In 1995, Alabama became one of the first states to legislate character education. The mandate was simple: ten minutes a day focused on 25 traits. Implementation, however, was left up to individual educators—many of whom, like current University of Alabama professor Ben White, barely noticed its effects.

“I went through school during that time,” White recalls. “And I didn’t notice much of a change.”

The early model treated character as a scheduled lesson or a boxed curriculum. For Dr. David Walker, Director of the University’s Center for the Study of Ethical Development, this approach missed the point.

“Character is not a program,” Walker explains. “Character is everything. Character is the way you do business in a school. It's how you relate to each other.”

At Belmont University, the effort to form students of purpose, wisdom, and strong character isn’t an abstract ideal—it’s a lived, campus-wide commitment. Through the Formation Collaborative, Belmont is strategically embedding character formation and whole-person development into every dimension of university life, from academic curriculum and staff leadership to student experiences and institutional culture.

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.