, the Healthy Minds Network has launched the creation of a best practices repository. While still a work in progress, the repository will provide that advice for a number of campus interventions.  

What is important about this research is it helps administrators understand where to spend time and money based on what the evidence suggests is the best investment. 

“What we should be investing in from a population, public health approach is a really difficult question given what little data currently exists,” Lipson said. “With the data repository, you can go to a publicly available resource and consider, ‘What are my options? What does the evidence look like? What schools have implemented this successfully, and who could I talk to there?’”

“Living a Life Worth Working”

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Like today’s future workforce, Dr. Michelle R. Weise is bound to hold numerous roles in her already accomplished career. The former college professor turned ed tech executive worked at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation before becoming the chief innovation officer of Strada Education Network’s Institute for the Future of Work.

Weise is also the author of Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs That Don’t Even Exist Yet. In it, she argues for reimagining how we train learners and earners for the prolonged careers that come with longevity, though not necessarily in ways one might think. In this interview for LearningWell, Weise talks about what little structure exists for us to gain the knowledge we will continuously need. She advocates for changes within post-secondary education and the workforce that will help align one’s inner and outer lives and lead us to recognize our shared humanity in an increasingly isolated world.

LW: Your book suggests there are numerous jobs we might have in our lives. What has your own work life been like in that regard?

Weise: When I look back, I can see the stepping stones, but I didn’t really plan any of this out. It was a lot of pivoting, learning new skills, and then taking that newly acquired knowledge and launching to the next thing. My first job was as a tenure-track English professor. That was supposed to be my job for life, but I realized early on that it didn’t feel like the right calling for me. My first job outside of academia was for an ed tech startup that was helping service members transition out of the military into civilian careers. We were creating tools and services to help them translate their skills into the language of the labor market. Even though I didn’t know it back then, that focus on learners’ translation of their own skill sets has been a resonant theme throughout all of my work.

I ended up building out the higher education practice of Clayton Christensen’s think tank on disruptive innovation. That was, as you can imagine, incredibly formative for my thinking, research, and exposure to every burgeoning innovation in ed tech and workforce tech. I’ve since built out various innovation labs for universities and have also worked with a wide range of stakeholders in the learn-and-work ecosystem and even created the Strada Institute for the Future of Work for Strada Education Network. All of these innovation and thought leadership roles have been focused on connecting post-secondary education more closely to the workforce.

LW: Could you define “long life learning” and what you think the implications of that are for the workforce?

Weise: Our lifespans are extending, and our work lives are getting longer. People are staying in the workforce at historically high rates, well into their sixties and seventies. There’s been this conception that folks who are currently retiring only had a couple of jobs or maybe one job throughout their careers—the “gold watch generation”—but the data shows that’s not true. Even our early baby boomers are retiring with an average of 12 job changes under their belts. So for the rest of us, we can expect many more job changes and pivots to come. For younger generations, that may mean maybe 20 or 30 job changes over a lifetime. For me, the simple mental model of a longer life and longer work life brings into sharp relief that we have no architecture, no infrastructure, no systems really set up to help us keep up with a rapidly evolving future of work.

So, the book is really my attempt to put the decades-old concept of lifelong learning into action by laying out how we can begin to invest in the on- and off-ramps we’ll all need to move more seamlessly in and out of learning and work. How might we get just what we need and then keep moving along on the workforce highway without always having to make a tradeoff and forgo our wages in order to advance our education? What are the ways in which we can do this much more fluidly and in the flow of work?

LW: How can we begin to solve for that from both a preparation lens and a workforce lens?

Weise: I’ll start from a curricular perspective. In an ideal world, we’d like to hire talented people whom we could trust in highly ambiguous circumstances. We’d like to trust that they’d take in various kinds of information, signals, and analyses, make sense of all that, and then use good ethical judgment to inform their decision-making process. It’s a mix of both human and technical skills. We need people to be able to dance across disciplines, take ideas from another domain and use them in new ways. But it’s very hard to train someone to do this unless we teach them how to really deal with ambiguity.

In order to do that, we can’t keep teaching in silos. In our industrial learning complex, we silo everything we teach. We don’t illuminate the ways in which disciplines interact and overlap. For me, the future of teaching and learning will center on purpose learning—orienting learners around solving a problem they care about like poverty, hunger, or climate change, and in the process of struggling with that larger challenge, they learn why certain principles and disciplinary knowledge are necessary. They also learn how to transfer and apply knowledge from one domain to another.

The refrain in higher ed is that we teach people how to fish, but we don’t actually do this well. We teach people very specific content and problems within a discipline. We don’t help our learners understand the coherence across a vast array of courses as a body of understanding.

At the same time, in order for our learners to thrive in an increasingly uncertain future, especially now in an age of AI, they’re going to need to hone their human skills to complement the work of machines. The term “human skills” might make us think, “Oh, I’m human, I have these innate skills.” Yes, but they require deep practice. And for older adults in the workforce, where do they go to practice skills like emotional intelligence, communication, and systems thinking? The lack of these human skills make themselves known in the workplace when there’s friction, when there’s an inability to build strong and collaborative teams. We also need to be thinking about how we build the right kinds of learning experiences for working learners to actually deepen their human expertise and their character skills.

LW: What role does the workplace play?

Weise: If you think about a T-shaped learner, it’s having both those human broad-based skills and some technical or technological expertise. And if we return to the concept of a longer work life, we’re not only going to have to deepen our human skills over time. We’re also going to have to gain different kinds of expertise over time and get skilled up. Sometimes we’re going to need that new knowledge in a very shallow way—just enough to be dangerous. Other times, it will require deeper engagement. We need to do this in an affordable way, within the flow of work.

In my book, I lay out five principles needed for a healthier learning ecosystem, and the fourth is this idea of integrated earning and learning. Right now, when someone’s in the workplace and wants to skill up, we say, “Here’s some tuition reimbursement money. Go do it on your own time on top of this full-time job or multiple part-time jobs and on top of your caregiving activities. Be self-disciplined.” But we need to bring the onus for training back onto employers. It’s not just on post-secondary education to solve this problem.

In 1979, we used to offer workers something like two and a half weeks worth of training for new skills. According to Peter Capelli, by 1995, that went down to less than 10 hours per year. But those 10 hours weren’t even about building new skills for the future. It was for things like compliance training, risk mitigation, sexual harassment training, or discrimination training. When I was writing the book, Accenture had data that around 44% of employers had zero upskilling opportunities for their existing workforce. We have to begin to reimagine on-the-job training. Skilling people up has to be a shared responsibility about building skills for the future.

LW: You use the phrase “living a life worth working.” How would you interpret that?

Weise: My work has been oriented around issues like career navigation, skills gaps, skills building, precision education, and automation and AI’s impact on our careers. And at a certain point, I realized that something was missing. I call it “the soul of work,” but it’s this question of how do we align our inner lives with what it is that we do when we’re making some sort of contribution in the world? This incredibly human element has been missing from all the trending discussions about the future of work.

One of the things that has been helpful for me as I’ve been studying the loneliness epidemic more is this understanding of the ways in which we’re clearly searching for something more. I found this interesting data that in the US alone, the consumer wellness market has reached $480 billion a year. Globally, it’s close to $1.8 trillion. People are paying for detox cleanses, intermittent fasting, and even bone broths. We’re clearly in search of something, and this is happening along with the deterioration of our communities, family structures, and faith-based organizations. In the wake of all that, we’re feeling like something is missing. There’s some hole or aching need we need to fill.

