Virtues & Vocations: Higher Education for Human Flourishing is an open invitation to a conversation, a community, and a set of contested aspirations for both how we ought to live together in this world and how higher education might serve those aspirations. It is also animated by a highly contested, largely untested hypothesis that higher education can, in fact, promote human flourishing. In this magazine, when we talk about flourishing, we do so as Aristotle did, rooting it in the cultivation of character.

In August 2017, just a few days after a white supremacist mob marched on the University of Virginia, one of their most eminent and committed professors, Chad Wellmon, wrote a provocative piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Virtues and vocations are classical moral concepts that invite fresh ways to think about how the educational process can make a difference for the moral life of their students.

The formation of elites has always been an uncomfortable subject for Americans because we think the whole idea of elites somehow violates our democratic ethos. In a society of equals, it feels wrong to speak of how a leadership class should be fostered.