A meditation bell signals the start and end of “The Art and Science of Human Flourishing,” a course at the U. of Virginia that encourages students to think about their values and how to find meaning in their lives. Eli Reichman for The Chronicle
Colleges’ responsibilities to students end at the classroom door.
Colleges’ responsibilities extend into every corner of students’ lives.
Those are the extreme edges of a spectrum on which colleges have moved back and forth for centuries.
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A meditation bell signals the start and end of “The Art and Science of Human Flourishing,” a course at the U. of Virginia that encourages students to think about their values and how to find meaning in their lives. Eli Reichman for The Chronicle
Colleges’ responsibilities to students end at the classroom door.
Colleges’ responsibilities extend into every corner of students’ lives.
Those are the extreme edges of a spectrum on which colleges have moved back and forth for centuries.
For a while now, higher education has been comfortable with a narrower view of what it owes its students. This was only exacerbated by the Great Recession. Since then, colleges have made their case in starkly utilitarian terms: Come here, get a degree, and you can earn a good living — even in this economy. Conversations about what else one might get out of college still happen, of course, but they have been pushed to the margins. That, however, is starting to change, in a shift that calls to mind a much earlier vision.
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At the dawn of American higher ed, colleges held dominion over students’ lives. Think explicit rules governing students’ conduct — from mandatory chapel attendance to an enforced “lights out.” Colleges knew the path, and as long as students followed their directions, they would get to the right destination.
No one is suggesting that colleges should resume this paternalistic role today. But things like the troubling rates of anxiety and depression among today’s students and the pressure they face to focus on careers make a strong case that students need more help in making meaning and staking out a direction in their lives.
The “Human Flourishing” course is being tested at three colleges to unite the scholarly examination of “flourishing” with practices, like meditation, that can help students thrive. Here, students meditate in the course at UVa. Eli Reichman for The Chronicle
What might giving students more direction look like today? Rather than enforcing rules to keep students on the right path — or even suggesting that such a path exists — a number of colleges across the country are seeking to guide students as they chart their own. Often, these projects describe their goals as helping students “thrive,” or supporting their “flourishing” or “well-being.”
One of the more-ambitious efforts is unfolding at the University of Virginia, where the preferred term is “flourishing.” There, the Contemplative Sciences Center, founded in 2012, is leading a push to transform students’ lives, both during college and long after.
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Two of the center’s projects, in particular, serve as a kind of test case for how the university might address flourishing in the academic and residential spheres of students’ lives, explains David Germano, its executive director and a professor of religious studies.
One is a first-year course, “The Art and Science of Human Flourishing,” developed in partnership with two other flagship universities, that melds scholarly and practical explorations of what makes people thrive. The other is a reconfigured residential college with flourishing as its theme.
Both projects are in their early stages, but the center’s goals are ambitious. Its vision of helping students connect their academic and residential lives harks back to a centuries-old idea that colleges ought to educate the whole student. Its methods, however, are designed with today’s stressed students and complex research universities in mind.
When American colleges were established during the Colonial period, they stood in loco parentis. That meant seeing themselves as “responsible for all aspects of the student’s life,” said Julie Reuben, a professor of the history of education at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.
Early faculty members didn’t simply instruct students in the classroom. They oversaw students’ spiritual and moral formation, ate with them, and lived with them in the dormitories. This remained the dominant model until the late 19th century.
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Then came the rise of the modern research university, with freedom its key ideal. Freedom to follow the evidence wherever it led. Freedom to learn. Students were granted more choice over which courses to take, and how to conduct themselves, too.
UVa students fill out a worksheet in which they place themselves at the center of a web of natural and cultural settings that help them flourish. Eli Reichman for The Chronicle
As colleges took a more hands-off approach to students’ lives beyond the classroom, extracurricular activities gained prominence on campus, and students started running these activities themselves.
When colleges began to sense they’d gone too far in this direction, in the early 20th century, they made a course correction. Colleges provided more oversight of extracurriculars — like athletics — that had been almost entirely student-run, Reuben said, and these extracurriculars became the thing they could point to as proof they were educating the “whole man.”
They also developed the modern profession of student affairs. Colleges were growing increasingly bureaucratic and complex, so from their perspective, a more specialized work force was an obvious solution. But the silos that colleges have created don’t always make sense to students. As Kevin Kruger, president of Naspa-Student-Affairs Professionals in Higher Education, put it, “students don’t experience a student-affairs life and an academic life — they just live their life.”
