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In the thirty-fifth episode of the third season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Meghan Sullivan, the Wilsey Family College Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good at the University of Notre Dame. Sullivan begins by discussing an article she contributed to a recent issue of Comment focused on the future of institutions. While several of the institutions on which contemporary society depends are fraying, Sullivan focuses on the future of the university, the formative aspects of the education it proports to offer, and the threats AI poses to the university if that aspect of the education it offers is not clear and compelling. Sullivan then discusses the formative aspects of her undergraduate education at the University of Virgina, the season she spent at the University of Oxford’s Balliol College as a Rhodes Scholar, and her doctoral education at Rutgers University. In their own unique ways, those experiences contributed to Sullivan’s appreciation for the University of Notre Dame’s Catholic and Holy Cross mission, the opportunities she was offered to teach philosophy, and the discernment process that led her to serve as the director of the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good. She then closes by discussing the virtues philosophers need to cultivate in order to flourish in relation to their callings and ways that the relationship that the Church and the university share contributes to those efforts on behalf of philosophers, faculty across the disciplines, and the students they serve.
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
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Our guest is Meghan Sullivan, the Wilsey Family College Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good at the University of Notre Dame. Thank you for joining us.
Meghan Sullivan: Oh my gosh, I’m so excited to be here.
Todd Ream: To begin, you contribute an article titled “What is the University For?” to the Winter 2025 issue of Comment. Before asking you about that article and what prompted you to contribute it, perhaps it’s important to note that the theme for that issue of Comment is Institutional Reckoning. And in our opening note Editor-in-Chief, Anne Snyder, notes that some of the institutions upon which we’ve depended over the course of our lives have shifted their focus in recent years from purpose to self-preservation. She also sees spaces though, and places where existing institutions are reforming and new institutions are forming.
When you look at the university, in what ways do you see a shift perhaps from a focus on purpose to one on self-preservation?
Meghan Sullivan: Yeah, it’s a, it’s a very interesting question, and obviously you hear a lot about higher education in the news right now, but the facts on the ground and the local cultures at different colleges and universities, they vary quite a bit like they’re. No single strategy that like all universities in the US are pursuing right now. It’s one of the best things about American higher education is that it allows so many experiments.
I do think that many universities are struggling right now with an identity crisis. That, that’s one of, one of the symptoms or side effects of the fact that there have been so many experiments in higher education in our country means that sometimes institutions and their cultures kind of lose their direction about what they ought to be doing because there are so many options. And I think that plenty of universities are trying to have it both ways to, to, to be a formative residential experience for young people that accompanies them in a really important life transition. That’s one model of education.
Another model which we get from like Germany in the 1800s is the idea that universities should be kind of like batteries, repositories of research. Um, and sometimes those two goals can be in tension. Uh, if you are trying to run a major research enterprise, a lot of those faculty members are not going to be spending too much time in the classroom. Uh, likewise, if you’re going to invest really hard in student formation, it’s going to require it’s going to require your university to make trade-offs about how you spend your time and attention. There’s a certain size that formation works at. If you get too much bigger than that, it’s really not clear that you’re able to have a genuine community. So I think a lot of universities right now who have been trying to have it both ways are realizing that some of these trade-offs are more significant than they thought they were going to be.
Layer on top of that, this just, you know, really persistent crisis in public trust across the board in higher education, which got started before the pandemic, you know, really was exacerbated by two years of education being disrupted just in an unprecedented way by the pandemic. And now as we realize that we want strong institutions that help form a generation of leaders for our country, that help form the consciences of a generation of human beings that are called to deal with some of the most difficult and weird ethical problems we’re facing I think a lot of folks are looking around and asking, have we built our universities to achieve this task? And they’re finding like we’re not finding the answers that they want.
And so I was, I was very grateful that Anne Snyder invited me to contribute to that Comment special issue, because there are people writing about all kinds of different institutions that are going through transformations right now. And it’s not just, you know, it’s not just universities, it’s churches, it’s the military, it’s democracy itself. Like it seems like every institution in the 2020s is now hitting this period of an identity crisis.
But I was grateful that Anne asked me to contribute, because if I had to pick one of the institutions that means the absolute world to me, it is colleges and universities. My experience going away to college as an 18-year-old absolutely transformed my life for the better, and I do not want to live in a version of the United States that does not have really strong, well-grounded visionary colleges and universities in it. So I was excited to contribute to that debate. And I, I think this is a great opportunity for us to, to dig deep and figure out how we want to really make these institutions stronger and, and built to survive the kind of onslaught of challenges that are coming at us this century.
Todd Ream: In your particular piece then, you contend the university is also grappling with two additional problems, atomization and authority, problem authority.
Would you unpack what you mean when referencing those problems and perhaps even provide a few examples that you see as evidence?
Meghan Sullivan: Sure. So, so the kind of context for that article in Comment, the, the original question I got from Anne and the editors was are the universities going to survive the era of artificial intelligence? Like, can we, you know, we barely squeaked by in the pandemic. Seriously are we built for now dealing with the advent of AI? And it is a really challenging question. Um, AI, perhaps more than any other technology in recent human history, affects the mission of universities because universities are places where people go to form themselves intellectually. And the big disruption of AI is that it has the capacity to take on your thinking skills for you. It has the capacity to make decisions for you, to learn things on your behalf, to translate information for you. It is like the biggest possible challenger to universities that we could have cooked up in a science lab. And it raises very interesting questions about what university life will be like now that there’s this big competitor in the market.
