United Negro College Fund’s Jelani Favors and the ECI’s Emily Hunt-Hinojosa and Michael Prinzing make the argument that character education efforts at HBCUs have been underappreciated. To kick off conversations around research on the role of HBCUs in educating character, they invite you to collaborate and join the discussion.
Current ECI grantees share what helped them develop strong proposals, build partnerships, and connect their ideas to their institutions’ needs. Together, they remind us that this work matters, that there’s room for many approaches, and that you are not alone in the process.
In 2025, ECI Webinars brought together diverse perspectives on how communities can cultivate wholeness, reciprocity, care, justice, and hospitality, and how character can be intentionally developed through community.
“We don’t just train people to be doctors or engineers or business leaders; we train people to think for themselves, and that is profoundly liberating,” Duncan Pritchard recently told LearningWell magazine about the university’s character work. Pritchard is director of the Anteater Virtues Project, which promotes the intellectual virtues of curiosity, integrity, intellectual humility, and intellectual tenacity across the university.
This fall, George Fox University hosted ECI Community members united in exploring the formation of student character in faith-based higher education. Together, this group of thoughtful leaders represents a growing subset within the ECI Community: faith-based institutions committed to forming students with the qualities they need to serve the common good.
What does it mean to build the traits of a peacebuilder rather than just theoretically know how to resolve conflict? At Utah State University, a religious studies professor and a political science professor are collaborating to enhance the university’s core curriculum with peace studies pedagogy that’s integrated with character education.
The North Carolina Central University (NCCU) Office of Community Engagement and Service, NCCU Wesley Campus Ministry, and Duke University Chapel co-sponsored a public conversation on “What an Education is For: Character and the Second Curriculum at HBCUs” at NCCU on Thursday, Oct. 16.
Seton Hill University is weaving its founding spirit, rooted in the mission of the Sisters of Charity, into a modern approach to character education. With support from the ECI, faculty and students are turning archives, classrooms, and conversations into spaces where virtues like humility, wisdom, and gratitude spark to life.
A recent study found that framing discussions about race around virtues like courage and patience reduces defensiveness, fosters openness, and encourages meaningful action. Our ECI Senior Research Fellow Juliette Ratchford contributed to the research.
The Educating Character Initiative announced a request for proposals from U.S. colleges and universities for grants between $50,000 and $1,000,000 to develop the character of their faculty, staff, and students.
In socially diverse contexts, character educators often struggle to articulate what “good character” means. They want to avoid both moral dogmatism and relativism. In this webinar, three distinguished presenters draw on Anishinaabe principles of relationality, process, and reciprocity to offer a third way, showing character educators how they can help students develop a contextualized understanding of good character.
Philosophy graduates consistently score higher on tests of verbal and logical reasoning than their peers from other majors, according to the new research by members of the ECI Community.
Once a federal Indian boarding school, Fort Lewis College is using its ECI Institutional Impact Grant to address its painful past by “centering character education within a reconciliation initiative that goes beyond atonement to institutional change,” writes LearningWell Magazine.
In the August installment of our media partnership with LearningWell Magazine, a publication of the LearningWell Coalition, Syracuse University’s “Character Development and Sport Fan Engagement” project is highlighted for differentiating itself from most sports-driven character-building projects by focusing on the fans.
In July, 52 faculty members from Wake Forest and beyond joined us for our “Character Across the Curriculum” workshop. The goal was to support educators who want to integrate leadership and character development into new and existing courses.
In an opinion essay for Inside Higher Education, Senior Lecturer of Marine Conservation and Ethics at Duke University Rebecca Vidra—a 2025 ECI Teacher-Scholar Grant recipient—reflects on her work to redesign courses on environmental issues in ways that center the formation of intellectual virtues like curiosity, humility, and resilience.
Thanks to the support of Lilly Endowment Inc. and Wake Forest University, the Educating Character Initiative (ECI) has awarded $15.6 million in new Institutional Impact Grants to 28 projects among 33 colleges and universities. Each of these institutions seeks to undertake a substantial and sustained effort to educate character in undergraduate populations across their institutions.
These three-year grants provide support to enable institutional leaders, faculty, and staff to infuse character in undergraduate curricula and programming in ways that align organically with their college or university’s mission, context, and culture.
Wake Forest University’s Educating Character Initiative (ECI) will expand its support for character education at colleges and universities across the country with more than $30 million in new funding from Lilly Endowment Inc.
Throughout the Spring 2025 semester, the University of Mississippi (UM) hosted several character-centered events and workshops with the recurring theme of moral grandstanding, or abusing moral talk to enhance your own social status.
The Anteater Virtues program at the University of California-Irvine focuses on the development of four key intellectual virtues: curiosity, integrity, intellectual humility, and intellectual tenacity. One of the project’s distinctive features is the support it receives from senior academic leadership.
We were privileged to speak with several of the principal investigators of 2024 grants while they attended the Program for Leadership and Character’s spring visit and ask, “What is most exciting about what you are learning from their grant projects?”
Thanks to the support of Lilly Endowment Inc., the ECI has awarded 40 new grants of up to $50,000 to 42 institutions seeking to educate and embed character in their distinctive contexts of higher education.
On February 10, representatives from five women-serving institutions gathered at Salem College for a Women’s Colleges Convening on Gender, Leadership, Ethics, and Character.
The Nathan O. Hatch Leader of Character Award honors an outstanding leader in higher education who has shown exceptional commitment to educating character at their institution and beyond.
The deadline to submit your Letter of Inquiry is February 20 at 5:00 p.m. ET. Please visit the 2026 RFP page for details and application instructions.
