Educating Character

eunice hu teaching class

A Time of Renewal for Character Education

From their beginnings, many U.S. colleges and universities have included the formation of character among their central educational aims.1 Though emphasis on such aims diminished in the latter half of the twentieth century, a broad range of institutions of higher education are now seeking to recover an emphasis on character while honoring the diversity and pluralism that characterize American life. The response to our first Request for Proposals demonstrated the extraordinary appetite for this work, with 140 institutions submitting proposals for our 2024 grants.

Across institutional roles, responsibilities, and disciplines, college and university leaders are adopting a renewed focus on the vital importance of character education, both for forming students to use their knowledge, skills, and capacities to serve humanity and for highlighting the distinctive value of higher education in contemporary life. Current faculty overwhelmingly see character formation as part of their role: in a recent faculty survey administered by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, 85% of 20,000 faculty across 143 four-year institutions said they “agree” or “strongly agree” that it is important for faculty to “develop students’ moral character” and “help students develop personal values.”2
Across several fields, scholars are advancing more sophisticated and practically
relevant accounts of character, and experts have illuminated why educating good character can be a valuable purpose for institutions of higher education. In particular, intentional efforts to educate character can support student wellbeing and flourishing, sustain academic excellence and integrity, promote equitable and inclusive community, foster good leadership and citizenship, advance career preparation and vocational discernment, and encourage the responsible use of technology. In many cases, educating character can also support an institution’s efforts to fulfill its distinctive educational mission, values, and aspirations.3

At the same time, character education is not without its challenges. While many colleges and universities desire to integrate character into their cultures and curricula, many do not know how to do so effectively. This work is especially complex given the diversity and pluralism of American society; the increasing demands placed on universities by students, parents, employers, and the general public; and the lack of a common vocabulary and institutional structure that can overcome silos of specialization characteristic of many disciplines and institutions.4 Faculty trained to do research in specialized disciplines often do not know how to educate character effectively in the classroom, and the pressure to publish research and fulfill increasing service demands makes it difficult to devote time and energy to learning a new field or designing new courses that address questions of character. Administrators trying to cut costs and satisfy a diverse range of stakeholders often lack the funding, time, and capacity to focus on educating character across their institutions.5 These challenges, among others, make it difficult for many institutions to imagine, much less implement, meaningful efforts to educate character in their contexts. This is a time when support for cultivating character is both highly desired and desperately needed.

Since 2017, the Program for Leadership and Character has been advancing a mission to educate character at Wake Forest University. In recent years, colleges and universities have increasingly reached out to solicit advice and share ideas about how to educate character in a university context. Inspired by our Wake Forest motto, Pro Humanitate (for humanity), and supported through a generous grant from Lilly Endowment Inc., we have developed the Educating Character Initiative to support a wider community of individuals and institutions to educate character within colleges and universities. Through the creation of a network of interested institutions and educators, the development and dissemination of research and resources, the organization of conferences and convenings, and the direct awarding of grants to individuals and institutions interested in advancing this work in their own contexts, we aspire to nurture a creative, compassionate, and collaborative community of educators who can learn from each other as partners in character education.

Character in Context

What do we mean by “character?”

Character education is not one-size-fits-all. While character education includes a set of widely shared virtues, strategies, and objectives and offers vital resources, frameworks, and examples to support faculty and staff in this work, it must be adapted to an institution’s distinctive history, culture, and context and integrated in organic ways that align with an institution’s core mission. Given the relational, institutional, and intercultural dynamics involved, the process of discerning and achieving such alignment is more time-consuming than any simple “plug-and-play” approach, but it also promises more potential for success and sustainability.

The Educating Character Initiative welcomes diverse approaches to moral, civic, and/or intellectual character and encourages engagement that is motivated to promote character development according to the mission and vision of each institution and to meet each institution’s unique population of faculty, staff, and students in context-sensitive ways.

An Approach from Wake Forest’s Program for Leadership and Character

The Educating Character Initiative is a part of the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University, whose mission and vision of character serve as our institutional anchor.

The mission of the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest is to inspire, educate, and empower 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, and catalyze a broader public conversation that places character at the center of leadership.

The Program for Leadership and Character understands character generally as “the collection of stable, deep, and enduring dispositions that define who we are and shape how we characteristically think, feel, and act.”6 The aim of the Program is to help students develop good dispositions (“virtues”) that foster individual and communal flourishing and to avoid bad dispositions (“vices”) that inhibit flourishing. The Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest focuses in particular on nurturing students’ sense of purpose and virtues of compassion, courage, gratitude, honesty, hope, humility, integrity, justice, kindness, resilience, temperance, and wisdom, among others. Different faculty, departments, and schools prioritize some virtues more than others and occasionally foster other virtues such as curiosity, creativity, and open-mindedness.

Overall, the Program for Leadership and Character’s approach to educating character is:

To support the development of good character, the Program utilizes a framework anchored in seven evidence-based strategies for character development:

These strategies and others are embedded throughout the Program’s curricular and co-curricular programming to support students’ holistic character development. To learn more about the Program for Leadership and Character, including more information about the seven strategies, please visit our website. We are in the process of compiling some resources for character educators that we are open to sharing.

We offer the above example of how the Program for Leadership and Character understands character education for illustrative purposes only. While other institutions are welcome to adapt what is useful from this approach, we do not expect that other institutions have or will adopt a similar framework or orientation.

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  1. See, e.g., Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Douglas Sloan, “The Teaching of Ethics in the American Undergraduate Curriculum, 1876–1976,” in Ethics Teaching in Higher Education, ed. Daniel Callahan and Sissela Bok (New York: Plenum Press, 1980), 1–57; and Elizabeth Kiss and J. Peter Euben, eds., Debating Moral Education: Rethinking the Role of the Modern University (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). ↩︎
  2. E. B. Stolzenberg, M. K. Eagan, H. B. Zimmerman, J. Berdan Lozano, N. M. Cesar-Davis, M. C.
    Aragon, and C. Rios-Aguilar, Undergraduate Teaching Faculty: The HERI Faculty Survey 2016-2017 (Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute, UCLA, 2019), 33. ↩︎
  3. These reasons were addressed in Michael Lamb, “Why Character?”, Educating Character Across
    the University Conference, Wake Forest University (December 2, 2022). ↩︎
  4. On institutional barriers to educating character in colleges and universities, see Michael Lamb,
    Edward Brooks, and Jonathan Brant, “Character Education in the University: Opportunities and
    Challenges,” in Cultivating Virtue in the University, ed. Jonathan Brant, Edward Brooks, and Michael Lamb (Oxford University Press, 2022), 253–277, esp. 258–263. ↩︎
  5. Ibid. ↩︎
  6. 6 See Michael Lamb, Jonathan Brant, and Edward Brooks, “Seven Strategies for Cultivating Virtue in the University” in Cultivating Virtue in the University, ed. Jonathan Brant, Edward Brooks, and Michael Lamb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 115–156. ↩︎
  7. Michael Lamb and Kenneth Townsend, “Wake Forest University’s Program for Leadership and
    Character: A Case Study,” in The Routledge International Handbook of Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Character Development, Volume II, ed. Michael D. Matthews and Richard M. Lerner (Routledge, 2024), 369–389. ↩︎