Category: Uncategorized

Thriving in Academia: The Power of Friendship and Community

Faculty members at small liberal arts colleges often experience isolation despite a focus on community. This post emphasizes the importance of developing friendships and academic partnerships for personal and professional growth. Connections with peers, mentors, and colleagues from other institutions foster resilience and collaboration, ultimately enhancing scholarly productivity and overall well-being.

A co-authored series on what faculty members need to thrive vocationally.

One of the seeming paradoxes of faculty life at a small liberal arts college is that although these institutions often champion community, faculty members frequently work in isolation. And despite the fact that research and publication have become increasingly collaborative, higher education has a tendency to view the “life of the mind” largely as an individual pursuit. University tenure and promotion criteria often reinforce this view, rewarding individual work over more collaborative projects—particularly in the humanities. Within this context, collaboration may be further inhibited by the fact that faculty are frequently hired as one of a few experts—and sometimes as the only one—in their discipline or sub-specialty. A recent article from Inside Higher Ed suggests that the key to scholarly productivity for faculty members working at teaching-intensive schools is to just be more efficient, side-stepping these other very real constraints.

In this post, we encourage faculty members to cultivate a kind of scholarly resilience that doesn’t expect you to do more with the same number of resources; instead, we should build resilience by generating “wealth in people” that we gain through belonging to a community, as Christine Jeske describes in her essay in the volume we edited, Purpose and Joy: Pursuing a Meaningful Career inChristian Higher Education. Friendship within academic communities can take many forms, but we focus here on generative friendships—what we term “academic partnerships”—that encourage personal and professional growth, and thriving. As Paul Wadell writes, “One of the great unpayable debts of friendship is to realize that our friends helped us become better than we ever could be by ourselves.”

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A Victory for Humanity: Vocation, AI, and Magnifica Humanitas

Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, emphasizes that discussions around artificial intelligence should focus on human dignity and community values. It asserts that genuine human experiences—rooted in relationships, compassion, and moral growth—cannot be replicated by technology. The text advocates for educational approaches that prioritize human flourishing amidst technological advancement.

Pope Leo XIV

Here’s a confession: my interest in generative AI isn’t really about AI, it’s about our humanity, because vocation work is deeply human work. It requires our individual ability to reflect and to learn, to discern and to decide; it also depends on our collective ability to be human together: to communicate clearly, to hold together some form of civil society, and to pay attention to our neighbors’ needs.

Similarly, Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, published in May 2026, is widely seen as being “about AI” when in fact, it’s about our humanity. In the third chapter of Magnifica Humanitas, when the pontiff turns his attention to AI, he’s actually focusing on what it means to be human.

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Weaving Art into Vocational Discernment and Research

From April 22 to May 17, 2026, the “Alive: Journeys in the Making” exhibition at the Putnam Museum showcased a collaborative project between Çağlar Çetin-Ayşe and Augustana students, exploring vocational journeys. It emphasized interdependence, creativity, and community through artistic expression, encouraging a shift from individual narratives to collective experiences in vocational discernment.

From April 22 to May 17, 2026, the Putnam Museum and Science Center at Augustana College hosted an exhibition that I—along with three Augustana students—created in response to this question: “How could art offer us a dynamic space that enables a deeper reflection, both individually and collectively, on vocation and our journeys?” The exhibition was titled Alive: Journeys in the Making, and it marked the culmination of a research project I conducted with these student as co-researchers. This project was supported by a NetVUE Grant to Individuals for Vocational Exploration and grew out my participation in Augustana College’s ALIVE (Augustana Leaders in Vocational Exploration) program, which invites sophomore students into a collective vocational discernment process. The program has recently completed its fifth year, and I have had the pleasure of serving as one of the mentors for the past two years. As researchers, we set out to examine the program’s transformative impact on us and to invite a broader audience into the dialogue surrounding vocation.

A gallery view from the exhibition at the Putnam Museum. Photograph by Çağlar Çetin-Ayşe.
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AI and the Defiant Hope of Vocation

Recent seasons of prominent TV shows feature generative AI, reflecting its influence on various parts of society, including higher education. Addressing AI’s role in vocation work is essential, as it impacts human purpose and agency. Through NetVUE, discussions can explore AI’s transformative potential while encouraging a nuanced understanding of its implications limitations. Ultimately, NetVUE provides a much needed space to figure out how best to respond to this existential threat.

