Wake Forest’s Eudaimonia Institute Tries to Turn From Controversy to Scholarship

Ken Bennett

Wake Forest University’s Eudaimonia Institute had barely set an agenda before it became a cause célèbre.

The institute’s hard-to-pronounce name (say, “YOO-day-MOE-nee-yuh”) became the subject of a professor’s satirical poetry on Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. And the source of its funding sparked widespread faculty consternation — along with a defense in The Wall Street Journal.

But Eudaimonia’s first conference, at Wake Forest this past weekend, wasn’t a joke to Matthew Gonnering, a software executive from Madison, Wis.; it was a long time coming. Mr. Gonnering first learned of the concept of “eudaimonia” — a Greek word that describes human flourishing — from a business-school classmate who had a psychology Ph.D. Since then, he has become something of an evangelist.

His business cards refer to him as his company’s “Chief Eudaimonia Officer,” and throughout the conference he wore fitted T-shirts — one in black, another in navy blue — with “eudaimonia” in white letters across the front. Over lunch on Friday, he told conferencegoers how he had surveyed his employees on their well-being and then made changes to improve it in his office.

The Eudaimonia Institute’s debut conference had an appropriately eudaimonic setting — a conference room with picturesque views at the Reynolda House Museum of American Art, a sprawling complex built early in the 20th century by the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company’s founding family. The event went ahead with enthusiastic participation from speakers like Mr. Gonnering, a handful of Wake Forest faculty and students in attendance, and little acknowledgment of the controversy that has swirled around it.

The reason for that controversy is the institute’s largest funding source: $3.7 million of its $4.2 million in research support came from the Charles Koch Foundation. Wake Forest’s Faculty Senate, concerned that the foundation is attempting to use the university to prepare a talent stream of free-market-oriented scholars for like-minded think tanks and political organizations, attempted to halt the funding. The senate was unable to do so, but last week it passed motions to create a new universitywide conflict-of-interest policy that would apply to external funding sources, and to appoint a member of the senate to the university’s gift-acceptance committee. Administrators will meet with senate leaders to discuss the motions this week.

Against that backdrop, James Otteson, an economics professor who is director of the Eudaimonia Institute, called the conference a chance to signal a “turning point” between the institute’s contentious beginnings and its scholarly emergence.

“My hope for this conference is that people would see we’re doing serious work,” Mr. Otteson said. “There are no ideologues here. That would be completely out of place, and that’s as it should be.”

The faculty pushed back on the gift in part because of a January 2016 article by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, which described an economist urging the Koch network to rebrand its free-market ideology as “a movement for well-being” at a donor summit. Mr. Otteson also presented at that summit, according to the article.

“Our complaint is not that their money is dirty,” said Jay Ford, chair of the department for the study of religions, who also chaired a Faculty Senate committee charged with reviewing the institute. “Our argument is with the way they want to use their money. Their intent is to use the university’s facilities to further this larger political legislative agenda.”

Mr. Ford attended portions of the eudaimonia conference, and he said that what he saw did not raise any red flags. Conference participants, however, had much to debate without ever mentioning the Kochs or discussing current U.S. politics directly.

Instead the attendees sought to chart out what the institute can and should do and to better define the origin of its name. Panels featured discussions between philosophers, economists, educators, and political scientists — an interdisciplinary group that dove deep into Aristotelian virtue ethics, the validity of self-reported surveys, and governments’ role in improving lives, among other topics.

To Measure or Not to Measure?

The institute’s unofficial goal is to create a way to measure the extent to which people are flourishing. Such a metric — Mr. Otteson called it an index — might allow for more-nuanced comparisons of countries, regions, or groups of people than metrics like gross domestic product. But the keynote speaker, Deirdre N. McCloskey, a professor emerita of economics, history, and English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, argued that it is both impossible and irresponsible to measure happiness.

Ms. McCloskey took issue with the use of questionnaires to assess well-being, in part because culture has an effect on how people answer questions about themselves. She warned against measuring pleasure as a stand-in for happiness and noted that even different types and providers of pleasure — sex, chocolate cake, and Mar-a-Lago were her examples — can’t be compared.

“Even within a single mind, adding up the pleasures over time can change,” she said. “It certainly does change. It changes with age. It changes with the day of the week.”

Ms. McCloskey, a libertarian, argued that the government has no business telling people how to be happy, calling such a notion “deeply screwy” and, later in the conference, comparing attempts to measure happiness with the blunders of the eugenics movement. She noted that although the king of Bhutan created a “gross national happiness index,” the country has a checkered human-rights record and its population is still poor.

“A pet, a subordinate, a person in a non-free society, has no chance of flourishing,” Ms. McCloskey said. “She can have many chances for pleasure.”

But several conference attendees described ways in which they are already doing what Ms. McCloskey warned against — measuring well-being using surveys. They stressed that their sample sizes include as many as hundreds of thousands of people, and that they look at many different objectives when assessing happiness.

Carol Graham, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, presented research concluding that poor white people are less optimistic about their well-being than they were 15 years ago. She suggested that this pessimism could help explain high rates of suicide and substance abuse. Kelsey J. O’Connor, a Ph.D. candidate studying economics at the University of Southern California, presented research that used survey data to show what he said was a significant connection between employment and well-being.

Mallory Montgomery, also an economics Ph.D. candidate at USC, said that information on well-being should be collected and analyzed, but that it must be distributed with guidance about how it should be interpreted.

“Maybe government shouldn’t tell us what to do or eat, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t study nutrition,” she said.

Mr. Otteson said the Eudaimonia Institute will continue to grapple with whether and how human flourishing can be measured. The idea here was to bring together different disciplines that are asking similar questions to see if they can help one another arrive at a common answer.

The Chief Eudaimonia Officer

Not all presenters addressed the question of whether happiness can be measured at all. Some, like Mr. Gonnering, spoke about how the concept of eudaimonia could be applied in the workplace.

To promote eudaimonia at Widen, his software company, Mr. Gonnering brought in not just massage therapists, puppies, and bike racks, but also coaches who hold one-on-one sessions with employees on how to find meaning and purpose in life. Revenue and customer retention have grown since he started the effort, and employee turnover is low, he said.

One member of the audience questioned whether Mr. Gonnering was being paternalistic. His response: Employees can choose not to participate in the program.

On occasion, speakers took a more expansive vision of what can be categorized as human flourishing. Jacqueline Isaacs, a strategic-communications fellow in the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities’ American Studies Program, described tense conversations with journalists while working in a press office during the 2012 presidential campaign. Her lesson: Rather than declining to comment when a reporter called, she said, she learned to ask more questions to figure out if there was information she could share that would both be useful to the reporter and promote her candidate.

“You can’t flourish in your job if you’re trying to destroy the other person,” Ms. Isaacs said.

Part of the appeal of the Eudaimonia Institute is that it will seek to find practical applications for its research on how and why people flourish, said Rogan Kersh, provost at Wake Forest. He supported the concept in part because the university was already undertaking a campuswide effort to promote well-being.

“This generation — they are more anxious and, speaking broadly, less fulfilled than previous generations of 18-to-24-year-olds,” Mr. Kersh said.

After months of debate and controversy, the conference organizers were relieved that the event concluded Saturday without significant protests or logistical issues.

“I’ve channeled all my energy into this conference for the last nine months,” said Adam Hyde, a research assistant professor of economics at Wake Forest and assistant director of the Eudaimonia Institute. “Now the work sort of begins.”

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.