Category: Teaching & Learning

On the last day of the Summer Studio at Olin College of Engineering, four teams of faculty from around the world reflected on their experiences. They had spent the previous week pursuing a framework that would lead to engineering education improvements in their home countries. As the facilitator moved from table to table, it became clear the participants had succeeded in what they came to learn: how to apply what a start-up engineering college in Massachusetts did to transform engineering education. 

“We had heard of the Olin pedagogy, and it had many synergies to our own,” said Uday Roopavath, an assistant professor of bioscience and bioengineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Jammu. “Before coming to the Summer Studio, I had a vision of what I wanted to do with my students, but I wasn’t able to define it. Now I can.” 

For over two decades, Olin College of Engineering has not only practiced a groundbreaking way of teaching within its own institution but also shared its methods with the rest of higher education, both domestically and globally. The effort is more than just an example of best practice sharing. The theory is that by instigating changes within institutions, a cumulative effect will occur to alter the field of engineering education and the types of engineers it produces. 

“A big part of our mission is to transform engineering education,” said Olin President May Lee. “The Summer Studio is the flagship program for allowing us to do that, and it’s more important than ever. Olin provides the scaffolding for students to understand what it means to learn — not just take tests and get the right answer. This way of learning leads to a kind of agency within our students that is essential, particularly with the onset of A.I.” 

Lee’s commitment to Olin’s role in influencing engineering education comes from the fact she has seen it first-hand. When Lee was the chief strategy officer for institutional impact at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (R.P.I.), her colleague there, Professor Shayla Armand, participated in one of the Olin summer programs and came back promoting an entirely new way of thinking about research and teaching. Before she left R.P.I. for Olin, Lee incorporated much of that transformation into R.P.I.’s current strategic plan. She then brought Armand to Olin as provost, and the two leaders continue working together to extend Olin’s impact on the field. 

May is the third president of Olin College, succeeding the five-year tenure of Gilda Barabino and the 21-year tenure of founding president, Richard Miller. The school was chartered in 1997 by the F. W. Olin Foundation with a directive for Miller to operationalize what the engineering community believed to be much-needed changes in how engineers had traditionally been trained. The prevailing sentiment was that a reliance on technical skills-based learning alone would not be sufficient to address the major changes brought on by a more integrated global economy and the launch of the internet. Engineers would need to have business and entrepreneurship skills, teamwork, creativity, and a broader understanding of the societal contexts of engineering. 

Olin was created to become a form of privately funded national laboratory for engineering education redesign. What the college lacked in size — the highly selective school enrolls about 400 students — it more than made up for in innovation. From the beginning, Miller and his team did things differently, rejecting a number of deeply held convictions in higher education, such as academic departments and tenured faculty. 

“We were given a rare opportunity — and responsibility — to rethink what it means to be educated in the 21st century and what it means to be an engineer,” Miller said. “The expectations were extremely high.” While the campus was still being built, 30 students spent the first year living in construction trailers and acting as partners in designing pedagogy.“ The student ‘partners,’ together with the founding faculty and leadership team, developed a new paradigm for engineering education based on human-centered design and intrinsic motivation,” Miller said. 

Olin students develop a sense of identity and agency early on, many acquiring patents and starting enterprises before they even graduate.

The concept of students as co-creators continues today. Olin is perhaps best known for its student-centered, project-based learning whereby students frequently work in teams, building real solutions to real-world problems. The faculty, who team-teach across disciplines, still apply human-centered engineering to their teaching — an approach that combines technical expertise with empathy, design thinking, communication, and an understanding of human needs. 

As a result, Olin students develop a sense of identity and agency early on, many acquiring patents and starting enterprises before they even graduate. Not surprisingly, they tend toward emerging technologies. Olin alumni Evan Morikawa and Andy Barry founded Generalist, the leading A.I. research and product driven company building general intelligence for the physical world, a.k.a. “robots.”  

By the late 2010s, Olin was earning a global reputation as the producer of the new kind of engineer — one that creates solutions, not just products. In 2018, M.I.T., in its global state of the art in engineering education report, named Olin first among 10 universities cited as current global leaders in engineering. M.I.T., which came in second, used the Olin model when revising its own engineering curriculum. 

Learning by doing 

As satisfying as it may have been to be an example to the standard bearer down the street, having a superlative pedagogy was only the first metric of success in Olin’s founding mission. 

