Excerpts from "Renewing the Wellsprings of Responsibility"

Dr. Nathan Hatch is President of Wake Forest University. In March 2009 he delivered a keynote address to the Council of Independent Colleges entitled Renewing the Wellsprings of Responsibility. Dr. Hatch's comments provide an accurate assessment of the perspective that many students on American campuses have about life, college majors and their future careers. The following are excerpts from Dr. Hatch's address. I agree wholeheartedly with his observations.

There has been something seriously out of whack with Americans’ relationship to work—at least those with college educations who pursue professional and management positions. On the one hand, we are clearly working at a more furious pace. Among the top fifth of earners, long weeks have increased by eighty percent since 1980; and Blackberries and cell phones have further eroded social time, blurring the boundaries between work, home, and leisure. Judith Shelevitz has written about bringing back the Jewish observance of the Sabbath as one way to extricate herself from a society that pegs status to overachievement. How else, she asks, can we shut down the machinery of self-censorship about work, or still the murmur of self reproach about not getting enough done. 1

There is also a second problem with contemporary professional life, beyond the fact that work looms larger in our lives. It is that young people have been defining success and choosing careers with less attention to larger questions of meaning and purpose. The stratospheric salaries in investment banking, in consulting, in the premier law firms, and in specialized sectors of medicine have bedazzled a whole generation of our best students. Yet despite their financial success, there are signs of acute frustration by many young professionals. Often, work does not satisfy or sustain. An astounding seventy-eight percent of new lawyers leave their firm by the end of their fifth year—up from sixty percent in 2000. 2

How do we train leaders, Father Theodore Hesburgh often asked, not just to make a living, but how to live? What can colleges and universities do to form leaders who, to use a poignant example, might have a twinge of conscience about a system that sold mortgages without restraint to persons with little ability to make future payments? “We don’t just need a financial bailout,” Tom Friedman has suggested in his piece “The Great Unraveling,” “we need an ethical bailout.”

Our culture and our students are thirsty for reconnecting issues of meaning and purpose to vocational discernment, but colleges and universities today have a much harder time doing this than in the past. What is heartening is the number of experiments that are seeking to address the issue. To do this effectively on behalf of our students, will mean working against the gravitational forces of the modern academy. To broach the issue of shaping character, to suggest that there are religious and spiritual resources that might be useful in that effort, to delve into student’s beliefs and commitments, and to take on a subject matter that falls outside normal disciplinary boundaries—all make for a complex if not precarious effort.

1 Judith Shulevitz, “Bring Back the Sabbath,” The New York Times, March 2, 2003.

2 http://www.jdblissblog.com/attorney_retention.html. See also Pauline W. Chen, “Medical Student Burnout and the Challenge to Patient Care,” The New York Times, October 31, 2008.