A series featuring interviews with NetVUE Scholars whose essays appear in Called Beyond Ourselves: Vocation and the Common Good, the most recent publication of the NetVUE Scholarly Resources Project.
On September 12, over one hundred people gathered at Loras College for this year’s launch of NetVUE’s “Big Read,” which is Called Beyond Ourselves: Vocation and the Common Good, the fourth volume of the NetVUE Scholarly Resources Project. Edited by Erin VanLaningham (who also served as this gathering’s host), this new collection of essays brings together a diverse range of voices to consider vocation in relation to the concerns of the common good and communal flourishing. The event featured presentations by four of the volume’s authors, along with a powerful keynote address by Mary Dana Hinton, a conversation between two college presidents, and presentations by faculty and staff from Loras College, all of which aimed to provide educators with ways to think about the roles of leadership and advocacy as we deepen our understanding of the common good as an essential part of vocational exploration on our campuses.
This series of posts showcases interviews with NetVUE Scholars who contributed to this volume and generously agreed to respond to my questions about their experience participating in this project, as well as reflecting on their essays and their relation to vocation and the common good. For our first interview, I’m pleased to feature Robert Pampel, who graciously opened the Loras gathering with reflections on his chapter, “The University as the (Common) Good Place.” Robert is currently the director of student academic affairs and associate dean at Washington University, in St. Louis.
What was it about a project on “vocation and the common good” that drew you to it? What were you hoping to learn from it? Or, give to others through it?
When I received the call to participate, I had been using the language of vocation in my classes and in the honors program that I directed for many years, drawing frequently on Buechner’s definition of vocation as the place “where your deep gladness and the world’s hunger meets.” Like many people enamored of Buechner’s definition, I often emphasized “gladness” over “hunger,” sometimes with mixed results for students who longed for a way to connect their passions to the wider world. When I heard the concept for this project, I was drawn in immediately. I thought I could bring a strong understanding of Jesuit ideas and honors pedagogy to the project, and I knew I would benefit from the erudition of my colleagues from across an impressive array of disciplines and institutions. I hope that I delivered on my part, but I know I was right about my colleagues.
What’s an important, even little known, piece of your vocational journey that informed your sense of calling in the past, or has in the present?
I’m not a traditional academic, and even as I’ve continued my education and found myself in positions of leadership on various campuses over the last 15 years, I’ve struggled mightily with the same kind of imposter syndrome that students often report. The language of vocation opened up a new way of thinking about my work, allowing me to claim my less traditional path and feel at greater ease around my faculty colleagues. I was able to embrace my more generalist academic persona, which played well as an honors director and in my current role advancing the liberal arts mission in an office that delivers comprehensive advising services to undergraduate students.
If you had to summarize the main point of your essay, or highlight what you think its most significant points are, what would you say?
College and university campuses have always served as rich contexts for student development, but the national conversation often dismisses the way affective and intellectual experiences intermingle to promote student discernment around weighty human issues and contribute to the common good. My goal was to reclaim this lofty purpose and demonstrate that campuses themselves, through their intentional design, craft common good places that contribute both to student and community flourishing.
How did the writing and scholarly cohort experience reflect your own vocation, and/or how has this experience impacted your calling as a scholar or teacher?
This experience was the most generative, collegial, and enjoyable one I’ve ever had with writing. Although the group represented a wide variety of disciplines and university roles, the process was so thoughtfully coordinated and supported that we came together easily, even as we wrestled with big ideas and sought to unite them under the banner of vocation and the common good. This process reflects my own impulse to find connections between seemingly disparate ideas—to seek a kind of narrative unity across a range of subject matter. That’s what appealed to me most about being the director of an honors program and, now, to my work seeking to embed aspects of the liberal arts and sciences in advising.
What impact can vocational scholarship play in higher education? What can it do to advance student and institutional formation and calling?
One of the great benefits of NetVUE is how it unites people in their respective corners of higher education around ideas of meaning and purpose, showing them just how relevant these topics are across very different institutions and contexts. We know there are shortcuts to technical knowledge in an age of ubiquitous technology and artificial intelligence, and if our institutions are merely producers of experts on narrow subject matter, we will increasingly struggle to make a strong case for our value to policymakers and the general public. Vocation provides a powerful rejoinder to this kind thinking, and seems perfectly suited to this emerging generation of students who seek connection and meaning in their work.
How do you imagine—or would you like to see—colleagues use this chapter in their teaching, professional development, or other work with students?
I hope reading and thinking about what our campus space represents fills people with a sense of pride and optimism about what the university campus has been and can be for students as they discover their purpose and understand their commitments to their communities. Our campuses serve as beacons of progress and possibility, vital forms of economic support to their host communities, and oases of hope and support for students from varied backgrounds. They’re not perfect, and they have often fallen short of their intended aims. They deserve our critical engagement and critique, but also our admiration and support to fulfill their aims. On a more practical level, I hope the chapter inspires campus leaders to interrogate spaces on their campus and to involve students in the process of experiencing common places through the lens of the common good. I was delighted to see this approach on display during NetVUE’s “Big Read” launch at Loras College, when attendees participated in a “common good places” walk around campus—learning the history and student culture of the campus while reflecting on the choices that contributed to or detracted from the experience of the common good.
If students were to read and discuss your chapter, how would you imagine engaging them in this conversation? What suggestions do you have for companion readings or other learning activities to use with them to help them explore this topic?
I imagine students would read this chapter with some affection for their campuses and the formative experiences they’ve gained there. I would also expect some skepticism or outright disagreement about whether campuses are really living up to their historical purposes around vocational formation in the present realities of the American college campus. Recent events on campuses around the country—political infighting, geopolitical conflict, and economic activism—can divide students from one another and from administrative leaders, and students would be right to be critical in the face of perceived injustices in their communities. At the same time, the campus often remains fertile ground for these views to take root and blossom, and I hope that students would see in the chapter the potential for certain spaces on their campuses to achieve this time-honored purpose. I love the idea of engaging “common good places” through a variety of activities. These have the potential to inform how campus groups use and move around spaces on campus, how admissions professionals deliver tours of campus, and how administrators make plans for how to develop new and old spaces for the vitality of campus and for student flourishing.
NetVUE member institutions interested in the “Big Read” can learn more about this program and how to participate by clicking here.
Readers might be interested in the paragraph that Robert offered for the section on “”Vocations of the Contributors” in the book: “Robert J. Pampel vividly recalls his first vocational crisis during summer orientation at Valparaiso University. In what he now views as unabashed manipulation by his instructors, he read Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” with future classmates. This lead to intense questioning of a rather uncritical decision to study engineering, which led him to switch his major to English literature. He thought he would become a professor, but doubts crept in as the Great Recession loomed and he abandoned the path to higher education—or so he thought. After a brief stint in an entrepreneurial fellowship program in Indianapolis, Robert moved to St. Louis for graduate education in higher education and international studies. In 2014, he joined the staff of the Saint Louis University Honors Program, where he has developed a deep fascination in and appreciation for the institution’s Jesuit mission and teaching, honors pedagogy, and all things vocation. He is thankful for a supportive partner and two spirited children who remind him of his vocation as a husband and father, even if he still experiences occasional vocational crises.”
Geoffrey W. Bateman is the editor of Vocation Matters.