Upcoming Webinars and Book Club
Educating Character Initiative Fall 2027 Webinar Series: Building Capacity and Addressing Barriers
Join us for a series of online webinar sessions focused on building capacity and addressing barriers in educating character, moderated by Aaron D. Cobb, Director of Collective Learning with the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University. These sessions feature panelists and presenters who will equip participants to build capacity on their campuses by scaffolding capacities through professional development and communities of practice, by attending to the needs of moral repair, and by articulating and adapting frameworks fitting for their distinctive contexts. We are pleased to offer these webinars in a virtual forum that enables more of the ECI community to learn from colleagues doing important work across the country!
Session 1: Building Cultures for Character Education at Wake Forest University
Session Leaders: Kathleen Stimely (Senior Director of Program Administration) and Cristy Guleserian (Executive Director in the College), Wake Forest University
Description: In this webinar session, we engage with Kathleen Stimely and Cristy Guleserian as they describe the important work of staff development and building a culture for character education efforts at Wake Forest University. They will describe the distinctive staff certificate program designed and developed by Kathleen, and the emerging communities of impact that equip and empower Wake Forest University employees to deepen their work in character formation across campus.
Date/Time: August 25, 2025, 4–5 p.m. ET
Moderator: Aaron D. Cobb, Director of Collective Learning, Educating Character Initiative
Session 2: Grantee Spotlight – The Patient Work of Building Community and Capacity
Session Leaders: Chris Napolitano, Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Educational Psychology, University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) and Alexis Carter Thomas, Associate Chaplain, Furman University
Description: In this webinar session, we will engage with two principal investigators of institutions who led efforts on Capacity-Building Grants at their institutions, developing community and a foundation for work they will now extend through Institutional Impact Grants. This session will provide insights on the ways community-building is central to the work of building capacity for educating character. Participants will learn from projects at two distinct types of institutions: a large, public research university and a private, liberal arts university.
Date/Time: September 24, 4-5 p.m. ET
Moderator: Aaron D. Cobb, Director of Collective Learning, Educating Character Initiative
Session 3: Living Well in Community: Human Relationships, Moral Repair, and the Work of Character
Session Leader: Nancy Sherman, Distinguished University Professor and Professor of Philosophy, Georgetown University
Description: In her new book out this January, Feed the Soul: Lessons from Aristotle on Living Well, Nancy Sherman walks beside Aristotle as he explores what it means to live a good life. As in her last book Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience, Sherman continues to explore the ancient view that “human goodness grows through human connections. People flourish through friendship and community, and they wither when they retreat.” In this interview, we engage with Sherman to discuss character formation and life in community. Part of this conversation will focus on fragility in human relationships, moral injury, and the need for moral repair as a vital dimension of character-building efforts.
Date/Time: October 15, 4 p.m. ET
Moderator: Aaron D. Cobb, Director of Collective Learning, Educating Character Initiative
Session 4: Discerning a Framework for Character Formation at Your Institution
Session Leaders: Tom Harrison, Professor of Education, Deputy Pro-Vice Chancellor (Education), and Director of the Jubilee Centre for Character & Virtues, University of Birmingham; Andrew Peterson, Professor of Character and Citizenship Education, Head of Department, Education and Social Justice, University of Birmingham.
Description: Institutions of higher education often look to the Jubilee Centre’s Character Education in Universities: A Framework for Flourishing, a framework developed in coordination with the Oxford Character Project, to help them articulate an approach to character for their institutions. Some of these teams simply appeal to the framework and indicate that they will apply it; others point to pieces of this framework and say how they might adapt it for work in their context. Join the Director and Deputy Director of the Jubilee Centre for a conversation about the work discerning how best to employ this framework for contextualized institutional work.
Date/Time: November 24, 11 a.m. ET
Moderator: Aaron D. Cobb, Director of Collective Learning, Educating Character Initiative
The Flourishing Student Webinar Series, in Partnership with the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at The University of Birmingham
In recent years, many universities have expressed their commitment to a holistic, socially-engaged vision of higher education and are increasingly talking about supporting students in developing ‘character’ and ‘attributes’. These are the qualities students need to navigate the fourth industrial revolution, flourish, and make a positive contribution to society.
This international webinar series, presented in partnership with the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at The University of Birmingham, features presentations on universities’ role in helping their students cultivate the character and attributes required for human flourishing. Following the success of the first and second series, this third series will feature six additional world-leading universities renowned for their focus on character education, sharing their knowledge and expertise.
The next series will be announced soon.
ECI Community Book Club
Our book club engages authors in conversations about their published books and their implications for character-building efforts. An ECI Scholar of Character interviews the author during the first half of each gathering, and the second half is devoted to audience Q&A.
