Existentialism and Higher Education: A Renewed Intersection in Well-Being

Abstract

Enhanced well-being for students, staff, and faculty has become a focal point on many campuses across North America. Well-being promotion tends to focus on the “wellness” half of well-being, practices related to individual health, stress-management, enhanced coping, and environmental conditions. These efforts, while significant, address the symptoms, not the root causes of what has led to the degree of experienced un-wellness or ill-being. What has not yet been adequately articulated in well-being theory, as applied to the higher education setting, is a focus on the “being” half of the well-being phrase, how higher education is connected to a student’s subjectivity and the meanings they give to the objective world. This article proposes a conception of well-being in higher education that stems from existential philosophy and humanistic psychology, as well as key concepts from Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. Higher education is seen as a place where students’ self-discovery informs their approach to knowledge and learning, as well as their development of an ethical sense of justice and the rights of others in the educational community. Well-being is in this way rendered more fully.