Anxiety: A Case Study on the Value of Negative Emotions

Negative emotions are often thought to lack value—they’re pernicious, inherently unpleasant, and inconsistent with human virtue. Taking anxiety as a case study, I argue that this assessment is mistaken. I begin with an account of what anxiety is: a response to uncertainty about a possible threat or challenge that brings thoughts about one’s predicament (‘I’m worried,’ ‘What should I do?’), negatively valenced feelings of concern, and a motivational tendency toward caution regarding the potential threat one faces. Given this account of what anxiety is, I show it can be instrumentally valuable: in sensitizing us to uncertainty and prompting caution and risk assessment efforts, it’s an emotion that can help us better recognize and respond to uncertain threats and challenges. But anxiety can also be aretaically valuable—that is, it’s an emotion that can contribute positively to one’s character. For instance, your anxiety about how best to care for your aging mother not only prompts helpful brainstorming about what you should do, but also reflect well on you—your unease demonstrates both an admirable sensitivity and emotional attunement to what’s at stake

Facilitation College Success Among Emerging Hispanic Serving Institutions: Multiple Perspectives Yield Commonly Shared Diversity Goals

Utilizing a qualitative approach, this research brief analyzes multiple perspectives on factors related to Latino student success. The central findings of this brief suggest that, while multiple perspectives exist, there are common areas of consensus relative to promoting cultural competency and fostering Latino student success

Confucian Ethics in the Analects as Virtue Ethics

The Confucian tradition embodies one of the most enduring and influential moral traditions in world history. Yet for Western readers Confucius remains little known, and perhaps even less approachable than the major thinkers of the Western philosophical tradition. While it is difficult to overstate his influence, Confucius himself left little if any written account of his moral outlook. What we know of the man and the origins of the Confucian tradition come from brief accounts of his life and teachings compiled primarily in the present text, the Analects. As such, Confucian ethics is best thought of as a tradition more than an explicit ethical theory

Emotion, deliberation, and the skill model of virtuous agency

A recent skeptical challenge denies deliberation is essential to virtuous agency: what looks like genuine deliberation is just a post hoc rationalization of a decision already made by automatic mechanisms (Haidt 2001; Doris 2015). Annas’s account of virtue seems well-equipped to respond: by modeling virtue on skills, she can agree that virtuous actions are deliberation-free while insisting that their development requires significant thought. But Annas’s proposal is flawed: it over-intellectualizes deliberation’s developmental role and under-intellectualizes its significance once virtue is acquired. Doing better requires paying attention to a distinctive form of anxiety—one that functions to engage deliberation in the face of decisions that automatic mechanisms alone cannot resolve

Soft Leadership: An Innovative Leadership Perspective

Professor M.S. Rao provides a discourse on the primary tenets of organizational behavioral management emanating from relationship structuring and strengthening. Known as “soft skills,” Rao offers a thorough rendering of the basic components comprising soft skills which he opines are in critical need of implementation in a highly technocratic and symbiotic global society. Soft skill tools such as “influence, persuasion, negotiation, motivation, recognition, appreciation, and collaboration for the collective good” represent the primary drivers of meaningful leadership

Partnering with Districts in Principal Preparation: Key Program Features in Strengthening Aspiring Principals’ Understanding of Issues of Equity and Excellence

The need for increased numbers of students of all ethnic groups to access and succeed in postsecondary education is a 21st century reality (Swail, Cabrera, & Lee, 2004). As Swail, Cabreraet al. (2004) reported, The act of going to college and earning a degree is more important than ever to today’s youth and our society. . . . Unfortunately, access to a postsecondary education is not equal in America. Students historically underrepresented at the postsecondary level – students of color, those from low-income backgrounds, and first-generation students- are still less likely to prepare for, apply for, enroll in, and persist through postsecondary education. (p. iv) For example, Latinos are one of the fastest growing ethnic groups, but only 19% of Latinos have completed an associate’s or higher degree (Excelencia in Education, 2010). While the number of Latinos accessing college is growing, a disparity still exists between minority group enrollment in college and white student enrollment (Swail et al., 2004). The principal has a key role in schools of creating the conditions wherein all students can be successful and access the next step of postsecondary education whether through a community college, a technical program, the military, or a university (Kaser & Halbert, 2009). As Kaser and Halbert (2009) stated, “Leadership creates the conditions in schools where all learners grow, progress, graduate, go on to some form of postsecondary learning and lead productive lives” (p. 20). Educational leaders can play key roles in advocacy for student success, recognizing inequities where they exist and working to overcome the inequities (Anderson, 2009; Papa & English, 2011)

Negative Epistemic Exemplars

In this chapter, we address the roles that exemplars might play in a comprehensive response to epistemic injustice. Fricker defines epistemic injustices as harms people suffer specifically in their capacity as (potential) knowers. We focus on testimonial epistemic injustice, which occurs when someone’s assertoric speech acts are systematically met with either too little or too much credence by a biased audience. Fricker recommends a virtue­theoretic response: people who do not suffer from biases should try to maintain their disposition towards naive testimonial justice, and those who find themselves already biased should cultivate corrective testimonial justice by systematically adjusting their credence in testimony up or down depending on whether they are hearing from someone whom they may be biased against or in favor of. We doubt that the prominent admiration­emulation model of exemplarism will be much use in this connection, so we propose two ways of learning from negative exemplars to better conduct one’s epistemic affairs. In the admiration­emulation model, both the identification of what a virtue is and the cultivation of virtues identified thusly proceed through the admiration of virtuous exemplars. We show that this model has serious flaws and argue for two alternatives: the envy­agonism model and the ambivalence­avoidance model