Can Character Be Taught? with Will Inboden

Welcome to all of you joining us for today’s online conversation with Dr. William Inboden on Can Character Be Taught? We’re delighted that so many of you have registered for today’s program. We really appreciate the honor of your time and attention. And I’d like to issue a special welcome to our many – I think we have over 101 first-time guests. So thank you for for joining us. And also want to issue a special welcome to our various international guests. We know that we’re being joined from people all over the world, at least 29 different countries that we know of, ranging from Argentina to Zimbabwe. So welcome from across the miles and across the time zones. And if you haven’t already done so, drop us a note in the chat box. Let us know where you’re joining us from. It’s always fun for us to see the community of people from all over the world who have tuned in. And if you are one of those first time attendees or otherwise new to the work of the Trinity Forum, we seek to provide a space to engage the big questions of life in the context of faith, and to offer programs and resources such as this online conversation to do so, and ultimately come to better know the Author of the answers, and we hope today’s Online Conversation will be a small taste of that for you today.

In many ways, those big questions of life boil down to essentially three: What it means to be a good person, what it means to live a good life, and how to live and order our life with others wisely and well. And all of those questions basically come down to character who we are as a person and as a people. Alexis de Tocqueville argued that democracy in America itself depended largely on what had been called habits of the heart, the shared moral commitments, sentiments, and practices that formed character and aided in connecting a diverse people. But in the last century, we as a society have shifted away from teaching character in schools and in universities to focus on different forms of learning. Technological changes have enabled us to receive our own customized information and entertainment streams aimed at capturing our attention, rather than ennobling our character. Institutions including schools, universities, companies, churches and religious organizations that once held moral authority and formational influence, are now in many cases distrusted, and questions about character and identity, while always contested, have grown even more heated and divisive and may even seem too hot to handle. So where does that leave us? Should cultivating character be a priority of education? Is it even possible to cultivate character education in a pluralistic and diverse society? In short, can character be taught? To help us wrestle with this question, I’m so pleased to introduce our guest today.

A long time friend, as well as a scholar, historian, and educator who has written extensively on religion, character, and its civic and even geopolitical implications. Dr. William Inboden. Will Inboden is the executive VP and Provost at UT Austin, where he holds a joint appointment with both the Department of History and the School of Civic Leadership. He recently served as the director of the Alexander Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, as well as the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas. In addition to serving in senior policy positions at the State Department and on the National Security Council at the White House. His books include The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, The Cold War, and the World on the Brink; Religion and American Foreign Policy 1945 to 1960, as well as other several co-edited publications. Will is also a lifetime member of the Council of Foreign Relations. He’s written widely for such outlets as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The LA times, USA Today, Foreign Policy, Politico, and many, many more. And he is also, I’m very proud to say, a senior fellow of the Trinity Forum. Will, welcome.

Hey, Cherie, it’s great to be with you and great to be with everyone else here today. Thank you.

Well, we’re really excited to have you here. You know, and as we start off, I think we’ll start with the basics, which is, you know, we often think about character education primarily in terms of encouraging personal virtue. But there’s also significant public and civic implications as well. And you have a unique vantage point as someone who is a historian, the inaugural director of a center on civic education, as well as someone who served in senior roles in international affairs and national security. So I’d love to get your thoughts on why does character education, as well as civic education matter so much, not only on an individual level, but even for the health of a democracy? What difference does it make?

Well, thanks Cherie. I mean, I think it it makes all the difference in the world. And, you know, I appreciated your reference to Alexis de Tocqueville there earlier. I had the privilege last year of teaching a class on the American idea, which, uh, which included a big unit on Tocqueville. And it was great to get reacquainted with him there. And, you know, one of the cardinal tenets of a well-functioning democracy is the concept of self-governance, right? Self-government. And that usually refers to the collective ability of the body politic, the people, to govern themselves through our elected representatives. But for collective self-government to be successful and flourish, we need individual self-government. And that’s what a lot of character is, right? Is the ability to, if you will, master and channel our passions, to make sure that our inner values and core, virtues connect us well with the webs of social and familial relationships and civil society that form a well-functioning, well-functioning political order. And so, you know, I think it all starts with the individual character, which leads to a more healthy, functioning group polity and then hopefully a well-functioning democracy. So, practically, what that means is all of us have a stake in the character, not just of ourselves and our friends, but of our fellow citizens.

Yeah. You know, at one point it was seen as one of the primary responsibilities of both universities and schools to inculcate and cultivate character as well as to impart knowledge. And it seems fair to say that that is something that universities are very explicitly moved away from. Will, why is that? What essentially occasioned the change where universities decided this is no longer in our purview?

Yeah. No, it’s a great question. And one I’ve, you know, spent a lot of time thinking about and studying, but also kind of living downstream from with my, you know, recent career in academia. I guess I’ll start by saying – I’ll come back very directly to the university question, but I’ll start by saying, you know, just to put out a fundamental first principle. I do think ideally, character education begins in the home, right? It begins in the home. It begins with the family and then with other important character forming and mediating institutions, especially, you know, speaking as Christians here, certainly the church has an important role as well as, you know, the other institutions that we may be a part of when we’re growing up. And so by the time we get to the university level, most students characters will have been formed, or perhaps deformed in one way or another. However, that doesn’t mean that there’s not a role for universities. And yet it’s, you know, universities have really deviated from that in recent decades. I think I’d point to two trends there. One is, you know, starting even in the 1960s when we had the the fraying and even rendering of part of the the social fabric of the country, some of which was quite, some very necessary trials to I don’t want this to be a overly wistful nostalgia for a bygone age, but what had previously been something of a cultural and social consensus on the virtues, the character of an American citizen really frayed.