And so when I talk about a ‘life worth working,’ it’s not that we all have to suddenly drop what we’re doing and pursue our passions. It’s about how we actually find moments of real authentic encounters, even in what can sometimes feel like mundane work or even in some things that are not necessarily compensated as paid work. How do we find the small moments of encounter that give us that feeling of purpose and meaning in our lives?

“When I talk about a ‘life worth working,’ it’s not that we all have to suddenly drop what we’re doing and pursue our passions. It’s about how we actually find moments of real authentic encounters, even in what can sometimes feel like mundane work.”

And that is really tough because studies are showing that we’re becoming more narcissistic and less empathetic. We are becoming so cloistered in ourselves that even small interactions are hard for us. 

I was thinking about how there have been all these return-to-work mandates recently, and I think in the minds of management, they’re thinking, “My people aren’t being as productive as they should be, so I need to bring them back in-person, so I can watch them and make sure they’ll be efficient and productive.” Those water-cooler moments and those serendipitous moments of connecting are being hailed as a way to get to greater productivity and deeper collaboration. But what I think we’re missing is that we need those moments of serendipity to actually build more of those small and authentic encounters because we have become so consumed with ourselves.

LW: Is this something we can teach or learn?

Weise: How to move towards this kind of service orientation and thinking about others rather than ourselves? I think it’s really hard. Our entire system is set up to build super individual high achievers, and then suddenly learners graduate from college, and we expect them to be great team players. I’ve always been impressed by how [Olin College] grads go through 20 to 30 different team-based projects connected to the real world by the time they leave. Why aren’t more schools doing this? It’s a way for us to help learners deepen their human skills and practice teaming and collaboration. In addition, by focusing on larger problems, learners must engage in design thinking. And the first step is empathy to understand the challenge they’re trying to solve for a company or an organization. They get to immerse themselves in acts of caring that are pointed away from themselves.

LW: You talk about human skills being an important part of mastering machines versus the other way around. What are your thoughts on the use of AI in higher education?

Wiese: People are getting really fearful about the use of AI, but instead of thinking about how it can replace humans, we should be leveraging this technology to fix a super unsexy problem: stitching together incredible amounts of data across our higher ed and workforce systems. We have so much data in various silos and legacy systems, and we don’t know how to tap into it all. GenAI gives us a way forward.

Think about how retail companies have built virtuous loops of information about us as consumers. Amazon’s doing randomized control trials on us every few seconds. In higher ed, we need to get smarter about our own people, our own prospective learners, to be able to offer them something that really taps into a pain point in their work lives.

This is where I see real potential for AI in higher education.

Navigate U

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Around 2021, administrators at the University of Utah discovered an unsettling pattern while reviewing student data: In an effort to satisfy requirements and pass some mandatory courses, some students had needed to retake a class five, ten times, or more. In one example, administrators found that a student had spent over $50,000 taking a single math course. These repeated attempts went unflagged because academic advising and course tracking systems were siloed instead of fully integrated across departments. In effect, when it came to the university body, one hand didn’t know what the other was doing—and neither one was reaching out to the student struggling with the path toward graduation.

The revelation brought into focus the number of students struggling with key courses without sufficient support or intervention. But more broadly, it illuminated a systemic disconnect: a lack of coordination between advising, academic support, and course scheduling, which was likely contributing to Utah’s unsatisfactory retention and graduation rates. The path towards a solution was paved with integrated technology and data transparency.

“University policy hadn’t been updated in over 30 years and was kind of adrift, just stacking additional credits on top of requirements. No one had made the case about how that impacts degree completion, how that impacts debt, and tying those things together in a really simple, clear way,” says Chase Hagood, vice provost for student success, who was hired in 2021 to be part of the new initiative’s leadership. “But not everyone was behind the open sharing of data. What does it take for a whole university to come together to say, ‘We believe in the exceptional educational experience. What is it going to take to get us there?’ We joined the Innovation Alliance, and the Coalition for Transformational Education, and getting in those peer groups helped elevate the work we do.” 

University leaders recognized the need for a more integrated, proactive approach, beginning with more democratized data. Within two years—and the addition of a new president and provost—this recognition had become forged into a commitment, leveraging EAB’s Navigate360 as the CRM platform to connect the campus. This became the tech muscle behind Navigate U, a 2024 university-wide initiative aimed at improving metrics of student success, including retention and graduation rates. Utah is banking on software and data analysis to follow individual student performance, flag potential issues, and introduce  interventions—and on the horizon, even track behavior trends.  

Eight Pillars and Key Features

University leadership recognized that existing approaches had “topped out” their effectiveness at steering 32,700 students toward their graduation goals. A new comprehensive strategy was needed, one that put the data capabilities to work under pillars of priorities, each with key features of innovation. The pillars of Navigate U were designed to bring together student support services, streamline policies, and integrate data systems to provide real-time insights into student progress through a structured, coordinated, more supportive approach.

“This whole Navigate U method is about looking at the institution and figuring out how we can prepare as clear a pathway as possible to help the student through here in four to six years,” says Brandon Johnson, senior associate dean of student success and transformative experiences. “By asking those questions, we stop blaming the students. We stop blaming high school for lack of preparedness. If we admit a student into the university, we should do everything possible to make sure that they are as successful as they want to be.”

“If we admit a student into the university, we should do everything possible to make sure that they are as successful as they want to be.”

One key feature of Navigate U is its proactive advising system. Previously, students often had difficulty knowing where to go for guidance, as advising structures varied across colleges. Some students had clear academic roadmaps, while others struggled with course selection and degree planning. Navigate U introduced a centralized approach, ensuring that all students are assigned an advisor with clear, standardized expectations for advising practices. Advisors now have access to real-time student data, allowing them to identify students at risk of falling behind and intervene earlier. 

Another feature is the data integration and early alert system. In the past, crucial information about students—such as course performance, attendance patterns, and engagement with support services—was scattered across different departments. Navigate U centralizes this data through the EAB Navigate platform, enabling faculty and advisors to monitor student progress more effectively. This system can flag students who may need extra support, whether due to failing grades, repeated course withdrawals, or financial concerns. It connects students to resources like tutoring, coaching, and peer mentoring programs. It also promotes student engagement, recognizing that a strong sense of belonging is critical for success. First-year transition programs, on-campus housing opportunities, and community-building efforts have been expanded to support this goal.

Course availability has also been a major focus of Navigate U. Many students faced delays in graduation because required courses were either full or not offered frequently enough. The initiative introduced a strategic course scheduling system, using data to predict demand and ensure essential classes are available when students need them. Additionally, the university implemented new guidelines for course enrollment thresholds to spur the scheduling of courses based on historical data and anticipated demand, and identify courses with high demand to consider opening additional sections.

“One of the things with no institutional policy was monitoring thresholds,” says Hagood. “You might be running a class with six students over here, but in another college—or even within the same college—maybe a department head says, ‘No, you have to have at least 15.’ We had no across-the-board guidelines to help deans make the best use of resources and kind of press them to think about it. It wasn’t good for faculty, and it wasn’t good for students.”

The pillars also target academic wellness, engagement, transitions, and financial structures.