And so that’s where the problems of atomization and authority come in. Problem of atomization, one of the, one of the features of college and university life, I would argue that this is true of high schools and middle schools too, to be honest, is that people come together to learn. Humans, I’m a philosopher, we are rational, social animals. We don’t like to be alone. We like to be with others. Many of the ways that our character is shaped and our habits are formed is by the other people that we spend time with.
Here’s the really interesting thing about artificial intelligence is until very recently, if you wanted to go learn a new skill or learn a new subject, you had to go be with other people. You had to enroll in that class. You had to move to South Bend, Indiana and live in a dorm for four years and breathe on other people and deal with them. Now, there’s a promise in many of these chatbots and large language models that we can develop products where if you want to learn something, it can just be you and your iPhone. Like you can learn it from the AI. No other human needs to be involved.
I’ve been doing Duolingo recently. I’m trying to learn German very, very badly. I don’t, I have no idea why I set this as a New Year’s resolution, but I’m trying to learn German for no reason in particular. And so I do my Duolingo lessons every day, and it’s like candy. It’s totally designed to like reward me for paying attention to it. Um, it, it gives me like really quick diagnoses about how I can’t remember how to say sister in German, which I can never remember. It’s schwester. But I do it all, just like me and my phone at 11 o’clock at night. There are some upshots to learning in this way. Again, it’s like totally on my own terms. I can decide how fast or slow I learn German. It’s designed to totally capture my attention and to get me to continue to do lessons. Um, it’s totally self-paced. It understands well the particular issues that I’m struggling with.
But on the flip side, there’s a genuine cost as well. One, like the whole reason we learn languages is so that we can communicate and be with other people. There’s something like really bizarre about learning German, so I can talk to a cartoon owl. Um, there’s also this question though, we realize that in our broader culture and society, one of the biggest struggles that we’re facing, one of the reasons why so many of these institutions that give our lives meaning are struggling right now is because we don’t know how to be with other people. We think everything is just, you know, we’re, we’re caught in our own little egoistic worlds and we think everything is just the project of “Meghan” development versus the project of doing something communally.
I am seriously worried if we transition to educational institutions that are totally powered by artificial intelligence where three and four-year-olds are learning how to read with an app on their iPad and college students are learning German from an AI that they’ve downloaded on their phone, that this issue of us all inhabiting our own individual solipsistic worlds is just going to get even worse.
One of the great things that education has done for our country and for our souls has been to bring people together to learn communally, to think that the project of discovery and caring about the truth is something that we do with other people, and so that’s a, you know, that’s an existential question that we’re wrestling with in the era of AI.
So that’s the atomization question. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Or should we talk about authority?
Todd Ream: Let’s talk about authority then now.
Meghan Sullivan: With the problem, that’s one problem is we’re all going our own way and AI’s just going to keep pushing us that direction.
With problem of authority, you know, I share this story in the article but when I was a little kid, I was a total nerd. And when I was 10-years-old, my grandparents got me the Encyclopedia Britannica set for Christmas. They realized, like, I, you know, I loved books. I loved information. So they bought me the Encyclopedia Britannica, all of them. It took up like two huge bookshelves in our living room. Um, I loved the way they smelled. I can still smell the, like Britannica smell to this day. They were way, way, way above my reading level.
I remember like trying to figure out how to look up the kinds of questions I was interested in as a 10-year-old, like what did killer whales eat and where does Prince William go to school? And just realizing, like accessing information from Brittanica, incredibly hard. You had to learn how to use the word index books and um, it really just kind of sat there on the shelf, like waiting for you to make discoveries. And I think we probably opened them 10 times before my parents sold them to Goodwill when I went to college.
But I cam of age in an era when if you wanted to know something, you had to go to a library, you had to go to an authoritative source like Britannica, and it’d be really hard maybe for you to figure out how to access that information. But once you did it, you knew you got a gem, like you got something that was really well vetted.
Well, then I went away to college. My first year of college is when Google went public. And I, I can remember being in my freshman dorm and one of my friends saying like, this is what everybody uses now is Google. Like nobody uses other search engines and this has all the answers. And as a college student, you realize, oh my gosh, this is like significantly easier than going to the library or accessing Encyclopedia or Britannica. I have the world at my fingertips. Like I can get the answer to any question I want through this algorithm.
And then your professors have to, have to tell you to like temper down your expectations a little bit, because unlike Britannica, there’s no master scholar running Google, like serving you the results from Google. It’s just an algorithm that’s making a guess about what’s going to make you happy. Like what do you want to look at? And it’s going to serve that to you and any ridiculous person on the internet can put something in that marketplace that the algorithm picks up and throws in front of your face.
So you have to learn to be discerning. Like, you know, you have all of these like discussions in your college courses, the advent of the internet that says like, don’t trust everything that you read. Just because it’s on the internet doesn’t mean that it’s real. But at least in the era of the internet, when you did a search, you got a list, you know, Google gives you those ten blue options, and so you could kind of see what was out there and make a discerning choice about what’s likely to be more authoritative and what’s likely to be garbage. And some people struggle to do that, but at least you can see that you’ve got some options.
Well, I think it’s highly likely now, you, you already see it happening with how AI’s being embedded in search on the internet, but it’s highly likely that in a few years we’re not going to have ten blue Google options anymore. You’re just going to have your favorite AI and you’re going to ask it a question, and it, with its personality is going to give you one single answer. Where did it get that answer from? Who knows? It got it from its large language model. It’s no, no particular website. There’s no particular human being that you can point to that was the source of that information or company or an organization that put that webpage up. The algorithm itself came up with the idea and it serves it to you, because it thinks it’s going to make you happy. It’s designed to be like the most relevant thing that you could be looking for. Relevance is not the same thing as truth. Like the things that I want to hear from my AI are not the same as the truth that I should know about the world.