And universities were often at the leading edge of that, just kind of asking fundamental questions about does absolute truth exist? Can some sort of, you know, unified culture exist in a pluralistic and fracturing country? And so many universities just became very leery of being able to answer those questions. And then the second thing was, as universities shifted to more of a professional or vocational training model of thinking. Right, it used to be maybe our role was to form the character of our students, but now our role is to equip them to get good jobs and to be, you know, productive employees somewhere. And again, I think that vocational, the professional training part is important, but too many universities have taken that too far. And then between that and some of the moral relativism, it left a vacuum where universities just kind of got out of addressing questions of character entirely. And yet the final thing I’ll say, which I think helps understand some of the turbulence going on with higher education right now, if there is a – it’s hard for there to be a vacuum in character education for too long. Eventually something else will come in to fill that void.

It’s just inescapable. And as you know, a number of universities over the last decade or two, embraced what, you

know, what has gone by different concepts, whether it’s DEI or wokeness or previously political correctness.

Obviously there’s a lot of problems with those movements, but I think we to understand them, we need to appreciate, part of it was an effort at character formation, right. It was thinking how to make students more tolerant. Right. More, more empathetic, um, more understanding of others’ lived experiences. And I can affirm some of those things. I’m, as you know, very critical of a lot of the excesses and distortions of that movement as well. But I think we need to appreciate that it was an effort to step into something of the vacuum in higher ed on no character, education or formation being being done at all. And so some of the broader reckoning going on with universities and higher education right now is realizing, okay, that got that those movements took us way off track. And yet, I don’t think the answer is to only jettison those and just return to vocational training. Rather, I’ve, you know, called that I think we do need a return to some sort of sense of the character formation mission of universities, particularly forming our students for their calling as citizens. Again, going back to that concept of self-government.

Yeah. Well, tell me more what you think that would look like.

Yeah. So. Well, you know, obviously we are a very pluralistic country, right? And, you know, the University of Texas is a, you know, technically a secular university or a public university. Right? So we don’t have any explicit confessional commitments there. But I’ll say again, speaking as a Christian, I believe in the concept of common grace. I believe in natural law. And I do believe that there are certainly some character virtues that can be, you know, known and appreciated and embraced by by all people. Right? Whether or not one is a professing Christian or not. I think this is a certainly a biblical teaching that we can see in, you know, Romans, Romans one and two, for example. And so that I begin with that as a theological principle, because I think that should give us the confidence to say, yes, you know, we can do some character formation work in universities, realizing that, you know, students will have already had some character formation earlier. So what it looks like, I think a, you know, all universities should have some sort of required core curriculum, which will include some training, teaching in the classics of Western civilization, which are not just about how do we know the world, not just getting into epistemology, but rather asking fundamental questions about what is the true, the good and the beautiful? What is a good life look like? Does human dignity and inherent rights exist? And if so, what are the implications for that? And the character implications for that is it is equipping our students to ask those fundamental questions about life, about existence and about their calling as citizens, especially as American citizens, and realizing that we’re not just here to get trained to have a, some sort of meaningful job, but also to exercise those responsibilities of self-government, to live a meaningful and flourishing life.

And I you know, I don’t think we need to be agnostic about character virtues such as honesty and integrity and loyalty, right, what those look like in particular ways can be contested, but, we’d be hard-pressed to find a rational person who would, you know, speak against those or question the importance of those.

Yeah. Well, there’s a lot to dig into there, Will, but, and gosh, where to start? One of the things that comes to mind, you know, we were talking about Tocqueville a little bit earlier and even just your talking about kind of what we hold in common. But by the time a student gets to the university, they have, they’ve obviously spent all of their life outside of it, and they have increasingly spent more and more of their lives online. And, so often what, like life online pulls us towards is not, you know, in articulation and reaffirmation of our shared moral commitments, you know, much less their formation. You know, it basically helps condition us to be outraged activists or addicted consumers or deeply distracted entertainment junkies. And so, you know, as someone who has kind of been an educator at these, you know, secular, prestigious research institutions for the last decade, how what have you seen just in terms of like the progression of students kind of coming in as we have become more and more kind of internet reliant and also like, what does one do? When increasingly for students life is lived online, rather than in the real world with an orientation towards our our shared life in common.

Yeah. Again, there’s a lot there. And I would expect nothing less than from you as a vigorous interrogator here. Right. Asking the tough questions.

I’ll just offer a few observations. Again, you know, one of the privileges of being in academia is being able to interact with 18 to 22 year olds every day, right. And it’s a great way to stay in touch with that generation. So a few observations. First, today’s college students are digital natives, as you said, have spent so much of their lives online and they are exhausted by it doesn’t mean they’re fully ready to give up their smartphones. I don’t think any of us here would be ready to give them up, but they are the two things I see over and over that today’s students are yearning for are meaningful human connections, interpersonal connections, really building friendships and community, not just online, like I said in person. Of course this is the post Covid generation, right? Some of their formative years were spent in such isolation. And the second thing is they are yearning to find something greater than themselves to live for. They may not always know what those answers are, but they just have an intuitive sense that there’s got to be more to life than just being a consumer or just the next achievement, you know, the next test score, the next certificate, the next job, the next diploma. And those two things that yearning for community and human connection and then that yearning to live for something greater than themselves, some sort of purpose.

