In our conversations with ECI community members, one theme that surfaces is the interpersonal and institutional challenges individuals need or want to overcome to get to character work. Educators often face structural and relational barriers as well as a well-documented resistance to cultural change. This has made us wonder whether facing these barriers is, in fact, part of or central to character work.
Consider, for instance, the work of moral repair. There is nothing more mundane than the need for repair in human relationships, but it is surprising how often we fail to be the kind of people who are willing and able to do this work. In his recent interview with Ezra Klein, Bryan Stevenson notes that clergy in his community respond to the individual desire for redemption without acts of confession or repentance by saying,
“‘Oh, no, it doesn’t work like that. You have to first confess. You have to repent. But you shouldn’t fear it.’ They will lovingly tell you: ‘Do not fear confession and repentance.’ And they’ll explain to you that confession and repentance, acknowledgment, is what opens up your heart to grace and mercy. That’s how redemption happens. That’s how repair happens. In a love relationship, we learn that we have to sometimes be willing to say: ‘I’m sorry.’ Show me two people who’ve been in love for 50 years, and I’ll show you two people who have learned how to apologize to one another when they offend, when they make a mistake.”
Stevenson concludes, “We understand that in our personal lives, but I think the same is true in our collective life, our communal life, our national life.”
Margaret Urban Walker contends that moral repair involves practices that foster “the basic elements that sustain human beings in a recognizably moral relationship” (2006, 23). Confession, truth-telling, repentance, forgiveness, reconciliation, and amends-making are among those practices most central to this project. These activities seek to renew a victim’s “trust and hope in a shared sense of value and responsibility” (2006, 28). Although Walker’s analysis focuses largely on reparative activities necessary to fulfill these aims after significant wrongdoing, moral repair requires more than reparative acts. It requires a community that is well disposed to engage in this vital moral task. The task of moral repair is never merely an individual moral task; restoring, renewing, or creating conditions vital to trust and hope is an exercise of the community itself. As Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, writes: “If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.” Within these communities, individuals experience conditions that attune them to others and the important work of repair.
Moral repair requires more than reparative acts. It requires a community that is well disposed to engage in this vital moral task. The task of moral repair is never merely an individual moral task; restoring, renewing, or creating conditions vital to trust and hope is an exercise of the community itself.
But communities sometimes fail to appreciate their role in the project of moral repair. They lack the appropriate sensitivity to the summons to restore, reestablish, or recreate the expectations that can support mutual trust and concern. There are communities that are indifferent to and lack vigilance for their role in holding wrongdoers accountable, or addressing the harms to victims who have been wronged. Even in those cases where communities engage in reparative activities, they may fail to do so in a way that demonstrates sufficient appreciation of the deep existential needs of those whose identity, character, and capacity for hope and trust have been destroyed because of harmful social structures or activities. And there are communities that fail to demonstrate sufficient seriousness about social structures and standards that are themselves transgressive.
If this is true of communities in general, it is true of our campus communities as well. There are deep divisions and fractures within colleges and universities — relational harm that occurs between and among faculty, staff, and students. And institutions often lack the will and the tools to do restorative work well. Institutions of higher education sometimes create rifts and fractures within the communities in which they are located, increasing distrust between “town and gown.” Trust is difficult; rebuilding trust may be even more challenging. Character work at colleges and universities cannot pretend these rifts do not exist. It cannot ignore the fractures within, and it cannot overlook the damages they sometimes cause.
There are deep divisions and fractures within colleges and universities — relational harm that occurs between and among faculty, staff, and students. And institutions often lack the will and the tools to do restorative work well.
Thankfully, there have always been exemplary institutions of higher education and moral communities more generally that have nurtured a commitment to the work of moral repair. We can look to them for inspiration and guidance on how to begin this work.
One might think of the role of the “second curriculum” at HBCUs in shaping individuals for liberatory movements, or the work of civic and church leaders in preparing college students for direct action through practices of rehearsal and performance. In the present moment, we see restorative work in institutions like Fort Lewis College that are showing us what it looks like to make reconciliation central to a new way of imagining character. Institutions like Utah State University are helping us to understand the character of peacebuilders who work to address and transform conflict within their communities. Brandeis University is inviting faculty, staff, and students into conversations to help imagine what it would mean to become a Just Community. We need other individuals and institutions to help us think deeply about how character matters for repairing the fractures colleges and universities sometimes create within their communities, or how character matters for healing long-standing divisions within the college or university itself.
Part of what it means to educate character is to form individuals and institutions for wholeness. To become whole, we must tend to what is broken and stands in need of healing. Wendell Berry, in his speech “Health is Membership,” notes the connection this way:
“The word ‘health,’ in fact, comes from the same Indo-European root as ‘heal,’ ‘whole,’ and ‘holy.’ To be healthy is literally to be whole; to heal is to make whole…If we were lucky enough as children to be surrounded by grown-ups who loved us, then our sense of wholeness is not just the sense of completeness in ourselves but also is the sense of belonging to others and to our place; it is an unconscious awareness of community, of having in common. It may be that this double sense of singular integrity and of communal belonging is our personal standard of health for as long as we live. Anyhow, we seem to know instinctively that health is not divided.”
Character-building efforts that neglect the work of moral repair fail to realize the full promise of character formation that aims at wholeness. Character-building is transformative not merely because it forms individuals to contribute well to their communities; in its fullness, it promises to form communities and individuals for the restoration of trust and hope that renew human relationships in contexts of great need, division, and, at times, near despair. As Stevenson notes, this is true both in our personal lives and at the level of the community and even the nation. Stevenson’s work of ensuring that a truthful history of our nation’s systemic wrongdoing and complicity in horrific evil is part of what it means to do this work even when repair remains elusive. This commitment to restoration and repair cannot be peripheral to our efforts as character educators; it must be a focal concern.
Character-building is transformative not merely because it forms individuals to contribute well to their communities; in its fullness, it promises to form communities and individuals for the restoration of trust and hope that renew human relationships in contexts of great need, division, and, at times, near despair.
But no note on moral repair as a central aspect of character-building efforts would be complete without an acknowledgment that repair is not always possible. Some things may not be able to be fixed, institutionally or personally. There are fractures that cannot be healed, discord that cannot be brought into a harmony rooted in justice, and workplaces where we may simply never belong.
Character work that exhibits wholeness must be true and accountable to these realities. Given how power operates, desires for repair, vulnerability, and connection can be weaponized against those whose abiding concern and commitment is for wholeness. And we understand that, while repair may be desirable, there are times when relationships must end, and vocations take a turn — complete with all the attendant grief that accompanies loss. Those who truly care about repair, and about character, will feel this grief most acutely. As Alasdair MacIntyre once observed, “…what matters about character is, in key part, what we are pained by….” So, we need to do more than draw inspiration from historic and contemporary exemplars of relational repair; we need to attend to the stories of individuals and communities whose commitments to real repair and integrity move them to refuse a false, feigned, or counterfeit communion.
Dr. Aaron D. Cobb is Director of Collective Learning for the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University.
Dr. Emily Hunt-Hinojosa is Director of Research and Community Impact for the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University.