Bio
Jennifer Rothschild is the Executive Director of the Educating Character Initiative. She joined the initiative as its Senior Scholar of Character in the summer of 2023, when the ECI was a brand new project of the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University. Since that time — a time of early partnership phone calls and drafts of a first requests for proposals — she has been fortunate enough to be part of the growth of a national and international community of character educators, fueled in part by over $35M of ECI grants to US institutions of higher education. A philosopher by training, Jennifer came to the field of character education via her academic research interests in ethical theory, the history of ethics, and Aristotelian virtue ethics. Her work focuses primarily on questions about habit, the sociality and unity of virtue, and the constitutions of vicious people. She has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in philosophy and biology from Grinnell College. Prior to joining the Educating Character Initiative, Jennifer spent a decade as faculty in the Philosophy Department at the University of Florida.