That’s a lot to work with in terms of having those conversations about. Okay, well, what does that mean? What, you know, what does it mean to be in community? What are the implications of your character for that? Right. Going back to some of those virtues I mentioned earlier about loyalty, about honesty. I mean, those are fundamental to building friendships. Integrity, self sacrifice. Those are also fundamental to to living for something greater than yourself. And that’s why the current generation of students, it’s this paradox. On the one hand, they’ve become rather cynical about big political causes, if you will. They’ve kind of gotten exhausted by all the to and fro about those. And so, you know, the normal, more facile, idealistic appeals to rally for this or rally for that, don’t get them motivated as much. And yet that yearning for transcendence, that yearning for something greater than themselves, is still really there. That’s why I think we see a lot of spiritual hunger and yearning. Certainly, you know, some of this is obviously very much a yearning for some sort of, you know, connection with God. And that’s why, even though previously the last several years, it looked like a trend towards more and more secularization, that’s that seems to have I think we may have reached peak secular and we now be maybe, you know, there’s something of a, you know, pockets at least of religious reawakening.

But that’s also why, you see a lot of interest in the students and having meaningful jobs, right? You know, more and more of them wanted to go into public service, whether, you know, with you know, certainly I do a lot of work in national security. So we’re seeing a lot who want to go into the military or diplomacy or that or others just wanting to be more involved in community service. And even those who are more motivated by, say, a profitable commercial sector or business job want to know that it means something, right? They want to know that it will help them provide for their family, or will create more philanthropic resources for them, or will be a part of helping to create jobs for other people or provide more resources to societies in need. And so, those impulses, that yearning, like I said, is what makes it so exciting to be working in higher education right now. And, you know, our, my colleague in academic leadership role is to try to help, you know, meet those needs for those students, make sure that we’re creating a curriculum and hiring faculty who can really connect with them in those areas.

You know, that kind of combination of yearning and idealism and cynicism is, um, is so fascinating. Well, our mutual friend Yuval Levin, who talks a lot about the importance of institutions, you know, for institutions to have formative power, which they’ve had a lot of in the past. And it does seem like lately that formative power has definitely waned. And often for very understandable reasons. There’s many institutions that, you know, have lost public trust because they should they have done untrustworthy, unscrupulous things. And, you know, it’s also become clear that if an institution has formative power, it can also have de-formative power. And that’s happened. But I’d be interested in your thoughts, like what you’re seeing with students and even as an institutional leader yourself, and that there’s been a lot of lost trust in educational institutions. So we need institutions to help and cultivate character. And what do we do when so many institutions have lost public trust at a time when they are so needed? And there doesn’t seem to necessarily be a lot of things filling that vacuum?

Yeah. Again, this is a really important but really difficult question. And I’m glad you referenced Yuval, because he’s been so formative for a lot of my own thinking on the role of institutions. And as you alluded to, we you know, many, many of us might have this default assumption that an institution exists to serve me or to serve a purpose for me, and that is part of it. But as Yuval points out, institutions also exist to help form us. Right? That there’s very much an interactive effect between the individuals who participate in or served by an institution and what that institution does to us. And yet, when those institutions fail us, and that’s what the current generation has seen, right? They feel like they’ve seen, rightly or wrongly, I think they’re more right than wrong in this. They feel like our public health institutions failed us during the Covid era. This is not to relitigate any particular aspects of that, but there’s it’s undeniable. It’s an empirical fact that there’s been a loss of trust in public health institutions, higher education institutions, including where I work now, right? We’ve also seen a massive collapse in public trust. You know, our other governing institutions, you know, Congress, certainly, right, has very low approval ratings. You know, just about anyone in the US government does. Sadly, religious institutions have also seen a decline. Certainly the media’s institutions. Right. So we’ve seen all this decline in trust in institutions. And therein is the disorienting aspect for our young people today, is they no longer feel like they can trust institutions, and yet they still want to be a part of something bigger than themselves.

And how to how to square that is the real challenge. I will say, you know, so that it doesn’t sound like I’m just describing it, admiring the problem. That I have found that one way to help reforge those connections is students today. Young people today are looking for heroes. They want to be able to to look to someone, however imperfect. Still, you know, had something noble about what they did or who they were. And one reason why I’m a historian, I enjoy teaching and studying history is to be able to expose students to more heroic figures from from the past. And, you know, heroic is by no means means infallible. Just what I’ll mention, that for a number of years, I taught a class on ethics and international affairs, and, a lot of it was looking at contemporary ethical issues in international affairs. But we also did some historical case studies. And one of the case studies I would use for the students was the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, you know, the great German pastor and anti-Nazi dissident who eventually
gave, gave his life, right, was martyred in a concentration camp. And rarely do I encounter a student who had ever heard of Dietrich Bonhoeffer before. Every now and then, maybe a student who grew up in the church has, but they are just captivated by Bonhoeffer, right? Because he has such a beguiling and a lot of ways, inspiring figure. And yet one who also, you know, did have his own shortcomings.

But still, there’s something really heroic about him in his life. And seeing how they, you know, they can find inspiration in someone like that. Obviously, he’s one of the most dramatic cases there, but, you know, I often will in that class will teach the great David Brooks. David Brooks’ book, The Road to Character, right where he has these wonderful case studies of, you know, Dwight Eisenhower is another one that he profiles there. And so students, they’re hungry for role models, for heroic figures and most of those, many of those heroic figures were somehow part of an institution. Right. And so it can be kind of an indirect way to show them we need these institutions. Even Bonhoeffer, who was resisting most of the institutions of his day, had been a part of helping to create the Confessing Church as an institution. Right. And, you know, other heroic figures we could look at, we’re either part of institutions or we’re helping to reform or reinvigorate institutions. And so that’s kind of a backdoor way I’ve found that we can expose students to we still need these institutions, because if we don’t have them, it’s just a, it’s a messy cacophony of rampant individualism. And then also it comes back to students, hey, part of your calling is to be a sacrificial participant in an institution. And those human connections you want to form of other friendships, pretty soon there’s going to be leading you to institutions.

