In recent years students across higher education have shown an increasing desire to cultivate purpose orientation in their lives. And yet these students often find that the college or university they attend provides them with few opportunities to do so. This disconnection explains in part the results of a 2019 Gallup poll which revealed that while more than 80% of college graduates reported that it was extremely or very important to them to derive a sense of purpose in their work, only a minority have actually done so. Further research suggests that students who align their interests and abilities with something bigger than themselves are more likely to be happy, excellent in their work, comfortable with uncertainty, and resilient.
Purpose-oriented students are, simply put, more likely to thrive in complex, challenging and diverse environments. Toward this end, AVDF awarded a grant of $336,000 to the University of Notre Dame in 2023 to support a curricular and co-curricular initiative that aims to help students develop their own sense of purpose orientation.
The program, “Called to the Common Good,” draws on successful models developed elsewhere, and will enroll three annual cohorts of 15 students each in a sequence of activities during their sophomore, junior, and senior years.
The project has three main components.
The first component will occur in the first year of the program with student participants completing a two-course sequence designed specifically for the initiative.
The first course, Living a Just Life, will introduce students to interdisciplinary literatures from philosophy, political theory, sociology, and theology that explore issues of moral purpose, theories of justice, and understandings of why and how we are called to the common good.
The second course, The Practice of Justice and the Pursuit of the Common Good, has two parts. In the first part, students will be introduced to a set of moral exemplars both through readings and a series of class guests. Students will have the opportunity to engage with academics, artists, and advocates as well as professionals in finance, education, law, medicine, and engineering to understand how people can pursue the common good in the context of a range of professions. In the second part, students will begin to develop a faculty mentored research project that seeks to use the student’s intended major and career aims to address a particular social concern. In these mentored projects, to be carried out in the senior year, students hone their moral purpose through the development of analytic skills and intellectual virtues in the service of the common good.
After the first year, the university will open additional sections of these two courses for students who are not part of the Called to the Common Good program. These additional sections will enroll an additional 120 students per year.
The second component of the Common Good program will occur in the summer after the sophomore year when students spend 10 weeks in a community—either domestically or internationally—where they collaboratively design a project to address a social concern. Students may, for example, work alongside refugee communities in Jordan to create micro-enterprises for Syrian women, or in rural schools around Calcutta to develop curricula that promote inter-religious tolerance. The experiences will be designed in consultation with the program director and must be approved in advance. All projects are expected to be continuous with the student’s major and career aspirations. The goal of this component of the project is for students to return to campus with a new set of vocationally specific skills and with a greater sense of who they are and how they fit in the world.
The final component of the Common Good program takes place in the senior year where the students will complete the faculty mentored research projects first hatched at the end of the sophomore year sequence. While the projects will be faculty mentored, the goal is for students to identify their own research questions and then design and carry out research that will produce an answer. Projects will vary and should be well aligned with the distinct disciplinary trajectory—the mix of major, minor and supplemental activities—of each student.
In addition to these three components, students who participate in the program will be part of an ongoing scholarly community of fellow students, faculty, and staff that will meet weekly over dinner as a group to talk, debate, and plan. Each semester the group will focus on particular themes, ideas or skills. One semester might focus on engaging across difference, the tools of civil dialogue, or the role of virtue in a life well lived.
“The sequence of activities in the ‘Called to the Common Good’ program provides a sustained opportunity for students to develop a sense of purpose that should inform the way they approach intellectual and practical matters. And the fact that the students are being guided by faculty mentors makes it even more likely that the program will have a substantial impact,” said John Churchill, AVDF Director of Programs.
The Common Good program is being developed and led by Dr. Suzanne Shanahan, one of the world’s leading academic practitioners in purpose-oriented education. Dr. Shanahan serves as the Director of the Institute for Social Concerns at Notre Dame. Before coming to Notre Dame, Dr. Shanahan was the Director of the Kenan Institute for Ethics and the nationally celebrated DukeEngage program. Dr. Shanahan was also the principal investigator for Duke’s campus-wide Purpose Project and is currently the principal investigator on the Kern Family Foundation Virtues & Vocations Initiative.
Under Dr. Shanahan’s direction, the “Called to the Common Good” program has the potential to develop into an exemplar for higher education when it comes to helping students cultivate a sense of purpose that will help them thrive as students and beyond graduation.