The most meaningful thing a professor can do is help a young adult become more fully themselves. We're looking for faculty partners to teach a semester-long course, grounded in fifty years of research, that demonstrably does this — and to do it now, in the moment our students need it most.
In Excellent Sheep, William Deresiewicz named a pattern most of us already suspected: the students our most selective institutions produce are extraordinarily capable and extraordinarily hollow — high-achieving young people who have spent a lifetime optimizing for the approval of adults and institutions, and who arrive in our classrooms unable to answer, for themselves, the question what is my life actually for? They are accomplished and anxious, credentialed and adrift.
We wrote that book off, quietly, as overstated. A decade on, every measure we have — mental-health intake data, major-switching rates, the pattern of our own office hours — suggests it was, if anything, understated. The problem was never a failure of intelligence. It was a failure of development. These students were never taught how to move from the mind that performs for its surround to the mind that authors its own life. Few of us were.
And then AI arrived. The tasks that universities have long used as proxies for thinking — the essay, the problem set, the research memo — can now be produced, competently, by a machine in seconds. Whatever it is that a university is for, it cannot any longer be that. The question every thoughtful dean and faculty member is now asking, often privately, is the same question: what do we teach, when the old outputs no longer distinguish a graduate from a bot?
We think the answer is the part of education that AI cannot do for a student and cannot substitute for a student: the development of the self that is doing the thinking. The capacity to hold one's own position without collapsing into the surround. To author a life rather than perform one. To grow, in the specific, measurable sense that six decades of developmental research has described and — crucially — shown can be taught.
This is the course that does that. And this is the moment when teaching it is, very possibly, the most important thing a professor can do.
We're inviting a small number of universities to host the first full academic run of a course that has, in smaller settings, helped 76% of participants develop meaningfully in the way they make meaning.
The Course sits in the tradition of constructive-developmental psychology — the line of research carried forward by Jane Loevinger, Robert Kegan, Susanne Cook-Greuter, and others over the last five decades. The central finding of that tradition is simple and well-evidenced: adults continue to move through qualitatively different orders of mind — not just accumulating knowledge, but changing the very form in which they make sense of the world.
The finding is well-replicated. What remains scarce is pedagogy. Very few formal settings in modern life actually help adults make the transitions this research describes — and universities, historically the place where young adults are asked to grow, have rarely been one of them.
The Course is a focused attempt to change that. It combines the research instruments used in the field with a semester-long program of readings, reflective practice, group dialogue, and applied work. The outcomes, in prior cohort runs, have been unusually strong.
The Course draws on six decades of scholarship in ego development, constructive-developmental theory, and adult learning. It is not a re-packaging of any single author's work; it synthesizes findings across the field and adapts them for the classroom.
Students enroll as they would in any credited course. They read, they write, they meet weekly. What makes it different is that The Course is oriented to a measurable outcome — movement along a validated developmental scale — and structured around the conditions the research identifies as most supportive of that movement.
of adults in prior course runs moved meaningfully beyond stage 3.
Measured on a validated developmental scale, pre and post. Scoring done blind by trained raters. Full methodology and cohort details available on request — and intended for publication in partnership with the host university.
We are trying to keep the lift as small as is compatible with doing this well. Here is everything we need from a host institution to run a full pilot cohort.
One tenured or tenure-track faculty member willing to be the course of record. They do not have to teach every session, but they are the academic home for the course within the institution.
Typical fit: psychology, education, human development, philosophy, or a general-interest program like integrated studies, great books, or humanities.A 3-credit slot, listed in the catalog as an elective or a core offering at the undergraduate or graduate level. We work with the faculty sponsor through the university's course-approval process.
We provide a draft syllabus, reading list, and learning outcomes in the form deans expect.A classroom appropriate for the enrollment size — anything from a small room with movable chairs to a large lecture hall with discussion-section space. The Course makes heavy use of structured dialogue; rooms that allow students to work in small groups are a plus. No special technology is required beyond a projector.
Because The Course collects pre- and post-intervention data, the pilot runs under the host institution's IRB. We provide a complete protocol, consent forms, and a pre-registered analysis plan.
The research component is separable from the teaching component — a university may offer The Course without the research, or run the research as a parallel study.Development of the kind this course supports is not easy work. It asks things of people — sustained reading, written reflection, serious dialogue with peers, the occasional uncomfortable confrontation with one's own ways of making sense of the world. There is no other environment in adult life where a person is as available to that ask as when they are a student, in a class, for credit, on a schedule their life is already organized around.
Independent adult learners — motivated, paying out of pocket, working around a job — do their best, and still rarely sustain that intensity for sixteen weeks. A university cohort does. The semester is the holding environment: the time carved out, the peer group assembled, the expectation to show up, the habit of reading and writing already formed. Our prior results come from approximations of this environment. A real one is what we are trying to build.
The pilot's results are intended for peer-reviewed publication, with the host institution's faculty as co-authors. But the deeper reason to host this in a university — rather than to run it privately — is the holding environment itself.Few universities teach adult development as anything other than a survey of theories. This course is the theories applied, with measurable outcomes.