Yeah. You know, well, I’d love to hear you say a little bit more about that, because as you were talking about heroes, one of the things that I was thinking is that the choice of the hero makes such a huge difference. You know, if one chooses Dietrich Bonhoeffer compared to, say, you know, a Roman hero. And there certainly does seem to be a rise in the adulation of the fairly nihilistic, win at all costs heroes. And so there’s something that’s kind of like even before that, like that essentially attracts a young person to a Bonhoeffer as opposed to a Hector or the like. Oh, what? You know, as a, as an educator, what do you think about sort of that that that early work, that cultivation of the loves that might orient someone to, you know, a self-sacrificing hero as opposed to the hero who always wins?

Yeah. Well, no, it’s a great question. I want to come back to it directly in a moment here. But I will say, since you brought it up. Yes. As we look at some of the prevailing cultural trends, particularly among some young men, um, there’s almost two competing narratives, kind of, you know, trying to capture the hearts of young American males right now. One would be that more nihilistic Nietzschean will to power one right where they just want to admire strength and domination.

And the Andrew Tates of the world.

Exactly. Yeah. And I can I obviously, I would very much reject that, but I can understand where some of that is coming from is, you know, in this broader crisis of masculinity. But the other narrative competing for that would be the more Christian narrative. Right? And we’re seeing, you know, certainly a return to church and to faith for a number of young men to now some of them are trying to combine both of those. And I don’t think that you can fully square that circle. But again, it goes back to when we leave a vacuum in institutions, when we leave a vacuum in character formation and in heroes, something will come in to fill its space. And so rather than, you know, banning that field and leaving that vacuum, let’s bring something positive in. But to your other question, yeah, I return back to an accommodate me. At the beginning of our talk, which is about the importance of early childhood character formation in the home. You know, for many kids, their first heroes hopefully will be mom and dad, right? In different ways of course. Then soon enough, they realize Mom and Dad are fallible and then really fallible. Right? But something about that impulse of having, you know, parents you can look up to. And so certainly my, you know, challenge in calling as a parent is to be worthy of that from my kids. And that’s my appeal to my fellow parents there. But similarly, I would like to I think we need more character education in our schools. We sent our kids to a classical Christian school here in Austin. And that is one of the reasons is because we really like the way they do character formation right there. Very, very explicit about it. Now they connect it to, obviously, the classical virtues. And, you know, the Christian revelation in learning, but they’re very explicit about that. And so, we hope that that can, you know, not only form our boys. In my case, we have two boys, form them as, as young men, but also maybe inoculate them from some of the later, less constructive temptations that that might come along or other, you know, callings in the world to take them in a, in a very, very different, different direction.

Yeah. You know. Well, I see the questions in the Q&A piling up. But, before we get to those, I want to ask you a little bit, just about like, you know, where the rubber meets the road, how you do it or how you approach this. And I’ve been so excited to talk with you for a number of reasons, but one is, you know, you you actually kind of do live and work within secular research institutions where, as well as in a pluralistic society where, you know, a lot of this stuff is very contested, you know, not only just whether characters should be taught is contested, but even like the very nature of the good is, I know that you’ve actually won teaching awards before for having the class that was, quote, most likely to change your assumptions. So I wanted to ask, you know, essentially, how do you do this both in the classroom, you know, and as you referenced, you’re also the father of boys. How do you do it at home as well?

Mhm. Oh boy. Again, there’s a lot there. I’ll try to keep this brief. And certainly for our listeners I can, you know, I will answer the question, but I don’t want to hold myself up as too much of a role model in this. I try and I fail in many ways. But, you know, certainly starting with my boys, a lot of it is about stories, right? Trying to tell them ennobling stories, you know, reading to them. They know their dad is a historian, so I’ve got a register of those, but also a lot of those stories for them about my own upbringing, you know, mistakes I’ve made in the past or choices I’ve made or positive things I was able to do as well, in ways that can really, really resonate with them. We certainly are trying to train them in proper habit habits, delayed gratification, honesty, integrity. So we’re somewhat strict as parents there, but also wrapping it in the gospel of grace. And some of that for my own boys’ characters is me saying I’m sorry to them when I mess up. Right. And trying to model repentance and humility and forgiveness, too, because ultimately, no matter how much we try for more ennobling or perfect character, we will fail.

Um, and that’s, of course, where the Christian gospel is our is our great hope. Uh, in the, in the classroom, as I said, uh, a lot of it is about weaving historical lessons in where we’re teaching, but also, um, I try to do a lot of case studies for the students, and I hear I can draw on my previous time as a, as a policy maker and having been a part of actually crafting and implementing policy. And I’ll bring in for the students a lot of what had been real life case studies, uh, that
that I’d had to work on before and having them not just hear a story about it or read an account of it, but actually role
play it themselves and forcing us to ask, what decision would I make in this moment and why? And and would I be
willing to to live with the consequences there? Uh, and I’ve, you know, put them through some pretty rigorous ones
before. But that’s the great thing about the classroom is it should be a free space to explore ideas, to try out different
things without fully having to suffer the consequences if you get something wrong.

