Virtue for Academic Flourishing: An Argument for the Importance of Character in the Higher Education

Abstract

Recent years have seen growing interest in the idea that education should be taken as one of its core aims of individual and societal flourishing, with a particular emphasis on the formation of students’ moral character. This movement has also provoked critique, however, on the grounds that efforts at character formation are extraneous to a university’s primary mission in the generation, preservation and transmission of knowledge, or on the grounds that faculty and staff are ill-equipped for this task, or because conceptions of the virtues vary across cultures. While reasonable responses can arguably be put forward to these objections, a further compelling case for the importance of character formation for academic institutions can be made from the fact that the moral character of a college’s or university’s faculty and students is arguably critical for its success in its core cognitive and epistemic aims, notably including teaching and research. Making use of the moral theory set out in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, we explore how many aspects of a university’s core academic functions would be (and indeed are) hindered by students’ and faculty’s lack of virtues such as courage and patience, temperance and studiousness, prudence and ‘teachability,’ and justice and honesty.