So another huge problem we have to wrestle with is universities, high schools, middle schools, educational contexts, have often taken on this responsibility of being authoritative. Uh, we teach students correct organic chemistry. We don’t teach them ridiculous organic chemistry. Um, before we let somebody teach you a course about Plato at the University of Notre Dame, we make sure that they spent a decade really mastering the material so that the ideas that they put before you are true. They might be hard. It might be hard for you to grasp. They might be uncomfortable, but there’s at least a high claim to them being true.
Now, if we turn to AI to be our teachers, AI is the ultimate sophist. Just, it is not capable of caring about the truth. It only cares about your eyeballs. Another example of this that have been coming up against recently, I use AI all the time, like I love using Gemini. I’m writing a book right now about the Parable of a Good Samaritan, and last week I was just doing a deep dive into research about what St. Thomas Aquinas says about that parable in Luke 10. And so I was asking Gemini just questions about Thomas Aquinas, and it starts hallucinating Thomas Aquinas quotes like Summa passages for me, just making up passages of the Summa to try to answer my questions. And the reason was I was asking it questions that were kind of hard and also like only half baked.
And it just wants me to be happy. It wants me to like make progress on my project. And when it can’t find what it wants in the real Summa or on the internet, it just makes things up that kind of sound like Thomas Aquinas and says like, well, you might consider this. Um, it’s like, it’s like the world’s worst research assistant because it so wants to please you, that it’s willing to do just about anything to get you there. Um, and luckily I know enough about real Thomas Aquinas to like be able to sniff out uh, a mistaken answer when I see one.
But you worry about a generation of folks who’ve not had the opportunity to get a great education. You don’t have a sense of what’s true. You don’t have a sense of what’s authoritative and who are just, again, totally addicted to this really, really like easy to use, relevant app that’s serving them information that doesn’t even care about the question of authority. And so these are things we got to wrestle with.
And, and this is also atomization and authority, these are reasons why we cannot let in-person education fail. Like we cannot let our school system, our K-12 education system or our universities deteriorate or be disrupted to the point of not resembling the cultures that we’ve worked for centuries to build because these in-person educational experiences give us intellectual virtues that it is just not possible that AI give us.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to ask you now about your own education. You mentioned how valuable your undergraduate experience was and your desire then for young people to have access to comparable experiences, and that experience took place in Charlottesville at the University of Virginia, where you studied politics and philosophy and then earned a Rhode Scholarship allowing you to study philosophy at the University of Oxford’s Balliol College.
Would you just please describe the discernment process that led you to apply for a Rhode Scholarship and then the formative experience you had at Balliol and in Oxford, by comparison to what you had in Charlottesville?
Meghan Sullivan: Yeah, this is great. I’m through and through UVA fan, whenever UVA and Notre Dame play each other now, because Notre Dame is like kind of in the ACC, I just have a existential crisis because I love both of these institutions so much. Happily, Oxford never plays any of them in any, anything. Oxford has no, no sports that matter. Uh, Rhodes Scholarship, this is really interesting. It’s an interesting question because I discovered pretty early on in undergraduate that I absolutely loved philosophy, and it took me, it took me like two years to, for the light really to come on that I could become a professional philosopher. Like that was not, that was not an option that my high school in Greensboro, North Carolina, like talked to me about. But I had decided by the, somewhere between my second and third year of college that I absolutely loved philosophy. I loved very abstract forms of philosophy, and I really, really, really wanted to try to go to philosophy grad school and see if I could become a professor when I grew up.
Todd Ream: I take it something about Socrates captured your interests in particular.
Meghan Sullivan: Oh my gosh, I think I wrote, I did a count. My mom has this huge box of like artifacts from college that I’d saved, and I think I wrote 11 essays about Plato in college. Like anytime I was given a choice about what essay topic to do, I would do a Platonic Dialogue. I was like completely obsessed. Um, so I love it. I bring this up because the Rhodes Scholarship is really famous for being a scholarship for like future senators and presidential candidates and business tycoons. Um, it’s not often associated as a scholarship for people who really wanted just invest in like the life of the mind.
I did not play any sports in college. Um, I, you know, I was not, I was definitely not your kind of prototypical Rhodes scholar. The one thing was I was really involved in our university’s honor system. I think in part because of my deep, like, philosophical commitments and, and strong, like moral commitments. But UVA has this had at the time this really strong honor code where students will not lie, cheat, or steal. Um, and if they do, they’re asked to leave the community. And there’s a whole process where it’s entirely run by students. Um, and it’s a really big student government job to be in charge of the honor system at UVA. You’ve got to run for it. It’s like an all campus election. It’s kinda like being student body president.
Anyways, I was like a passionate advocate of the honor system. And so my senior year of college, I was elected the chairwoman of the honor committee. Um, and this was like, other than philosophy, this was one of the big things that I was involved in. And one of the rules at UVA, almost always, the chair woman of the honor committee is what at UVA we called politicos. It’s basically like the students who are the real, like future senators that are going to go to law school or are going to go work for McKinsey. But I was the only one that like, I wanted to be a professional metaphysician. I was like, dead set. I just did the honor code. I read philosophy books and I did the honor system.
And so it was very funny. I got that, I won that election. And the rule at UVA is they just always kind of nominate the honor chair and the student body president to be their nominees for the Rhodes Scholarship, because those are the, the, like the hardest core politico kids. And I remember, you know, talking to the leadership at the university and they said like, well, we’re going to nominate you for this Rhodes Scholarship because, you know, you won the election and clearly your other students think that you’re a leader.