Right. Um, and, uh, and, and that that in turn has had a real, you know, character forming, uh, I think aspect for, for a
lot of my students, um, that it’s at the end of the semester, uh, you know, every university, including ours, will have the students fill out course evaluations. And those are helpful in getting that immediate feedback. But what I find most valuable, um, is when I’m hearing from students five or 10 or 15 years after they were in one of my classes. Long gone. And they reach out and say, hey, Professor Inboden, you may not remember me, but I just went through this particular
trial at work or this difficult circumstance in my home life. And I remember this lesson or this text we read in your class or this discussion we had in your class, and that really helped me navigate that. And oh my goodness, like those sort of
later accounts, you know, well enough to bring your crusty old professor to tears. Right. Um, and so and so that in some ways those longer term feedback have been more helpful for me in understanding what resonates and what doesn’t. Perhaps what stays with a student, you know, years, even decades later in terms of their own moral formation
and their character formation.

Yeah. That’s great. All right. Well, if you are joining us for the first time, you can ask a question in the Q&A feature. You can also like a question that helps give us an idea of what some of the more popular questions are. And I see that we have two somewhat related questions about just the very nature of the term. So I want to bundle those together. Ray Harris asks, not wanting to make assumptions, but would you offer some understanding of the word character? And somewhat similarly, Kevin Bryant says character is mentioned in everyone bobs heads like they understand the word, but I find it very misunderstood how you define it practically. So, Will, maybe you can kind of shed some light on the word, its definition and why we are, what we’re talking about here.

Oh, no. Boy, again, a really, really good question. Just off the cuff, I would say I think character is the, uh, the moral formation of a human being. It is the morally constituent parts of a human being. Right. So it is those values and those guardrails that that guide and shape our thoughts and our actions.

Great. Another question comes from Nathan Swanson, and Nathan says news outlets have reported the dramatic decrease in reading in today’s students. Those students consume content in bite sized portions like on tick tock, digital resources, etc., and often rely on AI tools like ChatGPT to write. How do we teach character and virtues in this context? And is there any hope for a revival of reading in general, and reading works that will advance character and virtue?

Yeah. Oh goodness. I’m spending a lot of time thinking about this and worrying about it and trying to address it. This is you know, that’s one of the most important questions any of us we’re going to hear all year. So thank you very much for that question. Yeah. And I’ll say that we are living in the midst of the AI revolution right now. I’m always something of a technology skeptic or I’m a little wary of anytime we hear a pronouncement about, oh, here’s the latest revolution, here’s the latest revolution. This one is a revolution. Okay. And I think we need to really, really wrestle with that. And there are some very positive parts of it too. But some of my biggest concerns were just expressed in that question. And I’ve seen this over the last 15 years in the classroom of the the declining attention spans, the declining ability to actually, you know, read through an entire article, let alone a book. And then diminishing writing skills as well. And that was already that atrophying of reading and writing skills was already taking place because of our smartphones and the digital revolution before AI then comes along and starts purporting to
do it for us. Okay. So I, this is a real, real challenge.

I will say this, universities, well, families, primary, secondary schools and universities are going to need to very proactively work against those trends. It doesn’t mean rejecting all AI. We also need to embrace a lot of parts of AI. But those particular trends of those diminishing, you know, reading comprehension. Attention spans and writing ability. We can’t just go along with that drift because that is going to, is leading to a profoundly disturbing atrophying of basic cognitive skills. And in turn, the pathways by which so much character is formed. And so, practically what that means something we’re going to be working on over the next year here at the University of Texas is reforming our core curriculum to include a required year long course sequence that will make the students read books. Right. And and how will we know if they’re reading those books and not just ChatGPT summaries? Right. Well, we’re going to have a lot of vigorous in-class discussion seminars in those, and we’ll even be reading passages in there and we’ll let the students know, because again, you know, sure, we may think, oh, lazy students are always looking for a shortcut. The students realize that these shortcuts are shortchanging them.

I’ve even seen this in my own life. I’m much older than all them, but my attention span for reading has been diminishing as well. And I need to work against that. And so but going back to what I said about their yearning for human connection and community, and so forming these in-person reading groups, uh, where we’re going to be talking about these these texts will help students, I hope, rediscover the joy of reading and the feeling of accomplishment you get when you complete a book from start to finish. Right? That’s no small thing, especially these days. Especially if it’s a really, really, really meaty book. But that in turn, I hope they will also see that, wow, this is training our brains better for comprehending a sophisticated, multi-layered unfolding argument, tracing the contours of personality and character development of the main characters in the book, especially if it’s a novel. Over time, seeing how the author builds and supports an argument and then addresses different objections to it. Similarly with writing, as I’ve said in another context, writing is thinking, okay. And so if we are letting ChatGPT do our writing for us, we are also letting it do our thinking for us.

And again, it can be an aid to some of the things we’re working on. I’m not a Luddite here, and even if I wanted to reject it, I can’t because it’s here and it’s not going away. But we do need to force ourselves to be doing our own writing, because that is training us to think, that is training us in taking whatever inchoate thoughts or impulses we may have in our mind. And how do I express these in a coherent way? And how do I express these in a way that may be persuasive to others? So you know, what does this mean practically? We’re probably going to be returning to Blue Books again, right? I mean, and having, you know, paper and pen and writing things out in class. So there’s other temptations are taken away. And I think and hope that we’re already starting to see some of this interest with our students, that even if it may not come naturally to them, that they will really welcome this. And so those are what our hopes are going to be because we cannot, we cannot just put our heads in the sand and ignore this revolution.