Goals and Metrics 

Graduation rates are a particular area targeted for improvement. At present, the six-year rate is around 66% (a previous peak of 70% declined during the COVID-19 pandemic). By addressing obstacles such as course bottlenecks and repetition, outdated policies, and inconsistent advising, the initiative aims to see 80% of students completing their degrees in six years by 2030. 

In tandem with this is the goal to increase the rate of retention. Currently, about 85% of first-year students return for their second year. With enhanced advising, course availability, and academic support, the university aims to raise this to 90% or higher, aligning with top public research institutions. 

The goals extend beyond graduation. With an improved focus on career readiness and job placement, Utah seeks to ensure that 90% or more of graduates secure employment or enroll in graduate school within six months of completing their degree. This effort includes strengthening connections between academic programs and career services, expanding internship opportunities, and incorporating career development into students’ academic experiences.

In tracking these key metrics and continuously refining its strategies, Navigate U intends to create a more efficient, supportive, and results-driven approach to student success. And with a new kind of tracking under development, the school hopes to gain a clearer picture of each student’s academic journey in order to provide targeted assistance before small setbacks become major obstacles.

The enhanced tracking aims to put more points of data into profiles to build a more comprehensive picture of the student life cycle: where they’re going, and where they’re not. 

“The next phase is working out how we incorporate swipe data from student affairs and event attendance, and then we can start to see this really interesting profile of the student. Are they using the library? Did they go to a coaching appointment? Did they meet with their advisor? Do they attend sporting events?” says Johnson. “If we start to see some gaps, we can launch some outreach to a student because we’re seeing them not only notengaged in some of these academic support resources, but they’re not engaging in campus life and wellness and belonging-fostering activities and events.” 

If a student had been missing class, for example, administrators could use their swipe history in the residence halls, dining halls, and gyms to get a picture of where they’re spending their time. And if they see the student is spending a lot of time swiping into the Student Union, they can send a coach, advisor, or mentor to informally reach out to them there. 

“The more we know about our students and how best to support them, the better it is for the student,” says Johnson. “I would love a day when we can create a spider web profile like you see on some of those career and personality assessments with different indicators and quadrants. You can see if it’s low or heavy in one area, then we can act on the areas that need to be filled in.”  

Johnson believes one of the greatest behind-the-scenes benefits of the Navigate U work might be the introspective thinking it encourages in faculty and administrators. It’s hard to look at a longstanding practice with fresh eyes if it isn’t considered broken. But that, he says, is where the work happens. 

“With some honest conversation, sometimes we come to see that something probably isn’t in the best interest of students after all. Instead of asking, ‘Why are we doing this?’—because there’s usually some answer for why—we try asking, ‘Do we really need to keep doing this? Is it something that’s benefitting us or the students?’” says Johnson. “Those questions are happening more often. And I think we’re fixing a lot of things.”

The University of Virginia Builds a Headquarters for Wellbeing

Posted on by Dana Humphrey

At noon three days a week, a room overlooking the pond at the University of Virginia falls into quiet meditation while the rest of campus churns with mid-day activity. Some students sit, some lay on the floor. A facilitator leads with guided thoughts and modes of breathing, but you’re welcome to do your own thing. After about 20 minutes, everyone is back on their way to lunch and afternoon classes.

“It’s very accessible to all kinds of people. It’s a nice break in the day, and it’s powerful for the people who have discovered it so far,” says Dearing Fife, a sophomore who organizes the sessions at the Contemplative Commons.

Dearing is a student advisor at the Commons, a new soaring glass and fieldstone building that is home to the Contemplative Sciences Center (CSC). For more than 12 years, the CSC had been operating from UVA’s religion department with multidisciplinary research, experiential learning, and mindfulness initiatives. The construction of the Commons represents more than an impressive new building to house a department and some activities. It is headquarters for the interdisciplinary face of wellbeing on campus—from grounding activities like yoga and meditation to scholarship on the many intersections of contemplation and nature, art, and technology.

The construction of the new Commons makes tangible President Ryan’s desire for UVA to be a top school for holistic student life while pushing boundaries on what higher education can look like in terms of mental health promotion. For many years, UVA had been the administrative backbone of the Flourishing Academic Network (FAN), an inter-institutional collaboration aimed at promoting student flourishing through higher education.

A Contemplative Commons

On the western edge of campus, the new 57,000-square-foot building sits beside the serene 11-acre pond and watershed area known as The Dell. Its U-shape wraps around a Ginkgo tree-lined courtyard, and connects to central campus via a pedestrian bridge over Emmet Street inspired by the High Line in New York, with benches and plantings. It’s hard to imagine a location better suited for a center dedicated to research, teaching, and outreach for contemplative experience.

“Our building is designed around the three themes of nature, art, and technology, and all three combine together to create contemplative opportunities for individuals,” says Kelly Crace, Executive Director of the Contemplative Sciences Center. “It’s intentionally multidisciplinary, creating wonderful spaces where students just love to come and study, whether they want to come into our art galleries, or come into our Conservatorium and experience light and sound in a variety of ways, or connect with nature through our biophilic design.”

The Commons houses, and reflects, work being done at UVA’s Contemplative Sciences Center. The facility’s purpose is to support student flourishing through a host of indoor-outdoor spaces, academic classrooms, immersive learning and events. It will soon include art installations and flexible studios that can be configured as classrooms, research labs, or even yoga studios.

Technology plays an interesting role in both design and practice in the Commons, used both to enhance mindfulness experiences and to create intentional tech-free spaces for deeper reflection. The Conservatory is an immersive room with floor to ceiling windows, sounds and light panels, with state-of-the-art audio to mimic natural soundscapes—think ocean waves, rainforests, waterfalls, wind, and buzzing bees. Other areas at the Commons are tech-free zones, encouraging students to disconnect altogether.

Innovative Classrooms, both labs and studios, are designed as multi-modal spaces that allow instructors to change the room setup based on the session’s needs. Classes can alternate between traditional seating, or more free-form setup using yoga mats or meditation cushions. Some rooms feature sprung floors, ideal for movement-based practices like Tai Chi, or facilities conducive to a Japanese tea ceremony. Others serve as academic classes that faculty members would prefer to hold in something other than a traditional classroom building.

“There’s one class that meets in the Commons, for example, on medical Spanish. This professor has her own deep contemplative practice, and she incorporates it into every class that she leads,” says Connie Kresge, chief of staff of the CSC. “She’s not just bringing in somebody who’s pre-med to learn a few vocabulary words. She is saying, ‘Okay, you are going to be the front line of working with humans. How do you imbue your practice with understanding of this population and a contemplative, compassionate approach?’ And so they also get the benefit of a setting like the Commons.”

Research and Practice

In a world increasingly defined by speed, competition, and information overload, the CSC represents a shift in higher education. Housed within UVA’s Provost’s Office, CSC benefits from strong institutional support, ensuring its programs are not peripheral but central to the university’s academic mission. As Michael Sheehy, CSC’s Director of Research, points out, UVA’s investment in contemplative education is unique among public universities, positioning it as a leader..

With its three-pronged mission, CSC is reshaping how students, faculty, and the broader academic community engage with education, wellbeing, and leadership. Work and programming at the Contemplative Sciences Center is organized around three pillars: Research, focus on advancing contemplative studies through scholarship; University Life, integrating mindfulness into students’ days; and Systems Change, expanding contemplative education globally through leadership and K-12 initiatives.

