Cal Turner Program
CTP Mission
The professions play a central role in American society. The mission of the Cal Turner Program for Moral Leadership in the Professions (CTP) is to develop the ethical identities and leadership capacities of those serving in the professions and to promote cross-professional collaboration in addressing challenging social problems. Through our various programming, we offer opportunities for students, staff and faculty at Vanderbilt’s professional schools to develop their sense of professional vocation and ethical leadership. In addition, we offer programs for the general public on subjects related to moral leadership within the professions. These offerings include conversations on justice and the common good, on addressing ethical issues relevant to the professions, and on developing important skills for leadership, including conflict management and transformation and leading change, trauma-informed leadership and the role of identity in the practice of ethical leadership. In these ways, the CTP seeks to equip professionals to be effective ethical leaders in challenging times.
We promote moral leadership as involving:
- Vocational commitment; ongoing discernment, improvisation, and learning
- Passion and compassion
- Reflection on personal experience
- An integrated, cultivated inner life
- Interpersonal skills
- Adaptive leadership that tackles complex social problems
- Community connection and collaborative action
- Risk; involving service, sacrifice, struggle, and more
- Naming moral issues as moral
- Requiring diversity of perspective, professionally and otherwise
- Seeing the bigger picture of everyday actions
- Engagement with moral exemplars
- Awareness of situational variables and biases
- Moral reminders and fellowship for moral resilience
Cal Turner Program - “Moral Resiliency for Moral Leadership in the Professions” keynote, speaker nursing clinical ethicist Cynda Rushton from John Hopkins University, co-author of Moral Resiliency: Responding to Moral Suffering in Healthcare.
Photos by Joe Howell
Collaborations
The Cal Turner Program collaborates with many organizations at Vanderbilt, within Nashville and across the nation. Some of our partnerships are:
- Carpenter Program, Vanderbilt Divinity School, Courageous Voices in Action
- National Conflict Resolution Center
- Tennesseans Against the Death Penalty
- The School for Contemplative Living
- The Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society, Vanderbilt University
- The Vanderbilt University Community Engagement Collaborative
- The Office of Health Equity at VUMC