Storylines about generative artificial intelligence played key roles in the most recent seasons of several award-winning television shows, as viewers of The Comeback, Hacks, and The Pitt can attest to. These storylines are not surprising: AI is reshaping everything in our world from art and commerce to education and health care, and more pointedly, labor protections related to AI were a key feature of the 2023 writers’ strike in Hollywood. AI has also impacted higher education, itself full of events, institutes, seminars, conferences, and statements, with resources for faculty, staff, administrators, and campuses to engage in conversations about AI.

close up shot of a typewriter
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Given how AI has come to fill every nook and cranny of our culture—and likely your campus and professional life as well—what unique contributions does NetVUE bring to this conversation?

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Vocation and Values: An Undergraduate Perspective

Recent graduate, Hector Aponte reflects on his experiences as a NetVUE student ambassador at Norwich University, where he guided peers through their vocational journeys. He emphasizes the importance of discussions around values rather than abstract concepts of vocation, helping students align their career choices with personal values and beliefs. Aponte encourages early exploration of values to foster purposeful lives and living of the “good life.”

The first post in a series featuring undergraduate student voices reflecting on their experiences of vocation and calling.

As an undergraduate student, one of the most rewarding experiences I had was helping a peer navigate an uncertain future they weren’t yet able to envision fully. As they discerned their potential career, they struggled to start this process and to consider everything needed as they tried to make an informed choice. They were aware of the impact their decision would have on where they might work, what kind of life they would live, the possibility of having a family, and future educational pursuits. I sympathized with their challenge and was pleased to offer as much support and guidance as I could; I had been in a similar situation just a few years prior, but this time I had a better sense of where to start.

Hector Aponte (right) with Nick Lavery, an Army Green Beret who visited Norwich as part of its NetVUE ambassador program in 2025.

I was able to support my friend because of my role as a NetVUE student ambassador on my campus during my junior and senior years. In this role, I provided information and resources to my peers, scheduled events and speakers, and worked with faculty to share the importance of thinking about vocation with their students and walking with them on their vocational journey. A focus on vocation and calling can provide a critical foundation that helps us as students find purpose and meaning in our lives. Being an ambassador allowed me to help other students navigate the questions that accompany the discernment of our vocations, and I was drawn to this role because my sense of vocation includes helping others achieve what I learned Aristotle called eudaimonia, or the good life.

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Active Listening as Vocational Discernment

We live in a distracted age in which smartphones and social media threaten to interrupt us constantly, but especially college students who often struggle to maintain focus and attention. Yet attentiveness is essential for vocational exploration and discernment. This post explores how active listening can help mitigate distractions, foster meaningful conversations, and support students in their journey to figure out who they are and how they want to be in their futures.

“We’ll leave the TV and the radio behind. Don’t you wonder what we’ll find?”

Joe Jackson

Decades before smartphones and tablets, Joe Jackson’s lyrics about an upcoming date night anticipates an evening without the media distractions of that time.

Although media platforms have changed, such distractions are still plentiful and time consuming. Most college students spend more than four hours per day on their smartphones, and nearly half of teenagers say they’re online “almost constantly.” At any time, we can escape our present circumstances and explore unlimited opportunities for stimulation. No longer forced to make small talk or sit with our thoughts, we can explore colorful, scintillating messages from anywhere.

photo of people engaged on their phones
Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

While these platforms can connect us, they also compete for our limited attention. Attentiveness is essential to vocational discernment, so much so that Scott Mattingly describes it as the “foundation of every vocational journey.” In Living Vocationally: The Journey of the Called Life, Paul Wadell and Charles Pinches describe attentiveness as a virtue that helps us to be fully present. “We cannot be responsible,” they write, “without an accurate perception of reality, and we cannot accurately perceive reality without growing in attentiveness.”

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Called to an “A”: Vocation and Alternative Grading

This post reflects on how best to support students’ learning and vocational exploration even as we evaluate their work. At the NetVUE conference, the author of this post reflected on the similarities between the values that guide vocation and alternative grading and explored diverse strategies for fostering student growth through alternative grading methods. Emphasizing flexibility, self-awareness, and outward orientation, these approaches aim to create a supportive learning environment. By shifting from traditional grading, professors encourage students to connect their efforts to meaningful outcomes and vocational discernment.

