Preparing Students for Work, Life, and the Common Good

The Question Before Us

What should education prepare students for? Students come to college with clear hopes: a strong education, a meaningful career, and a better future. We owe them an education that delivers on those aspirations, especially at a time when public trust in higher education remains historically low. Yet the value of a university education does not stop with the starting salary or the title. Our graduates need more than technical skills to navigate uncertainty, ethical choices, personal loss, and decisions about who they want to be and the communities they hope to build.

Learning to See Differently

Recent conversations brought this larger responsibility into sharper focus. At a Spirit and Place Big Tent Talks session, University of Pennsylvania Professor Justin McDaniel invited reflection on what education should prepare learners to do and become. At the 2026 Thomas H. Lake Lecture, hosted by the Lake Institute on Faith and Giving at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at IU Indianapolis, Notre Dame Professor Meghan Sullivan asked us to reconsider the parable of the Good Samaritan by inhabiting every role—even the often-overlooked donkey—before drawing conclusions. Her approach modeled a vital form of learning: listening carefully, examining assumptions, and making room for perspectives that do not come naturally to us. Wisdom begins when we pause and seek to understand before we judge.

Belonging Is Part of Learning

That habit of understanding is especially important in a time of loneliness and division. A recent article in The New York Times, “Status Defines Friendship for Too Many Americans,” notes that in an era marked by loneliness and social fragmentation, universities have a distinctive civic role. We bring people together across disciplines, beliefs, backgrounds, and life experiences. In classrooms, laboratories, studios, and shared campus spaces, students learn that belonging is not passive. It grows through working together, engaging disagreement with respect, and discovering common purpose. Through literature, history, philosophy, religion, science, and the arts, students confront enduring questions: What do we owe one another? What does courage require? What makes a community just?

Invitation to Inquiry

At IU Indianapolis, this vision is taking form through programs that unite career preparation with human formation. It is being brought to life through the reimagination of our general education curriculum. This fall, the IU Indianapolis Arts & Humanities Institute’s One Read program invites our campus and community to read Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man, supported by a discussion toolkit and enriched by our stewardship of the Ray Bradbury Collection. The cornerstone program is also offering five distinctive sections of ENG-W131 that reflect the creativity and leadership of School of Liberal Arts faculty. In Professor Peter Thuesen’s section, students will encounter Bradbury and other transformative texts while wrestling with consequential questions and examining their assumptions. Professor David Craig’s Global Traditions and the Good Life course will extend that inquiry across cultures and traditions, asking students to consider character, virtue, purpose, and human flourishing.

The Education Our Moment Requires

Together, these experiences express a simple but consequential belief: Our students deserve an education that prepares them for both livelihood and life. A university education should open doors to meaningful work while cultivating intellectual humility, moral imagination, resilience, empathy, and a sense of belonging. When we join practical knowledge with the habits of mind required for responsible citizenship, we prepare students not only to compete and succeed, but also to lead, serve, build trust across difference, and contribute to the common good. This is the full promise of higher education. This is the work our moment demands and the time is now.

Go Jags!

Latha Ramchand
Chancellor