“If Olin only graduates good engineers than we have failed because we have not changed engineering education,” said Chris Lee, the interim dean of research and strategic partnerships at Olin. 

Dean Lee leads Olin’s efforts to share with the world what the college itself has built. This transfer of knowledge has taken many forms over the years. Since the college’s inception, visitors have come to campus to sit in on classes and converse with faculty and students, all hoping to see what the engineering education incubator was all about. Miller said that in his last 10 years at Olin, he hosted leaders of 800 universities from 65 countries who journeyed to Olin to see for themselves how the learning model works.

In 2009, Olin started the Collaboratory, which included more formal workshops for visitors who not only would observe Olin’s methods but could learn how to apply them to their own institutions. This eventually led to Olin’s residential summer program. Now called the Summer Studio, the on-campus program aims to help institutions accelerate their institutional initiatives related to teaching and learning. The Summer Studio is an intensive project-based professional development experience for the teams of educators that come to drive these projects forward. Teams of up to six participants pay $35,000 to attend. 

Participation in the Summer Studio has shifted over time from pre-Covid levels of 10 to 12 teams and over 80 participants to this year’s smaller group of four teams, all from outside the United States. In July, the campus hosted teams from Saudi Arabia, India, Bolivia, and Korea. Like Roopavath, most of the team members arrive with a specific problem they want to solve. But if they come looking for Olin’s secret sauce, Dean Lee tells them there isn’t one, or at least there isn’t one that could be universally applied. 

“We don’t give them the answers; we give them a process,” he said. “Every institution is different. You tell us what you want to do and what your culture is like, and we’ll adapt to it.” 

President Lee underscores the point.  “We would never be so presumptuous as to think that what we do ought to be copied exactly someplace else,” she said. “There are disciplinary and curricular considerations. Each institution has their own traditions, their own accreditation concerns; and there are, of course, size differences.”

The teams are each assigned two coaches, Olin faculty members, who meets with them before, during, and after the one-week engagement. During the week, the teams utilize design principles to work through an interactive loop of goal setting, constructive feedback, reflection, and re-engineering — just as they would in an Olin classroom. “We tell them at the very beginning: ‘You are going to experience what we do here. You are going to be the students,’” Dean Lee said.

“We tell them at the very beginning: ‘You are going to experience what we do here. You are going to be the students.’”

A primary educational framework they learn is called GAPA — goals, assessments, products and activities — which Olin uses with its students. At the Summer Studio, the process is introduced as a tool that can be applied to anything from a desire to increase attendance to redesigning first-year curriculum to starting an institution from scratch. “We tell them, ‘If this is your goal, what activities will you do? What products will you develop to show those activities are successful? How do you assess what you’ve done?’” Dean Lee said.

GAPA is only one of many takeaways of the Summer Studio. Educators from around the world share common goals, despite their different cultures and perspectives. Those that attend the Summer Studio are both receptive to new ideas and generous with their own body of knowledge. This makes for high-quality collegial relationships, even life-long friendships. 

For Olin College, the learning is bidirectional. “A critical piece of Olin’s DNA is that we are constantly learning,” President Lee said. “We are learning from the institutions who come as participants — observing how they might interpret what we say and listening with intention to their feedback. For me, that’s an important outcome of the Summer Studio.” 

With an opportunity to make her own mark on Olin, President Lee believes the Olin model, now well established, can be applied to a range of non-engineering institutions, from liberal arts colleges to state schools and historically Black colleges and universities — “all in service of extending our impact and transforming higher education.” 

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

At a recent talk at Villanova University, the author and commentator David Brooks told students, “Know what you want. Want it well and want the things that are truly worth wanting.” The advice was not original to Brooks but rather to St. Augustine, who believed that knowing what you’re passionate about is critical in a world where human beings are driven more by desire than by reasoning.  

Interpreting the wisdom of St. Augustine is, in many ways, the raison d’être of Villanova. The Catholic university in Pennsylvania is considered the world’s premier institution for Augustinian scholarship. Pope Leo XIV is among its graduates. But while Villanova’s Augustinian roots run deep, one might ask: What does the work of the late fourth century Christian theologian really mean to a modern university with 21st century students? 

This is the underlying question behind a new character education initiative at Villanova called Pilgrim Virtues. The name refers to a central pillar in Augustine’s work — that human life is a pilgrimage. The program seeks to highlight what is distinctly Augustinian about character education at Villanova and share that with the campus community as well as others working in this field.  

