Adaora I Onaga
There is something profoundly instructive about a discipline whose entire purpose is filtration. A nephrologist spends a career thinking about what the body must keep and what it must release: which substances sustain life and which, if allowed to accumulate, gradually become toxic. It is not a bad place from which to begin thinking about ethical leadership. Institutions, much like the human body, are ultimately shaped not only by what flows through them, but by what they have the wisdom to retain, the courage to confront, and the discipline to let go.
This is also where the conversation about character and holistic education becomes particularly important. To educate character is, at its deepest level, to form individuals and institutions for wholeness. This is why we continually return to the idea of holistic education. Wholeness requires more than acquiring knowledge or mastering skills. It requires learning to recognise what is healthy, what is broken, what needs healing, and, sometimes, what must be removed altogether.
Even the language of health points us in this direction. Health shares an ancient Indo-European root with words such as heal, whole, and holy. To be healthy, in its deepest sense, is to be whole. We instinctively recognise that ethical action is, in some profound way, action directed towards wholeness. This helps explain the close connection that ancient philosophers made between ethics and eudaimonia, human flourishing, happiness, or fulfilment. The ethical life was not understood merely as adherence to a set of rules. It was about the kind of person you became.
And here, the kidneys offer us another important lesson. A healthy kidney cannot function in isolation. It depends on the larger circulatory system and must remain in constant relationship with the other organs of the body. Its health is therefore relational. Institutions are no different. A university, hospital, ministry, company, or public institution cannot effectively identify and filter its own corruption through willpower alone. Ethical health requires accountability structures, colleagues naming what they see, listening leaders, and a culture where disclosure isn’t betrayal. An institution that celebrates only its successes while quietly refusing to examine its failures is not practising wholeness. It is practising denial. And denial, both medically and morally, can lead to systemic failure.
An institution that insists it can regulate itself without any meaningful external scrutiny is not necessarily demonstrating strength. Sometimes, it is displaying the early symptoms of institutional decline. No institution should assume that its position, reputation, or past achievements make it immune to the need for examination and correction. This may sound rather gloomy, but the point is ultimately hopeful. If character formation is genuinely about preparing individuals to contribute meaningfully to their communities, then it cannot stop at teaching values or publishing codes of conduct. It must also take the work of moral repair seriously. We must confront what is unhealthy, restore what can be healed, and remove what undermines the integrity of the whole when necessary.
This is one reason I find the work at Pan-Atlantic University, especially in the Institute of Humanities, very encouraging. There is a growing recognition that education must be holistic and transformative if it is to contribute meaningfully to the moral repair of individuals, organisations, and communities. That work is not always comfortable. In fact, meaningful formation rarely is.
It requires us to move beyond codes of conduct and institutional statements towards the cultivation of living examples, people whose character gives credibility to the values they profess and whose lives make those values visible to others. Ultimately, institutions shape themselves by the rules they establish, the behaviours they reward, the failures they confront, the truths they are willing to hear, and the examples they elevate.
Perhaps that is the deeper lesson from the nephrologist’s perspective. Wholeness is not a condition we arrive at once and then permanently possess. It is a practice. It requires constant attention, discernment, correction, and renewal. The body must continually filter what sustains it and remove what threatens it. Institutions must do the same.
For as long as an institution intends to remain healthy or live, it must continually ask: What must we keep? What must we release? What needs to be healed? And what must we have the courage to remove? These are just the thoughts from a nephrologist-philosopher; do share your reflections in the comments section.