Is it possible to increase college students’ concern for the common good—and commitment to pursuing it—when they are faced with ethical dilemmas? Harvard’s Howard Gardner and Wendy Fischman attempted to do just that in their “Beyond the Self” pilot project, and are now helping faculty at institutions across the country adapt and implement the intervention on their campuses.

“We want students to be concerned not only with their own flourishing, we also want them to think about other persons and indeed, the broader society flourishing,” said Wendy Fischman, Project Director for the Harvard Graduate School of Education initiative Making Ethics Central to the College Experience. “We want students to become sensitive to ethical dilemmas and to reflect more deeply on the difficult decisions and situations that they face now and that they might face as professional workers and as future citizens in society—and to develop strategies for resolving or navigating these dilemmas.”

Over two years, their research team worked with approximately 150 students at four schools, tracking weekly journal entries and following up with four one-on-one conversations with each student throughout the academic year. At the end of each year, most students reported that participation helped them to slow down, to consider other perspectives, and to think about how their own behaviors and actions can have real consequences on others. In response to these results, the Kern Family Foundation funded an additional 3-year project to expand and deepen the work.

“We’re looking to work with individual institutions to help them make use of the approach, both the journaling and the discussions, because we feel that both are key to the process,” Fischman said. “Some faculty are embedding the whole portfolio approach as we’ve structured it, and we’re helping them run it. For other faculty members, we are co-constructing a new approach based on what is already happening in their classes or programs.”

In addition to helping people adapt the portfolio approach, the team is also trying to help institutions understand the impact of existing programs, courses, and centers which squarely focus on character and ethical development.

Katie Abramowitz started working with Fischman when she was a college student and was hired as a research assistant after she graduated.

“Reading so many interviews of college students made me reflect on my own college experience,” Abramowitz said.  “I think my favorite part about working on the project was getting to have those one-on-one conversations with students and hear about how much of an impact they felt like this project was having in their lives. I think, for some of them, the conversations were one of the only places where they could actually express their thoughts and opinions. Because we were outsiders, they could say whatever they wanted, and we would be there to listen to them without judgment.”

Fischman agrees that the conversations were key— they confirm what she and Gardner heard during their 10-year study on higher education, in which they conducted 2000 interviews (1000 students, 500 faculty and administrators, and 500 parents, young alums, trustees and job recruiters), recently published in The Real World of College (MIT Press, 2022).

“The default is a transactional mindset about college, earning over learning,” she said. “There are not enough opportunities for students to step back and think, ‘What is this all about?’ Often when we talked with students, they told us that the interview was the first time they ever really were asked questions such as, ‘what are your goals for the college experience? Why are you going to college? What do you want to get out of it?’ And so I think that the big questions—whether about college and/or how to navigate ethical dilemmas—are easily missed if nobody takes the time to ask them, and then to reflect seriously about them.”

Fischman is looking for more faculty and institutions that are interested in working with them, and welcomes inquiries.

“There are multiple ways to get at these issues of ethics and character,” she said. “We want to understand what’s going on in the higher education landscape. What’s most effective? How are students making use of the focused programs and courses? What really seems to be helping them as they prepare to venture into the work world, and into the real world? And if a school is uncertain where to start, we have an approach that we think can help.”