Thanks to John Addleman, for inviting me to be a part of this conversation. I am Joe Creech, and it’s my privilege to serve as the executive director of the Lilly Network of Church-Related Colleges and Universities. John asked me to say just a word about what that organization is. Since 1991, the Lilly Network—formerly known as the Lilly Fellows Program—has aimed to strengthen the quality and shape the character of church related higher education. I would say our two most prominent features are that we’re ecumenical and that we build friendships. That is to say, we’re not an advocacy organization, but we foster ecumenical conversation, collaboration, and connection, and we develop leadership for church-related colleges and universities. We primarily do this through giving grants funded by Lilly Endowment Inc. to our network schools to gather people on their campuses or among campuses and to provide leadership opportunities on their campuses. We also run a number of national fellowships, and you can learn more about these on our website.[1] If your school is already one of the 106 members of the Lilly Network, then you can certainly take advantage of any of those opportunities.
I’ll turn now to addressing Dr. Hunter’s talk, and please know that I am working from notes, so I might not be as clear or concise as I would like.
Dr. Hunter, thank you so much for your talk. When I wear my academic hat, I’m an American historian. So, I’ve admired your work for many, many years—decades, scarily. I want to preface my remarks with two thoughts that provide some hooks to hang some of our ideas on.
The first is a statement by Father Michael Patella, a Benedictine monk at Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, who passed away last summer after a short battle with ALS. Father Michael composed a commissioning service for our Lilly Graduate Fellows who were at the end of their three-year program, which took place during their first three to four years of their graduate programs as they prepared for jobs in the academy. This was his final charge to them: “Divine love drives the universe. Your vocation is to help it through.” That statement came to mind during Dr. Hunter’s talk—that divine love drives the universe. That is our telos as teachers and academics. That is our purpose as those who work and learn in the academy.
The second thought is really a question: How do we imagine an educated person? What picture comes to mind? What traits or virtues or vices do we imagine? And then I want us to think a little bit further about how the structures of our institutions—like our admissions processes, our curricular and co-curricular activities, our classroom activities, our graduation ceremonies, our enrollment reporting—point towards the formation of this imagined educated person. That is, how do these institutional structures go together to form the sort of people we imagine at the end of their journey with us?[2]
To get to that question, however, I want first to think about our own academic vocations and the ways we have been formed to find meaning in our work. That’s one of the things that the Lilly Network thinks about a lot, and many of our programs are designed towards that end.
To get at this question of the academic vocation, I want to take us back to Max Weber and his 1917 talk, “Science as a Vocation.”[3] Living at the end, perhaps, of what he understood as the Enlightenment period, Weber noted that universities and the work of professors—work that had developed out of the monasteries of Europe and had aimed to provide education within community and toward transcendence—was now, in fact, disenchanted.
That is to say, universities and those that populate them were now directing their purposes not towards community and transcendence but rather towards individual mastery and creation of knowledge for its own sake. And he challenged his listeners to stare unflinchingly and courageously into this void of meaninglessness in their careers—to realize that our jobs were simply to add one more brick to the wall of knowledge, only to see that brick pulled out and replaced by another. There was no higher meaning to our work, transcendent or not, beyond the act of creating knowledge itself.
Now, most academics didn’t take up the challenge. Most of us have not been able to stare into the void. Most of us are not nihilists. Nevertheless, I would argue that Weber’s picture of the academic vocation, resting on a grinding pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, is still the ideal towards which many of us work—the pursuit and mastery of narrow, precise, disciplinary knowledge for its own sake. This pursuit and mastery becomes the measure of meaning in our work as well as the measure of how we understand academic success.
It might be the case, then, that we in the academy have already perfected the sort of nihilism that Dr. Hunter identifies in the larger culture. And when I say, “we in the academy,” here, I’m thinking of academics at both secular and Christian institutions, because in many ways we share more in common than not, as we’re all formed in the same sorts of ways in the same sorts of graduate programs, and we advance in our careers through the same sorts of credentialing processes. And even though, as I said, most of us aren’t willing to stare into the void of vocational meaninglessness, nevertheless, again, this ideal remains. We see it, for example, in the odd locution, known well to academics, that “I don’t have enough time to do my own work.”
That’s an odd statement to anyone outside the academy. Could you imagine a garbage collector saying, “I don’t have enough time to do my own work?” Or a medical doctor saying, “I don’t have enough time to do my own work?” But of course, we understand what this means: I don’t have enough time to do research. If I am teaching, grading, or on committees, these are the things that pay the bills.