Faculty co-author a paper with strong, well-measured results. The host institution is named as the study site.
Syllabus, weekly session plans, reading list, reflection prompts, assessment rubrics, and student-facing handouts — all production-ready and licensed for university use.
Weekly check-ins during the semester, shared materials with other host universities, and an annual convening of faculty running The Course.
These are the questions we expect most often from a university that is seriously considering hosting The Course. If yours is not here, please ask it.
No. It is a credited course grounded in six decades of peer-reviewed psychological research, with assigned readings from the primary literature, written assignments, and formal assessments.
What distinguishes it from a typical survey of the field is that it uses the field's own validated instruments to measure whether the course is doing what the theory predicts. In that sense it is closer to an applied research class than to a self-help offering.
We've seen good fits in psychology, education, human development, philosophy, and general-interest programs (honors college, integrated studies, great books). The faculty sponsor's home department matters less than their willingness to hold the course seriously.
If the host institution has a teaching-and-learning center, that is also a natural home.
The instrument we use to measure growth — the Washington University Sentence Completion Test — has been refined, precisely for this concern, over nearly five decades. It has unusually strong construct validity and is, by design and by repeated study, near-impossible to fake upward. A student who tries to produce "what a developed person would say" typically produces a more obvious signal of where they actually are, not less.
On our side, we keep the teaching and the measurement firmly separate. The Course does not study, rehearse, or prepare students for the instrument. Students encounter it at baseline and at post-assessment and not in between. Scoring is done blind by independently trained raters who did not teach the class. The full methodology, including these safeguards, is available on request.
The figure is drawn from prior cohort runs of earlier versions of this course, measured pre and post using the Washington University Sentence Completion Test — a validated instrument in the field, scored blind by trained raters.
We want to be honest about what we do and don't yet know. The prior result is meaningful, but we have not yet run this at the scale, or with the methodological rigor, that tells us how reliably it will replicate. It may replicate in full. It may not. A university pilot — with larger N, pre-registration, and independent analysis — is precisely the setting in which that question can be answered honestly. We are hopeful. We are also genuinely curious.
A full methodology document — sample sizes, attrition, inter-rater reliability, comparison to published baselines for normal adult development — is available on request.
Costs at this stage are modest. We provide the instructional materials, the training for the faculty lead and teaching assistants, the research protocol, and ongoing consultation throughout the semester. The university provides the room, the credit, the IRB, and its faculty's time. Any direct costs — for example, rater stipends for scoring the research instruments — are shared, and we will be transparent about them in the course of a real conversation.
Longer-term licensing, for institutions that want to run The Course year after year, is a separate conversation — structured so that The Course remains financially viable for the university and for the course's continuing work.
The Course is run under the host institution's IRB. We provide a full protocol — including consent forms, a pre-registered analysis plan, and procedures for students who wish to opt out of the research component while remaining in the class. Taking the course is never contingent on participating in the study.
On wellbeing: developmental psychology has been studying these transitions in adults for over fifty years, and the instruments we use are well-established and low-risk. The pedagogy is structured and peer-supported; students are not asked to disclose personal material in ways that would violate academic norms.
Most of us, somewhere along the way, quietly gave up on that phrase. We learned to be embarrassed by it. The job became producing papers, running sections, surviving committees — and hoping, at the edges, that a student here or there was getting something real. This course is an invitation back.
A professor of the 1960s could plausibly believe they were shaping the character of a generation. A professor of the 2020s has mostly lost that permission. We would like to give it back.
Teaching this course is different from teaching a subject. It is the closest academic work gets to what we, in the quiet of our own minds, imagined teaching would be when we first signed on for this life. Students walk in one person at the start of the semester and walk out, measurably, a more fully authored version of themselves at the end. You have the data to prove it. They have the lived experience to match it.
We have yet to meet a faculty member or teaching assistant who taught this course and did not describe it as one of the most meaningful teaching experiences they had ever had. Not the most efficient. Not the most tenure-advancing. The most meaningful. Many felt it reminded them why they went into this work in the first place.
It is also — we will say this plainly — the part of your job that AI cannot touch. A language model can produce a lecture on constructive-developmental theory tomorrow. What it cannot do is sit with a twenty-year-old across a seminar table and be the presence through which they begin to hear their own voice for the first time. That is the specific, irreplaceable thing a human teacher does. This course is structured entirely around making that the work.
If you have read this far — if something in the last five minutes caught, made you sit back a little, made you feel for a second like you might be the person we are actually writing to — then please write. Even if you aren't sure. Especially if you aren't sure. There is often humility behind that hesitation — and it is a humility this work needs.
If you are a faculty member who thinks you might want to teach this, or an administrator who thinks your institution might be the right home for it — we would very much like to hear from you. No form. No application. A single email to a single person, and a real conversation from there.
Direct: sk@post.harvard.edu · Typical reply within 48 hours.