This January, I led a team of five colleagues affiliated with NetVUE who presented at the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) Annual Meeting: Answering the Call for Constructive Engagement. One of the meeting’s tracks was “Advancing Public Purpose,” providing attendees the chance to explore many related questions: how we define the public purposes of higher education, how we think about telling and retelling our stories, and how a sense of purpose informs our leadership. There were also opportunities to learn more about anchoring purpose in various undergraduate experiences, including liberal arts pathways, civic engagement, research, project-based learning, and career and professional opportunities. Our NetVUE panelists shared concrete strategies for incorporating vocational exploration into undergraduate education by attending to career development and preparation, civic learning, community engagement, student well-being, and purposeful pathways.
Our panel began with Terese Lund, associate vice provost for purposeful pathways and professor of psychology at Wingate University, who provided context for both the developmental stages of emerging adulthood and the challenges we face in higher education. Terese described a profound convergence in this moment, where higher education is asking, “What is college for?” and students are asking, “What am I for? What am I called to do?” She argued that these are not separate questions. Taken together in the context of the many pressures higher education faces, they lead us to see that purpose-centered vocational discernment is not a luxury or an add-on, but the answer both to higher education’s question about value and to students’ developmental needs.
Connecting students’ developmental needs to the work of the world, Darby Ray, director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships and Donald W. and Ann M. Harward Professor of Civic Engagement at Bates College, spoke next. In her presentation, she argued that we need to integrate vocation intentionally at the intersection of self and world into the seemingly ubiquitous (and sometimes commodified) conversations about purpose. Emphasizing the importance of helping students think about something beyond the self, she shared ways that civic engagement can provide capacious, ethical opportunities to expand the boundaries of self, allowing students to engage in both “self-work” and “world-work.”
In her presentation, Michelle Hayford, associate dean of University College and executive director of arts at North Carolina State University, considered arts accessibility and the transformative power of engaging the arts through partnerships with community organizations that care for the most marginalized. Focusing on her work in applied theatre, Michelle modeled how such projects can promote justice and serve to transform the common good. She described “Pathways to Connectivity,” a Common Good Players theatre production that she scripted and directed with students at the University of Dayton and guest artists from the Reentry Office of Montgomery County. This production asked the question, “What do we owe one another?” Michelle contended that attending to the common good requires that we pay attention to mutuality, interdependence, and collective healing.
Next, Kamara Jackson, senior director of career programs and employer relations at Dominican University (IL), a Hispanic-Serving Institution, shared its equity-minded and developmentally scaffolded career and vocation course sequence that is embedded into the core curriculum for all undergraduate students. She discussed the many levels of student support and mentoring built into the program through community engagement and partnerships, which provide mentoring and required career practicum experiences. Kamara argued that these curricular initiatives have made real and significant changes in a student’s undergraduate educational experience and in their post-graduation trajectories.
Richard Sévère, dean of the college of humanities, education, and social sciences at Purdue University Northwest, concluded the panel, focusing on mentoring and how his approach to it, friendship, and vocation helps build resilience. Richard asked participants to consider what happens when our students aren’t managing the realities of their work and the ways we might collaborate with them to build and practice resilience inside the classroom and beyond. His presentation emphasized the notion of experimentation, practice, failure, and trying again.
As their presentations suggest, each panelist works collaboratively at their institutions with faculty members, staff, and external partners to support student discernment and to create bridges within their institutions and with the communities in which they are situated. As Terese explained, “purpose formation is both a privilege and a responsibility of institutions of higher education—an integrative endeavor that meaningfully connects mission to the pressing realities facing today’s students.” Audience members left our session understanding the importance of aligning our strengths and values with a shared sense of purpose—fostering campus cultures that support student flourishing, advance mission, and reclaim higher education’s public value in service to the common good.
I was honored to facilitate this session and impressed with the work that my NetVUE colleagues are doing on their campuses. Audience members asked several pressing questions, largely focusing on how to overcome various forms of resistance and about how to collaborate more effectively with stakeholders within institutions and their communities to promote the work of vocational exploration. NetVUE provides broad resources and deep expertise to address urgent and persistent needs of students, faculty members, staff, and institutions. Our experience at AAC&U shows that there are many institutions that will benefit from the good work our colleagues are doing.
Sheila Bauer-Gatsos is a professor of English at Dominican University (IL). She also serves as special assistant to the provost for university-wide programs, in which she is responsible for academic oversight and program leadership, curricular initiatives and coordination, and retention and academic success initiatives. Her most recent publication is a chapter titled “Disciplinary Form: Introduction to Literary Studies,” which appeared in Cultivating Vocation in Literary Studies. Sheila is a NetVUE Faculty Fellow and attended the NetVUE Teaching Vocational Exploration Faculty Seminar in 2017 and NetVUE Leading Vocational Exploration on Campus Seminar in 2024.