A Journey to Leadership in a University Both Socially Woke and Soulfully Awake

• In Event: The Erotic Reconstitution of Democratic Life: From Socrates to Today

Abstract

In the contemporary academy, we are challenged by data-driven, technical, “post-humanist” educational policy and practice. We are also challenged by approaches that reduce people to demographic categories and see truth and goodness as mere ideology masking power relationships. These are not just topics in the world for us to comment on. They shape our lives as academics. Why do university faculty teach the courses and build the degree programs that we do? Why do we choose certain topics and affiliate with certain academic movements? We make professional choices because of a complex mix of intellectual interests, personal commitments, institutional needs, and social expectations. In doing so, our institutional contexts play an important role in shaping the choices we can envision and the practical pathways that are open to us.

This paper describes a personal transition from one kind of institution to another, in pursuit of a context in which academics can embrace soulful ethical development as central to their work and in which we can pursue formative along with distributive justice.

Philosophers of education have consistently discussed human flourishing as a key goal of education. Against narrow technical visions of education, most philosophers have kept in view the multiple dimensions and capacities that educators must attend to – vocational and cognitive, but also civic, ethical, emotional, interpersonal, and, not least, in the ancient language of Socrates, Plato, and Diogenes, cosmically soulful. Philosophers have also emphasized the integration of these capacities.

This paper describes a transition to an institution open to developing a collective focus on “forming meaningful lives” or “educating the whole human being” as central to research, teaching and service across the school. We emphasize the “formation” of undergraduates, meaning a concern for their ethical, emotional, interpersonal and soulful development, in addition to vocational and cognitive ends. This context also allows a rapprochement between formative, whole person development and the pursuit of social justice.

Author

• Stanton E. F. Wortham, Boston College