The ECI will extend its impact on character education across the country by offering a new round of grants in 2027 for U.S higher education institutions with support from a nearly $44 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. The grant will also enable ECI to award additional grants in 2026.
Categories: Educating Character Initiative News, News
The Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School welcomed its inaugural cohort of HBCU Moral Fusion Scholars to campus in May. Their commitment to awaken “a new heart and a new hope through a moral commitment to prioritizing love, truth and justice,” renews hope for the future for this essay’s authors.
Categories: Educating Character Initiative News
Baylor University’s Andrew Hogue and the ECI’s Emily Hunt-Hinojosa share learnings from the Common Good Character Trust. Through the group’s discussions, they discovered that “character-building efforts that aim at the common good need a model of character formation that accounts more fully for institutions, cultures, and broader social forces.”
Categories: Educating Character Initiative News
ECI Executive Director Jennifer Rothschild was featured on The Flourishing Leaders podcast, where she discussed character as a social story, hospitality as a leadership practice, and the future of character education in higher education.
Categories: Educating Character Initiative News
At the 2026 NetVUE Conference, teams from four ECI-supported campuses — University of Dubuque, Bellarmine University, King University, and Belmont University — shared how character, vocation, and mission are woven into daily campus life. Their approaches range from faculty learning cohorts and holistic advising to campus-wide character festivals and communities built on accountability.
Categories: Educating Character Initiative News
Each semester at Institutional Impact Grantee Radford University, students from across the university gather at the Wicked Festival, presenting original solutions to some of the world’s hardest problems. “Students, community partners, alumni judges, and faculty circulate, ask hard questions, and push back. The students are the authorities.”
Categories: Educating Character Initiative News
In the first installment of a new series, Aaron D. Cobb, ECI’s Director of Collective Learning, invites us to consider whether courage is a virtue we can develop on our own. Practicing by ourselves is not enough. We need guides: people who can help shape how we learn and show us what good practice looks like.
Categories: Educating Character Initiative News
A diverse group of coaches, athletic directors, trainers, and academics came together to discuss the challenges and opportunities of promoting character development in college sports.
Categories: Educating Character Initiative News
ECI Researchers Michael Prinzing and Juliette Ratchford recently ran a study that investigated what students think about intentional efforts on the part of faculty or institutions to foster their character growth.
Categories: Educating Character Initiative News
“We’re going to develop the leadership for the next generation of leaders, and we’re going to do it in the ways that we care about when it comes to character,” Chris Marsicano, P.I. for Davidson College’s Institutional Impact Grant and the inaugural director of the Martin Institute for Public Good, recently told LearningWell magazine.
Categories: Educating Character Initiative News