“I think the character movement has really tapped into something real, something essential in higher education, and we wanted to become a part of that from our own distinct tradition.”

The initiative began two years ago with a Capacity-Building Grant from the Educating Character Initiative (E.C.I.) at Wake Forest University’s Center for Leadership and Character. In 2025, Villanova received an Institutional Impact Grant of $822,258 from Wake Forest to build out an institution-wide series of character education programs, aligned with Augustinian teaching, both curricular and co-curricular. The idea was to coordinate, catalyze and accelerate the many character education activities that were taking place within three areas at the university: the Department of the Humanities, the Honors Program, and the Augustinian Institute. 

“I think the character movement has really tapped into something real, something essential in higher education, and we wanted to become a part of that from our own distinct tradition,” said Anna Moreland, who heads the Honors Program. 

Moreland and her colleague Michael Tomko, the chair of the Humanities Department, are the driving force and guiding spirit behind Pilgrim Virtues. Moreland’s sought-after “Shaping Initiative” course series (“Shaping a College Life,” “Shaping a Work Life,” and “Shaping an Adult Life”) helps students transition to college and walk through the experience intentionally, thinking deeply about their professional callings and their life beyond campus. 

Courses in the Department of Humanities study the questions that matter most for living a good and deeply human life.  Indeed, much of the work Moreland and Tomko were doing in their classrooms already bore the imprint of both Augustine’s teaching and the character education movement. They were curious about how to connect the two and scale the work so that it touched everyone on campus. But the challenge included engaging an audience that may only be tangentially aware of, or influenced by, the saint himself. First year students are required to read Augustine’s seminal work, “Confessions,” but for many, that will be their only exposure. And while Villanova is a Catholic university, a good percentage of the students are not, or are not practicing. 

To explore all of these considerations more deeply, Moreland did something unusual in higher education: She looked outside her university for partners. There, she “stumbled” upon the E.C.I. “We work in our silos so effectively that sometimes we reinvent the wheel,” she said. “But through the E.C.I., I realized there are all these good people around the country who are doing similar work. What we needed to do was get to know one another.” 

Moreland and Tomko drew on the expertise of the E.C.I. to examine other character education customs, including the more recognized Aristotelian tradition. In doing so, they quickly realized they had something to offer as well as to gain. “Through our work with the E.C.I., we were able to bring the Augustinian framework — those insights and experiences — to the broader field of character education,” Tomko said. 

The leaders believed that the examination of what Villanova had to offer required introspection and input from a wide cross-section of the university. Fortunately, the Capacity-Building Grant Villanova received covered a faculty and staff workshop pilot that would be the first foray into bringing diverse voices together on campus to revitalize Augustine’s teachings in a meaningful and visible way. The method they used was emblematic of the tradition they were reawakening.  

“We were drawing on the knowledge and inspiration of this group we had assembled,” Tomko said. “We not only had ideas but also the practical experience of how to live well in community.” Moreland said coming together to understand what it meant to teach character at an institution like Villanova was the most profound experience she had had at the university. “We brought our whole selves to those conversations,” she said. 

An important voice in the discussions was Paul Camacho, the associate director of the Augustinian Institute at Villanova and an associate professor of philosophy in the Humanities Department. The institute exists to promote the study of Augustine and his legacy within the pedagogy at the university. As an Augustinian scholar, Camacho helped clarify the distinctions within traditions. 

“A lot of what has emerged in character education is based on Greek philosophy, which sometimes presents a list of virtues that could be somehow obtained like credentials, as Benjamin Franklin famously attempted in his virtues checklist,” Camacho said. “Augustine reminds us that virtue is not something that you acquire but rather is a dramatic and dialogical narrative unfolding across the whole of your life.” 

St. Augustine of Hippo was a Late Antique philosopher, theologian, and bishop known for his insights into the human condition and one’s relationship with God. He argued that human beings are fundamentally desiring rather than reasoning creatures and that we are shaped by what we love. Augustine’s pilgrimage through life, his self-examination and conversion as captured in the “Confessions,” is perhaps his defining characteristic. 

“Augustine believed the good that we are striving for is always something that’s in process, always on the move, and always in relationship with other people,” Camacho said. “The task of being human is never really accomplished.” 

It was this journey through life that resonated most with the Villanova community and its students navigating their own education and personal growth. In identifying the pilgrimage theme, the initiative’s leaders explored what virtues would be critical for students traveling this road. If, for Augustine, love is the beginning and the end, what do you need along the way? 