At the heart of CSC’s work is a research lab known as CIRCL, which stands for Contemplative Innovation, Research, and Collaboration Lab. There, scholars study many aspects of the ways meditation, nature, and technology shape our well-being from a collaborative, cross-disciplinary perspective.

One of the current projects examines how different environments impact contemplative experiences, explains Sheehy. As part of the methodology, participants will be studied meditating in five different settings, and researchers then track brain activity, heart rate, and emotional responses. “If you meditate in a garden, does it feel different than if you meditate in a featureless white room?” he  asks. “What happens in your brain and body when you practice mindfulness in nature?” Sheehy is also editor of the Journal of Contemplative Studies and also Contemplative Currents, which  are uniquely poised to cover both peer-reviewed academic studies and open public scholarship.

Research, academics, and collaborations go well beyond the study of nature and meditation. CSC is diving into diverse studies such as virtual reality experiences, lucid dreaming research, and exploration of leadership and public policy.

“We’re having professors coming in from our Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy to talk about policy and leadership from a contemplative perspective, professors from religion to come talk about Buddhism, and we’re exploring collaborative work of how we can do things with the school of data science,” says Crace. “What’s really cool is getting a sense of the breadth and diversity that’s possible. People might initially think, Oh, so this is where you do yoga, or this is where you do mindfulness, that type of thing. Yes, and we’re so much more than that. Being able to bring in that diversity of collaboration, I think, is really important.”

University life          

But the CSC isn’t just about research—it’s about making curiosity and mindfulness part of daily student routines to support an overall culture of thriving. The CSC hosts monthly salons, where students and faculty can discuss contemplative topics with leading interdisciplinary scholars.  A Citizen Leaders Fellowship offers students a year-long leadership opportunity to gain skills needed to flourish during their time at UVA and after graduation.

Beyond the lab and classroom, the CSC and Commons are uniquely poised to support student flourishing with a wide range of campus programming—beginning with a celebratory weekend of concerts, food and activities in April to mark the grand opening of the Commons. Going forward, a weekly calendar of programming and well-being initiatives include regular yoga, meditation, Tai Chi, reflective writing, and spaces to cultivate mindfulness and resilience.

It’s a bold push against what Crace calls the “stress-glorification culture” of modern academia.

People ask, Why would a university have a building for contemplation? They don’t ask, Why do you have a building for the arts, and a building for sports?

 “’I stayed up two nights. Well, I stayed up three.’ It’s this constant one upping, where we’re trying to find distinction through how hard I’m working,” he says. “It’s not only how hard I’m working, but it’s important for you to know how hard I’m working, and it just creates a very toxic culture that really disrupts flourishing. We want to be a disruption to that stress culture.”

Systems Change

Flourishing is a key word in the overall picture of contemplative sciences and its place in a larger ecosystem of institutions helping young adults maturing in a way that best supports their wellness and full potential. Appropriately enough, the Flourishing Academic Network (FAN) grew out of key individuals at UVA committed to flourishing, including David Germano, a religious historian at the University of Virginia and Crace’s predecessor as former director of CSC, and alumni Jeffrey Walker, a finance executive, philanthropist, and member of the board.

“What we’re trying to do with FAN is taking a system orientation and looking at how we can prepare students for the real world, and allow them to succeed in higher ed,” says Walker. “It means giving them tools when they arrive, and educating them about what kind of tools there are out there, working on things like social emotional learning models, meditation, yoga, body movement, breath practices, peer to peer support, and also managing ego and collaborative models, and looking at leadership models.”

For real systemic change, the third pillar of the CSC reaches beyond the campus into the wider scope of academia with FAN, and reaching K-12 classrooms and international leadership programs.

 “The systems change work can be thought of as expanding what we do reaching outward,” says Kresge. One major initiative is the Compassionate Schools Project, a groundbreaking K-12 mindfulness curriculum leading new practices in Louisville, Kentucky. Another is the Dalai Lama Fellows Program, which trains young leaders around the world in mindfulness-based social change. In 2024, CSC took 17 Fellows to meet His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

CSC is also working on a national initiative to integrate contemplative education into higher education policy. By partnering with education policymakers and university administrators, CSC hopes to make contemplative practices a core part of the American educational experience—and something both more easily understood and more widely undertaken.

“People ask, Why would a university have a building for contemplation? They don’t ask, Why do you have a building for the arts, and a building for sports? No one stops and says, what do you mean by arts?” says Kresge.. “We don’t have that barrier in our colloquial understand of the words arts and sports, but we do in our conversation of what contemplation is.”

Leaders like Kresge hope there would be a greater understanding of mindfulness and meditation as an ongoing tool and practice—like exercise—and not a one-time thing that can be taught in a seminar and crossed off a list.

Sheehy learned meditation from his grandmother when he was about 10 years old, and it made a lasting impression. “I’ve had the chance to live most of my life with access to knowledge about contemplative practices, because I’ve had experiential access to as a constant reference point,” he says. “That’s why I think the research we do is important, because we’re showing people how these practices wok, how powerful and empowering they can be, and give them agency over transforming their lives.”

Dearing Fife also had access to these practices at an early age, and the addition of the Contemplative Commons at UVA cements her belief she could not have found a better place for herself to attend school. A self-described “anxious kid,” she discovered meditation in middle school, and it’s been a core part of her life ever since. “Like brushing my teeth,” she says. “A non-negotiable.” She grew up knowing that learning to handle it was just going to be her thing.

“Everyone manages something in their life, and I have to manage my anxiety,” she says. She meditates once or twice a day, and believes it’s a tool many more college students would benefit from. She is aware of a first-year student who shows up to the noon meditations regularly, and likes to envision that it’s making a difference in her life—and that in a small way, as organizer of the sessions, Dearing contributes to that.

“It’s a big school, and I’m in Greek life, and that’s been great,” she says. “But I also wanted an academic realm where it’s like, This is my place, and this is where I’m going to impact the university,” she says. “And this, working at the Commons and CSC, is it.”

Life Lessons with John Bravman

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Bucknell University President John Bravman personifies the saying “the harder you work, the luckier you are” and imparts that message to his students. With humility and humor, the career academic brings us through the key milestones in his life, from working to overcome a speech impediment as a child to being the “smart kid” in New York City public schools to his spectacular, yet uneven, success at Stanford, where he learned to be a great teacher well before he became a college president.    

Here is an excerpt from our interview:  

LW: To start, can you give a bit of background about yourself, your family, how you grew up, your education? From what I understand already, you have a very interesting story.

Bravman: Well, I doubt I do. But I grew up in New York City 67 years ago. I’m a first generation college student—second generation American but first in my family to go away to college. So my father was in World War II, and I grew up with parents from the postwar era, and I came of age in the early sixties. My earliest distinct memory is probably Kennedy being assassinated. So that’s the place in time. And everything that happened in the sixties influenced me somehow, some way. I had a love of science. My father was an accountant, but he liked science, too, and I probably picked it up from him. But things like going to the World’s Fair in ’64 and ’65 and going to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, these were all big deals for me. And sure enough, I became a scientist.

LW: Where in the city were you educated?

