Scott Peters

Kenan Distinguished Faculty Fellow Eric Mlyn has been working on a new resource for those in higher education who wish to promote and advance social change.  Stylus Publishing recently released the edited volume Civic Engagement and Social Innovation: Toward Higher Education’s Democratic Promise.  In it, Mlyn and Amanda Moore McBride, University of Denver, explore the civic engagement and social innovation movements prominent on many of our campuses.  They also look at the government role in scaling social innovations – a topic that will surely grow more important as we launch public and private COVID coping and recovery efforts.  Mlyn and McBride discuss some of their  findings with Campus Compact President Andrew Seligsohn in this podcast.

“We hope that readers come away from this volume with a new sense of how higher education can respond to the challenges of this historical moment with a renewed commitment to our democratic purpose. This was important before this global pandemic – it is now simply crucial.”
– Eric Mlyn

What role does a liberal arts education play in creating a full life? Duke senior Joyce Er provides an answer in her Kenan Moral Purpose Award-winning essay. In her essay, “The Value of an Interdisciplinary Education,” Er reflected on how her desire to create something of value in the world led her to computer science, while her public policy studies reminded her that “there are no easy solutions—technological or otherwise—to the world’s biggest problems.”

This year, the competition opened a new category for the best graduate or professional student essay on how their research has informed their moral purpose or challenged prevailing ideas and institutions. Theology, Medicine and Culture Fellow D. Brendan Johnson described in his winning essay, “Moral Medicine,” how his studies in Social Medicine and Liberation Theology led him to question the inherent value structure of professional medicine, realizing, “the status of the poor becomes the ethical standard by which we measure the success of our actions, of our profession, or of our society.”

The annual Kenan Moral Purpose Award is given for the best undergraduate student essay on the role a liberal arts education plays in students’ exploration of the personal and social purposes by which to orient their future and the intellectual, emotional, and moral commitments that make for a full life. The graduate award is given to the best graduate or professional student essay connecting their research to moral purpose.