A Conversation on Purpose with Greg Jones and Clayton Spencer

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Meet the Speaker: L. Gregory Jones

Known for his entrepreneurial leadership, Dr. Greg Jones became president of Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee on June 1, 2021. Prior to his appointment at Belmont, he served as the longtime dean of Duke Divinity School (from 1997-2010 and again from 2018-mid 2021). Between 2010 and 2018, he served in a variety of roles, including vice president and vice provost for global strategy at Duke University and provost and executive vice president of Baylor University. 

During his time at Belmont, Greg has established a new vision for the institution “to be the leading Christ-centered university in the world, radically championing the pursuit of life abundant for all people.” Achievements during his first year include securing more than $35 million in grants and gifts, launching the Belmont Data Collaborative, expanding the Bridges to Belmont program to support Metro Nashville Public School students and establishing a program that more deeply connects Belmont students, faculty and staff to the regional community to create programs that foster social good. 

A gifted speaker, Jones is the author or editor of 19 books, including the recently released Navigating the Future: Traditioned Innovation for Wilder Seas (with Andrew P. Hogue) which outlines his perspective on traditioned innovation as “a habit of being and living that cultivates a certain kind of moral imagination shaped by storytelling and expressed in creative, transformational action.” Other works include Christian Social Innovation, the co-authored Forgiving as We’ve Been Forgiven: Community Practices for Making Peace (with Celestin Musekura), the co-authored Resurrecting Excellence (with Kevin R. Armstrong), and the widely acclaimed Embodying Forgiveness. An ordained United Methodist minister, he has published more than 200 articles in a variety of publications.

Dr. Jones is also a gifted speaker, media contributor and thought leader in higher education, social innovation and theology. He recently joined the National Leadership Council for the Partnership for American Democracy and currently serves as a senior fellow at Leadership Education, which he founded, and senior fellow at the Fuqua-Coach K Center on Leadership and Ethics. Greg is passionate about re-shaping cultures within and across organizations and has coined the term “traditioned innovation” to capture how he re-frames complex challenges to seize significant opportunities. 

He received his bachelor’s in speech communication and a masters of public administration from the University of Denver, and his masters of divinity and Ph.D. in theology from Duke University. He currently serves on the boards of the John Templeton Foundation, the McDonald Agape Foundation and the India Collective.

Dr. Jones is married to the Rev. Susan Pendleton Jones, and they are the parents of three children: Nathan, Ben and Sarah, and are grateful for their two daughters-in-law, Amy Little Jones and Allison Jones, their son-in-law Joey Fala and their granddaughters Clara, Audrey, Sophie and Hannah.

Meet the Speaker: Clayton Spencer

Clayton Spencer became the eighth president of Bates College on July 1, 2012, and retired from the presidency in 2023. She came to Bates from Harvard University, where she spent more than 15 years on the university’s senior leadership team.

Before joining Bates, Spencer served for seven years as vice president for policy at Harvard, directing policy initiatives for the university. She previously served as Harvard’s associate vice president for higher education policy as well as acting executive dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Spencer was also a lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, where she taught courses on federal higher education policy.

As the former chief education counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, Spencer worked for the late U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy from 1993 to 1997. She directed education legislation and policy in the Senate, including federal student aid, science and research policy, the education budget, and technology in education.

Clayton serves on the boards of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, the Annapolis Group of Liberal Arts Colleges, and the Steering Committee of the Coalition for Life Transformative Education. She previously served on the Board of the American Council on Education, where she chaired the Public Policy Committee and was a member of the Executive Committee. She has served as a trustee of Williams College and Phillips Exeter Academy and on the Boards of the Maine Public Broadcasting Network and the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education of the U.S. Department of Education. She was a member of the 2015 Aspen Institute Task Force on College Opportunity for High Achievers, the work of which resulted in the 2016 launch of the American Talent Initiative.

Earlier in her career, Spencer clerked in the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, practiced law at the Boston firm of Ropes & Gray, and prosecuted criminal cases as an assistant U.S. attorney in Boston. She earned a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1985. While at Yale, Spencer was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, winner of the Moot Court competition, and chair of the Public Interest Council.