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Students asserted more control over their lives on campuses in the 1960s, Reuben said. And they’ve held onto that control since then. Colleges’ purview was defined as academic — and, increasingly, vocational — education. The idea of educating the whole student fell out of favor, despite occasional efforts to revive some interpretation of it.
That brings us, more or less, to the present moment, and the particular challenges it presents higher ed. A college degree now ranks among life’s most significant expenses, and students — and their families — expect more from it. Meanwhile, the college-going population has grown more diverse. Educating students from a wider array of backgrounds, many colleges have realized, requires being attentive to the life experiences students have had before they enrolled. Similarly, many colleges have come to see that they cannot ignore the mental-health issues that so many students now bring to campus. Some 18 percent of students report being diagnosed or treated by a professional within the past year for depression, and 22 percent for anxiety. For these and other reasons, colleges are rethinking their responsibilities to students once again.
Students don’t experience a student-affairs life and an academic life — they just live their life.
They are trying out a variety of models. Georgetown University, for instance, runs a program in which professors choose an aspect of well-being that connects with the subject matter they’re teaching and weave it into the coursework, in part by bringing in a guest speaker with relevant expertise from a different part of the institution to help students connect the topic to their lives. Wake Forest University has created an office of well-being to serve everyone on campus, piloted a freshman-experience course that includes well-being as a focus, and offered students one-on-one sessions with coaches to work on problems like trying to get more sleep. It also started a research collaborative to investigate how colleges can improve student well-being. And it’s not just elite universities doing this work, either. The University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, for instance, runs a program that takes a whole-student approach to helping underrepresented students thrive.
There’s no consensus yet on which approach is best. They share some traits, however. Chief among them: an understanding that in order for well-being to be taken seriously, by students as well as professors, it must connect with a college’s academic heart.
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“The Art and Science of Human Flourishing,” the course developed jointly by UVa, Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is making a bid for seriousness.
The course seeks to unite the scholarly examination of flourishing with practices, like meditation, that can help students thrive. But if separating academics and their practical application feels artificial to students, bringing them together can be tricky for colleges.
The course asks first-year students to wrestle with a big question: “What does it mean to not just survive in this world, but to really thrive, flourish, and live a life of deep fulfillment and meaning during the short span of time that we’re on this planet?”
This is an unusual premise for an academic course, and one that seems to have resonated — at least with students’ parents. Germano and Leslie Hubbard, who co-taught the course at UVa last year, talked it up during the university’s most recent parent orientation. They appear to have made a splash: A number of the students taking the course now mentioned that their parents’ encouragement was part of the reason they enrolled.
The course offers a framework of flourishing that has five dimensions: foundations, awareness, connection, wisdom, and integration, which it breaks into 13 components.
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It unpacks each component academically and practically. This means students read up each week on what both science and the humanities have to say about a particular aspect of flourishing, like mindfulness, and also try out practices, like various forms of meditation, that are meant to help them cultivate that quality. Those practices are further developed in the course’s weekly lab section.
Leslie Hubbard (left), program director for student learning at UVa’s Contemplative Sciences Center, and Juliet Trail, the center’s director of education, teach their “Human Flourishing” course in a structured way, so that it can be given at three colleges in the same semester.Eli Reichman for The Chronicle
This is a lot of ground to cover in a single course, and the two instructors teaching it at UVa this fall find that a 50-minute class period flies by. To ensure they stay on track, the instructors — Hubbard, who is program director for student learning and initiatives at the Contemplative Sciences Center, and Juliet Trail, the center’s director of education — tightly map out the class period, allotting, say, five minutes for an opening contemplative practice, or 15 for a reflective exercise.
This intense planning by Hubbard and Trail serves another purpose, too. It helps the instructors make sure the course runs as similarly as possible in their classroom to those running at Penn State and Madison. That matters because “Human Flourishing” isn’t just a course; it’s also an ambitious experiment. The multicampus team is collecting evidence it hopes will eventually persuade other colleges to adopt it.
Gathering that evidence from the very beginning gives the team a head start, but it also presents a challenge. How can instructors draw out individual students to help them make meaning while also ensuring that all three campuses deliver a broadly comparable experience?
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During a class period on a recent Wednesday morning — the second meeting devoted to the topic of resilience — Hubbard and Trail followed their plan pretty closely.