Bravman: P.S. 34 Queens. Then I moved to Long Island for junior high and high school and went to public schools there, too. But it was quite a culture shock, moving from the city to the suburbs. It was just different. I’m sure there’s a lot of sociology and psychology and history and economics to explain why. We were not a wealthy family by any means, but we were never hungry. And for whatever reason, I grew up with the notion that smarter is better—that it’s good to be smart and work hard and all that kind of stuff. And probably, because I moved during those preteen-teenage years, when I went out to Long Island, it was all of a sudden, “Who’s better looking? Who has nicer clothes? Who’s more popular?” This was not a wealthy place, but just all of a sudden, it changed. I remember thinking about that but realizing, of course, that smart still mattered, and I had to do well in school and all that. But that was the first big cultural shock I experienced in my life.

LW: When you say being smart matters, and you saw that as a pathway to success, would you say your peers in the NYC public schools seemed to share that perspective more so than those in Long Island, who seemed more socially-oriented?

Bravman: Probably not. But my honest answer is that, from kindergarten through fifth grade, it felt like the extent to which you were looked up to by your peers came down to who is the smartest kid in class. And that felt very different on Long Island.

But I mean, I spent seven years on Long Island at three different schools, all public. And then I had the incredible good fortune of going to Stanford, where I ended up spending 35 continuous years. Believe it or not, I’ve often said that one of the best things that ever happened to me was a rejection. And I’ve reflected on that rejection throughout my life. I desperately wanted to go to MIT from high school because I’m a sciencey, nerdy geek. And that’s what you did if you grew up on the east coast. That’s where I could be the best of the best. Everyone knows MIT. And if you’re on the west coast, you went to Caltech.

But the story there is that a friend of mine in high school, who was also a nerdy kid, took a family vacation to California the summer after our junior year in high school. He came back with tales of these redwood trees, which I’d only seen in National Geographic, and the Pacific Ocean in Monterey Bay. I’d never been west of Pennsylvania. He told me about a school I’d never heard of called Stanford University, and he said, “We have to go there. It’s amazing.”

And of course, there was no internet back then. So I went down to the high school library, where we had a room forcollege books, and it turns out the Stanford Viewbook was missing. So I didn’t even see pictures of Stanford. All they had was their course catalog, which back then was just text. I illegally took that book home for the night because you’re supposed to leave them there. And I went through it, and I was so entranced by this book with no pictures that I designed my whole curriculum only to find out later that what I thought I was going to take were all junior-level classes, not freshman classes. Long story short, I did not get into MIT, but I got into Stanford, and my friend did not get into Stanford, where he really wanted to go. He went to MIT, was miserable, and dropped out.

I’m just saying, I’ll never, ever forget that rejection and the lesson of, “Okay, life knocks you down? You just keep going.”

LW: With that course catalogue, did you recognize the rigor of the courses right away? What attracted you to the curriculum?

Bravman: Well, I love books. Most of the books I own have nothing to do with science and engineering. I’ll have a real problem when I retire because I’ve now collected 5,000 books, and I have no place to put them. So honestly, I think I just liked this course catalog. It was words, and I had never read a course catalog. I remember sitting in my bedroom, reading page after page of these course descriptions. I thought, “This is amazing, and I want to learn all this stuff.” And then I went off to college for 20 years. 

LW: You must have been quite wowed, then, because your friend was not kidding—it is beautiful.

Bravman: Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s like 362 days a year of perfect weather. I’d never been on a plane before. And back then, Stanford had arranged charter planes from several cities on the east coast, so I was on a plane with 250 kids going to Stanford. I showed up on campus, and it was just the most amazing thing. I had a lot of financial aid. It included loans, scholarships, and a work requirement. So I was assigned to work in a kitchen. I probably picked that off a list. I liked to cook, even as a boy. But I remember we got to campus late, and within minutes of entering my dorm, someone came and told me that I was late for work because as a brand new freshman, I was supposed to work the first day on campus in the kitchen, helping make dinner. So I showed up, and Kay Malik, who was the head of the food service in Wilbur Hall at Stanford, she said, quite curtly, “You’re late for work. Don’t do it again.” So I didn’t exactly have a perfect start.

I loved Stanford. But the fact of the matter is I almost flunked out my sophomore year because I was not prepared for the rigor of the academic work. I quite honestly never really studied in high school because I didn’t have to. I had one B in ninth grade art. So I did not graduate with a perfect 4.0. So I graduated second in my class. My friend, who went to MIT, was one of six people with a 4.0. So I was technically ranked number seven, but I’ve always liked to say number two.

LW: What was it like to have been close to the smartest in your class in high school and then become average, or maybe even struggling to be average, in college?

Bravman: Well, I’d never met kids who went to private schools before. So I was dealing with that and people who went to Beverly Hills High, which is a public school but a very, very good one, resourced differently than my schools were. I don’t remember too much about that, but I remember being scared and disappointed in myself. I thought, “What am I going to do and what am I going to tell my parents?” And I’m sure kids today feel the same way. And they probably also experience certain emotions I didn’t. So I’ve tried to be a better and more sensitive advisor academically, but also as a boss, understanding that people have a variety of experiences. But I think that near failure was a really important learning lesson for me. And part of that is, “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.” 

That’s also where I learned about advising. My advisor was an almost brand new professor at Stanford from Great Britain. He went to Cambridge. And so I learned a lot along the way, too, about England as a result of that relationship. But he was helpful and supportive, and I’ve never forgotten that. So obviously I didn’t flunk out, and I did well enough, and I ended up getting into the doctoral program there in engineering. 

When I started the doctoral program, my undergraduate advisor remained my advisor, but I also got a second advisor in electrical engineering, a different department. My department, material science, announced a new faculty search. And I remember saying to my advisor in electrical engineering, “Hey, look, did you see my department’s going to be hiring someone else? I wonder who they’re going to get.” And he looked at me and said, “I want you to apply for it.” I said, “That’s ridiculous. I’m not going to be a Stanford professor. Give me a break. I almost flunked out.” He said, “No, I want you to apply for it.” And he was an older professor. He’s still with us. He’s 85 and a giant in his field. He was a giant in his field then, and he said, “I want you to stay.”

So that advice and encouragement from two different advisors changed the course of my life. That whole advising experience has meant so much to me ever since because I know what it did for me. I ended up staying there for a total of 35 years before coming here to Bucknell in 2010. I lived off campus one year in graduate school and three years as a young professor. So 31 of 35 years, I lived on campus. And for 14 of those years, I think it is, I lived in an undergraduate dorm as what we call a “resident fellow.” So most of my life, I’ve lived on a college campus. So I went to college 50 years ago next September.

When I say it made my life, I mean, I’m not kidding. And obviously it took a lot of hard work—first to not get kicked out, secondly to get a position in the graduate program, and then to pass my Ph.D. qualifying exam, which I failed the first time and you only can take twice by policy. So I worked my butt off and passed the second time. And then I had to get on faculty, and then I had to earn tenure. And that is not trivial at university, let me tell you. Stanford’s policy is that you have to be one of the two best people in the world at your age in your field. And that’s not possible, really, but that’s the written standard. And of course, Stanford School of Engineering is incredibly famous in my area because of Silicon Valley. So I had the combination of thrills and chills every single day, and getting tenure was probably the achievement of my life until I became president here.