United Negro College Fund’s Jelani Favors and the ECI’s Emily Hunt-Hinojosa and Michael Prinzing make the argument that character education efforts at HBCUs have been underappreciated. To kick off conversations around research on the role of HBCUs in educating character, they invite you to collaborate and join the discussion.
Current ECI grantees share what helped them develop strong proposals, build partnerships, and connect their ideas to their institutions’ needs. Together, they remind us that this work matters, that there’s room for many approaches, and that you are not alone in the process.
In 2025, ECI Webinars brought together diverse perspectives on how communities can cultivate wholeness, reciprocity, care, justice, and hospitality, and how character can be intentionally developed through community.
In the episode, Aaron Cobb discusses hope—not just as a feeling or a fleeting optimism, but as a virtue that shapes character and community.
“We don’t just train people to be doctors or engineers or business leaders; we train people to think for themselves, and that is profoundly liberating,” Duncan Pritchard recently told LearningWell magazine about the university’s character work. Pritchard is director of the Anteater Virtues Project, which promotes the intellectual virtues of curiosity, integrity, intellectual humility, and intellectual tenacity across the university.
This fall, George Fox University hosted ECI Community members united in exploring the formation of student character in faith-based higher education. Together, this group of thoughtful leaders represents a growing subset within the ECI Community: faith-based institutions committed to forming students with the qualities they need to serve the common good.
What does it mean to build the traits of a peacebuilder rather than just theoretically know how to resolve conflict? At Utah State University, a religious studies professor and a political science professor are collaborating to enhance the university’s core curriculum with peace studies pedagogy that’s integrated with character education.
The North Carolina Central University (NCCU) Office of Community Engagement and Service, NCCU Wesley Campus Ministry, and Duke University Chapel co-sponsored a public conversation on “What an Education is For: Character and the Second Curriculum at HBCUs” at NCCU on Thursday, Oct. 16.
Seton Hill University is weaving its founding spirit, rooted in the mission of the Sisters of Charity, into a modern approach to character education. With support from the ECI, faculty and students are turning archives, classrooms, and conversations into spaces where virtues like humility, wisdom, and gratitude spark to life.
A recent study found that framing discussions about race around virtues like courage and patience reduces defensiveness, fosters openness, and encourages meaningful action. Our ECI Senior Research Fellow Juliette Ratchford contributed to the research.
The Educating Character Initiative announced a request for proposals from U.S. colleges and universities for grants between $50,000 and $1,000,000 to develop the character of their faculty, staff, and students.
In socially diverse contexts, character educators often struggle to articulate what “good character” means. They want to avoid both moral dogmatism and relativism. In this webinar, three distinguished presenters draw on Anishinaabe principles of relationality, process, and reciprocity to offer a third way, showing character educators how they can help students develop a contextualized understanding of good character.
Philosophy graduates consistently score higher on tests of verbal and logical reasoning than their peers from other majors, according to the new research by members of the ECI Community.
Once a federal Indian boarding school, Fort Lewis College is using its ECI Institutional Impact Grant to address its painful past by “centering character education within a reconciliation initiative that goes beyond atonement to institutional change,” writes LearningWell Magazine.
In the August installment of our media partnership with LearningWell Magazine, a publication of the LearningWell Coalition, Syracuse University’s “Character Development and Sport Fan Engagement” project is highlighted for differentiating itself from most sports-driven character-building projects by focusing on the fans.
In July, 52 faculty members from Wake Forest and beyond joined us for our “Character Across the Curriculum” workshop. The goal was to support educators who want to integrate leadership and character development into new and existing courses.
In an opinion essay for Inside Higher Education, Senior Lecturer of Marine Conservation and Ethics at Duke University Rebecca Vidra—a 2025 ECI Teacher-Scholar Grant recipient—reflects on her work to redesign courses on environmental issues in ways that center the formation of intellectual virtues like curiosity, humility, and resilience.
Thanks to the support of Lilly Endowment Inc. and Wake Forest University, the Educating Character Initiative (ECI) has awarded $15.6 million in new Institutional Impact Grants to 28 projects among 33 colleges and universities. Each of these institutions seeks to undertake a substantial and sustained effort to educate character in undergraduate populations across their institutions.
These three-year grants provide support to enable institutional leaders, faculty, and staff to infuse character in undergraduate curricula and programming in ways that align organically with their college or university’s mission, context, and culture.
Wake Forest University’s Educating Character Initiative (ECI) will expand its support for character education at colleges and universities across the country with more than $30 million in new funding from Lilly Endowment Inc.
Throughout the Spring 2025 semester, the University of Mississippi (UM) hosted several character-centered events and workshops with the recurring theme of moral grandstanding, or abusing moral talk to enhance your own social status.
The first in a series of stories by LearningWell on the Educating Character Initiative and the efforts of our member institutions.
The Anteater Virtues program at the University of California-Irvine focuses on the development of four key intellectual virtues: curiosity, integrity, intellectual humility, and intellectual tenacity. One of the project’s distinctive features is the support it receives from senior academic leadership.
We’ve compiled a short list of recommended newsletters focused on character and character formation.
We were privileged to speak with several of the principal investigators of 2024 grants while they attended the Program for Leadership and Character’s spring visit and ask, “What is most exciting about what you are learning from their grant projects?”
Thanks to the support of Lilly Endowment Inc., the ECI has awarded 40 new grants of up to $50,000 to 42 institutions seeking to educate and embed character in their distinctive contexts of higher education.
Recent highlights from three ECI grantees.
On February 10, representatives from five women-serving institutions gathered at Salem College for a Women’s Colleges Convening on Gender, Leadership, Ethics, and Character.
The Nathan O. Hatch Leader of Character Award honors an outstanding leader in higher education who has shown exceptional commitment to educating character at their institution and beyond.