Among this year’s First Year Seminar (FYS) courses that greeted incoming First Years at Bates, there stood a new option: “Purpose, Work, and College: A Holistic Introduction to Purposeful Work.” Its purpose, as stated by its instructor, Marienne Cowan, MA, CCSP, is to “introduce [to students] the philosophical elements of purposeful work.” 

Purposeful Work at Bates can be broadly defined as helping students find activities that align with who they are. The course uses the purpose of education as a focal point for discussion and draws on various documents such as Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “The Purpose of Education” as argumentation. 

Cowan wants students to leave with an understanding of having an “alignment between values, interests, skills and strengths and what they’re doing.” This alignment, Cowan argues, is not far removed from a liberal arts education, and serves as a cornerstone in “promoting the wellbeing of students.”

This focus on values that align with actions is becoming increasingly challenging in today’s academia. An article from The New York Times stated that the liberal arts are attacked “by slashing funding, cutting back on tenure protections, ending faculty governance and imposing narrow ideological limits on what can and can’t be taught.” 

The struggle between a holistic education, vocational training (training that prepares one for a specific occupation), and finding a balance between the two is a common point of discussion for nearly every college wishing to prepare their students for a competitive job market, while also creating a meaningful college experience. 

The creation of the Purposeful Work FYS allows the Center for Purposeful work to engage more with the first-year student population. Furthermore, it also serves to bring other factors of a person into the academic process in a time when the academic relevancy of these other factors are being attacked.