Educating Character Initiative Announces 2025 Teacher-Scholar Grant Recipients

Thanks to the support of Lilly Endowment Inc., the Educating Character Initiative (ECI) has awarded 12 grants to support individuals in developing their scholarly expertise in character education within higher education, expanding the pipeline of scholars doing research on character education in colleges and universities, and increasing knowledge-sharing and pedagogical innovation across institutions and disciplines. We look forward to the ways in which the recipients’ work will deepen our collective understanding of character and expand capacity to educate character in specific contexts. Congratulations to these deserving winners.

David Busch, Cuyahoga Community College

Randall Curren, University of Rochester

Paul Gannon, Montana State University

Robert Hartman, Ohio Northern University

Lauren Kuykendall, George Mason University

J. Mark Manry, Rochester Christian University

Elyse L. Postlewaite, Montclair State University

Sara Protasi, University of Puget Sound

Will Small, University of Illinois, Chicago

Malavika Sundararajan, Ramapo College of New Jersey

Kevin Timpe, Calvin University

Rebecca Vidra, Duke University

---

The ECI is grateful to all those who submitted proposals for 2025 Teacher-Scholar Grants. We were impressed by the quality of the proposals we received, including many we were unable to fund in this round. We encourage all applicants whose requests were not fulfilled to reapply in our next grant cycle.