Moving Up without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility by Jennifer Morton
Book Description
Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, very little attention has been paid to the deep personal compromises such students have to make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own. Measuring the true cost of higher education for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, Moving Up without Losing Your Way looks at the ethical dilemmas of upward mobility—the broken ties with family and friends, the severed connections with former communities, and the loss of identity—faced by students as they strive to earn a successful place in society.
Drawing upon philosophy, social science, personal stories, and interviews, Jennifer Morton reframes the college experience, factoring in not just educational and career opportunities but also essential relationships with family, friends, and community. Finding that student strivers tend to give up the latter for the former, negating their sense of self, Morton seeks to reverse this course. She urges educators to empower students with a new narrative of upward mobility—one that honestly situates ethical costs in historical, social, and economic contexts and that allows students to make informed decisions for themselves.
A powerful work with practical implications, Moving Up without Losing Your Way paves a hopeful road so that students might achieve social mobility while retaining their best selves.
Author Bio:
Jennifer Morton is Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Philosophy with a secondary appointment at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania where she serves as the Graduate Chair of the Philosophy Department.
Her research centers on how poverty and social class shape our agency. Her first book Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility focuses on the ethical sacrifices that first-generation and low-income students make in pursuing upward mobility. It was awarded the Grawemeyer Award in Education and the Frederic W. Ness Book Award by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. It was also selected as Princeton President Eisgruber’s Pre-Read for the Class of 2025.
Dr. Morton received the American Philosophical Association’s Scheffler Prize for her work in the philosophy of education. Her piece “Reasoning Under Scarcity” was awarded the Australasian Association of Philosophy‘s 2017 Best AJP Paper Award. Her paper “Grit,” co-written with the brilliant Sarah Paul, was selected by the Philosopher’s Annual as one of the ten best philosophy papers published in 2019.
Dr. Morton has held positions at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the City College of New York, the Graduate Center-CUNY, and Swarthmore College. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University and her A.B. from Princeton University.
Dr. Morton was born and grew up in Lima, Peru, where she attended Colegio Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Date and Time
Tuesday, September 29, 2026 at 4 p.m. ET
Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation by Roosevelt Montás
Book Description
What is the value of a liberal education? Traditionally characterized by a rigorous engagement with the classics of Western thought and literature, this approach to education is all but extinct in American universities, replaced by flexible distribution requirements and ever-narrower academic specialization. Many academics attack the very idea of a Western canon as chauvinistic, while the general public increasingly doubts the value of the humanities. In Rescuing Socrates, Dominican-born American academic Roosevelt Montás tells the story of how a liberal education transformed his life, and offers an intimate account of the relevance of the Great Books today, especially to members of historically marginalized communities.
Montás emigrated from the Dominican Republic to Queens, New York, when he was twelve and encountered the Western classics as an undergraduate in Columbia University’s renowned Core Curriculum, one of America’s last remaining Great Books programs. The experience changed his life and determined his career—he went on to earn a PhD in English and comparative literature, serve as director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum, and start a Great Books program for low-income high school students who aspire to be the first in their families to attend college.
Weaving together memoir and literary reflection, Rescuing Socrates describes how four authors—Plato, Augustine, Freud, and Gandhi—had a profound impact on Montás’s life. In doing so, the book drives home what it’s like to experience a liberal education—and why it can still remake lives.
Author Bio
Roosevelt Montás is the inaugural Laura Y. Chang and Arnold Chavkin Professor in Liberal Education and Civic Life at Bard College. He is also the inaugural executive director of the Chang Chavkin Center for Liberal Education and Civic Life, with a mission to revitalize liberal education in colleges and universities nationwide. From 2008 to 2018, he served as Director of the Center for the Core Curriculum at Columbia University. At Columbia, he also directed the Freedom and Citizenship Program, which introduces low-income high school students to the Western political tradition through the study of original texts.
Roosevelt was born in the Dominican Republic and immigrated to New York as a teenager, where he attended public schools in Queens. His book Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (Princeton University Press, 2021) reflects on his experiences as a student and teacher at Columbia University, explaining how a liberal education transformed his life and why Great Books have the power to speak to people of all backgrounds. He is also author of Becoming America: Four Documents That Shaped a Nation and Why Their Ideas Still Matter (forthcoming, Princeton University Press, 2027) and co-editor of The Princeton History of American Political Thought (forthcoming, Princeton University Press, 2027). He speaks and writes on the history, place, and future of liberal education and his essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Commonweal, The Los Angeles Times, The Point Magazine, The Financial Times, Aeon Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, The Dispatch, and other outlets.
Date and Time
Tuesday, November 3, 2026 at 4 p.m. ET