Michael Naughton

RECOVERING PRACTICAL WISDOM THROUGH THE INTEGRATION OF LIBERAL AND PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION The Problem: The Disordered Relationship between Liberal and Professional Education Of all the virtues that we hope to find in a university-educated person, wisdom should stand out as pre-eminent: that noble quality whereby knowledge and information are ordered to the good of the whole. Law was examined not as a specialty unrelated to inquiries of a liberal education, but as a discipline that related to the nature of the human person and society, to virtue and in particular justice, to the meaning of civil and ecclesial authority, to the social nature and private ownership of land and property, and others. The same is true of political scientists and foreign policy experts who have failed to take seriously an understanding of religion to evaluate developments in the Middle East or in Africa, a failure with enormous and continuing consequences for a right understanding of cultural and political realities in those regions of the world.7 And more recently, universities increasingly speak about the importance of social justice as well as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), but little about wisdom. Universities are subject to what G. K. Chesterton calls modernity's temptation of "wild and wasted virtues": The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. [...]some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.9 For Chesterton and the Greco/Roman and Christian traditions, there is a unity to the virtues, and our temptation is that we isolate certain virtues where they become unhinged from other virtues and a larger understanding of the human person.

As with any proposal for institutional reform, and especially one that has gained so much ground in such a short amount of time, this paper asks whether diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement is good for corporations. Are businesses stronger with DEI practices and ideas or weaker? We believe that the DEI movement is asking the right questions: How do we create more just and equitable institutions? The challenge, however, is whether this movement is giving the right answers to such questions. The main premise of our paper is that without deeper principles than DEI itself, these qualities of corporate life will be misunderstood, misused, and disordered in our increasingly fragmented and politicized culture. We propose in this essay that "subsidiarity" serves as one of those deeper principles that can order and enrich our understanding of DEI. It serves as a gift principle that begins to reveal the deepest nature of our work, namely, that our work allows us to exercise our gifts in serving others.

In this paper, we propose that unreflective use of the term social entrepreneurship may perpetuate the idea that “entrepreneurship” is largely a financial and private reality and that this view of entrepreneurship will eventually trivialize or perhaps undermine the important benefits and the real intentions behind the social entrepreneurship movement. We believe that Catholic Social Teaching can shed important light on this dilemma by emphasizing three specific strategies inherent to entrepreneurship when assessing the moral contribution of the firm. As a result, we argue for the principles of good goods, good work and good wealth as an alternative framework for all good entrepreneurial venture.

We address how the leaders of a Catholic business school can articulate and assess how well their schools implement the following six principles drawn from Catholic social teaching (CST): (1) produce goods and services that are authentically good; (2) foster solidarity with the poor by serving deprived and marginalized populations; (3) advance the dignity of human work as a calling; (4) exercise sub-sidiarity; (5) promote responsible stewardship over resources; and (6) acquire and allocate resources justly. We first discuss how the CST principles give substantive content and meaning to the Good Goods, Good Work, and Good Wealth framework in The Vocation of the Business Leader (Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace in Vocation of the business leader, Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Vatican City, 2012) and then discuss their congruencies and tensions with the UNGC and UNPRME principles. Next, we describe the Catholic Identity Matrix an assessment tool that provides a quantitative and qualitative portrait of how well a Catholic business school integrates, within the scope of its mission and capacities, the three goods and related CST principles in its strategies, policies, activities, and processes. The concluding section discusses implications for ongoing UNGC and UNPRME assessment, reporting, and development efforts, and addresses the generalizability of our approach to business schools who draw their inspiration and moral principles from other faith-based or secular traditions.