But my essay for the Rhodes Scholarship was all about vagueness. Like the problem of metaphysical vagueness. It was like you’d never seen a Rhodes essay look anything like this. And I remember my mentors at UVA saying, we love you, Meghan. Like, you know, we’re, you know, we’re happy to nominate you for this, but there’s no way on earth you’re going to be chosen as a Rhode scholar. Like you just, you play no sports your other passionate after, after the honor system is vagueness and Plato, like Oxford’s not going to have any clue what to do with you.
And sure enough, I went, Rhodes at the time made you do these two, this week of brutal interviews. You had these two interviews back-to-back. You had to win the state nomination and then you had to win your region. And so I remember going to these interviews and all of the other students were like military academy students or again, like, you know, future lawyers. Uh, Pete Buttigieg, you know, a major political leader was one of the Rhodes candidates in in my year.
And I think what helped me is I, long story short, I got into those interviews and the interview panels had been hearing like pitch after pitch about a student who wants to work in like foreign relations or work for the government. And then I’d come in and I was like a breath of fresh air, because I was like just a total weirdo, philosophy, Megan. Uh, and, and also none of the panelists knew nearly as much about philosophy as I did. So when I got in the room, I was like, you know, very confident. And I think really entertaining to them, and to everyone’s surprise, I got selected.
When you get selected for a Rhodes Scholarship, it’s kinda like American Idol. You interview, the final interview, all day, and then they bring everyone back in the conference room at the end of the interview day and they line you up and they’re just like, you, you, you are going to Oxford. The rest of you guys thank you for participating. And so, and then you go and you, and you have to decide on the spot if you’re going to take the offer. So I just remember like leaving that conference room and calling my professors and they were like, “Cool, wow, this is really surprising.” So anyways, that’s how, that’s how I won a Rhodes Scholarship.
And then I got to Oxford and I fit in super well. I think the committee made a great decision because Oxford has a just world class philosophy department. I mean, this is the philosophy department that John Locke was, you know, a member of. I mean, it’s just, it was absolutely wild. And for somebody like me with my particular intellectual passions to be able to spend two years there just in the, in the place of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien and Locke, and all of these great figures, I’d never really traveled beyond North Carolina and Virginia at that point. It just rocked my world. Like, it just totally expanded my world. So I was very, very, very grateful for that opportunity.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. You then recrossed the Atlantic in pursuit of becoming a professional metaphysician.
Meghan Sullivan: Exactly. I didn’t give it up.
Todd Ream: No. You enrolled and pursued a PhD in philosophy at Rutgers University. Would you talk about mentors who proved to be most formative, perhaps, you know, even as far back as your experience as UVA, but also through your experience at Rutgers, and then authors in addition to Plato and Socrates, who also then became most formative to you?
Meghan Sullivan: Yeah, this is great. So Rutgers University in New Brunswick, I don’t your listeners might not know this, but they also have a very, very top philosophy department. It doesn’t make a ton of sense. Like Rutgers just decided in the 1990s, they were going to spend a ton of money on philosophy, ton of taxpayer New Jersey dollars on building what’s one of the, typically recognized as one of the top three philosophy departments in the world. Um, and man, you could not think of a different campus on planet Earth from Oxford than Rutgers. Oxford’s like medieval and contained, and there are these like, you know, thousand year old walls. Rutgers is a campus, four campuses, that take over two cities in central New Jersey, and they have a super highway that crosses through the campus. Totally different vibe, but I loved it.
Um, the, it was also just an incredible place to learn philosophy and I was very grateful that my dissertation supervisor, mentor, now dear friend, was a philosopher named Dean Zimmerman, and Dean was just you know, God puts kind of the perfect people in your life at the right time. Uh, Oxford was a pressure cooker. I learned to work really, really, really hard at Oxford, but talk about the problem of atomization. I also learned to like just keep my head down and, you know, work alone and just try to get the best possible grades and scores that you could get. That was very much the culture at Oxford.
And Dean has a very different view about how you are formed as a great scholar. Um, I remember we had these just awesome reading groups where we’d, you know, get a dozen donuts and we’d sit for hours and we’d read papers about philosophy of religion and we’d talk about them. And you were encouraged to form friendships with other students and really invest in like the social life of philosophy. Um, Dean, there are very, very few philosophers who have a deep personal faith and almost none in the New York area philosophy, pressure cooker that I was in at that time. Um, but Dean was an exception. He had a very deep personal faith and was very, very comfortable and adept at talking with me about what it means to combine your personal, philosophical and theological convictions with being a really great professional professor and researcher. So I was so, so, so grateful for his mentorship, and it was exactly what I needed at that phase in my life.
I had a great, I had amazing mentors at UVA who, you know, I’d come from a big public school in North Carolina. My mom’s a receptionist in a dental office. My dad worked at a china replacement company, like didn’t come from an academic family, and my, my mentors at UVA were the ones that really turned the light on in me about that I could be a scholar, that, like, that was, you know, that was a way of life that you could be called to and what that would mean and get, just gave me the confidence to go after it, as I said.
But at Rutgers, and so as an undergraduate, I had mentors that showed me what I could be. By the time I got to Rutgers and got to work with Dean, I had people who were really willing to accompany me on like being a good, well, what it means to be a good philosopher, and not just like good in the sense like publishing in the best places or trying to compete for a good job, but like, how do you have your, how do you, how do you care for your soul as you as you pursue these ambitions? And so I was, I was just extraordinarily grateful. I feel very lucky. I just had amazing opportunities at each step.
Todd Ream: You then accepted an appointment in the philosophy department at the University of Notre Dame, and as we’ve talked about, you’re the product of three research universities, none of which to this day retains a pervasive connection to a religious tradition or community, have echoes of it in their past in the case of two of them there, but not pervasive to this day.