Class began with a short meditation exercise. The 60 students joined in gamely, sitting up straight with both feet on the floor and closing their eyes as instructed. Then Hubbard briefly reviewed what they had learned before class about resilience by watching a video lecture and reading two short articles written for the course, one synthesizing humanities perspectives on resilience and the other on science perspectives.
The humanities reading included excerpts from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Maya Angelou’s poetry, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” But rather than referring to those texts, Hubbard began by reading a Michael Jordan quote that the students, had they been older, may have recognized from a Nike ad: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
“What do you think about that?” she asked. “What does that say about failure?”
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A few students chimed in. “He has a growth mind-set,” one replied, referencing a topic that the readings had touched on.
“Great,” Hubbard said, before restating the student’s answer.
“You have to fail to succeed,” another added.
“Can you tell me more about that?” Hubbard asked.
“You’re going to succeed based on the obstacles and challenges you overcome,” he responded.
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The class period sped on. The students participated in a guided meditation about using their strengths, and individually completed a related worksheet to build up to the day’s culminating activity: a one-on-one conversation with a partner about how they had each drawn on a personal strength to face a challenge. While the instructors’ plan for the day included several periods of full-class discussion, they had to be brief to accommodate all of the other components.
One of those discussions came after the partner activity. “What are some other things that you noticed during the practice?” Trail asked near the end of it.
“When I first thought about my experience,” one student replied, “it wasn’t that remarkable. But when you start to say it out loud and hear it through other perspectives, it can seem like you did a lot more than you thought.”
“Yeah,” Trail responded, “discovering new value or new information.”
After a few more comments, Trail read a closing poem by Rumi. Then class was over.
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AChronicle reporter was not the only outsider visiting that day. Germano, one of the course’s creators, sat in, too. While it’s impossible to evaluate a course from a single class period, he told the reporter afterward, this one, at least, felt too structured, not as improvisational as he would have liked. And he thought that it was lacking in intellectual heft. This is a course, after all, that seeks to bring together everything from ancient religious practices to recent brain science. There are plenty of ways discussion might have gone deeper.
The two shortcomings Germano identified were related: Sticking to a script can limit discussion. With more flexibility, he thought, the instructors might have slowed down. They could have involved more students beyond those who volunteered, and they might have asked more-probing questions.
Hubbard, who co-taught the course last year, sees the structure she and Trail use — like the way they delineate that class is beginning and ending — in part as a corrective for how things went in the first pilot. The class sometimes went on tangents, she said, which could get chaotic. “For example, we would prepare a one-page worksheet, and we’d only get through a fourth of it, and they’d rush through the rest.”
It was hard for students to put together all the components of flourishing when the instructors tried to help them draw connections but ran out of time at the end of a class period, Hubbard added. She understands Germano’s perspective and agrees that some of the more spontaneous moments from last year’s pilot were memorable. But they came, she thinks, at a cost.
Maybe no one single program is helping someone to suddenly have meaning in life.
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Their version, Trail said, is “not so structured that it becomes unresponsive.” But she and Hubbard “don’t want to accidentally leave out the parts that help students make meaning.” That’s why, though they’ve made some adjustments based on Germano’s feedback, they’re still providing more structure than he probably would. Instructors and others from the three universities all have a hand in shaping the course, and it remains a work in progress.
Even so, the multicampus team is already laying the groundwork to persuade other colleges to adopt it. That, said Karen Inkelas, an associate professor of higher education at UVa who also has an appointment with the center and is part of the course team, will require presenting administrators with a compelling case in their native language: data, evidence, and results.
Each class period on each campus, a graduate teaching assistant takes descriptive notes detailing how content is presented and time is allocated. Researchers also consider students’ writing samples, which provide a sense of how well they understand the course content, and the logs they keep of the contemplative practices they engage in outside of class.
At this early stage, Inkelas said, the focus is on how the course is working, what patterns can be seen in the data, and whether any differences across the campuses seem to be making the course more or less effective.
The team has ambitious research goals, too. The researchers would like to randomly assign students to the course, Inkelas said, but that’s hard to pull off. They would like to point to longitudinal data, but that obviously takes years to collect. Evaluating whether colleges’ efforts help students thrive is challenging work in general, said Nicole W. Brocato, who is responsible for developing Wake Forest’s well-being assessment and carrying out activities for the collaborative it started.