Yeah. That’s fascinating. So a question from John Owen. John asks, is it realistic to suppose the 21st century secular university can teach character in a way that Christians could affirm? Or is the most we can hope for the
university to allow individual faculty, including Christians, to teach character according to their own visions?

Hmm. Well, I believe that’s Professor John Owen at the University of Virginia, a dear friend and sometime coauthor of mine. So thank you for that, John. I’ll share my thoughts. But we need to have you on here sometime and hear your thoughts on this, too. So, it’s a very good question. Professor Owen raises, and again, ones that, you know, he and I, in different contexts, have to wrestle with in these secular, pluralist universities. But I will go back to that concept of common grace. Right. I do believe that there are some of these foundational virtues and characters that people of any or no faith tradition can generally affirm, even if the particulars may be somewhat debated. Because the possibility of self-government and, you know, a thriving constitutional republic depends on these, right? And like I said, I come back to some of the ones I mentioned before. Honesty. Courage. Loyalty. Trustworthiness. Integrity. Right. Aside from the most, you know, nihilistic or benighted cynic who could really argue against those? What do they look like in particular? Yeah, that’s a real challenge. But I think leaning in on on those, we certainly
would find, frankly, that’ll be an important part of restoring public trust in universities as institutions. I think a large part of the country would like to see universities return to those, rather than some of the, I think, more misplaced attempts at character formation, which became indoctrination that we’ve seen in recent decades.

That’s interesting. So Randy Tomlinson asks, he says, in looking at the loss of trust in institutions, it seems the trust requires an underlying truth. He puts truth in quotation marks. In what sense? In what some are calling a post-truth world. How do we find or come back to truth?

I’d expect nothing less from a Trinity Forum audience. I was asked in a panel I did a couple of weeks ago on what’s the purpose of a university? And I said, I’ll give it to you in three words. It’s pursuit of
truth. And again, Randy, I think it’s correct that we’ve really abandoned that with universities. And yet, I think that is a very important organizing principle that can govern all of our research, our, you know, science and technology research, at the end of the day, is trying to discover the truth about how the world is ordered, how the universe works, how matter interacts with matter. You know, basic physical laws there. But similarly in humanities and social sciences, even if most, you know, too many scholars might deny it. We’re all, I say this as a historian, you know, we’re all trying to discover the truth about the human condition, the truth about human interactions, the truth, the truth about about the past. And similarly, in the classroom, that’s what students are really seeking after. Again, if we may not fully realize it.

And so, you know, to pursue truth, one has to believe that there is a possibility of truth. And I certainly do as a Christian. But I think, again, going back to the common grace principle, I think when when really, really pushed, almost everyone would have to acknowledge that there is some sort of truth out there that they may be wanting to discover. I certainly hope that they will be wanting to discover, we just can’t abandon that. And that very process of seeking after truth, hopefully can give us the possibility of finding it. But even that process of seeking after it that requires the development of character. Right? It develops again, it requires honesty. It requires some humility because we often, you know, may not fully, fully see or discover that truth. It requires a certain empathy of listening to others about what they’re learning and their own journey for truth. And so I think it’s possible to believe in absolute truth, while still being very tolerant of others who may have different answers to that question.

So Richard Miles asks, do you see any evidence of a turn among Gen Z towards more formal ancient sources of character formation, such as traditional Catholicism, the Orthodox Church, or the classic Greek and Roman
philosophers?

Yeah, well, thank you, Richard, who’s also a longtime dear friend. And of course, a very important leader in support of the Trinity Forum. Yes, I do. And that’s that’s one reason why it’s been a great privilege to be a part of this project of trying to revive classical education at some of our universities, such as the Hamilton School at the University of Florida, which I previously led, or the School of Civic Leadership here at the University of Texas or some others, it is connecting our students with what a real yearning is that they are having, again, they are rather
exhausted by the chaotic cacophony of the 21st century digital landscape. And they feel just really, uh, I just made that up. I hope that rolled off the tongue. Okay, so, and they feel really disconnected from tradition, and yet they have some sense that, hey, I want to be reconnected to our forebears. I want to be reconnected to where we came from. And they, you know, find there’s something, someone who’s, you know, fond of a, you know, a sort of a higher church liturgy myself. There’s this goes back to that role of institutions outside of shaping us. Right. And when we are participating in a liturgy, knowing that many fellow believers
in generations before participated in this, knowing that it’s not just us coming up with our own thoughts and words and feelings.

Right. But it’s kind of kind of submitting to others that have been created before, and also that it’s something we share with many other believers, believers around the world. And so I think certainly in this rediscovery and return to faith that we’re seeing with some parts of the younger generation, it’s also a return and discovery of some of the more traditional forms of faith, whether you know, Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy or more confessional forms of Reformed Protestantism, which would be my own tradition. And frankly, that’s also why I think we’ve we’re seeing a return to interest in the classical world also. Right. Ancient Greek and ancient Greece and ancient Rome. And, you know, some of the institutions and cultural practices that they had, again, not always in the most helpful way. Like, as we said, sometimes this becomes a little bit more of a rather belligerent will to power, but it stems out of that same impulse of wanting to connect to something larger than ourselves or previous to us, and locating ourselves in the inheritance of some sort of cultural and civilizational tradition. And I think that’s helpful. We as human beings, we are not just, you know, a kind of atomized individualist. We want to be a part of something, uh, greater than ourselves, both with our immediate community and whatever past that we come from.