As a Holy Cross in Catholic University, in what ways did your arrival in South Bend compel you to rethink the formative nature of the university and perhaps also your identity in terms of someone who committed one’s life to the academic vocation?
Meghan Sullivan: Yeah, it’s a great question. So, I mean, UVA is as secular as it gets. So UVA’s founder, if your listeners don’t know, is Thomas Jefferson, who famously rewrote the Bible and just took out all the parts that he didn’t like, which was like half of it. Um, so that gives you a sense of the religious vibe at the University of Virginia. However, much to Mr. Jefferson’s chagrin actually, my sophomore year of college, I found a very deep faith, and became Roman Catholic, converted to Catholicism. I joined the Church officially Easter of my third year of college. Um, but had a very profound faith experience my second year of college. And was accompanied by a group of Dominicans that ran a little parish kind of near my dorm. Um, and so made a, made a very, discovered a very serious part about my spiritual life in college.
I’m always reminded and I tell this to my faculty friends who teach freshmen, is that on the surface they might seem like they’re kind of a hot, confused mess, but under the surface, and they are sometimes, but under the surface there are some always big questions and longings and desires that are kind of brewing in there. And I, that was certainly my first year of college.
So I became Catholic and as he said, I spent my entire education after that at very, very secular places, Oxford, extremely secular, at least the version, the parts of it that I was a member of Rutgers. I was lucky to have a person of great faith as a dissertation director, but like the vibe in that philosophy world that I was in was, you know, pretty, pretty dismissive of questions of faith, which is kind of embarrassing if you’re a professional philosopher, in my opinion.
When the opportunity came to join Notre Dame, it’s hard to become a professor. Uh, some of your listeners might know, like it’s very, very hard to find any job. When you’re finishing up a PhD program like I was, it’s kinda like you feel like kind of like a soldier, like you’re just willing to be deployed anywhere, Singapore, Azerbaijan, like any place that’ll pay me to teach philosophy, I’m on my way. I just got so lucky. I mean, truly the year that I was ready to leave graduate school, the kind of dream job came to me. My family had no connection with Notre Dame before. As I said, I wasn’t Catholic when I was a high school student, so and nobody in North Carolina applies to Notre Dame if they’re not Catholic.
Um, so like Notre Dame wasn’t even on my radar as a possible college to go to when I was discerning college. But I arrived here and, you know, the first day I was interviewing for the job here, immediately felt the, the kind of sense of calling. I think that there are tremendous opportunities at secular universities like UVA and Oxford for people to discover their faith. I certainly did. Those Dominicans helped me tremendously.
But there’s something really special about a place like Notre Dame where it just, it’s an explicit part of the mission to help people discover God, discover God’s love for them and to care for their souls in a, in a very complete way. It’s just been like the greatest gift of my life to be able to like serve and join and be part of an institution, an institution that has that kind of explicit Christian mission. And it’s formed me tremendously. It’s like, you know, formed my faith life.
I’ll give you one story of something that I found deeply moving in the last couple days that just, you know, wouldn’t be, would never happen at UVA or Rutgers we you know, we’ve we were taping this episode in in the wintertime here in Indiana, and we’ve been getting just hammered with snow. And we have, we’ve had a lot of snow recently and a group of students took it upon themselves to build this huge chapel out of snow. They were packing recycling bins with snow and using it to make snow bricks and kind of like, you know, like medieval masons, built this kind of, it’s got, it’s got vaulted arches and crosses and spires, and they built this huge one-story snow chapel in the middle of the North Quad at Notre Dame. And last night one of our chaplains here on campus held a mass there and 1600 people turned out in like 19 degree weather to kneel in the snow. And like, and it’s beautiful. Uh, like they have stained glass that’s made out of ice and food coloring. I mean, it’s just wild.
I don’t think these students went to class either, by the way, in the last like two weeks. Like I have serious concerns about whether any of these kids have been going to class, but to be at it’s funny and silly and beautiful and totally fitting for what, you know, the kind of dreams of young people. And for me, the opportunity to be a part of an institution that helps remind people that we have these kinds of spiritual longings and this creative capacity and that it can just be part of way of life, that means everything to me. I think it’s, I think it’s absolutely beautiful.
So I love being at Notre Dame. The weather is pretty terrible. That’s one thing I will complain about that like the snow is ridiculous. Uh, I’m from North Carolina, like, I just cannot cope with how dreary the winters are here.
Todd Ream: I believe Father Hesburgh when asked why there is a granite mosaic on the side of the library there, he said, one, it’s a testament to our faith commitments. Two, and he said, the weather is abominable, and we needed something that could endure and persist through it.
Meghan Sullivan: Fair enough. That’s so true. Unfortunately, the ice chapel is probably not going to survive this week. I think it’s going to be 36 on Friday, and then it’s going to be a slush chapel, mud chapel.
Todd Ream: It. It hits 35, 40 degrees and risk management is going to be out there taping it off in some way.
Meghan Sullivan: Yeah.
Todd Ream: Thank you very much. I want to transition now to asking you to compare two of your books that are in print to date, Time Biases: A Theory of Rational Planning and Personal Persistence was published by Oxford University Press in 2018, and then co-authored with Paul Blaschko, The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning was published by Penguin in 2022.
Would you compare, in terms of your vocation as a philosopher, what led you to take on those two projects and then how you perceived doing philosophy, perhaps for audiences that overlap but maybe audiences that also, there’s different expressions of those works in terms of audiences that they would reach that might be somewhat different from one another?
