The Pastoral Professor: Leading Students Toward the Good Life in the Countercultural Classroom
By: Katherine Jo
Katherine Jo, Ph.D., is the Director of Program Development and Design with The Purpose Project at Duke University, where she develops courses and programs that engage students in the question of what it means to live a good life. As an educator and philosopher of education, she works to translate our highest educational ideals into effective practice. She is the creator of Teaching on Purpose, which prepares doctoral students across disciplines to be educators who help students flourish, and she frequently leads workshops for faculty within and outside of Duke.
I've come to realize that the classroom is a microcosm of the world; it is the chance we have to practice whatever ideals we may cherish. The kind of classroom situation one creates is the acid test of what it is one really stands for.
— Jane Tompkins, “Pedagogy of the Distressed”1
Why should anyone learn mathematics if it doesn’t connect deeply to some human desire, something we long for—to play, seek truth, pursue beauty, find meaning, fight for justice?
— Francis Su, Mathematics for Human Flourishing2
Among the various ways universities influence their students’ lives, professors can play an especially pivotal role. Students (theoretically) devote a significant portion of their time to academics, and, for traditional undergraduates and most graduate students, professors are the only older adults on campus that they encounter on a regular basis. Whether or not professors try to teach about what they believe to be the good life, they do. As Tompkins reminds us in the quote above, teaching, in the educator’s aims and practices, is an expression of what the educator believes matters in life. What, then, would it mean for professors to educate (taking from the Latin root, lead out) students toward the good life in the university?
For my purposes, I want to consider “the university” as a type of educational institution — one granting advanced degrees and emphasizing research in its mission — and not as an ideal form of higher education. Since the modern research university took root in the late nineteenth century, whether and how higher education institutions and their faculty should try to shape students’ ethical lives have been fraught questions. Moreover, because the research university has had a dominant influence on the intellectual culture and institutional structures of higher education and is the training ground for all faculty, it has shaped what happens in the classroom at all types of institutions.
Teaching and the Good Life in the Modern University
The colonial college was clear about its mission to mold Christian character in students, and instructors were charged with doing so through teaching the classical liberal arts curriculum and assuming a quasi-parental role in monitoring students’ behavior (the effectiveness of their efforts is debatable). This curriculum culminated in a senior-year course in moral philosophy, usually taught by the college president, whose aim was to reveal that the disparate courses in the curriculum revealed a “unified and intelligible” world subject to a divine moral law and would thereby “give meaning and purpose to the student’s entire college experience and the course of study.”3 The course was to have normative force and “serve as a guide to right living.”4 For the institutions and their faculty, the intellectual and ethical development of students were an integrated endeavor.
This kind of education lost its justification due to three major cultural transformations: (1) disagreements over religious doctrine among college leaders proliferated, making impossible any consensus on metaphysical and moral truths; (2) Enlightenment philosophies that valorized rationality, objectivity, and critical skepticism came to define intellectual rigor, leading to the ascendency of empirical sciences and delegitimizing metaphysical, moral, and existential questions as subjects of academic inquiry; and (3) protecting and promoting students’ autonomy — their freedom of thought and choice about how to live — and the corollary of developing their critical thinking skills became the highest educational aims, also due to the influence of Enlightenment thought.5
Consequently, teaching, particularly in secular, pluralistic institutions, came to be conceived more narrowly as instructing students in one’s subject matter and cultivating the intellectual skills and dispositions (such as open-mindedness) necessary for properly pursuing inquiry in one’s discipline. This evolution of the professor’s role in student development was also driven by the interests of the new generation of research-focused scholars and the modern mission of the universities who hired them: advancing knowledge.6 It is widely acknowledged today that, regardless of where faculty teach, they have been trained and formed to be scholars, not teachers, much less teachers responsible for students’ holistic formation.
Over time, an institutional division of labor between educating students’ intellects and caring for the ethical and other domains of their lives became entrenched: professors, under the division of “academic affairs,” are responsible for the former, and an ever-growing cadre of professionals, under “students affairs” for the latter. The existential, spiritual, ethical, and psychological dimensions of students’ lives have largely been delegated to offices of religious life, leadership programs, counseling centers, and wellness centers. Since the early twentieth century, higher education reformers, typically liberal arts advocates and scholars from humanistic disciplines, have sought to reintegrate the intellectual, ethical, and existential — and to revive the mission of educating “the whole person” — with little success.
