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Two Lenses Are Better Than One: The Liberal Arts Curriculum at the Heart of the LSI Design Pathway

At the center of the Design Pathway is a liberal arts curriculum that encourages Fellows to see beyond conventional approaches, engage diverse viewpoints, and develop solutions informed by both reflection and action.

The question sounds deceptively simple: what makes a leadership education genuinely transformative rather than merely informative? For the University of Chicago’s Leadership and Society Initiative, the answer lies not in what is taught but in how — and, more specifically, in who teaches it together.

The LSI Design Pathway, a full academic year of immersive, cohort-based learning on the University’s Hyde Park campus, is built around a core pedagogical conviction: that the most expansive thinking happens not when a single expert illuminates a topic, but when two very different kinds of experts address the same domain from fundamentally different vantage points. The productive friction of those contrasting perspectives is not incidental to the curriculum. It is the curriculum.

What follows is a closer look at how that principle came alive in the 2025–2026 academic year, across nine courses organized within LSI’s three Learning Pillars: Know Oneself, Understand the World, and Envision the Future.

The Architecture of Productive Tension

Each quarter of the Design Pathway features three core courses, one anchored in each Learning Pillar. Within each course, two instructors share a unifying theme but approach it from distinctly different disciplines, life experiences, and intellectual traditions. A behavioral scientist and a gerontologist. A management professor and a Classics scholar. A political philosopher and a former deputy mayor. The combinations are deliberate, and the results are consistently greater than the sum of their parts.

This architecture reflects something foundational about how the University of Chicago thinks about education. The goal is not to provide answers but to develop the capacity to ask better questions — and to hold competing frameworks in productive tension long enough to generate genuine insight. For Fellows who have spent decades becoming expert in a particular domain, that kind of openness can feel both disorienting and deeply generative. That is precisely the point.

This piece explores the autumn quarter Core Courses within the Design Pathway as a case study of this pedagogical approach. You can view the full 2025-26 Design Pathway Curriculum here.

Know Oneself: Frameworks for Reflection

The first Learning Pillar, Know Oneself, anchors each quarter in a course called Frameworks for Reflection. The shared theme changes each quarter — Leadership & Purpose in the autumn, Experiential Wisdom in the winter, Looking Inward in the spring — but the animating question remains constant: who are you, and how did you become that person? And what might this tell you about your values, identity, and motivations for the future?

In the autumn quarter, that question was explored through an unlikely but illuminating pairing. Harry Davis, the legendary professor at the Booth School of Business who has spent decades helping leaders navigate transitions, brought a framework grounded in behavioral science, organizational psychology, and lessons from the arts. His course, Leadership Transitions, treats the disorientation of an organizational crisis or major career change not as a problem to be solved but as essential terrain — a necessary stage to try new leadership identities and build a new sense of self-awareness through intentional experimentation of the characters we need to play or want to play and why.

Alongside Davis, David Wray of the Classics Department taught World Wisdom Literature, bringing Fellows into direct conversation with Aristotle, the Stoics, and four other great philosophical traditions — not as historical artifacts, but as living guides to the art of living well. Where Davis offered frameworks for navigating transition, Wray offered something older and stranger: the accumulated reflections of thinkers who have wrestled for millennia with the same question Fellows were asking of themselves. The combination produced a kind of intellectual depth that neither course could have achieved independently. A Fellow who understood the behavioral science of identity transition and had also wrestled with Aristotle’s account of human flourishing left with a richer and more textured sense of what their own transition meant.

Understand the World: Lenses for Investigation

The second Learning Pillar proceeds from a different premise: that a leader who is able to consider complexities through myriad lenses beyond their own domain knowledge is best equipped for driving solutions, innovations, and ultimately impact. Lenses for Investigation is designed to support Fellows in widening their aperture, equipping them with the analytical frameworks of multiple academic disciplines and asking them to apply those frameworks to some of the most consequential issues of our time.

In the autumn quarter, the shared theme was Governance — and it was explored through an almost theatrical contrast. John Paul Rollert, whose teaching and research sit at the intersection of political philosophy, business ethics, and intellectual history, taught Citizenship and the Business of Society: a rigorous examination of liberal democracy, civic obligation, and what it actually means to be an engaged member of a democratic society in a moment when those norms are under pressure. His co-instructor, Samir Mayekar — former Deputy Mayor of Chicago and now Managing Director of the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation — taught the Economic Development Playbook from the inside: what it looks like to govern a major city through simultaneous crises, how the tools of municipal finance and economic policy work in practice, and what it takes to align government, philanthropy, and business around a shared urban vision.

The pairing illuminated something neither course could have surfaced alone. Rollert asked: what are the philosophical foundations of the obligations citizens and leaders bear to one another? Mayekar asked: what do those obligations look like on a Tuesday morning when the budget is tight and stakeholders have competing needs? Together, the courses gave Fellows both the conceptual architecture of democratic governance and the practitioner’s understanding of its routine pressures.

Envision the Future: Pathways to Impact

The third Learning Pillar begins where the other two leave us: equipped with a deeper self-understanding and a richer analytical framework for the world, but still facing the most demanding question of all. What will you actually do?

Pathways to Impact is the most explicitly forward-looking of the three courses, and its pairings reflect that. In the autumn, the shared theme of Innovations for Society was explored by Megan Christenson of Redefine Alliance and Priya Parrish of Impact Engine — two practitioners working at the intersection of entrepreneurship and social change, but from unique areas of focus. Christenson’s course explored the Theory of Change: the foundational framework that asks social impact organizations to make explicit the logical chain connecting their activities to the outcomes they seek to produce. Parrish took on best practices of impact investing: a field built on the proposition that capital, properly structured and rigorously measured, can generate social and environmental outcomes alongside financial returns. One course asked: how does organizational logic connect to impact? The other asked: how does capital? Together, they gave Fellows sharpened tools of the modern social impact ecosystem.

The Whole Greater Than Its Parts

Across the year, the cumulative effect of the Design Pathway’s paired structure is something that is difficult to describe but unmistakable to experience: a growing capacity to hold multiple frameworks simultaneously, to resist the comfort of a single explanatory lens, and to see complexity not as an obstacle to leadership but as its essential terrain.

That capacity is what the University of Chicago has always sought to cultivate — in undergraduates encountering the Core curriculum for the first time, in doctoral students learning to see their specialized questions within a broader intellectual landscape, and now in accomplished leaders returning to the campus with the deepest possible motivation to learn: a genuine stake in the answers.

The 2025–2026 Design Pathway was, at its heart, a year-long argument that the most consequential questions — who am I, how does the world work, and what am I going to do about it — are not answered by expertise alone. They are answered through the productive friction of contrasting perspectives, the discipline of genuine inquiry into self and society, and the courage to remain in uncertainty long enough for something genuinely new to emerge.

That, in the end, is what a liberal arts education offers. And it is what the Leadership and Society Initiative offers to the leaders who are ready to receive it.

Learn more about the LSI Design Pathway.

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