The beginning of the school year brings a familiar chore for teachers, revising and updating our course syllabi. As Peter Meilaender notes in his column, “Education for Bureaucracy,” this routine task has, in recent years, been getting more burdensome. While syllabi once were usually fairly concise and straight­forward documents, they are getting much longer as new requirements keep getting created. Many of these are easy enough to satisfy. For example, attendance policies and grading schemes must now be spelled out, which most teachers already were doing. We also must notify students of various forms of aid available to them, such as tutoring or disability assistance. I am skeptical that a syllabus is the best way to convey this kind of information to those students who most need it, but there is no harm in including it, so I copy and paste the recommended language and don’t think much about it.

However, one requirement has proven more challenging. We now must specify in our syllabi how specific parts of our courses will help students achieve the Student Learning Objectives, a university-wide set of goals adopted a few years ago and referred to (apparently without irony) as the SLOs.  A few of these SLOs cover the kinds of things that students would do in any course, such as demonstrating “content knowledge” and learning to “communicate clearly and effectively.” Others, however, are more ambitious in that they focus on things like becoming “active learners,” learning to “interact and collaborate effectively in groups,” and even cultivating “the virtues of empathy, honesty, and justice.”

So I am left to ponder, what part of my class helps students cultivate empathy? Does that happen during class discussions or pop quizzes? Will reading a particular journal article lead them to practice justice? Like most professors, I don’t much like new rules that make my job harder, but I cannot deny that there is value in taking time to consider what kind of long-term impact my courses might have on students.  The end of an education is not simply to learn things; it is to become the kind of person who lives a life of learning. And as Mark Schwehn helped us recognize in Exiles from Eden (1993), scholarship is not a solitary pursuit. Universities are communities whose members join together in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding and who also seek to cultivate virtues that are appropriate and necessary to the pursuit of knowledge and understanding, virtues like self-discipline, humility, faith, and charity.

This issue of The Cresset explores this relationship between learning and the virtues that learning both needs and nurtures. In “Knowledge and Beauty,” Messiah College’s Peter Kerry Powers asks first-year college students to approach their education as a path not to empowerment but to humility, an opportunity to become aware of all they do not know. In “The Imponderability of the Past,” Thomas Albert Howard of Gordon College explores how the study of history cultivates the virtue of prudence as we both learn from the past and recognize the limits of our ability to know it. Harold K. Bush of St. Louis University reviews James K. A. Smith’s How (Not) to Be Secular (Eerdmans, 2014), a book that guides readers through the writings of philosopher Charles Taylor and reflects on how to live a life of faith in a post-Christian, secular age. And in “Thinking About Love,” Ian Clausen, a Lilly Fellow at Valparaiso University, demonstrates how Christians can engage in philosophical reflection on the nature of love.

What happens in a university classroom inevitably has much to do with character formation. This does not mean that teachers should act like moral scolds, but that teachers have a responsibility to help students cultivate certain habits and virtues. In our classrooms, students are introduced not just to new ideas, but to new ways of thinking.  As important as learning the subject matter is how they learn to engage it and how they learn to engage one another, as members of communities dedicated to the pursuit of learning.

—JPO