What really gives meaning or worth, then, to our work within the university, is research. Again, even if the creation and mastery of knowledge is an ideal more than a reality, it has an atomizing effect on our lives, as our primary allegiance is to the guilds that govern our professional advancement rather than to the communities of people who populate our institutions. And, crucially, our vocational ideal reflects our own formation as a scholar. It reflects therefore a set of vices and virtues that shape how we understand the habits of thought and practice that define our work and that, by extension, the way we define the meaning and purpose of education—the education specifically of our students.
And now I want to kind of come back to that question I asked originally. How do we imagine an educated person? How do we imagine the folks at the end of our education process? What sorts of traits, virtues, and vices might we want to see developed in them? If we, as I have suggested, draw on our own formation to answer this question, then it would seem that perhaps we’re also preparing them for their own work in ways that reflect formation in mastery or possession of knowledge or other atomizing character traits. If this is the case, it would seem we as educational institutions are contributing in significant ways to the very nihilism Dr. Hunter identifies.
At this point, I find two scholars who are thinking deeply about higher education to be useful interlocutors. The first interlocutor is Kathleen Fitzpatrick, whose book, Generous Thinking, suggests that from kindergarten on, those who succeed in the game of education or academics are those that can compete well.[4] They learn how to play the game by acquiring those traits that enable them to compete for top grades and other accoutrements of academic success. And this acquisition continues on through college, through graduate education, and beyond for those who achieve mastery in the academic arena. And what’s inculcated in these academic winners are, again, individualistic, atomistic traits such as grit, mastery, and competitiveness, rather than virtues that foster collaboration, empathy and caring. These traits they then pass down to their students.
The second interlocutor is Michael Sandel, whose most recent book, The Tyranny of Merit, argues that higher education is bound to an insidious logic of meritocracy in which those who have won the game of meritocracy think that they’ve earned it themselves and that they don’t owe their winning to anyone else.[5] In other words, they achieve it alone. Those that lose at the meritocracy game also, unfortunately, feel that they deserve it because they had the opportunity and access but could not muster the self-discipline to take advantage of either. Sandel goes further to argue that the polarization that we find in our current society—so carefully outlined by Dr. Hunter—pits the winners in the meritocracy game against the losers. And because the winners have also won the game of attaining educational credentials for the informational and professional economy, higher education itself is implicated in fostering the cultural cleavages that Dr. Hunter identifies.
In closing, I want to go back, again, to imagining an educated person. What is it about our classrooms, our curricula or admission processes, that might counter the narratives of competition and meritocracy and then back again to the nihilism Dr. Hunter identifies? How might, for example, using a word like “access” contribute to narratives of meritocracy? On the other hand, rather than contributing to contemporary polarization and even nihilism, how, specifically, might we educate for community, for belonging, such that we help love move the universe? Put differently, how can we educate in a way that doesn’t flatten personhood, or that prepares us for life in community, rather than educating for the ideals of mastery, control, and possession? How, in other words, might we cultivate habits of humility, of self-sacrifice, of faith, of charity, that lead to life in community? To cultivate listening, teamwork, and empathy? How might such aims—such a vision of an educated person—again, inform our grading or admissions policies? How might it affect the way we think about things such as plagiarism?
In the end, then, I’d like to think about the ways in which our institutions and our own vocations have contributed to the sort of cultural nihilism that Dr. Hunter paints. But then also, I would like for us to ask, how might we move our institutions to help counter such nihilism? I’ll end with one more quotation from William Cavanaugh, in his recent book, The Uses of Idolatry. In that book, Cavanaugh argues that, actually, the idea of disenchantment does not involve the absence of enchantment in the wider society as has been argued in other places, but actually involves the replacement of one enchantment for another. This quotation gives me hope. Cavanaugh writes: “Worship has not receded in a supposedly ‘secular world,’ but has rather migrated from explicit worship of God to the implicit worship of things of human creation. . . . [This] indicates a deep longing in the human heart for the transformation of our lives.”[6] And, that’s something I’d like to take to our institutions. Thank you so much.
[1]. “Apply for a Fellowship,” The Lilly Network of Church-Related Colleges and Universities, accessed June 20, 2026, https://thelillynetwork.org/apply-for-a-fellowship.
[2]. My thinking on this point, here and throughout, has been deeply shaped by Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Eerdmans, 2020).
[3]. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, in David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, eds., The Vocation Lectures (Hackett, 2004), 1–31.
[4]. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Generous Thinking (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).
[5]. Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit (Picador, 2020).
[6]. William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry (Oxford, 2024), 1.