“Augustine believed the good that we are striving for is always something that’s in process, always on the move, and always in relationship with other people.”

The five virtues they arrived on are: humility, forgiveness, patience, wonder, and conviviality. While the first three are more easily understood, wonder and conviviality, as seen through an Augustinian lens, merit definitions. Wonder, for Augustine, was an impassioned search for beauty “so ancient and so new,” as written in “Confessions.” Conviviality, from the Latin term con-vivere or ‘to live together’ binds its members in a common project, toward a shared goal.

The Journey Continues 

As the early work of the initiative laid the philosophical groundwork for the pilgrim virtues, the Institutional Impact Grant is bringing theory to practice. The new grant covers a series of programs, courses, lectures, and fellowships that are all ultimately student-facing. This fall, a new course called “Augustine the Pilgrim,” to be led by Camacho, will follow the footsteps of Augustine’s life, culminating in an actual pilgrimage to Italy. 

The faculty and staff workshop pilot is now an established program with a waiting list. The year-long workshop supports professors and practitioners in incorporating the virtue framework into classrooms and co-curricular activities. In bringing together diverse professionals from all areas of the university, the workshops have yielded positive results, both intended and unintended.  

Sunny Gaye Hallowell, a professor in Villanova’s nursing school, often wondered what the world was like for her colleagues in the humanities. She felt her students, while proficient at the scientific material, had limited opportunities to connect the meaning of nursing practice to who they were becoming as adults. When she heard of the Pilgrim Virtues workshop, she was the first to sign up.

“In my discipline, we teach to competency-based learning objectives. We give students challenging questions and case studies, so they can develop necessary skills to become amazing nurses,” Hallowell said. “But what are we doing in the classroom to cultivate a human being? I wanted to blend art and science to help students explore the human experience of health and healthcare through the eyes of both patients and providers, and to help them form a professional identity.” 

Hallowell said attending the workshop and learning the virtues gave her the language and structure to do that. Exposure to colleagues across multiple disciplines was an added benefit. “The chance to cultivate a classroom where we can walk through the virtues to think and engage independent of our own disciplines has been transformative,” she said. “It has given us a point of connection as faculty, and it has introduced me to colleagues and friends that reinforced the presence of an academic community I belong to.”

An important goal of the initiative is the direct engagement of students, both through the classroom and through programs like Augustinian Ambassadors, which was introduced through the Capacity Building Grant. Modeled after the faculty and staff workshops, the Augustinian Ambassadors program brings together interested students to deepen their understanding of Augustine’s teachings through texts and reflection. 

Kate DiLella was one of the first Ambassadors and will continue in the program this upcoming year. The rising senior was originally drawn to the Ambassador role because of her Catholic faith and interest in deepening her understanding of Augustinian character, and she believes the program has the potential to benefit anyone on campus. “Many of the students in the program seem to have a similar idea of what we are striving for, but through studying St. Augustine, we are reminded that life is a pilgrimage and part of the beauty is that we can’t foresee all the bumps that will come along the way.”

Once they have become reintroduced to Augustinian virtues, Ambassadors are expected to encourage their peers to participate in numerous ways. The well-attended David Brooks lecture was one option. The hope in offering these character-building onramps is that students may be particularly receptive to them at this point in their lives. 

Camacho has a theory on the subject based on what he sees as most prevalent in today’s students: a desire for security. “The culture, their parents, the job market are all telling them, ‘Everything is precarious out there.’ So the decisions they are making are based on fear,” he said. “But when you do that, you become smaller. You are no longer curious, and your relationships with other people become temporary.” 

Camacho said the pilgrim virtues offer another way of relating to the unknown. “These virtues tell us we are all on this journey together. If we are willing to grant that we fall short and that other people fall short and have the humility to accept that, we can loosen up a bit. Character formation isn’t another checklist of perfection but instead this wonderful opportunity to expand our attention to become curious about the world and what we love.” 

Asked if she believes that exploring the kinds of questions that lead to character development is unusual for students of her generation, Kate DiLella said, “I think questions about life and purpose and who we are and who we are called to be are likely on more students’ minds than it may seem, and through Educating Augustinian Character, students are guided in how to think about these bigger questions in life.”

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

This spring, a few months after starting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Jane Laurence deleted all her social media accounts.