Meghan Sullivan: It’s a great question. Well, you know, we mentioned this really briefly but when I started graduate school, I decided to focus initially on very, very theoretical topics in philosophy. So we joke about metaphysics is the basically the kind of catchall branch of philosophy, going back to Aristotle that deals with like questions about change and existence and the nature of reality. The really heavy stuff. You can tell how thrilled my parents were that that picked that direction. Um, but I, my work in graduate school and my first couple years at Notre Dame, my focus was very much on all of the puzzles that accompany our thinking about time and the passage of time. Um, and don’t Google those papers because if you go find them, they’re like almost incomprehensible. They’re like six people on planet Earth that would focus on those papers. They were very, very theoretical.
But my second year at Notre Dame, I started teaching a sophomore seminar on just questions about time and life. And undergraduates have about one week’s tolerance for very theoretical questions. And then they really, they really put your feet to the fire. They’re like, show me that this matters for my life. So they put a lot of pressure on me to start looking at time in economics, time in social psychology, and just how our beliefs about time affect decisions about how we live our daily lives.
And I loved teaching that class. Um, and it really expanded my, it really opened up kind of my aperture about all of the different really interesting questions that a philosopher can work on. And I got obsessed with it and started really thinking about, okay, there’s the question of how time works in reality, but then there’s also all of our assumptions about the past and the future, which affect our ability to feel meaning in our lives and to make decisions about what a good life looks like. And I love debating my students about those, and I loved learning about those questions with them.
And when it came time for me to go up for tenure, I did what you are adamantly not supposed to do. When you go up for tenure, you’re supposed to just like dig into the project that you have been working on and like ride it across the finish line. And against all sane advice from my colleagues, I was like, I am done working on the super theoretical questions. I’m now just very interested in this question, like how should we live our lives given like what it is to reason well about time.
And so I started working on that Time Biases book. Happily they did not fire me. They gave me tenure. Um, but that Time Biases book is my attempt to give people philosophical guidance about how to reason about all the trade-offs that we make in our life. Um, so, you know, really simple ones like how much money should a good person save for retirement to like, you know, really heavy ones. The book ends with like big existential questions like, we only get between eighty and a hundred years on planet Earth, if we’re lucky. And in the scheme of like the vast amount of time in the universe, that is nothing. How do we find meanings in our very, very, very short, very contingent lives? Um, and that’s also a question of time. So that was where I started to do the pivot.
Around that same time, I started teaching this course at Notre Dame. I established this course at Notre Dame called God in the Good Life, and Paul Blaschko was an graduate student teaching assistant on that course, along with a couple other folks. Um, but realized, like, I love talking about these kinds of big existential questions and you know, I love reading Plato. I love reading Aristotle. I love, you know, resourcing these great ideas from the past, and the Good Life Method book really came out of the experience of teaching that big God in the Good Life course.
So the Time Biases book got a lot of great attention when it came out. The New Yorker did a little piece on it, which was really wonderful. Um, and I realized I like speaking to public audiences. I love speaking to potential students. Uh, and the editor, our editor from Penguin, reached out to me and she’d heard a little bit about the course, and she’s like, you know, it’s not just 18, 19-year-olds that think about these questions of what it is to lead a good life. Like people in airports think about these questions and Penguin readers think about these questions. Would you ever think about doing a book for adults? And it was just a really fun challenge. It was a great project to work on with that graduate student, Paul, at the time. Now he’s a teaching professor here at Notre Dame. Um, and so just did it.
I would say, you know, if there’s one theme, theme that feels like podcast therapy. There’s one kind of theme in my career, it’s I don’t have a really strong like master plan of all of the different academic projects I’m going to take on. I very much like the kind of opportunity comes up and I really feel a strong sense of interest or calling in it, and I’m happy to just kind of jump in with both feet. And so as a result, I feel like if you look back over my 15 years at Notre Dame, there are these different chapters, but if you’d told me from the beginning what I’d be working on now, I would’ve been shocked.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Well, and perhaps the answer to this next question is your willingness to jump in with both feet because you established yourself in the philosophy department, made contributions, began teaching these courses, and expanding, you know, the audiences for these courses. But then you also decided to become an administrator and take on administrative work and roles.
Initially serving as the director of what was known as the Notre Dame Institute of Advanced Study, which has now become the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, can you describe the discernment process besides maybe a willingness to jump in with both feet?
Meghan Sullivan: My colleagues in philosophy still have not forgiven me for this one. They forgave me for switching topics at tenure time, but I don’t know if they’ll ever forgive me for joining, what we, you know, what we lightheartedly call the dark side.
Todd Ream: I didn’t say it, but I may have heard that phrase before.
Meghan Sullivan: You know, I, as I said, I was really involved with student government in college and actually one thing I’m grateful for is, as a result of that work, I did get to see as a college student, a little bit behind the curtain of just how universities work. You know, we got lots of advice from central administration about that committee that I ran, and they had some good mentors who themselves had chosen administrative paths just because total accident, because of that experience with the honor committee in college.
So one, I think I was very lucky that I just got to know some academic leaders who felt they had this vocation to serve in other, other, other ways than just being a teacher and a researcher and could and could also give you kind of reality check about how demanding those jobs are and how different they are. So I’ve always had, I’ve always had people kinda in my ear that that’s a important way that you serve a university.
I had no clue when I, I first became a center director of the NDIS seven years ago, and I can remember getting the offer call from our vice president of research and he’s like, you know, I was walking down our quad in front of the library in front of Touchdown Jesus and I’d sat down on a bench to talk to him and I kind of knew what it was about because we’d been discerning for a few months, whether or not it made sense. And he is like Meghan, he is an old grizzled veteran, an engineer who’d run an institute for 20 years and then been a vice president for another decade. And he is like Meghan, you are not at all qualified for this job. You don’t, you don’t know how to manage people on a budget and you don’t know how to do any of those skills.
