Be the change: academics as civic professionals

Sullivan developed this application in a critique of contemporary trends in undergraduate education that stresses either an instrumentalist orientation that only values vocational outcomes and practical skills or one that focuses on "critical thinking," defined as the discipline-specific "distanced intellectual stance" that divorces knowledge from real-world contexts. [...]the pursuit of practical wisdom requires not only academic content knowledge but also practical experience in the uses of that knowledge and a grasp of relevant questions of social and ethical purpose and meaning (Sullivan 2012, 153-155).