For years, she’d tried different strategies to limit her screen time, including taking intermittent breaks from various apps. But her habits continued to be consuming and compulsive. When she finally managed to wipe the slate clean, she was stunned by the amount of time freed up on the other side. “It felt,” she said, “like quitting a part-time job.”

It’s no secret that college students around the country are struggling to reclaim their time from technologies powered by the ability to capture and retain people’s attention. What’s less clear is how or whether institutions might be able to intervene in this slippery “attention economy,” which appears to be threatening engagement not only in the classroom but, well, everywhere.

At U.N.C., a new initiative called Educating for the Virtues of Attention (EVA) has set out to be that intervention. Unlike typical digital detoxes, EVA is less about eliminating the distraction than it is centering what’s truly worthy of our attention. The goal is to help students reflect on their habits of attention and build more intentional ones through opportunities for deep in-person engagement across campus. 

Funded by a nearly $800,000 grant from the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University, which supports character education efforts at colleges and universities nationwide, EVA is rooted in the idea that the ability to pay attention is a critical character virtue and one in need of cultivating now more than ever. 

An inconvenient virtue

Today, conversations about attention tend to center ideas about technology and productivity. But long before the invention of the smartphones or concerns about short-form media content, philosophers were thinking about human attention as a character virtue.

Long before the invention of the smartphones or concerns about short-form media content, philosophers were thinking about human attention as a character virtue.

Michael Vazquez is a teaching assistant professor in U.N.C.’s philosophy department and has been one of the leaders of EVA since its launch a year ago. He explained how the understandings of attention promoted by two particular 20th century philosophers, Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, underpin EVA’s guiding principles.

“I think one way to put it is they [Weil and Murdoch] both think there’s a reality and a world that’s much bigger than us, and attending is a matter of seeing that reality as it really is — the reality of other people, the reality of the world, the natural world, and so on,” Vazquez said. 

In other words, to attend is to be more active participants in the world outside ourselves. And the more we attend, the more likely we are to become people who understand and care about that existence beyond us. 

Of course, the fickle thing about virtues is that they’re famously difficult to acquire, not to mention maintain. That pattern holds true when it comes to developing attentional habits, which requires leaving the safety of our controlled internal reality to confront a far less predictable and potentially less pleasant one beyond. 

“They’re comfortable illusions, they’re self-reinforcing, and they tend to be convenient,” Vazquez said of our inward tendencies. “It is awfully inconvenient to build attentional habits that make you susceptible to the reality of other people because that challenges your assumptions, your desires, your projects.”

Still, there’s a silver lining. Attending may demand more work than not, but the payoff can be quite satisfying for those who manage it, especially young people less accustomed to trying.

“It turns out if you just put the phones away and you have analog experiences with other people, whether you’re looking at art together or reading a book, you tend to feel pretty good about it,” Vazquez said. 

Perhaps a single in-person experience isn’t enough to make us virtuous right away, Vazquez added, but there are reassuring signs that it’s still the way to deeper feelings of purpose and meaning. That attending can improve not only the lives of others but our own is what he called “the icing on the cake.” 

Campus arteries

Vazquez described EVA programming as having three pillars: faculty and staff programming, student curricular programming, and student extracurricular programming. 

For faculty and staff, the main activity is communities of practice. These are opportunities for educators who apply to come together and discuss, as Vazquez put it, “the place of attention in the classroom.”

While the parameters of these conversations are left purposely broad, Vazquez said faculty veer towards using the forum to talk about how they’re seeing students struggle attentionally, as well as to workshop possible interventions.

“Does it seem like students are more distracted?” Vazquez said professors ask each other. “Does it seem like these technologies are not enabling or facilitating but actually inhibiting what happens in the classroom? Longform reading, is it on the decline?” 

One particular community of practice is designated for the instructors of a class called College Thriving. All first-years at U.N.C. are required to take this one-credit, intro-to-college course, which offers resources and strategies for academic success and, especially, personal wellbeing.

College Thriving is also the junction where EVA’s work with faculty and staff bleeds into efforts to impact student curricula. A major goal of the instructors’ community of practice is to think about ways to incorporate lessons and exercises around attentional habits into the course content. 

Devon Almond, a U.N.C. advisor and College Thriving instructor, helps lead the community of practice for his colleagues. He said there’s no single, standardized way the instructors are meant to bring attention-minded content into their class, nor is any staff member who teaches the course forced to be part of the discussion group.

