Journal of College and Character

Love as a Force for Social Change

From disturbingly cheerful predictions about the demise of higher education to rhetoric casting professors as adversaries, postsecondary institutions face a steady stream of criticism and hostility. This negativity demoralizes us at times, yet those of us who work on college campuses often describe our vocation as a labor of love. We know of faculty inviting international students to their homes when they have no place to go over breaks, residence hall directors spending nights in hospitals with students facing injury or illness, student activists risking expulsion and arrest standing up for oppressed communities. These stories (and so many more) exemplify the beloved community, a term first used by philosopher, Josiah Royce, then popularized by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to describe people working together interdependently toward a vision of compassion, peace, and recognition of the inherent worth of all living beings.

In this special issue, we seek your stories of universities as beloved communities. To be sure, higher education falls short of this idea in many ways. But those shortcomings are already well-documented, hence our desire to offer a counternarrative. We invite you to consider the following questions as you craft your proposal:

• Why is there a squeamishness in talking about the role of love outside the personal realm? What is the cost of this hesitance and what would it mean for love to be a more regular part of the discourse in and about higher education?
• In what ways can and should love (i.e., heart work) be practiced in the “heady” world of the academy? For example, what would it mean to focus more on the spiritual and less on the material aspects of education?
• Love is listed as a character strength on the Values in Action inventory. Is love the right response to violence and/or other forms of oppression? How so (or not)?
• What role does and should love play in our conversations with student activists? How can campus activism help advance love not just as a personal experience but as a community ethos?
• What role does and should love play in communicating across ideological differences? In what ways can love serve as a unifying concept in the anti-DEI era? What are the potential costs and benefits of this strategy?
• How does the increasingly technologized academy enhance or diminish the possibilities for love and connection on college campuses? Is more technology always good because it increases access? Is more technology always bad because it diminishes opportunities for face-to-face relationships?
• What role does love play in addressing the student mental health crisis? Is there a concern that incorporating ideas like love (and other character strengths) in this realm pathologizes mental health issues or is love an underappreciated aspect of human condition struggles?
• What role can non-Western concepts (such as the African notion of Ubuntu, “I am because we are.”) play in re-orienting American higher education toward the idea of beloved community?
• How can love serve as a counternarrative to the dehumanized, neoliberal dominant narrative of the academy?
• How have you seen love bridge “town/gown” tensions? How do the ideas of beloved community and interdependence help transcend this binary?

Authors may address one or more of these questions or raise their own questions in their proposal.