Beyond Funding: Bellarmine, ASU, and George Fox
We were privileged to speak with several of the principal investigators of 2024 grants while they attended the Program for Leadership and Character’s spring visit. Below are a few comments they offered in response to what is most exciting about what they are learning from their grant projects.
JON BLANDFORD, BELLARMINE UNIVERSITY: “We’re raising different types of questions, But it’s ultimately about raising questions of meaning and purpose and value. And that we think doing that–and doing that over time–is going to form our students into the best versions of themselves. That’s an exciting thing to say about what an education does. If they’re leaving as the best versions of themselves, or at least with the potential to become the best versions of themselves, then I feel very good about what we’re doing.”
JOAN MCGREGOR, ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY: “I’m pleasantly surprised how many faculty are really excited about the project and excited to get involved in it. We’re running what we’re calling communities of practice, where we have these workshops together. We lead out with certain things, but we are also finding that there’s a lot of great contributions. So we’re really kind of learning from one another.”
JOSEPH CLAIR, GEORGE FOX UNIVERSITY: “The resources of the grant have created a cross-campus leadership group called the Formation Working Group. We met every other week for two hours. And just the relationship and the conversation around the table, I think, has literally set the table for the work that we want to do. I think many of us just live in isolation and in silos and busyness in higher ed. [We] don’t get out of our area enough to even have the conversations with other leaders, because the work of character formation has to be, unsiloed, multi-disciplinary conversation to really work on a campus. And yet, that’s the hardest thing to do. And so the grant has given us the leeway and the resources to have that conversation.”