Spencer received a bachelor’s degree from Williams College in 1977, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, with highest honors in history and German. She earned a bachelor’s degree in theology from Oxford in 1979 and a master of arts degree in the study of religion from Harvard in 1982. In 2015 she received the Doctor of Civil Law honorary degree from Bishop’s University in Sherbrooke, Quebec.

Formation for Flourishing in Higher Education: Reimagining Purpose

Higher education as an industry needs to be re-imagined. The challenges we face are too numerous to think we are just dealing with a series of complicated problems that can be attacked one at a time. Rather, they are complex problems that require creative solutions. If we assume they are merely complicated, or hard, we will just focus on one without realizing that we are making related problems worse.

We need to re-imagine the purpose of higher education and connect it more explicitly to human flourishing. Doing so will require fewer incremental approaches and more of a transformed vision. To be sure, such a transformed vision should not be nostalgic for some idealized and romanticized past. We need a vision that embodies “traditioned innovation,” drawing on the best of higher education’s past for innovative approaches to current realities and anticipated trajectories.¹ This is especially true for professional education and for preparing people for diverse professions.

What might such a transformed vision entail? Three ways of re-framing the imagination for higher education will illumine the outlines of such a transformed vision: (1) A rediscovery of purpose; (2) A holistic approach; and (3) An embrace of perpetual learning across the lifespan to cultivate human flourishing.

A Rediscovery of Purpose

Current headlines highlight a variety of challenges facing higher education. Americans have far less trust in higher education, with a historic decline in just the last decade. Many see faculty as far too politicized, and this criticism seems to be borne out by increasing tensions between state legislatures and public universities. Student struggles with mental health, especially at some of the most prestigious institutions, paint a picture of academia that is more grueling than it is beneficial. These issues, coupled with rising tuition costs, have caused many parents and students to question whether a four-year degree is the best investment.

These challenges have led to piecemeal changes to try to address these issues one-by-one. But such a strategy feels more like playing “whack-a-mole” than making actual progress. And that is because the challenges we face are more symptoms that require a deeper diagnosis than they are isolated problems.

The heart of the deeper diagnosis has to do with questions of purpose: the purpose of higher education itself and the ways in which it can and should help students discover purpose for their own lives and vocations. There is no simple way, either historically or philosophically, to describe the crisis of purpose in higher education. It does not afflict every institution equally, nor is it the case that all institutions are unable to answer questions about purpose. Rather, across the twentieth-century and into the first decades of the twenty-first, higher education has tended to focus more on pragmatic answers of usefulness than deeper questions of purpose.² We have offered statistics on the economic impact of a college education, we have shown the benefits of our institutions to our local communities, and we have touted our research productivity in achieving breakthroughs across a variety of sectors.

At the same time, though, we have become less articulate about such classical themes as “truth, beauty, and goodness,” and whether our core purpose includes addressing whether there is an “ultimate” Purpose with a capital P for human life, human communities, and the world as a whole. Obviously, this way of framing the issue will be different for those universities that retain a faith-based identity than those that are secular, “post-religious,” or public, but arguably questions about purpose and Purpose ought to be at the heart of any good educational institution. To raise the question of whether there is any ultimate sense of Truth, Beauty, Goodness (and thus Purpose with a capital P) is not to presume a positive answer. But keeping such questions at the center of the conversation will illuminate ways that students can discover purpose in the course of their college career.

This is deeply connected to whether higher education is called to help its students articulate their sense of purpose and help them ask questions about ultimate Purpose. Classically, colleges and universities have understood themselves as helping students discover a sense of purpose deeper than questions about skills and job prospects. Such descriptions often have been linked to language about vocation, calling, and character. And, as courses have cropped up recently in a variety of institutions addressing these topics—from Stanford’s “Designing Your Life” and Yale’s “Life Worth Living” through Notre Dame’s “God and the Good Life” to a course my wife and I teach at Belmont, “What’s Your Why?”—we are re-discovering the strong appetite for such courses.

