In a remarkable experiment lasting over a decade, a group of 88 independent campuses, ranging from comprehensive universities to intimate colleges, have demonstrated the value of an emerging educational agenda focused on meaning and purpose. These programs have shown that college can provide emerging adults with an understanding of themselves within today's insecure and highly competitive world that enhances their ability to develop the "grit" needed to create meaningful lives. By focusing on the exploration of vocation and its theological foundations, these efforts produced remarkable outcomes in enhanced student engagement in learning and more effective entry into adult life. Discernment of vocation provides for many students, a synthetic and compelling focus for intellectual and practical exploration. Sustained by articulate reflection and grounded in communities of learning that included faculty as well as students, undergraduate life takes on new significance and urgency. Liberal Learning as a Quest for Purpose analyzes a series of successful efforts to reconfigure undergraduate education as a journey toward life purpose. The book ties together the liberal arts, personal development, and preparation for life through the exploration of vocation, including the probing of vocation's religious roots amid its contemporary resonances. Examining the experiences of students and faculty, the book reveals the concrete importance of this educational agenda for individual lives and particular campuses. By connecting the several dimensions of undergraduate experience through reflection on purpose, these programs expanded the bandwidth of academic learning in energizing and exploratory ways. Within the larger, troubled environment of contemporary higher education, these pioneering efforts hold promise for a significant rethinking of the undergraduate experience to better serve students and society.

About the Author
William M. Sullivan is a senior scholar at The New American Colleges and Universities, and Visiting Professor at the Center for the Study of Professions at the University College of Oslo and Askershus in Norway.

Reviews
"When college is supposed to be all about getting a job, what difference might it make to suggest that it is also about discovering a vocation? A number of experiments in undergraduate education have renewed attention to meaning and purpose by pursuing that question in creative, practical ways. Even as pressures on higher education imperil society's confidence in the value of liberal learning, William M. Sullivan discloses possibilities of renewal at the heart of the college experience."-Dorothy C. Bass, coeditor of Leading Lives That Matter: What We Should Do and Who We Should Be "For everyone concerned about higher education's present shortcomings, there is now a brightly-illuminated pathway to a more promising future. William M. Sullivan's Liberal Learning as a Quest for Purpose gives us a well-documented guide to creating a college experience ideally suited for students' intellectual and personal development. The book is a must-read for educators and for all those who yearn for meaningful reforms in our country's higher education system."-William Damon, author of The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find their Calling in Life "At a time when higher education in the United States is under siege, William M. Sullivan puts forth a compelling vision of purposeful education. Then, drawing on an ambitious study of diverse campuses, he details how this vision is being impressively realized."-Howard Gardner, author of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed "Sullivan's argument is persuasive, and supported by numerous examples of the ways that the [Program for the Theological Exploration of Vocation] curricula envision-through the lens of vocation-a holistic approach to college education in the 21st century." -- Reading Religion



Book Information
ISBN 9780190499242
Author William M. Sullivan
Format Hardback
Page Count 248
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 476g
Dimensions(mm) 155mm * 236mm * 23mm