Um, and he’s like, but you, you know, you’ve got, you’ve got a good vision for this institute, and we think that like you will eventually become a good leader. And so he is like, so I’m going to offer you this job. And I’m going to make you meet with me for an hour every month for however many years it takes for you to get some like practical wisdom in your skull. Uh, and before you make any decisions this year that are of any significance, you need to call me, talk to me because you’re just like, you’re so clueless. And we’re going to get through this together, and someday you’ll be good.
Um, and he was totally right. I’m very, very grateful for Bob who stopped me from all manner of self-inflicted wounds the first couple of years I was trying to direct that small institute. And it’s very funny, our Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, which the NDIS grew into is now a very, very large research institute on campus. We’ve got, you know, $75 million in active grants for ethics projects right now. And we’ve got a big team of faculty and staff that are working on those projects and some very, you know, very significant responsibilities.
And I had breakfast with Bob a couple weeks ago, and one, we were just kinda celebrating the arc of how much the institute’s grown, but mostly reminiscing about how much I’ve grown because like I have just all kinds of skills and insights that I had to earn the hard way by, by getting a lot of good advice and making some dumb mistakes. Um, but I’ve kind of grown into this job, which I absolutely love.
I mean, one thing, I’m, I’m going to have lunch today with a professor who’s just taking on her first center directorship, so it’s her first kind of tour of duty. And I’m so excited to talk with her because these jobs can be really hard when things are going badly, when there are budget cuts, when there’s a big, you know, when there’s issues with people, those are some of the times the hardest ones to deal with, when you’re kind of facing a tough strategic choice and you don’t know which direction to go, it can get really hard and you can feel really lonely.
But man, most of the time it’s what if you really invest in your team and you really invest in the work of your institution, it’s so rewarding. It’s so much more rewarding than just kind of sitting in Starbucks writing philosophy papers by yourself. And, and I love it. Like I love our crew up here. I love the work that we get to do. So I’m, I’m a big champion of like telling people, if they feel like they got the gene, not everybody’s got it, some people shouldn’t take these jobs, but if you feel like you got a little bit of the leadership and management gene, it’s worth the effort to try to grow into these jobs and, and everybody’s terrible at it at first.
I don’t know if that’s been your experience, but certain, like I also know a lot of college professors, you think like, I’m thertest kid in class, so I’m going to be the best manager on planet Earth. And then they take these jobs and you’re just like, oh my gosh, you’re a catastrophe. Like you’re making such bad decisions.
Todd Ream: Since the management and leadership gene is now part of your DNA in relation to the academic vocation, could you share with us how you’ve come to understand what the academic vocation entails, how you define it, what virtues are also critical to continue to cultivate in order to share it with the audiences that you’re called to serve.
Meghan Sullivan: Absolutely. So first we are called to serve our institutions. So, you know, there’s a, there’s a real challenge for a lot of early career leaders to think that their goal is to just kind of defend their little bit of turf, defend their projects or their priorities. And one of the biggest lessons you need to learn, and this is one that Bob Bernhard like drilled into my head and my thick skull, is it’s not about you. Like, you are not the star. If anything, you’re, you’re the, you’re the backstage stage manager at best, but you really have to stay focused on asking, like every day with every decision you make, is this what’s best for the students and my colleagues at Notre Dame and for Notre Dame to do its mission in the world? Or for UVA or for Oxford or whatever it is.
And the folks who like, and, and you got to sometimes make hard decisions on that front. You got to sometimes do projects that you are not excited about. Um, you’ve got to sometimes give things up. You got to sometimes give money back or give resources back to the institution because they need it for something vital. This happened all the time during the pandemic, saying I’m going to stop my projects to create space for our students to be healthy for these next two years.
So first is like, you’ve got to really, really, really be committed to the institution and, you know, your other small little fiefdoms and projects have to be secondary. You got to be really committed to people, if there’s, I, you know, if there’s a virtue that you need to be a great leader, in my opinion, it’s the same as the virtue that you need to be a great professor and scholar and it’s love. Um, not the kind of stupid shallow love that’s just like rah rah, Notre Dame.
Um, but a deep love that enables you to see the dignity in the people that you work with, to see the inherent dignity in your students and in your colleagues to be able to like forgive them and look at them again when they do things that are annoying. And if you’re a institute director or a department chair or dean, people are doing things annoying to you all the time but having, you know, really, really committing yourself at the end of the day to the thought, I run an ethics institute.
The good should be loved. Like the ideas that we talk about, they should not be alienating. They should not be depressing to people. They should be the kinds of ideas that people absolutely fall in love with. And so that if that the fruits of that virtue are not flowing through your work and your culture, something is seriously off and you got to, you know, you got to take stock of that.
Um, you know, really, really practically, I’d say if somebody’s discerning whether or not they got the gene, one of the biggest questions is, you know, what gives you energy during your week? I get so much, I look forward to meetings for some reason, for this reason, some of my colleagues hate me, but I’ll like look ahead of my schedule for the week and think like, I cannot wait to have that conversation with Adam on Wednesday. Like, that’s going to be such a cool project. I want to do it with him.
If you’re getting energy, if you’re looking ahead and getting energy from those kinds of experiences, that’s a good sign. Like you’re on the right track. If you look ahead of your week and say like, I cannot wait till Friday when I get my quiet time to work on my book, don’t become an administrator. You’ll be able to get that time, but it’s going to be few and far between and you’re, you’re constantly going to be efacing your interests and your priorities for what’s best for the group. And so you got to, you got to really gut check if that’s the kind of energy that you’ve got.