But attention practices are important to Almond, who came to U.N.C. after working in an alternative college setting that focused on contemplative practices like meditation. That background has made him attuned to the prevailing culture at Chapel Hill that prizes constant movement and pressure to be productive. 

“There’s all of this noise and activity and socialization and competitive scarcity that comes at the expense of recognizing the stillness, the silence, the solitude, and the slowness that gives rise to a steadfastness,” Almond said.

The buzz of a college campus can be exciting, Almond added, but he likes to use College Thriving as an opportunity to encourage students to slow down. He often hosts sessions outside the typical classroom, like at the campus museum or planetarium, where students can observe new spaces with time and intentionality that are rare for their packed daily schedules. “The campus is our canvas,” he said. 

Attending may demand more work than not, but the payoff can be quite satisfying for those who manage it, especially young people less accustomed to trying.

Other class activities include a deep listening exercise for students to do in pairs, where one talks for four minutes straight and the other cannot interrupt or contribute in any way — just listen. And at the start of every class, students place a tented card in front of them that lists not only their name but their hometown and a few of the class themes and larger world causes they care about most. 

“It’s attending — it’s caring — to who and what is in front of you as well as what’s within you and the environments and the settings that create that,” Almond said.

The most focal component of EVA, though, is the extracurricular one. This involves both creating and incentivizing opportunities across campus for students to engage deeply with each other and new spaces and activities. 

At this point, EVA has forged partnerships with most of the “major arteries” on campus, Vazquez said. Last year, the events ranged from a professional Shakespeare production at the performing arts center to a guided exhibition tour at the art museum to a reflective exercise in the botanical garden. 

The point isn’t just to get students to participate in activities. Each event also features what Vazquez calls additional “scaffolding” to ensure the students understand exactly how they’re practicing attentional habits and why they’re important.

“Because you can go to the orchestra and you can have an intentional experience and you may even grow in your attentional capacities in some way or other, but you might not be able to name it yet,” Vazquez said. “You might not be able to think of attention as a skill that you can develop until you’re given a vocabulary.”

As for getting students to show up, EVA has cultivated a few strategies. For one, EVA events are accredited with a program called Campus Life Experiences. These include a variety of events, from resume writing workshops at the career center to open mic nights with the music department, of which all new U.N.C. students need to complete a certain number each semester. 

In terms of more intrinsic incentives, Vazquez said the most important is ensuring the main EVA activity is fundamentally interesting to students. That appeal, he added, requires that events are always free of cost and, of course, involve some kind of food. 

Carolina Unplugged

Now coming up on its second year, EVA will continue to run the main programming it started in the first, as well as build out some additional projects.

One of these additions will be Carolina Unplugged, another community of practice-style forum that will bring together groups of students to try out or reflect on different attentional efforts that counter time on their phones. 

Right now, Vazquez plans for one cohort of students to agree to use Bricks, which are physical devices that attach to smartphones to block distracting apps, throughout the semester and meet weekly to discuss the impact.

Another group he has in mind would similarly gather weekly but instead engage in in-person activities, like cooking or reading, that simply allow them to be present in each other’s company.

Jane Laurence, the soon-to-be-sophomore who recently deleted all her social media apps, is looking forward to being involved in Carolina Unplugged and EVA broadly as a research associate. She will assist Vazquez and the larger EVA data collection team working to both determine the program’s impact on students who participate and analyze general trends in how people approach and build attentional habits.

“I don’t think that these platforms are going away, so how can we develop better relationships around them? What types of people can or can’t?” Laurence said of her research interests. “What’s the impact of a community that’s trying to have different types of conversations about social media usage?” 

Another student, Diya Kayaleh, is a rising junior who will help coordinate the Carolina Unplugged groups. She, too, is especially excited to see how even smaller cohort-based work can influence the larger student body.

“Okay, there’s this group of people on campus doing something with attention,” she imagines even uninvolved students will begin to think. “What kind of reflection does that call within me?”

Often, Kayaleh added, she thinks there’s a tendency to underestimate the value young people place on in-person experiences and their desire to be active and offline.

“We want to collect those experiences, and there’s no reason that we shouldn’t,” she said. “It’s not that we’re so fundamentally broken or far gone that we can’t. We absolutely can.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Granting opportunity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘They read everything’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eagles Bridging the Gap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Practical Virtue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning by Doing 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building Belonging through Shared Exploration

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

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

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

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

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

Measuring What Matters

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

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

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

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

Lessons from the Pilot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choosing Despair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding Humanity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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