And I just reflect on that—to have gotten there as a first generation college kid, who almost flunked out and then didn’t pass his Ph.D. qualifying exam the first time. And I’m no genius, not even remotely close, but I know the value of working really hard and keeping a dream ahead of you and sacrificing. In my experience, working really hard is no guarantee, but it can make a difference. I’ve tried to be very sensitive to students who are struggling. Maybe they wouldn’t believe a college president almost flunked out of school. But it’s the God’s honest truth, and I want them to know that. And being an advisor doesn’t mean you have to be a pushover. You can be direct and strong without being strident, and you can be understanding of someone’s needs and foibles and weaknesses. And I can’t believe in September, I will have literally been in college for 50 years.

“[As an advisor] you can be direct and strong without being strident, and you can be understanding of someone’s needs and foibles and weaknesses.”

LW: That’s a great milestone. So when you almost failed, who was it that believed in you enough to keep you going?

Bravman: That’s a great question. It’s hard to answer. Obviously, my advisor’s support and some other faculty were important. But I did realize that I’d have to get my stuff together, or my life’s going to be very different.

LW: So you had a strong sense of agency.

Bravman: I was probably more scared shitless than anything else. I really was, and I was afraid of disappointing my parents, for sure. So I was in the process of applying to transfer to a couple schools back east—good but lesser schools—and not even thinking about, “Are they really going to take someone who’s almost flunked out?” Thankfully, I didn’t have to find out, but I learned that you can talk yourself quickly into procrastinating, and it usually doesn’t have a good end. So I learned that lesson painfully and learned that I had to discipline myself to partition the various aspects of life—fun and work and this and that—and to sleep as little as possible to maximize everything else. That’s probably the best answer I can give you, but I was really scared.

LW: Let’s talk about when you were recommended for, and ultimately earned, that coveted teaching position. You hadsomeone who really believed in you. What did that feel like?

Bravman: You know, all the prejudices about research institutions are often true. But this advisor, he was both at the absolute top of his field and the best teacher I ever had. That was a role model for me. And honestly, a lot of getting that job was just dumb luck—right person, right time. And I, in my naivete, just thought, “Gee, I wonder who they’re going to get.” It never entered my mind that I’d be on the Stanford faculty. And he just said, “John, I want you to apply.” And I don’t remember much else, but saying some quip about, “That’s ridiculous. I’m not like you. I can’t be you.” And now I’m one of two people in Stanford’s history to have their highest award for teaching and their highest award for service.

LW: What about the teaching? What do you think, given all you’ve told me, contributed to you being a great teacher?

Bravman: Well, I’ll tell you, I have a story there, too. It’s the same answer: total, utter fear of failure. My brother is older than me. He’s very outgoing. My sister’s younger and very outgoing, and I was the introvert. And my father was a very, very smart man. It’s such a shame he couldn’t go to college. I grew up with a speech impediment, and my father, when I was in second grade, bought a reel-to-reel tape recorder—which I still have and still works—and a microphone. And he made me read into the tape, and he made me listen to myself, which is painful to this day. But he wanted me to learn to overcome my speech impediment. And I never forgot that because I grew up just incredibly fearful of speaking in front of any crowd, all through college. And in part, that’s why I failed my Ph.D. qualifying exam.Because it’s oral the first time. It’s two-and-a-half hours in front of 10 professors. So I was scared out of my mind. Andsome of my speech issues, when you’re scared, they come to the fore. 

Fast forward to teaching, having had lots of not-so-great teachers at Stanford, as well as some great ones, I knew which I wanted to be. So when I started teaching, I probably prepared 10 to 12 hours per one hour lecture. We had, early on, a video camera in our department and a VHS machine. This was pretty advanced at the time. So I remember at midnight when the building was empty, videotaping myself, giving my low-level introductory material science lectures to an empty room on videotape and then watching it until two o’clock in the morning, learning what I did wrong. I was so scared of failure, and I really wanted to be a good teacher. The fact is, I have eight teaching awards,two of them national. So I like telling people who have these issues, honestly, if you knew my fear of talking in public and now I can stand in front of arbitrarily large and loud crowds, anyone can. 

The fact is I’m still a deep introvert. I don’t actually believe in fundamental change that way. You overcome and you adapt. I’m proud of what I did in teaching, and I think I’m a reasonably good public speaker now. I’m not very good at reading a script. But I want students who are struggling, especially with public speaking, but anything really, to know that if I can do this, believe me, you can.

LW: Well, you can’t win all those teaching awards without getting a positive response from the students themselves. They really are the ultimate judges on this. Do you have a sense of what about your teaching has resonated so muchwith students?

Bravman: I became a techno geek in terms of computers, as they arose. So the Macintosh 1984 came out the same year I joined the faculty, and everyone was using IBM PC. Those were released in 1980, but I started with a Mac. I was, for the most part, a bit ahead of my time with new software, new technology, and I took that into the classroom. So I think that was noticed.

I think it helps to be friendly and approachable and tell stories, like, “Hey, here’s my story. If I can do this, you can do this.” And hopefully I gave clear lectures. My department had very few majors. The big undergraduate courses were all kind of service courses. And so people didn’t really want to be in my classroom, but they had to be. And so that’s something to think about. And then at the graduate level, I ended up teaching things that, for the most part, very few people fundamentally like. They just have to do it as a doctoral student. Like crystallography, it’s very dry and not very exciting. So I worked hard at bringing in real life examples that people could relate to that still allowed me to explicate on the subjects. And so it’s those kinds of sensitivities, but also being in my office at midnight. Students would come see me at midnight because that’s more their hours than mine.

Of course, early on, you’re younger, so you’re closer to them. But what’s the lure of academics? Every year, the freshmen are the same age. Every year, I’m exactly one year older. It’s so unfair.

LW: Did you think early on in your career that you’d ever be a college president? Was that a holy grail that you always hoped to achieve?

Bravman: No. My dream job, having grown up in New York City, was to be the president of the American Museum of Natural History on Central Park West. The woman who was the president there was president for like 25 years. And I remember thinking, “Would you please just retire?” But seriously, being a college president is a tough job. And it always has been. But I’m who I am, and I’m not who I’m not, and I can only do what I do. So I just keep building as best I can.

Formative Education at Boston College 

Posted on by Mollie Ames

At a Boston College retreat, sophomores are asked three questions: What are you good at? What brings you joy? Who does the world need you to be? The exercise is part of a program called “Half-time” meant to help students begin a lifelong process of vocational discernment. For Jesuit universities such as BC, this type of formative education, defined as “educating whole persons for lives of meaning and purpose,” is part of the fabric. It is now the focus of a new academic department at BC called the Department of Formative Education (DFE). 

The department extends BC’s leadership in formative education, expanding the focus from the practice of undergraduate education to research on “life-wide and lifelong” formative education. Housed within the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, DFE features an undergraduate major (Transformative Educational Studies), a master’s program (Learning, Design, and Technology), and the first ever Ph.D. program in Formative Education.

“Our programs tackle big formative issues,” said Chris Higgins, the Department’s founding chair. “How can we nurture vision and values? What are the dispositions that sustain democracy? How do we co-evolve with technological tools? How can we cultivate a sustainable relationship to the earth? What does it mean to flourish as a human being?” 

Such questions, Higgins explained, demand an interdisciplinarity approach, spanning anthropology, design thinking, history, the learning sciences, philosophy, and the psychological humanities.