In the past few decades, psychologists and higher education researchers have added their voices to the call for universities, and specifically faculty, to do a better job caring for the whole student. They argue that today’s “emerging adults”7 (18-29 year olds) need more developmental support because the path to adulthood has become much more complex and ambiguous; traditional sources of morality and social structures that once established and limited the possible social and vocational paths for young people have been delegitimized, leaving them with infinite options but little substantive guidance.
This concern further justifies engaging students on existential and ethical questions. Students are seeking clarity about what to believe, who they want to become, and how they can live lives of meaning and purpose. Meanwhile, critics argue that higher education institutions, especially universities, are neglecting their educational responsibilities.8 The university has become a deficient developmental environment for students, one that lacks the intellectual and relational support that students need to flourish.
Students are in fact feeling this lack — along with the stress, confusion, and anxiety of having to figure things out on their own9 — but they are unlikely to look to their professors for help. The rationalistic and depersonalized intellectual culture of the academy makes discussing deeply personal matters with them seem inappropriate. In the words of one student, “I’ve never had a professor with whom I would talk about these types of things … I feel like there’s sometimes a line with some professors. They don’t want to talk about these things. It’s like it never really comes up.”10 A senior at Princeton University started a weekly gathering for his peers to “reflect on how to build more fulfilling lives” because “they often found that they couldn’t do that in classrooms, and students who weren’t involved in religious groups didn’t have a place they can do that.”11 These sentiments are echoed throughout the literature on the gap many scholars and educators perceive between the developmental and existential challenges today’s students are facing and the kind of education the university offers.
Three different approaches to educating students toward the good life have garnered widespread attention in recent years.
“Science of happiness” courses, which are rooted in positive psychology and aim to teach students the evidence-based concepts and practices for increasing life-satisfaction (a well-known example is Lori Santos’s “Psychology and the Good Life” course at Yale University)
Character education, which is rooted in virtue ethics and aims to cultivate virtues, such as courage, honesty, and humility (a well-known example is Wake Forest University’s Program for Leadership and Character)
What I’ll call the “worldview approach,” which is rooted in philosophy more broadly and religious studies and aims to help students develop their own considered vision of the good life (well-known examples include the University of Notre Dame’s “God and the Good Life” course and Yale University’s “Life Worth Living” course).
Each offers something valuable (and each has limitations12). All of them, to a certain
extent, fill an existential and ethical vacuum in the classroom, as it were, and students are flocking toward them. Students are hungry for opportunities to talk about the big questions in life, for intellectual resources and tools that can guide them, and, despite the “transactional” mindset many have,13 for compelling alternatives to their instrumentalized lives and education.
The disciplinary roots of these courses make it easy to think that, for professors to help students pursue the good life, they have to teach courses like those above and, therefore, have a scholarly background in psychology, philosophy, or religion. This view, however, rests on a narrow understanding of how professors can and do influence students beyond their intellectual development. All professors, regardless of discipline, can educate students toward the good life, but recovering this holistic aim requires that we reconceive the professorial role in ways that work against the culture of the research university and the broader culture in which students are educated and formed.
The Pastoral Professor: Teaching Counterculturally Toward the Good Life
The days are long gone when instructors and college presidents could try to inculcate a single view of the good life in students, even at religious institutions. The modern approach of limiting instruction to disciplinary knowledge and skills and to teaching students “how to think, not what to think” does not address some of students’ most fundamental needs as they wrestle with what kind of life to lead. How can professors in today’s universities lead students toward what they believe to be the good life within a pluralistic context while respecting and nurturing the autonomy of their students?
Educators, it was stated above, inevitably convey to students their conceptions of the good life through their educational practices. They express and embody their priorities and values in how they conduct class, how they relate to students, what they draw attention to, what they ask students to spend time on, the capacities they ask students to exercise, and what they recognize and reward, among other things. Thus, to say that the classroom has become an existential and ethical vacuum is only partially true, and professors can intentionally embody the values of the good life through their teaching.
