What’s New
🎩 GET INVOLVED! 🎩
Are you a Wake Forest student who wants to get involved with our Program? Click or tap on the button below to learn more:
- 🎤 We are co-sponsoring an event with Piedmont Opera called Girls of Yellow Diamonds. This recital features classical singers Alice Chung and Helen Huang as they take us on a musical journey with local pianist and Wake Forest adjunct professor Dr. Yong Im Lee Federle. You can learn more and claim a free ticket for this event here.
- 📣 Join us for our major conference, Educating Character Across Differences: Cultivating Communities of Character in the University, December 5-7, 2024, at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC, hosted by the ECI on behalf of our Program.
- 💰The Travel for Interdisciplinary and Community Engaged Learning (TICEL) Travel Grant application is now open to faculty in the graduate and professional schools! Applications are due October 25, 2024, apply today!
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Our Mission
The Program for Leadership and Character inspires, educates, and empowers leaders of character to serve humanity. Through innovative teaching, creative programming, and cutting-edge research, we aim to transform the lives of students, foster an inclusive culture of leadership and character at Wake Forest, and catalyze a broader public conversation that places character at the center of leadership.
Over the last decade, Wake Forest faculty have become leading experts in the study of character. The Program for Leadership and Character is now using this groundbreaking research to develop creative, liberal arts-based programming to transform the lives of our students.
We are excited to share who we are and what we aspire to do. We hope you will join us in this effort.
Courses
We teach courses on leadership and character and equip others to develop relevant courses.
College Programming
Our outside-the-classroom programs equip students to develop the character needed to lead with integrity.
Professional Schools
Our efforts in the professional schools prepare students to be leaders and professionals of character.
Conferences
We host conferences to facilitate broader reflection on leadership and character beyond Wake Forest.
C2C
Learn more about yourself and others through a Call to Conversation.
Research
We use rigorous research to assess our programs and share our results.
Join the Center for Literacy Education for the Leadership, Equity, and Education Speaker Series on Monday, September 23 in the Kulynych Auditorium from 6-7 pm. Dr. Donovan Livingston, Director of College Thriving and Teaching Assistant Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will give a lecture on hip hop as a form of literacy.
Over the summer, we held our Men’s Student-Athlete Leadership Retreat. The retreat was led by Wendell Dunn, Assistant Director of Leadership and Character for Athletics, and Dwight Lewis, Associate Athletic Director, Student Engagement and DEI. We asked the student-athletes to share their takeaways and experiences from the three-day retreat, and here’s what they had to say.
Yesterday we hosted our first Leadership and Character Involvement Kickoff! This dinner was an opportunity for students to meet our Program staff, learn about the work that we do, and the ways they can get involved. “Our hope was for the students to know that we are a resource for them; that this is a space where they can explore not just what they want to do, but who they want to be,” says Roscoe Bell, our program coordinator.
If you missed it, don’t worry! We will host a Wednesday Night Dinner in Starling Hall on September 18, at 6 p.m. where students can stop by for refreshments, meaningful conversation, and a chance to build a community on campus.
Join us tomorrow for our Leadership and Character Involvement Kickoff at 6 p.m. in the Magnolia Room! This event is an opportunity for students to learn more about who we are, the ways they can get involved in the Program, and have dinner and meaningful conversations. We hope to see you there!
What is college for? Let’s talk about it! In preparation for our upcoming discussion group, our Leadership and Character Scholar, @juztmason (’25), asked students their thoughts on attending college and here’s what they had to say.
If you are interested in continuing this conversation, sign up for our discussion group! Click the link in our bio to sign up by Wednesday, September 4.
Last week we wrapped up our pre-orientation program called L.E.A.P. (Leadership, Ethics, and Purpose). During this four-day program, students reflected on virtues such as courage, justice, empathy and humility and examined the ways student leaders can have an impact at Wake Forest and their larger communities by knowing their character and leading with it. Rafael Castro (‘28) shares the most meaningful part of his experience after participating in L.E.A.P.
This week, we welcomed the incoming class of Leadership and Character Scholars to @wfuniversity with an open house at Starling Hall. @k.michael.lamb delivered opening remarks for new students and their parents. #ProHumanitate #WFU28
How do you engage with those whose views differ from your own? Our Principled Pluralism Fellows share what they learned about pluralism after completing an 8-week summer fellowship.
Do you want a world of robot lawyers or do you think such a world would strip humanity and character from the law? Director of Pre-Law Bryan Ellrod goes at length about this very topic on his recently published article about AI Lawyers “Programming Utopia” in the Journal of Law and Humanities. #AI #ProHumanitate
Intellectual Humility is recognizing and accepting one’s intellectual limitations in order to pursue deeper knowledge, truth, and understanding. As part of a larger research project on the virtue and its place in the medical community, Visiting Scholar and Assistant Professor of Psychology at Rowan University Dr. Tenelle Porter surveyed @wakeforestmed faculty during the UGME Curriculum Retreat this past June.
Thanks to the support of Lilly Endowment Inc. and @wfuniversity, the Educating Character Initiative (ECI) has awarded $15.6 million in Institutional Impact Grants to 24 projects among 29 colleges and universities seeking to undertake a substantial and sustained effort to educate character in undergraduate populations across their institutions. These three-year grants range from $100,000 to $1 million. They will provide support to enable institutional leaders, faculty, and staff to infuse character in undergraduate curricula and programming in ways that align organically with their mission, context, and culture.
A wide range of public and private colleges and universities––representing diverse populations of students, institutional types, and disciplinary orientations––submitted innovative proposals to develop or expand character education efforts at their institutions. Recipients of Institutional Impact Grants include major research universities, liberal arts colleges, Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, religiously affiliated colleges, multi-institutional collaborations, a Historically Black University, two military academies, and universities serving large populations of first-generation college students.
You can read the full announcement and find the list of recipients at the link in our bio.
Leadership and Character in Austria! Earlier this month our Research Scholar, Becky Park, attended the European Conference of Positive Psychology in Innsbruck, Austria. During her presentation, she spoke about the work of the Program and the role of relationships in character development within higher education.
Using empirical data, she shared that students’ relationships with their peers and mentors was one of the most meaningful aspects of their experience in the program, and outlined the ways in which these relationships contributed to virtue growth and personal development in students.