Stanton Wortham is the inaugural Charles F. Donovan, S.J., Dean of the Lynch School. An anthropologist by training, Wortham spent several years at the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked with scholars of varying disciplines within the liberal arts on how their expertise applied to education. When he arrived at BC, he was able to continue this work of integrating the liberal arts into scholarly inquiry on education, with the blessing of BC President Father Leahy. In creating the new department within the Lynch school at BC, Wortham was inspired by the Jesuit reverence for the liberal arts and its emphasis on formative education.  

“Most of our education ignores the multi-dimensional nature of how people learn,” he said. “Formative education is this notion that people have several different types of development—social, emotional, ethical, spiritual—and all of those things are going on in a young person’s life at the same time.”  

“Most of our education ignores the multi-dimensional nature of how people learn.”

Wortham believes the optimum form of human development is when all these dimensions are aligned—a state he refers to as “wholeness.” The other two pillars of formative education are purpose, which helps young people explore what will bring them both meaning and a living; and community, the recognition that this discernment about life’s purpose happens together with others. Character and ethics are naturally woven in.  

“Too often at an institution, we tell young people that if they just learn a lot of stuff and get a good job, then everything is going to be fine. And it’s just not true if you’re not connected to something that has bigger meaning,” said Wortham. “We can’t tell students what to believe, but it is our job to help them ask questions about what is ultimately important to them.”

Wortham envisioned a department known both for its research and its teaching. He wanted to convene a group of liberal arts faculty that would bring diverse disciplinary perspectives to the study of formative experience, practice, and aims. This research on holistic development then enriches courses aiming to inspire students to think about education in this formative way.  

To lead the department, Wortham recruited Higgins, a philosopher, who had been leading the Transformative Education Studies program (TES). Now part of the Department of Formative Education, TES is growing with 95 majors to date. “‘Transformative education’ names both what we study and how we study,” Higgins explained.

“Our courses explore questions about personal and social transformation. Questions such as, what does it mean to be an educated person? And what kind of schools do we need in a democratic society? At the same time, we want these classes themselves to be transformative experiences, spaces where our students can reflect on their own efforts to form themselves into somebody who can lead a flourishing life.” 

Higgins shares Wortham’s perspective that education has grown too narrow and instrumental. His recent book, Undeclared, calls out the contemporary university, with its “credentialing mindset,” for paying only lip service to the idea of general education. Far from being encouraged to explore, students get the message that they had better “pick a lane and step on the gas!” Instead, he offers a vision for an educational renaissance in which “soulcraft,” described as “the quest to understand, cultivate, and enact ourselves in lives worth living,” is the primary focus.  

Higgins’ creative energy is reflected in the department itself, down to its name which he said is intentionally ambiguous. “Formative education is open for interpretation,” he said. “I don’t want to determine the kinds of questions that my colleagues want to explore.” 

Those questions are wide-ranging and include topics one might not immediately think of. Professor Marina Bers studies how children can develop ethically and interpersonally through engagement with coding and robotics. Caity Bolton, a cultural anthropologist, is studying what holistic human and social development looks like through Islamic education in East Africa and the Arab World. DFE affiliate faculty member Belle Liang has developed a “purpose app” for college students.  

Just in its second year, the DFE doctoral program is already producing notable research. For example, Ph.D. student Harrison Mullen has received a grant from the N.C.A.A. to study the experience of athletes forced to retire from the sport that has been so central to them. Framing the issue in formative terms, Mullen considers how practices such as sports help us make sense of what it means to lead a worthwhile life. In interviews with retired athletes, he explores the deep sense of loss that accompanies this life transition.

At the Department of Formative Education, as at BC overall, personal reflection is fundamental. “It’s the Jesuit thing,” said Higgins. “We are devoted to careful study of the ‘what’ and the ‘how’—but we also never forget the ‘why’ and the ‘who.’ Why does this matter? And how does this help you understand who you are and what you stand for? 

Higgins offered examples of TES courses and their activities. “In ‘The Educational Conversation,’ we invite students to reflect on their key formative influences through an educational autobiography. In ‘Spiritual Exercises,’ we introduce students to a range of spiritual practices, starting with the exercises devised by the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius of Loyola.”

For Wortham and Higgins, the time is ripe to reconsider the hyperfocus on academic achievement. They believe educators in a variety of settings are looking for a richer, formative language to describe their practices and aims. To this end, the Lynch School is launching the Transformative Education Lab, which will share research and best practices around whole-person education. Wortham and Higgins hope that the lab will extend Boston College’s leadership in formative education to new audiences, helping to recenter questions of meaning and value in educational debates. 

“Academic achievement is critical. Subject matter knowledge is critical,” said Wortham. “But these students we are teaching and testing are people. We need to consider their mental health, how they will build relationships with others—all the things that make them thrive as human beings.”

Principled Innovation 

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Higher education has long debated its role in character development. Religious schools, secure in their subjectivity, have made producing people of good character part of their core mission. But for public universities serving diverse populations, the entire concept can be fraught, starting with the language itself. How are we defining character? And should values and principles be part of a student’s education? 

Arizona State University appears to have threaded the needle on character education with an initiative called “Principled Innovation” – a framework for ethical decision-making that can be used by individuals or in community settings. It is based on “pro-social” values that lead to defendable outcomes like “what’s good for humanity” without being overly prescriptive. Under the leadership of President Michael Crow, ASU has added Principled Innovation to the list of design aspirations that drive the university, calling it “the ability to create change guided by values and ethical understanding.”

Ted Cross is ASU’s Executive Director of University Affairs and Crow’s point person for the roll-out of Principled Innovation. He says character education is best understood as a reflective process that enables students to flourish – in a way that is flexible and individualized.

“We want people to improve themselves,” said Cross. “Positive psychology has a take on that; philosophy has its own angle. We packaged all of that into an inter-disciplinary approach that helps faculty, staff, and students ground decisions and actions in values and character.”

Informed by the Jubilee Centre’s Framework for Character Education in Schools at the University of Birmingham, Principled Innovation includes four domains of practice – Moral, Civic, Performance, and Intellectual – each of which encompass certain character “assets” or virtues meant to guide one’s ability to create positive change in the world. ASU’s institutional commitment is expressed through Principled Innovation as a guiding principle, while the practice of Principled Innovation is supported through a pedagogical approach, engaging tools and resources, communities of practice, and curricular and co-curricular activities. 

Building the Framework

The design lab for Principled Innovation was ASU’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. In 2017, the dean of the college, Carol Basile, was concerned by the state of K-12 education systems and decided to change things from the inside out – through addressing the education workforce and teacher and leader preparation. She came to the conclusion that to do so, character education needed to be included. To understand how, she enlisted Cristy Guleserian, a colleague at the college who is now its Executive Director of Principled Innovation. 

“We asked ourselves, ‘What could it mean for a college of education at a public university to integrate a character education framework into the systems of teacher and leader preparation?’ said Guleserian. “In having these conversations, we realized it couldn’t just be integrated into a curriculum to teach future educators about character. It had to be our approach to everything we do and something that we embraced as a college community.” 