On the whole, faculty teach according to what is most valued in the modern research university. They cultivate in students the skills and dispositions that define academic inquiry: rational analysis and argumentation and a critical, impersonal mode of engaging with the world and ideas. They relate to students as scholarly experts, and any guidance and support they provide pertains to students’ intellectual development and academic performance. The ethos of the classroom is also infused with the broader cultural values in which higher education is embedded: an emphasis on academic performance and external markers of success as measures of self-worth; competitiveness and the pursuit of individual achievement; credentialism and the general instrumentalization of academic learning. At top-tier schools, the good life also means the pursuit of perfection, status, prestige, wealth, constant “success” in all domains, and constant productivity and busyness. These academic and cultural values are either implicitly reinforced by higher education institutions or are simply not questioned.
These ways of thinking, doing, and being, however, neglect or are at odds with what we know is important for human flourishing. The academic mode of engagement has its value, but it offers little opportunity for students to cultivate emotional depth, the capacity for wonder, appreciation, and joy, or the habits of self-reflection that lead to personal growth.14 The performance-oriented, individualistic ethos of schooling, at all levels, creates educational environments where students rarely experience unconditional acceptance and a sense of belonging and community, learn to care for others, and cultivate the capacity for true leisure. Moreover, the rote nature of most formal education, along with the grueling intensity of the college admissions process, often undermines students’ sense of meaning and purpose.
Professors can show students a better way. The current cultural context calls for professors to assume what I call a “pastoral” role, one in which teaching is motivated by the broader aim of helping students live the good life. The term is meant to convey care for students’ welfare and flourishing beyond the intellectual domain and not to suggest that faculty should teach about or try to convert students to the Christian faith. It captures what I have in mind more comprehensively than, for example, mentor or role model, which are often used to indicate a role that nurtures someone’s development as a person. In the academy, mentoring mostly refers to guiding and supporting individual students to help them develop their academic or professional competence and confidence.15 The term “role model” emphasizes being an embodied example of admirable characteristics and does not necessarily imply intentionally guiding students.
As a pastor cares for his16 congregants’ spiritual needs and guides them toward what will help them flourish spiritually, the pastoral professor cares for students as young people who are grappling with existential and ethical concerns—questions about meaning, purpose, and how to live a good life; and, in caring for them, the pastoral professor guides students toward what he believes is good for their flourishing and away from what he believes is not. The pastoral professor also cares for his students as a community of learners and engages in practices that support their flourishing.
The word “guide” may sound too heavy-handed, but this guidance is neither coercive nor dogmatic. Pastoring, as distinct from preaching, is the work of being a compassionate presence and voice to individual congregants and the whole community in times of confusion and difficulty, rather than of expounding ideas as an authoritative expert. The guidance of good pastors flows out of their experience as fellow journeyers who have similarly struggled with how to live a good life and want to share helpful insights they’ve gained along the way. The pastoral role is not a separate, additional responsibility. Teaching, and all that it involves, is an expression of a professor’s care for students. The pastoral professor’s teaching is shaped by a belief that what he asks students to learn moves them toward the good life, and he works to help students pursue their educations in ways that enable them to flourish.
The pastoral professor leads students toward the good life and works against the cultural values that lead them away from it in two ways: indirectly, through educational practices that help students learn those ways of thinking, doing, and being that are part of the good life, and directly, by explicitly talking to students about what hinders the pursuit of the good life, all within the context of their lives as students.
For practical recommendations on what this kind of teaching can look like, I cannot recommend strongly enough the example offered by Francis Su, a professor of mathematics at Harvey Mudd College in his beautiful and moving book Mathematics for Human Flourishing, and equally beautiful and moving talk, “Achievement and the Lesson of Grace.”17 Aside from opening readers up to the rich world of mathematics, Su is an excellent model of a professor who guides students toward and invites them into the good life with compassion, candor, and conviction. I will elaborate on a few pastoral practices below.
At an intellectual level, the pastoral professor teaches the course subject matter in ways that help students see its value for pursuing truth and experiencing what is good and meaningful in life. As suggested by Su regarding the reasons to study math, connecting academic study to the human endeavor to make sense of the world and experience what makes life meaningful helps students experience meaning and purpose in learning and to understand why it matters beyond its instrumental value. Inviting students to reflect on what the course material means for their own lives and to respond to it at an emotional level develops their capacity to examine themselves, be moved by what they encounter, and understand the breadth of human experience.
At a relational level, the pastoral professor intentionally creates a classroom culture that values and practices care and concern for each other, community-mindedness, affirmation of good character and not only academic performance, grace, and humility. Getting to know students, showing care beyond their academic performance, and helping them build relationships that are collaborative, friendly, and personal teaches them they can prioritize good relationships while pursuing their educational and professional goals.