A Holistic Approach

Making questions of purpose central to higher education also invites a more holistic pedagogical approach. Too often in contemporary higher education we treat students as if they are simply brains that need to download information. But if we are only focused on conveying information or transmitting skills, contemporary advances in technology are rendering us increasingly irrelevant. Young people yearn for more holistic approaches. For example, in 2019, a Gallup–Bates College Study showed a crucial link between purpose and work, along with how difficult it is for college graduates to discover that link. Higher education ought to be leading the way in helping students connect their work with questions of purpose by asking deep questions about a well-lived life and through internships and other extracurricular experiences that put those thoughts into action.

This is even more important given the growing challenges to mental health and well-being. Loneliness, anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation among young adults has increased significantly over the last decade. Higher education leaders have noticed these trends and sought to address them, but merely reactive efforts like hiring more counselors do not deal with the deeper issues that can only be addressed by fostering connection and community and addressing deeper themes of purpose and character.

Technology may be advancing in its ability to process information and write remarkable essays. However, questions at the heart of what it means to be human—including our emotions, our desire for wisdom, our embodied relationships with one another—invite a more holistic approach to character formation and to a discovery of what the New Testament calls “life that really is life” (I Timothy 6:19). One need not be religious to yearn for what Miroslav Volf and his colleagues at Yale call “life worth living.” And nurturing that well requires us to take an institution-wide approach. At Belmont, a focus on “whole-person formation” is one of our five strategic pathways to accomplishing our mission and vision.

Formation for Flourishing

Reorienting our practice around questions of purpose and the life well-lived drives us to a re-imagination of higher education for human flourishing. Most centrally, this invites us to focus on what it means for our students to flourish, both while they are students and throughout their lives.

A re-imagined higher education for flourishing would embrace opportunities and responsibilities to engage people across the life-span, while remaining focused on our mission of higher education. Rather than assuming that higher education exists only, or even primarily, for 18–22 year olds, whom we then seek to maintain relationships with as “alumni,” we would see roles for us in education and formation throughout the lifespan.

Higher education obviously has a stake in the education of people 0–18. They are, to put it in business terms, our “supply chain.” If preschool and K–12 don’t do their work well, it makes it even more challenging for higher education. Rather than engaging in blame games about where the failures lie, we ought to embrace intrinsic partnerships that foster continuities in education and formation throughout life. Less often noticed is that we have a stake in the education and formation of people who are much older than 18–22. This includes opportunities for people who never went to college, or didn’t finish, to complete degrees later in life. It also includes opportunities for college graduates to continue to learn and grow—whether to keep up with changes in professional expectations, re-tooling for new opportunities, or simply to grow in wisdom by learning throughout life.

Underlying this new approach is an entrepreneurial mindset that needs to be cultivated across higher education. Such a mindset includes, but is distinct from, innovation and entrepreneurship as vocations some people pursue. Rather, it is a focus on the future and how we can learn most fruitfully from what has gone before us, rather than an attempt to replicate the past or survive the status quo. Too many of us in higher education think and lead as if we are preparing for 1995 in case it ever comes back. We need to be oriented, and orienting our students, toward a “traditioned innovation” approach to the future that prepares them to think and live entrepreneurially for flourishing.

A flipped approach leads to a framing of higher education’s purpose in provocative ways such as the following: how can higher education, and in particular my institution, equip people with the character, purpose, and skills for them to flourish, to help others in their families and communities to flourish, and to help the world flourish? The ways in which a faith-based institution such as Belmont or Notre Dame might address this question are distinct from an elite research university such as Duke or Washington University in St. Louis, much less from a public university such as Michigan or Cal State–Northridge.

Arizona State University is already providing fascinatingly innovative app­roaches to such a framing, ranging from their work across the lifespan to their engagement with communities near and far. We need to cultivate more examples from diverse institutions, and Belmont is working on such innovation. Rather than the isomorphism that tends to happen in higher education, we need to cultivate institutions doing very different experiments designed to foster purpose, character, and human flourishing for their constituents and broader communities. And those experiments should keep questions of Purpose with a capital P—including those of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness—at the heart of our diverse approaches to “higher” education.