With this as their north star, Guleserian and her team worked intentionally with faculty, staff, students, and community partners and eventually incorporated the practices and assets of what would become Principled Innovation into everything they did, from fostering culture and environments to teaching, advising, and student services. But getting to an agreed-upon understanding of what all this would look like involved cultivating authentic relationships through a series of one-on-one discussions and all-college design sessions – a process Guleserian described as equal parts invigorating and challenging.  

“There was a lot of skepticism at first – a lot of questions about whose character, whose values, and whose virtues we were talking about. I remember spending about an hour going back and forth about one word,” she said.

In one of the sessions, a participant offered what would be a break-through in the log jam. “We need to ‘ASU-ize’ this,” he said. The group understood him to mean “co-create” a concept that more explicitly reflected ASU’s diverse community and well-publicized mission.  

“We recognized that innovation is at the core of what we do here at ASU and our charter holds us responsible for being inclusive for the well-being of the communities we serve. So the framing of Principled Innovation was born from that shared purpose,” said Guleserian.

The framework is intentionally flexible. In an essay for the book The Necessity of Character, ASU President Michael Crow and Ted Cross write, “By refusing to adhere to a single philosophical or religious worldview, ASU has made room for students to draw on their different backgrounds as they engage with our character education initiatives. Only by remaining flexible in this way have we been able to secure ‘buy-in’ across the university.”

At a research university known for outside the box thinking, Crow has made innovation part of ASU’s nomenclature. But the decision to include it in the title was more than just good branding. Principled Innovation proposes the notion that “just because you can innovate, doesn’t mean you should,” reflecting a growing national movement to infuse character into the critical actions of scientists and others in the innovation community.    

When asked if there could be “Unprincipled Innovation,” Cross said “definitely.” 

“It’s not enough to be innovative if you don’t innovate with purpose and principle. It’s not enough to help people learn how to make a good living if we’re not helping them learn how to live good lives, whatever that means to them,” he said. 

“It’s not enough to be innovative if you don’t innovate with purpose and principle. It’s not enough to help people learn how to make a good living if we’re not helping them learn how to live good lives.”

Principled Innovation in Practice

Building on the work of Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College (now called College for Teaching and Learning Innovation), Principled Innovation is currently practiced in ten colleges at ASU, including the W. P. Carey School of Business and the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions, as well as the Office of the Provost and Educational Outreach and Student Services. All of this work uses the framework and assets for reflective practices and community practice that lead to positive change.  

“The framework asks, ‘What are some of the possible intended or unintended outcomes of the decisions we make and how can we mitigate some of the possible negative consequences before we take action?’” said Guleserian.

A good indication of how the framework may influence ASU’s pedagogy is the launch of the Principled Innovation Academy, which is housed in University College. The curricular program involving human-centered problem-solving methods and team pitch competitions has already engaged with 750 students.  

Cross calls the program “shark tank meets design thinking meets character education,” where students create and pitch ideas using the Principled Innovation framework. Last year’s winner was a career recommendation engine for students that works by asking them questions like, “What are your work values? What are your personal values? And how would that map to your career?” 

It is clear that the careful work that went into developing Principled Innovation at ASU helped propel it from a concept within one school to a major design principle for the entire university. But for advocates like Cross and Guleserian, the buy-in it has received at the country’s largest public university says something about the times we are in. 

“The U.S. is so deeply divided that we are talking past each other,” said Cross. “There’s a lot of anger and aggression and mistrust. But if we can engage multiple perspectives in the way we design and create things, the way we teach and collaborate, it helps us to develop environments of trust and belonging.”

Invented Here

Posted on by Dana Humphrey

Sukhwant Jhaj, Vice Provost for Academic Innovation and Student Achievement at Arizona State University, spoke with Dana Humphrey, co-host of Invented Here, about ASU’s Work+ program, a bold and transformative initiative redefining how we think about student employment. Sukhwant shares how Work+ evolved, its impact, and the lessons he’s learned in bringing the initiative to where it is today. Learn more about the Work+ Collective here: https://theworkpluscollective.asu.edu/.

Influencers for Life

Posted on by Dana Humphrey

A continuation of our series on answers to the question:  “What experience or person in college most influenced your development as a human being?”

When Carter Jones left for college, he was thrilled to be moving on to the next chapter of his life, until a familiar anxiety dampened his excitement.  Would he fit in? – “like, really fit in” – as a student of color in a predominantly white school? He’d done it before, attending a suburban high school 15 miles outside his home in the city. His friends there had his back, but every new situation is a do-over when it comes to belonging. 

On one of the first days of school, Carter met Derrick, also a first-year student, and the two connected immediately. What they did not share in background (Derrick is White, from the suburbs, Carter is Black and Dominican from the inner city), they made up for in their mutual passions – sports, music, technology, and where to get the best pizza. The two became close friends. 

Halfway through that first year, Derrick shared with Carter that he had been struggling with his mental health. Like Carter, he had been worried about finding his place in a new environment. He  seemed preoccupied with his body image, though Carter said, “he looked fine to me.” In fact, Carter wasn’t aware how distressed his friend had become until he told him he was leaving school. It was then that Derrick explained that in his senior year of high school, he was so despondent, he had barely gone to school at all.   

When Derrick left college for home, it could have been the end of their friendship, but in many ways, it was just the beginning.

“I was like ‘are you kidding me?’ Here I find this great friend to go through school with and suddenly he leaves,” said Carter. “It was so disappointing.”

When Derrick left college for home, it could have been the end of their friendship, but in many ways, it was just the beginning. 

Then Carter did what Carter does.  He made it work.  Derrick lived in a town not far from campus and Carter found a way to visit often.  They’d watch football together, eat junk food and hang out. Soon, the family came to expect his Sunday visits and Derrick’s dad, Don, would pick Carter up at school and drop him off after dinner.  On those rides, they’d talk, and Carter was surprised to learn that Don, a successful businessman, had little money growing up.  He had put himself through college – the same college –  with loans and part-time jobs.  He could not afford to party in the dorms like the other students and, he, too, could feel out of place. 

“His upbringing was more like mine,” said Carter. “He was scaping by, hoping the next loan would come in to pay tuition.”

Derrick made the decision to return to school around the same time Carter was struggling to secure the money for that semester’s tuition.  “I am not going back without my best friend,” he told Carter, and they went to Don for advice.  Don created a financial plan for Carter that included working with aid officers, even the school’s president, to streamline tuition and allow for online participation so that Carter could graduate with a degree in computer science. When he needed an internship one summer, Don connected Carter with one of his own friends from college who was in technology.  

“His support for me was unbelievable,” said Carter.  “But it wasn’t just opening doors.  He was really invested in how I did and checked in all the time about my grades, how I was doing socially. I thanked him over and over again and he’d just say – stop, you are like a son to me.”

Asked how Don’s support changed his outlook on life, Carter said “Before, I felt like I was just getting by, not caring much about how I did but knowing how much faith Don had in me, it made me think of myself differently.  I began to really care about doing well. It mattered to me.”

Six years later, Derrick and Carter remain best friends and Carter continues to be part of Don’s family.  Carter may not ever know the depth of Don’s gratitude for showing up for his son, or how much of himself he saw in Carter, though it would benefit him for the rest of his life. But that’s not what this story is about – nor how it started.  It is about two college kids who find friendship and are smart or lucky enough to hold onto it. 

“It is amazing to me what relationships can do for your life,” said Carter. 

Names have been changed for this story.