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.
Categories: Educating Character Initiative News
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.
Categories: Educating Character Initiative News
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.
Categories: Educating Character Initiative News
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.
Categories: Educating Character Initiative News
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.
Categories: Educating Character Initiative News
The first in a series of stories by LearningWell on the Educating Character Initiative and the efforts of our member institutions.
Categories: Educating Character Initiative News
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.
Categories: Educating Character Initiative News
We’ve compiled a short list of recommended newsletters focused on character and character formation.
Categories: Educating Character Initiative News
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?”
Categories: Educating Character Initiative News
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.
Categories: Educating Character Initiative News