It’s Saturday on a farm outside Tempe. A math major and an English major from Arizona State University are weeding a row of carrots and chatting about where they grew up, while two students from the school of business are turning a compost pile nearby. Afterwards they gather with the rest of the student volunteers for a conversation about sustainability and care, and what that means for how we should live our lives.

This is a reality at the Arizona State University ASU Farm, an interdisciplinary center designed to integrate character building directly into the student experience through sustainable agriculture.

Why do good engineers make bad ethical choices?

“This question has been at the top of my mind for a long time,” said Jesse Pappas, Assistant Professor of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. “My suspicion has been that many students and professionals aren’t taking ethics personally enough, so it’s not internalized as part of their identity.”

The clinical psychology student recited the facts of the case as if it were a formula. That’s what she had been trained to do, what her peers and professors expected. There was probably a time when this student wondered about the complex and human questions that might lead a person to the moment of diagnosis, but if those questions remained, they were hidden behind the unemotional, analytical veneer demanded by professionalism.

What if high-quality, virtue-based leadership development could reach anyone, anywhere? Leading with Character, a free online course, has begun to scale character-based leadership training across cultures and continents.

It’s Friday early in the fall semester, and a group of students from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business board a bus for what Professor Andy Hoffman calls “a four-hour ride into the woods.” At a retreat center, they surrender their phones and laptops—returned only on Sunday—and prepare for a weekend focused not on team building, networking, or branding, but on discerning their life’s calling.