At the 2026 NetVUE Conference this past March, I couldn’t stop thinking about how to meet learning outcomes while at the same time cherishing students and lingering with them along their educational journeys. At the post-keynote roundtable discussions, faculty colleagues shared how they do so: Some are more lenient with grades early in the semester to boost feelings of self-efficacy, while others are less lenient to help students realize they’re still worthy of being cherished even in moments when their effort isn’t their best.

This discussion reminded me that we share similar goals but have strikingly different ways to work toward them. Yet we all think about this in terms of giving letter grades.

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From Pipes to Lenses: Refocusing Our Vision for Vocation

This post reflects on the disconnect in education that pressures students into specific career paths rather than encouraging self-discovery. Resisting the tendency to view education as a pipeline, this post encourages us to see it through a lens. Ultimately, it advocates for guiding students to uncover their passions, fostering authentic vocational discernment rather than conforming to predefined roles.

As a college professor who teaches undergraduate students, I often ask them some version of the question that we ask kindergarteners: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” A kindergartner might answer, “astronaut,” “superhero,” or “dog-treat baker.” But by the time a student considers college, the answer starts to shed its innocence; it becomes weightier, accompanied by a concrete plan that students imagine will allow no deviations.

pipelines on the mountainside
Photo by Jijo Johnny on Pexels.com

When I was in college, I thought I would become a rural doctor: not because I loved science (at least not in the way it was presented in school), but because of something harder to name that centered on a sense of place and a desire to serve a community that looked like mine. Because I was good at school—and good students who wanted to help people where I come from became doctors—my teachers prompted me to study science, and my vocational guidance ended. I was rarely challenged as to why, nor was I asked what else I loved, in order to understand why that might matter.

What nobody asked—and what our current system was not built to ask—was why this approach should ultimately determine a person’s calling. To ponder this question, we need to think about our current pipeline-like system and how we got here.

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The Fluidity of Vocational Discernment

tranquil stream cascading over rocky surface
Photo by Makayla Asuncion on Pexels.com

A version of this post was delivered at Wisconsin Lutheran College’s winter commencement this past December, where Paul marked his retirement and celebrated more than 25 years working in higher education.

Among the foundational tenets of vocational discernment, here are two: our vocations are dynamic, and our vocations are ambiguous. For many, the inverse of these principles can also be true, shaping our impulses to think of discernment as being fixed or final. If we think about vocation in these terms, we start making assumptions that are misguided and possibly damaging, such as, discernment happens only once. If we think about discernment as a singular event, we put ourselves under a lot of pressure to get our calling right, perfectly right.

But if we think more accurately about the dynamic nature of vocational discernment, then we ought to keep in mind its fluid quality. If we picture discernment as a substance, then we see that it is amorphous and pliable, depending on the shape of the life that contains it.

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Reclaiming Vocations: Finding Purpose Amidst Loss

This post opens by reflecting on a mock funeral at Montclair State University that protested cuts to humanities and social sciences, highlighting deep grief in higher education. This shared sense of loss prompts a need for vocational recommitment. The podcast episode featuring Victor Strecher illustrates how purpose can guide healing, emphasizing the importance of meaningful work amidst adversity.

gravestone with a concrete cross
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A photo from a recent news article in The Guardian stopped me in my tracks. It featured a black tombstone memorializing 15 departments within the humanities and social sciences facing cuts at Montclair State University, where students organized a mock funeral in protest of this proposal. At the top of the tombstone, a large RIP dramatically introduced the list of the departments, starting with anthropology and ending with English.

This story is an all too common one across higher education right now, leaving students, faculty, and staff in a state of grief over profound vocational dislocations as their callings are being devalued by college administrators and policymakers. This student-organized funeral resonated with me upon my return from a recent retreat for educators, who gathered to reclaim our vocational visions and voices. One undercurrent in our conversations was a deep sadness for all that has been lost in higher education in recent years: departments slashed, dedicated colleagues terminated, harmful narratives about our work increasing.

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