And I know a lot of academics who take these jobs thinking they can have it both ways. Like they’re going to just really cleanly divide their time. And like two days out of the week I go do my institute job and two days out of the week I do my research. And one day out of the week I teach my grad seminar. You can’t if you’re a leader, your time is not your own. Like you, that’s the thing you’re giving away as well. You’re giving it to the people that you work with. You’re giving it to the institution. So you’ve got to be willing to say, you know, my will is going to be secondary. And some people are not ready for that.
Todd Ream: Thank you. What vices then are most important to confront for individuals who’ve perhaps followed this path in terms of an understanding of the academic vocation?
Meghan Sullivan: Oh my gosh. This would be a great article for one of your listeners to write for like The Chronicle of Higher Education or something. But the seven deadly sins as applied to university life, all, I mean, all of them. It’s like envy, like you look at somebody else’s project is going really well and you, you, you secretly hate them for it. Um, terrible sin for a leader, totally toxic to the people who look up to you. That’s probably the one that I fall into.
Pride I know so many folks who think that they’re much better public speakers than they are. Uh, you know, you’re getting really concrete. I don’t know, you, your, your listeners probably sat in through some of these presentations and you’re just like, what is this guy talking about? Um, and the biggest challenge is there are so many professors that just love to hear themselves talk, like they’re the star of every talk that they’re giving. And to be a great teacher and to be an excellent administrator, you’ve got to love your audience, like they have to be, you know, those students have to be the forefront of your mind of what you’re, who you’re talking to that day. Or if you’re giving, you’re giving a difficult presentation about like a tough decision that the university is making.
It’s not about you, like you’re, you know, you’re a vessel in this case. It’s about the audience. What are their fears? What are their questions? Are you giving them what they need? I think that there’s this kind of like vice of pride that so many leaders don’t realize how it’s holding them back. Like they just keep, they’re so in their head about them that they’re forgetting that they don’t matter.
Um, and so, yeah, you just run down the list, I guess. I don’t know what the lust equivalent would be. I’m sure there is one. We don’t have that in Notre Dame. Um, that’s not a Notre Dame issue.
Um, but all I, I think also great leaders are very, very, very aware of where their blind spots are and hopefully have really good psychological safety and trust with people who are their closest advisors and confidants who can kind of call them out on their nonsense. I get, I have, I have an amazing managing director that works with me in our institute and she has no problem whatsoever pulling me aside and like pulling me into her office and being like, that was ridiculous or that was wrong. And you also got to have the, you know, you got to have the ability to ask for forgiveness and to own up to the things that you screw up, which are kind of frequent.
Todd Ream: Thank you. For our last question then today, I’ll ask us to sort of step back and look at the university and its founding partner in the Church, and in what ways can the university be of greater service to the Church moving forward? In what ways can the Church be of greater service to the university?
Some would argue the gap between the two has become too great and that we need to find ways to come together and in relationships of trust that allow those two institutions to flourish in their own ways, but serve one another.
Meghan Sullivan: I totally agree. Briefly, you know, the Church the, the Church is constantly needing to bring its teaching to bear on the most like cutting edge issues that humans are facing in this phase of our life. Like we’re, we’re constantly bringing the Christian social tradition into the current conversation. And universities are really well situated to do this. My average pastors I know and priests and bishops, they’re sometimes rushing to keep the lights on, they’re anointing the sick at their bedside. They’re baptizing babies. They’re leading the Church. Like they don’t necessarily have the opportunity to sit down and put their head down and think really deeply about what artificial intelligence is going to mean for our capacity to have intellectual virtue going forward.
Like they, that the universities were founded in medieval Europe precisely to give some people the time to do that kind of like deep thinking and reflection that’s going to inform the next iteration of the relevance of the Christian social tradition, the relevance of the Gospel. And universities I know a lot of people are skeptical universities are doing this work right now, but I promise you like a lot of them are and they’re professors of deep faith at the on these campuses, who really think that they, their vocation is to help the community think through these issues and realize what their options are and make sure that they grasp the truth.
Um, so universities can serve the Church by like taking up the kinds of problems and questions that the Church needs some deep thinking about, and there are plenty of those right now. The Church can serve universities, I mean universities like mine, but, but, but most universities I know about, they deeply, deeply, deeply care about corrupting the youth, about the four main, the proper that’s quoting Socrates, not really corrupting them, but you know, forming their souls, waking them up realizing that we don’t want, want a generation of people that just have a certain set of job ready skills, but are actually mature, virtuous adults that are capable of leading our country and through like, you know, difficult and challenging seasons.
And the work of formation is like an all hands on deck effort. Like we do a little bit of it maybe in dorms and in student clubs and in college classes. But our students are already pretty formed before they even get here by their families and their churches. And the Church continues to play a vital role in like meeting the spiritual needs of these young people that the Church can meet needs in ways that the, you know, bureau of student affairs or residents life committee on college campuses can only touch on.
Um, and so if at the end of the day we look at this group of however many at Notre Dame, it’s 8,000 young people who think like you’re entrusted to us for the next four years, we really want to help you figure out the kind of person that you’re going to be for the rest of your life, we had better call on the resources of local churches and these faith communities to play some role in that because that there are needs that people have that can only be met in those institutions. Um, and we all have the same ultimate goal, which is to see individuals flourish and achieve the good life. And to see our communities realize the common good. And so there’s a sense of like, we got to be all in this together.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Our guest has been Meghan Sullivan, the Wilsey Family College Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good at the University of Notre Dame. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us today.
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Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