Yeah. You know, this is a this is a great but challenging question from Lee Barfield, who asks any suggestions for character formation for kids born in poverty with no men in their lives. Limited vocabularies and no, you know, close by positive heroes?

Yeah. No, that is that that is a tough one. Not that the other questions have been have been easy. So, and I’ll say, I have less, I have, obviously deep empathy for children in that, those really dire straits and those unfortunate situations. And I think we, when you see whether it’s, you know, crime and poverty rates, or despair or drug abuse, so much of it is connected to unfortunate children who come from those broken homes or places without, you know, pathways of opportunity. And I have a lot less firsthand experience or expertise in that realm, too. But I will try to take a stab and I will start with this. I’m enough of a believer in the resilience of human nature and the broader truths of the created order. I think students or, you know, children even coming from those very difficult backgrounds, we should not give up on them at all. We should not assume that they’re going to be consigned to lives of despair and lack of opportunity. And that’s why I’m a big fan of mentoring programs, especially faith based ones.

All children need a father figure, even if they don’t have a father in their lives. And so insofar as other men can step in and play that, that’s why I think we’ve seen some great success from classical schools that are located themselves in impoverished areas or inner cities, where the kids are coming from really difficult backgrounds, but they want to be challenged. There’s tremendous human potential in them when they are challenged, when they are in an environment of, where they’re wearing uniforms, where it’s more disciplined, where there are higher expectations for them. And that’s where, again, we’re all created in God’s
image. We have, I think, a resilience in us that even when we come from very difficult circumstances, that will, that can obviously shape and inform the direction our life goes, but doesn’t preordain, a really dismal, dismal outcome. And so I, but it’s again, it’s going back to our own quest for character. It’s on all of us to be doing more to help help the less fortunate. That’s obviously a very clear mandate of mandate of Scripture.

Yeah. Speaking of our own quest for character, Bethany Jenkins asks, she says, since you won the most likely to change or challenge assumptions award Ward, what assumptions do we make about character that we might need to be challenged about?

Oh gosh. You know, these questions are getting harder and harder. So well, thank thank you Bethany, I should, again I would expect nothing less from you. Assumptions we make about character that we might need to be challenged about. Yeah, I’ll say this, you know, speaking as a father, sometimes we may assume that if we just teach character in the right way, that it will automatically be embraced or, you know, our young people may live up to it. I also have a pretty strong doctrine of sin. Right. And so, yeah. And knowing myself, I would have to believe in a strong doctrine of sin, right? I remember starting one of my class sessions where we were talking about the flaws in human character and asking for a show of hands among the students. How many of you are sinners? And actually, all their hands went up, as did mine. Right. So but again, I say that to caution us against thinking, oh, if we only return to the more traditional curriculum or if only parents spent more time with their kids that a good character would automatically come forth.

Um, and the second I will say, and I would share this when I was teaching that the ethics classes even if we have, by and large, formed pretty good characters, let’s not assume that they will be self-maintaining and self-regulating. I can think of plenty of times in my life where even though hopefully I’ve had a relatively well-formed character, where I would slip up and I would do something, I would think that’s just not me. That’s not who I am, that I told that mistruth or that I mistreated that person. And then I have to ask myself, well, wait a minute, I did that. How can I say that’s not who I am? Because I did that right. And it’s a way of shirking
responsibility to say, well, that’s not really who I am. Well, no, if we did that, that’s who we are. And so that’s another I think, deficiency in how we sometimes think about character is not fully acknowledging our own shortcomings there.

That’s actually a perfect segue to a question from Paul Matisse, who says character development continues throughout one’s lifetime. What’s your recommendation to maintain virtues that lead to good and godly character after they’ve been learned? If we fail to have a plan for continuing, these virtues may just disappear and negatively impact one’s character.

Yeah. Oh, boy. This is another really, really important question, right? These are all good and challenging, but that one is especially important. And again, I have to first have the disclaimer. I’m certainly not a perfect model of that. But I will say that as I have grown professionally and advanced in my own career, even though I still feel like I’m the same fundamental person I was in my teens or teens or 20s. New temptations and character tests are always coming along, and it’s kind of like with each promotion or new level of responsibility, there’s also new tests of character. You know, in my current role here, I now have management responsibilities for a much bigger budget and a lot more people than I than I had before. And I hope I’m doing okay with this, but I’m finding that
it is bringing new tests and strains on what I would have thought are my character. And so how do I address that? Well, I’m, you know, still trying to have regular accountability sessions with some long time, you
know, trusted Christian friends.

Certainly regularly praying about it, certainly inviting accountability for my wife and going back to what I said about reading and role models. I’ve been, I’m always trying to read, read biographies, and I’ve been actually reading memoirs of a number of previous university presidents and provosts and kind of learning how did they navigate some of these challenges and tests of character that come with these new responsibilities? So those would be, I guess, a few practices I’m trying to employ, however, however imperfectly. I will say, the other test of character is higher education being in the spotlight like it is now. And now that I’m in this
leadership position, I’m much, much more visible is any character failings I have used to be, I could kind of hide them, or only a few people would see them. Now, you know, the whole campus will see them and probably the
whole state of Texas.

Oh, there are so many good questions here. And I sort of hate to, as our time kind of draws to a close, I’m going to, combine a couple of questions. So Walden Moss asks for those, unfortunately, who have may experienced more deformation than healthy formation. Do you have any suggestions or recommended resources for undertaking reformation of character at the college level or far beyond it, and somewhat relatedly, Pedro Lopera asked, in your
experience as a teacher, what are some novels or stories that are the best for learning about character development?