The more we cultivate such diversity among higher education institutions, the more we will re-inspire trust and confidence both in the relevance of higher education and its intrinsic importance. By framing questions of purpose, character, and entrepreneurial mindset more clearly in terms of what it means for human beings, individually and collectively, to flourish, we as higher education leaders may see far greater impact on creating and sustaining the flourishing world at the heart of our own sense of purpose.

This article was written by L. Gregory Jones and published by the Center for Social Concerns in “Higher Education for Human Flourishing” in Spring 2024. For more information, please visit the Center for Social Concerns website.

Notes

1. For a more extended description and account of what I call “traditioned innovation,” see L. Gregory Jones and Andrew P. Hogue, Navigating the Future: Traditioned Innovation for Wilder Seas (Abingdon Press, 2021).
2. Amidst an extensive literature discussing these issues, notable is Julie Reuben’s historical account of the marginalization of ethical discussion in the modern research university. See her The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago, 1996). And, given the isomorphism of higher education, intensified by accreditation processes, even colleges and universities that bear little resemblance to a research university such as Harvard or Johns Hopkins have often mimicked their practices and assumptions.

Purpose in Work and Life: A Case for the Liberal Arts

Thinking About Work

When I arrived in Lewiston, Maine in the summer of 2012 to become the eighth president of Bates College, I was captivated by its grand landscape of manufacturing. Enormous mill buildings, most now quiet, line the city’s river and canals, their perfect rectangular forms, huge courses of impeccable brickwork, and row upon row of tall, symmetrical windows embodying the very essence of the industry they made possible. The number and sheer scale of these buildings speak to the might of Lewiston and its sister city Auburn as a textile and shoe manufacturing hub well into the twentieth century. The beauty and precision with which these structures were crafted reflect “industry” in a different sense—namely, the diligence and skill of the human beings who built the mills and ultimately worked within their walls.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that I had landed myself in a world whose deep logic involved “work.” Work as a beacon of hope for generations of French-speaking Canadians who saw in the mills of Maine the promise of a paycheck and a means to build new lives. Work as a source of vibrancy and community in a new country. Work in its most concrete form—making things.

Yet, I was charged with the seemingly cerebral task of leading an excellent undergraduate college devoted to the liberal arts and justly proud of its strong academic culture. How, then, was I to think about the work of the liberal arts in this particular setting? To be sure, a liberal arts education is not primarily about making things, but might it, in fact, involve making?

I found a compelling starting point in the words of Peter Gomes—Harvard professor, theologian, long-time minister of the university’s Memorial Church, and, as it happens, a Bates graduate. He died in 2011, after forty years spent sharing his wisdom with successive generations of Harvard undergraduates. About the aims of a Harvard education, he famously said: “We put the making of a better person ahead of the making of a brighter person, or a better mousetrap.”¹ According to Gomes, we do this by helping students figure out what kind of life they wish to lead: “What is my purpose? How can my life be better? How can I help to make a better world? These are the questions worth asking, and college is one of the few places that allows you, even requires you, to do so.”²

The Logic of Purposeful Work

If motivating and equipping our students to live lives of meaning and contribution is a core purpose of the liberal arts, then work is central to the project. Whatever a person’s particular interests, choices, or constraints, most people wish to figure out a way to stay healthy and happy, to nourish human connection, and to leave the world—or at least their corner of it—better than they found it. For many people, this means, among other things, finding work that contributes to an overall sense of fulfillment, while also furnishing the practical and financial means to sustain a life.

Which is why preparing students for work and career should not be—as it has been for far too long at many excellent colleges and universities—an afterthought relegated to the waning months of senior year. (Remember the binders of banking jobs?) Nor can it be addressed by tactics alone—online hiring platforms, access to alumni networks, job shadows, internships, or industry info sessions. These practical tools are important, but only as part of a framework that locates questions about work where they belong—at the center, not on the outskirts, of the project of the liberal arts.

Purposeful work, as we came to think about it at Bates, is not a kind of work. It is not found “out there” inherent in a particular type of job or career. It can be paid or unpaid, within a family or for an outside organization, part-time or full-time, manual or intellectual, artistic or managerial. It is not “do-gooder” work, though for some individuals it might be. Rather, purposeful work is about aligning who you are with what you do and how you choose to move through the world.