In addition to embodying the good life in these ways, the pastoral professor explicitly talks to students about the values shaping their lives that he believes hinder their flourishing in their lives as students. In the talk referenced above, Su describes the ways he explicitly communicates to his students that “your accomplishments are not what make you a worthy human being” to counteract the enormous pressure they feel to succeed academically and professionally.
Ultimately, the pastoral professor invites students into a world in which they encounter, see embodied, practice, and taste the good life, showing them a better, more compelling way to live. He deliberately seeks to nurture their full humanity through his practices and deliberately tries to help them find their way toward the good life amidst competing values. In my own work, I have witnessed how this kind of teaching opens students’ hearts and minds to possibilities for pursuing the good life that better fulfill their deepest desires.
Many faculty may find teaching and relating to students in this way foreign, uncomfortable, and difficult to fit in alongside their academic learning objectives. Academic learning, and the academic learning experience, however, must be understood in relation to and as part of the good life we and our students seek. What students do and experience in their classes can lead them away from or toward that life. All professors can care for the flourishing of their students by bringing the good life into the classroom.
Jane Tompkins, “Pedagogy of the Distressed,” College English 52, no. 6 (1990): 656.
Francis Su, Mathematics for Human Flourishing (New Haven: Yale University, 2020), 208.
John R. Thelin and Marybeth Gasman, “Historical Overview of American Higher Education,” in Student Services: A Handbook for the Profession, ed. John H. Shuh, Susan R. Jones, and Shaun R. Harper (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011), 5.
Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 19.
On the philosophical transformations that have shape modern intellectual life, see Reuben, The Making of the Modern University; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Christopher Winch, Education, Autonomy, and Critical Thinking (London: Routledge, 2006).
Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, Emerging Adults in America: Coming of Age in the 21st Century (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2006).
Bruce Kimball, Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education (New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1995).
See, for example, Anthony Kronman, Education’s End: Why Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Robert J. Nash and Michele C. Murray, Helping College Students Find Purpose: The Campus Guide to Meaning-Making (San Franisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010); Sharon Daloz Parks, Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Emerging Adults in Their Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Faith, Revised (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011); William Sullivan, Liberal Learning as a Quest for Purpose (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner, Quarterlife Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties (New York: Jeffrey P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2001).
Perry Glanzer, Jonathan P. Hill, and Byron R. Johnson, The Quest for Purpose: The Collegiate Search for a Meaningful Life (Albany: State University of New York, 2017), 200.
Emma Whitford, “Seven Hours a Week on Existential Despair,” Inside Higher Ed, October 23, 2018, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/10/23/several-programs-are-encouraging-students-slow-down-and-think-about-life-outside.
Briefly, science of happiness courses define the good life in terms of life satisfaction and do not engage students in more fundamental philosophical questions that inform their worldview. Character education tends to focus on cultivating specific virtues, without placing the process or the virtues in a broader exploration of what it means to flourish that can motivate these virtues. I favor the worldview approach insofar as it asks students to examine their deeper beliefs about flourishing and asks them to develop a vision of flourishing to live by. There are, however, debates about who is qualified to teach about various religious traditions as well as pedagogical differences regarding how to help students form beliefs about the good life. All of these approaches face issues of scale due to their disciplinary bounds.
Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner, “Students are Missing the Point of College,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 25, 2022, https://www.chronicle.com/article/students-are-missing-the-point-of-college?sra=true.
Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture, translated by Gerald Malsbary (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998); William G. Perry, Jr., Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 199), 8; Michael S. Roth “Beyond Critical Thinking.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 3, 2010. https://www.chronicle.com/article/Beyond-Critical-Thinking/63288.
Brad W. Johnson, On Being a Mentor: A Guide for Higher Education Faculty (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2016).
I use the masculine pronoun both for the sake of simplicity and because the kind of care I describe is often feminized in the context of education.
Francis Su, “Achievement and the Lesson of Grace (11/01/2013),” Wheaton College, April 24, 2015, YouTube video, 23:24, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwJXPRj_CUM&ab_channel=wheatoncollege.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Thank you, Katherine, for this essay. During my tenure in public university, as was also true in Christian settings, I cannot count the number of Providential opportunities that were granted to care for students. The affective nature of our craft is often lost in a cognitive, behavioral academic world. Our outcomes should always link thinking-being-doing.