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. Led by Duncan Pritchard, Distinguished Professor in UCI’s School of Humanities, the project promotes four core virtues: curiosity, integrity, intellectual tenacity, and intellectual humility. The goal of the Anteater Virtue project is to push back against a purely instrumental view of higher education, where students focus solely on grades and degrees.
“We want to make people good epistemic thinkers,” said Tom Colclough, a postdoctoral scholar on the project.
Beyond shaping critical thinkers, research suggests that students who engage with the Anteater project see better educational outcomes, regardless of their major. The hope is that different academic departments will tailor the curriculum to fit their specific fields.
“Nursing is the farthest along in the process,” Colclough emphasized.
One of the nursing faculty members leading the way is Cassidie Thomas, a Health Science Clinical Instructor. She has integrated the curriculum into multiple courses, starting with her ethics-focused frameworks class.
“I realized that I couldn’t do this if I didn’t know what it was all about,” said Thomas. “So I watched all of the videos and took all of the quizzes. I needed to connect it to their learning in a meaningful way.”
She asked herself a key question: If she were a nurse in a clinical setting, how could these virtues influence how she approached different situations? That reflection led her to incorporate not just the virtues but also their opposites—intellectual vices.
“I decided to incorporate the intellectual vices,” Thomas said. “Close-mindedness, superiority, and gullibility can creep into the professional and healthcare environment. I wanted students to see how that plays out in real-life situations.”
The results were striking. By exploring how these intellectual pitfalls affect ethical decision-making, her students engaged with case studies on a deeper level.
Her second course to integrate the virtues was a capstone-style leadership class. Students were required to write an intellectual virtues statement, reflecting on how nursing intersects with these values and how they would apply them in their professional careers.
“I taught ethics as a separate topic in this course, and there are ways to teach ethics in a very compartmentalized way—select a framework, memorize the terminology, classify the situation,” Thomas said. “But that approach creates distance between the student and the ethical dilemma.”
By focusing on intellectual virtues, she saw a shift.
“Students started seeing themselves as part of the situation rather than analyzing it from a distance. Their reasoning became less about classifying the ethical picture over there and more about how they might navigate it themselves.”
Developing intellectual virtues is hard work, and both Thomas and Burke worry about students maintaining these values in the face of systemic challenges. That concern, Burke said, is precisely why she embraced the Anteater Virtues.
“Rather than talking about nursing ethics until we are blue in the face and then disciplining students who are cheating,” said Burke, “we hope this curriculum change will connect integrity in the classroom to integrity in practice.”
Saying the right thing is easy. Doing the right thing is much harder.
For nursing students, the stakes of failing to uphold integrity in the classroom are relatively low. But in real-world practice, the consequences can be life or death.
Through the Anteater Virtues, Burke and Thomas are working to create classrooms where students don’t just learn about integrity, but they feel the weight of patient trust and the responsibility that comes with it.
