How do you cultivate ethical values and commitments within nursing at a large public university where the students often differ in religious, ethnic, political and socio-economic backgrounds?

Leanne Burke, Associate Clinical Professor and Pre-Licensure Program Director at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), faced this challenge head-on when she arrived on campus. Engaging a diverse student body in conversations about complex moral dilemmas in nursing practice proved difficult.

She struggled to find the right approach.

"Without the baseline understanding that you might have with students from a similar faith tradition or in a small school, I had to learn how to have complex conversations about maternal healthcare, fetal development, loss of life, racial disparities in the healthcare system, and how our beliefs affect where we work," said Burke. "I knew these conversations were vital, but I didn’t want to cause harm."

Then she discovered the Anteater Virtues, a campus-wide initiative designed to integrate intellectual character into the university’s culture.

The Institute for Citizens and Scholars (C&S) is leading a national effort to reshape how colleges and universities foster civic engagement on campus. An initiative of C&S, College Presidents for Civic Preparedness unites 100+ campus leaders nationwide to equip students with the skills to engage in civic life and strengthen their communities. The initiative offers a Faculty Institute, that helps faculty members develop the skills and confidence they need to teach students how to engage in dialogue across differences. C&S is on a mission to help young people collaborate across differences to tackle the toughest challenges our country faces.

When Craig Goehler’s first-year engineering students walk into their first engineering design course and pick up a syllabus, they probably expect problem sets and design assignments. So they are likely surprised to see words like “empathy, honesty, and justice” in the weekly learning outcomes alongside those assignments. But for Goehler, an associate teaching professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, it is important to be explicit about the way virtues are embedded in the engineering design process; in fact, Goehler has come to believe that virtue is fundamental to becoming a good engineer.

We sat down with Fr. Boyle to discuss his work over almost 4 decades, and how his generous vision of human goodness and dignity continues to have implications for social change. Read More

What does character education add to the educational vision of a community college? Though in the early stages of their work, Ted Hadzi-Antich, Grant Potts, and Arun John at Austin Community College (ACC), suspect there will be a fulsome payoff for civic communities, employers, and, of course, the students themselves. In short, everyone benefits when an access institution puts character at the center of its work.