Liberal Learning as a Quest for Purpose

William M. Sullivan

Suggests teaching and learning practices stemming from three-year research effort developed by participating campuses
Introduces the Program on the Theological Exploration of Vocation (PTEV), a model that attempts to understand contemporary problems facing undergraduate education
Includes strategies that promote discussion of efforts to re-imagine the higher education experience

Liberal Learning as a Quest for Purpose

William M. Sullivan

Description

In a remarkable experiment lasting over a decade, a group of 88 independent campuses, ranging from comprehensive universities to intimate colleges, have demonstrated the value of an emerging educational agenda focused on meaning and purpose. These programs have shown that college can provide emerging adults with an understanding of themselves within today's insecure and highly competitive world that enhances their ability to develop the "grit" needed to create meaningful lives. By focusing on the exploration of vocation and its theological foundations, the programs have produced remarkable outcomes in enhanced student engagement in the learning process and more effective entry into adult life.

Discernment of vocation provides for many students a synthetic and compelling focus for intellectual and practical exploration. Sustained by articulate reflection and grounded in communities of learning that include faculty as well as students, undergraduate life takes on new significance and urgency. Liberal Learning as a Quest for Purpose analyzes a series of successful efforts to reconfigure undergraduate education as a journey toward life purpose. Examining the experiences of students and faculty, William M. Sullivan reveals the concrete importance of this educational agenda for individual lives and particular campuses. By connecting the several dimensions of undergraduate experience through reflection on purpose, Sullivan demonstrates how these programs expanded the bandwidth of academic learning in energizing and exploratory ways. Within the larger, troubled environment of contemporary higher education, these pioneering efforts hold promise for a significant rethinking of the undergraduate experience to better serve students and society.

Liberal Learning as a Quest for Purpose

William M. Sullivan

Acknowledgments

Introduction: "What Should I Be Doing with My Life?"

Chapter 1: Personal Meaning, Public Purpose
Chapter 2: Grounding Liberal Education
Chapter 3: The Examined Life: Reflection and Practical Wisdom
Chapter 4: Renewing Heritage to Meet the Contemporary Challenge
Chapter 5: How Vocation Integrates: The Virtue of Community
Chapter 6: Recovering Liberal Education's Humanistic Aims
Chapter 7: The Theological Perspective as Educational Resource

Conclusion

Notes
Index

Liberal Learning as a Quest for Purpose

William M. Sullivan

Author Information

William M. Sullivan is currently a senior scholar at the New American Colleges and Universities and Visiting Professor at the Center for the Study of Professions, University College of Oslo and Askerhus, Norway. Previously, Sullivan directed the Preparation for the Professions program at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Prior to that, he was Professor of Philosophy at La Salle University.

Liberal Learning as a Quest for Purpose

William M. Sullivan

Reviews and Awards

"When college is supposed to be all about getting a job, what difference might it make to suggest that it is also about discovering a vocation? A number of experiments in undergraduate education have renewed attention to meaning and purpose by pursuing that question in creative, practical ways. Even as pressures on higher education imperil society's confidence in the value of liberal learning, William M. Sullivan discloses possibilities of renewal at the heart of the college experience."-Dorothy C. Bass, coeditor of Leading Lives That Matter: What We Should Do and Who We Should Be

"For everyone concerned about higher education's present shortcomings, there is now a brightly-illuminated pathway to a more promising future. William M. Sullivan's Liberal Learning as a Quest for Purpose gives us a well-documented guide to creating a college experience ideally suited for students' intellectual and personal development. The book is a must-read for educators and for all those who yearn for meaningful reforms in our country's higher education system."-William Damon, author of The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find their Calling in Life

"At a time when higher education in the United States is under siege, William M. Sullivan puts forth a compelling vision of purposeful education. Then, drawing on an ambitious study of diverse campuses, he details how this vision is being impressively realized."-Howard Gardner, author of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed

"Sullivan's argument is persuasive, and supported by numerous examples of the ways that the [Program for the Theological Exploration of Vocation] curricula envision-through the lens of vocation-a holistic approach to college education in the 21st century." -- Reading Religion