Because life is a journey and we evolve over time, even as the world and our worlds also evolve, the answers to the question of how we wish to live our lives change over the lifespan. But the essence of the exercise—learning to navigate the dynamic relationship between “self” and “world”—remains the core pursuit.

In a liberal arts setting, we give our students a great deal of choice about which courses they will take, what they will major in, and how they will populate their college experience outside the classroom. We also do our best to give them the tools to approach their choices with self-awareness, diligence, and discernment so that they can carve out a path, in college, first, and ultimately in life, that will be authentically their own.

The concept and methodology of the Purposeful Work program are built on these core principles. It is not, for instance, about exhorting students to “find their passion.” Just as purpose is not found “out there” inherent in certain types of work and not in others, it also does not typically reside within a person as a pre-existing passion waiting to be liberated. Unless, perhaps, you are Albert Einstein, or Toni Morrison, or Yo-Yo Ma.

For most ordinary mortals, purpose tends to emerge in the “doing.” This is how Richard Courtemanche, a handsewer in one of the shoe factories of Lewiston, described his purposeful work.

An average handsew[er], back in those days, in the ’60s, would probably do about twenty pairs a day. A good handsewer would do around thirty pairs a day, as he was considered to be fast.

A real fast guy, we’re talking, you know . . . thirty-five to forty pairs. I would do around sixty pairs a day, for many years. Myself and Vern, Vernon Daigle, locally, were probably the fastest handsewers. That was unheard of, what we could do. We did it because it was, it came natural, what other people would do, unnatural. So he was a good man. I learned from him, because he used to handsew quite a few years before me. I used to watch, and I’d say, I can do the same thing. And then from there I picked up the tricks that my dad used to show me, then I picked up some others, then after that, I loved it.³

Richard Courtemanche did not start with a passion for shoemaking that he unleashed on the world. Rather he waded in, he paid attention, he learned the skills, and then along the way he discovered that he was really good at stitching shoes. Only “after that,” did he come to love his work. In other words, the passion did not precede the engagement with work, it was the other way around.

Learning a set of skills or a base of knowledge is a fundamental aspect of identity formation, of becoming fully human. I can sew shoes. This is what I do. This is who I am. I am proud of it. “Myself and Vern . . . . That was unheard of, what we could do.”

For our students, most of whom have a luxury of choice that Richard Courtemanche could only dream of, purpose emerges (or not) as you try different things and get your hands dirty. But this only happens if exploration is paired with reflection. The Purposeful Work team at Bates works with students beginning in first-year orientation to ease them into the notion that the starting point for making life choices is understanding who you are and what matters to you. The staff use various tools and strategies to help students gain an awareness of their interests, strengths, and values—what brings them joy, what kind of things they know they are good at, where they are, or are not, confident in their abilities, what sorts of things they might like to try, and how much risk are they willing to take, to name a few examples.

Unquestionably, the most important dimension of the Purposeful Work approach is the sense of agency and confidence it fosters in students as they make their way through various cycles of exploration, reflection, and adaptation. These elements are specific and concrete, and students internalize the process. Based on what you’ve figured out about yourself, what kinds of work would you like to explore? Once in an internship or a job shadow, how was the experience for you, and do you wish to pursue it further? If it feels like the right field, but the wrong role, you refine your choice for your next opportunity. If the experience does not feel right at all, you move on, consciously rejecting pathways that do not align.

Not only is the Purposeful Work program built on the core values of the liberal arts, it also reinforces them. The emphasis on self-knowledge as the starting point, and the structured approaches used to develop it, puts students in the habit of making conscious choices about many aspects of their college experience—whether in the classes they choose, the activities they jump into, or the leadership responsibilities they take on. Students begin to think of their college experience itself as their “purposeful work” during the undergraduate years, even as they look toward how they will find it after graduation.⁴

This well-scaffolded approach is proving to be powerful for all students. It is particularly important, however, for students who may be the first in their families to go to college or have not had much exposure to a broad range of careers. From the beginning, Bates conceived of the Purposeful Work program as an important piece of its equity promise to all students. Bates is committed to providing broad access to the education it offers, and it has become much more intentional about supporting all students for academic success and full participation in the college experience. Purposeful Work adds another piece of the puzzle. A well-thought-out and well-executed approach to helping students bridge from college to work and career ensures that all students—not only those whose parents are able to connect them to networks of opportunity—have the skills and confidence to seek out career opportunities commensurate in scope and ambition with the education they have received.