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For one thing, existing assessments of well-being don’t always translate well to college students, Brocato said, which is why Wake Forest is creating one just for them. The tool, which is still being refined, asks questions tailored to undergraduates’ phase of life in terms they understand. Its goal is to help colleges take the temperature of their student populations. One question, for instance, reads: “There is at least one faculty or staff member at my school who cares about me as a person.”
Leslie Hubbard, one of the instructors co-teaching UVa’s “Human Flourishing” course, tightly schedules each class period, in part to give students time to draw connections.Eli Reichman for The Chronicle
Then there’s the question of what outcome, exactly, colleges hope a project will produce — and over what kind of time frame. Even if colleges want to gather results on a single, straightforward program — say a workshop — they face a challenge. Most measures of well-being consider it from a life-span perspective. “Those kinds of questions,” Brocato said, “are terrible for determining the benefits of a short-term program.”
Well-being, after all, is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. The colleges most invested in helping students thrive understand this — it’s part of why Germano and Inkelas hope to integrate flourishing into both academics and residential life at UVa, for instance, and why Wake Forest is running a suite of interconnected efforts.
“Maybe,” Brocato said, “no one single program is helping someone to suddenly have meaning in life.”
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Certainly, setting up students to thrive over the long haul isn’t something colleges can figure out overnight. UVa’s goal of orienting residential life around flourishing remains in its early stages. Inkelas was just recently named principal of one of the university’s residential colleges, and she’s working with the students who are already a part of its community to fine-tune what its new theme will look like.
The course, while still under development, is far enough along to give an early glimpse of what effect the university’s grand plans might have on the life of an individual student.
This is what it set in motion for Ethan Sullivan. Last year he took the course at UVa after he happened to see it advertised on the Facebook page for his entering class.
One day, Germano asked a question in class that Sullivan said changed his life: Are you living in accordance with your values?
“That was something I never asked myself,” he recalled, “and it was certainly something that a professor giving me a grade had never stopped to ask me.”
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Germano’s question made Sullivan realize he wasn’t sure what his values even were. Growing up in Oakton, Va., an affluent community outside Washington, he said the main value he had absorbed was a particular kind of academic success, one predicated on earning good grades and gaining admission to an elite college.
What else did he really care about? Sullivan wasn’t sure, and that made him feel that something was missing.
He spent some time over his freshman year examining his life to see what might be lacking. He never had an epiphany, exactly, but some clarity came just before the spring semester, when he went through fraternity rush.
By then, Sullivan had already joined half a dozen clubs. But none of them really provided him with a community. At UVa, he said, student organizations are competitive, usually presenting themselves as ways for students to gain an edge when they apply for jobs by displaying their leadership qualities. “If I had a nickel for every time I heard the words ‘organize,’ ‘plan,’ ‘develop’ … “
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Joining a fraternity offered Sullivan something different. As he went through the pledging process, he said, “I felt like the people there really cared about who I was.” One fraternity brother, Sullivan said, remembered that he had mentioned a test in a previous conversation, and asked him how it had gone.
Sullivan joined Sigma Phi and plans to live in its house next year. “It sounds kind of corny to have a club of best friends,” he said, “but that’s really what it becomes.”
Sure, brothers may be up against one another for the presidency of their fraternity or a spot on its softball team, he said. But in general, the fraternity offered him an island of cooperation in a sea of competitiveness.
All of this helped Sullivan arrive at an answer to the question posed in the course. He values the quality of his close, personal relationships. Sullivan still cares plenty about doing well in class. But it’s no longer his North Star.
Colleges have a long history of pushing students to engage in just this sort of reflection. Projects like the “Human Flourishing” course seek to update this vision for the present moment and make it widely available. But even if colleges bring this vision into the curriculum, students may well be left to make sense of it long after the semester is over and far outside the classroom walls.
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Still, what happens in that classroom can matter.
If Sullivan hadn’t stumbled upon the course, he wouldn’t have heard Germano’s question that day: “Are you living in accordance with your values?”
He still could have done all that was asked of him: Take the necessary courses, earn good grades, cross the stage to receive a degree.
But he might never have questioned how he wanted to live.
Beckie Supiano writes about teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
Beckie Supiano is a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, where she covers teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. She is also a co-author of The Chronicle’s free, weekly Teaching newsletter that focuses on what works in and around the classroom. Email her at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.