Hmm. Okay. Yeah. Some great stuff there. And I think I’d try to thread those together. Well, the first on the question about, you know, character deformation and failings, I go back, obviously, for all of us as Christians, the bedrock principle there is grace, right? And that we serve and worship a God of second chances and third chances and fourth chances. And that that, you know, the need to repent, to seek forgiveness. Certainly of our God, but also sometimes of others we may have wronged through some character deformations that in of itself can be healing, right? That can be humbling, that can be healing, and that can be, I think, restorative for character. As far as readings, I’ll mention two, um, you know, somewhat disparate, hopefully not too pretentious. The first one I actually first
encountered many years ago through, uh, Os Guinness and the Trinity Forum, which is Langdon Gilkey’s classic book Shantung Compound. Um, I highly recommend it to everyone. I think it may still be in print. It’s written in the 1960s. Yeah, I’ve taught on it for many, many years, but it’s not a novel, right? It’s his true story. It’s his memoir of his time in a Japanese internment camp with a lot of other Westerners in China during World War two. And the subtitle is a story of men and women under pressure. And it’s a great case study in how, when our lives are more
comfortable and free, we may seem to have virtuous character, but when we’re in a situation of deprivation, requiring sacrifice, or, you know, not having the material comforts and the freedoms we want, our real
character comes out, uh, and, um, my students when I, at the end of the semester, when I asked them to evaluate the reading list, they almost invariably would say that that was their favorite book.

I, it is just yeah, it is really, really compelling story of the surprising emergence of virtues in some of the heroic people in the book, but then also a cautionary tale. And then the, the other among novels. And I say this at the risk of some pretension, is War and Peace. It took me a long time to finally get through it. I read it about ten years ago, but I remember C.S. Lewis had said he thought it was the greatest novel ever written. But I think just a wonderful display of so many of the fragilities of the human character, and yet done against a backdrop of a strong sense of divine sovereignty and God as the author of history, and something a little bit liberating there about even when we may have some character failings, there still is hope. You know, Tolstoy’s doing a lot more with the novel than just that. But it is, especially when we’re talking about diminished attention spans. And for reading, well, if we really want to kick against those goats. Let’s take on the biggest one. Right. So it took me about two months to read it, I will say.

I still have not finished it, so it’s it’s on my list as well. Well, this has been a real pleasure. And in just a moment, I want to give you the last word. But before that, a few things just to share with all of you. Right after we conclude, we’ll be sending around an online feedback form. We’d love for you to fill it out. We read these. We really do try to incorporate your suggestions to make this program ever more valuable, and as an incentive to do so, if you fill out that feedback form, we will give you a code for a free Trinity Forum Reading download of your choice so you can read Shantung Compound or any number of readings that impact this topic. In addition to Shantung Compound, there’s a few others we’d recommend as well, including Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism with an introduction by our guest, Will Inboden. Will also mentioned Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His reading Who Stands Fast? is an excellent one. And our Reading The Loss of the University, with selections by Wendell Berry and Jacques Maritain, also seems particularly germane to our discussion today, so we hope you’ll fill that out. Secondly, tomorrow for everybody who registered, we will be sending around an email tomorrow, which will include a lightly edited video link of today’s online conversation, along with a bunch of other readings and resources to equip you.

If you want to go deeper into this topic, or even to host a discussion around it with other people, to kind of to discuss it and consider it together. So be on the lookout for that. In addition, we’d like to invite all of you who are watching today to join the Trinity Forum Society, which is the community of people dedicated to advancing Trinity Forum’s mission of cultivating, curating, and disseminating the best of Christian thought for the common good. In addition to being part of that worthy community around that noble goal, there’s a bunch of benefits involved in being a member as well, including a subscription to our quarterly readings, as well as a subscription to our daily What We’re Reading list of curated reading recommendations. And as a special incentive for anyone who joins after today’s online conversation, we will send you a free collection of our Great Lives reading collection, which includes eight different works, including Bonhoeffer, which will mentioned along with our readings on Abraham Lincoln, Augustine’s Confessions, and several others. A few things also to let you know about in terms of events coming up two weeks from today, at the same time, same space, we’ll be hosting Molly Worthen on a conversation around charisma, the hidden dynamic that changes the world, which is based on her new and fascinating book, Spellbound.

And for our viewers who are in Nashville on October 13th, we’ll be hosting Malcolm Guite, who is a poet, priest, scholar and musician, to discuss an Epic for Our Times, which is based loosely on his new epic poem on the Arthurian legend. So come and discover why Arthur matters now. And for those of you who are in DC on November 19th, we will be hosting our biggest event of the year at the National Cathedral, where we will be making the inaugural award of the Michael Gerson Memorial Prize for Excellence in Writing on faith and public life, and hosting an evening conversation around the moral duty of the writer in confusing times. As we wrap up, I also want to just send my thanks to our Trinity Forum team who put our vision and mission into action there behind the camera right now. But special thanks to my colleagues Tom Walsh, Campbell Vogel, Marie-Anne Morris, Macrae Hanke and Frances Owen. And of course, special thanks to you, Will. And the last word is yours.

Well, thank you so much, Cherie. It’s been an honor to have this discussion with with everyone. And I will actually use the last word to give a strong second plug for the Molly Worthen discussion in a couple of weeks. She’s a longtime friend of mine going back to graduate school. She’s got a really remarkable personal story of coming to faith, and her new book is fantastic, and she’s just a great picture of a faithful Christian in secular academia. So I look forward to tuning in for that one and hope everyone else will as well.