Testing Our Assumptions

Bates developed its Purposeful Work program based on the intrinsic logic of a liberal arts education. Yet, the link between finding purpose in work and overall fulfillment resonates far beyond a particular set of colleges and universities and the students who attend them.

In the fall of 2018, Bates partnered with the Gallup organization to conduct a survey of nationally representative college graduates, of varying ages, career stages, and types of higher education experience, to examine how they think about purpose and work.⁵ Since the mid 20th-century, Gallup has explored global measures of well-being in terms of five interrelated elements: purpose well-being, social well-being, financial well-being, community well-being, and physical well-being. In examining the relationships among these, Gallup identified purpose (defined as liking what you do every day and learning or doing something interesting each day) as the most important element given its disproportionate impact on one’s overall well-being.

The Bates/Gallup study was designed to build on the existing research related to purpose well-being by specifically examining the extent to which college graduates seek purpose in their work. The findings were striking. Eighty percent of college graduates say that it is very important (37%) or extremely important (43%) to derive a sense of purpose from their work. Yet less than half succeed in finding purposeful work, and purposeful work was found to be particularly important to the younger workforce. Reflection and self-understanding are central to finding purpose—graduates who align their work with their interests, values, and strengths are three times more likely to experience high purpose than those with low levels of reflection. Finally, graduates with high purpose in work are almost ten times more likely to have high overall well-being. Only 6% of those who have low levels of purpose in their work have high levels of well-being, whereas fully 59% of those with high purpose in work have high well-being.

I offer this study not as the definitive word on a topic as deep and rich as “purpose.” Rather, I mean to describe the impulse we had at Bates, as we moved forward in developing the Purposeful Work program, to pressure-test our assumptions with a broader audience not necessarily steeped in the goals and methods of a liberal arts education.

Concluding Thoughts

We live in a world defined increasingly by complexity, uncertainty, and rapid change, where a college graduate can expect to have multiple distinct jobs before the age of 50. It is no longer sufficient or even plausible, therefore, to prepare our students for work or career based on the availability of a particular kind of first job, or on the notion of “career” as a stable and well-defined pathway through life. Instead, the ability to sustain work over a lifetime will increasingly depend on individual agency that combines the content knowledge, cognitive skills, and interpersonal abilities required for employment with a mindset of informed self-determination and adaptability.

Far from being irrelevant to preparing students for work and career, these are precisely the strengths that a liberal arts education brings to the table.

The Purposeful Work program at Bates reflects the efforts and contributions of many, including faculty, staff, students, parents, alumni, and outside experts. It began with an idea and generative discussions on campus, followed by the appointment of the “Purposeful Work Working Group” that crafted its report and recommendations in 2013-14, further program development led by a small design team reporting to the President, and the creation of the Center for Purposeful Work in the fall of 2018.

To find out more about the Bates Center for Purposeful Work, visit https://www.bates.edu/purposeful-work.

To learn about other efforts across higher education focused on the education of the whole person for growth and transformation, visit https://thecte.org.

This article was written by Clayton Spencer and published by The Center for Social Concerns in Higher Education for Human Flourishing in Spring 2024. For more information, please visit the Center for Social Concerns website.

Notes

1. Gomes, Peter, Never Give Up! And Other Sermons Preached at Harvard, 2008–2010, ed. Cynthia Wight Rossano, Cambridge Memorial Church, Harvard University, 2011, p. 21.
2. Ibid., p. 41.
3. Richard Courtemanche, “Portraits and Voices: Shoemaking Skills of Generations,” Exhibition, Museum L-A, Lewiston, Maine (2012).
4. Almost half of Bates faculty have formally integrated aspects of Purposeful Work into their classes, and all Bates students at this point engage with the program over the course of their college, many in multiple ways.
5. The final report of the Bates/Gallup survey may be found in full here: bates.edu/purposeful-work.