Author: Mollie Ames

When Jaydn Decuir was looking at colleges, her father asked her an instructive question: “What is it you need to solve the problems you wish to solve?” She thought about her own community and how she hoped she could someday lessen the burden of gentrification on those who were displaced. She decided she would become a civil engineer. Her first choice was Howard University. 

Students like Jaydn Decuir are the heart and soul of Howard. They are high-performing, civically engaged, and mindful of their positions as future Black professionals in careers where they’ve been historically underrepresented. The prestigious Research 1 university, which is also an H.B.C.U. (historically Black college and university), has graduated more African American Ph.D. recipients than any other university in the United States. Many of them serve in leadership positions focused on social justice. 

Howard University is now engaged in a campus-wide character education initiative that takes all of this into account, as it considers how to codify, promote, and integrate character work throughout the university. In 2025, the university received a substantial Institutional Impact Grant from the Educating Character Initiative (E.C.I.) at Wake Forest University. Funded by the Lilly Endowment, the program seeds and studies character education programs at colleges and universities of diverse profiles across the United States. 

“What we do here is create leaders, and you cannot have those conversations or that training without talking about character,” said Dr. Dawn Williams, the interim provost and chief academic officer at Howard. “What this initiative allows us to do is name it, and study it, and that leads to capacity building and replication.” 

The grant will help organize the formal and informal character education efforts already underway at Howard into a center. Research will inform an H.B.C.U.-based framework for character education that can be infused into the curriculum and shared with schools throughout the country. Perhaps most importantly, the work will help answer questions such as: What is different about character education at an H.B.C.U. with a rich legacy of social change? And what does character education look like for institutions that have both held it dear and been excluded from its record? 

What does character education look like for institutions that have both held it dear and been excluded from its record? 

“When you think about character, different things come to mind that may have been informed by books, experiences, or individuals,” said Dr. Jorge Burmicky, the principal investigator on the grant and faculty member at the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Howard. “Now we get to add to that word — its meaning and traditions — from the perspective of our work here at Howard.” 

Studying the Scholars

As a higher education scholar focused on racial equity, social justice, and leadership, Burmicky said the opportunity to lead the exploration of character at the nation’s premier H.B.C.U. was “by far my wildest dream.” Through a previous capacity building grant from the E.C.I., Burmicky had participated in the Common Good Character Trust project, where he met with other scholars and thought leaders to reimagine character education through a contextually relevant lens.  

Burmicky said the first part of the project, which is housed within the provost’s office, aims to study and potentially transfer exemplars of character education that exist within the university. In seeking a baseline, he immediately consulted Ron Smith, the executive director of the Karsh STEM Scholars and the Humanities and Social Sciences Scholars programs at the university. Smith had been running these highly selective learning communities since 2016. 

The Karsh program is modeled after the Meyerhoff Scholars program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, with the expressed intention of addressing the underrepresentation of African Americans in STEM professions. Its unique capacity to nurture leaders of good character made it the ideal subject by which to assess and organize character education at Howard.  

“Our programs are anchored by a set of values that can easily be discussed as building character within students,” Smith said. “We have expectations for our students on how to build community and to connect ourselves to what has always been central at Howard: our motto — Truth and Service — which runs deep through our veins.” 

The signature component of these initiatives is the Summer Bridge Program (S.B.P.), a six-week curricular and co-curricular living-learning community for emerging leaders that is capped by a two-week study abroad component. While sharpening skills within their disciplines, the S.B.P. challenges student to think more critically about virtues such as justice, courage, empathy, self-awareness, and humility. It upholds eleven core values, including “be honest and earn the trust of others” and “be open to new ideas and different perspectives.” 

As a Karsh Scholar, Jaydn Decuir became part of that community. She met her roommate and best friend on the first day of the S.B.P. and said her experience that summer will stay with her the rest of her life. 

“I imagined the Summer Bridge Program to be technically-heavy, but it was so much more than that,” Decuir said. “We had so many discussions about what was happening around us, around the world, and what our viewpoints were on different issues. I am forever grateful for it.” 

This holistic preparation is meant to equip students with skills beyond their disciplines, as they navigate graduate schools and professions that have unique challenges for students of color. In this way, the S.B.P. reflects what Burmicky outlined as some of the larger goals of the character initiative. “Our approach focuses on how students develop character by seeking truth, engaging diverse perspectives, and making ethical decisions, all while navigating their racial and ethnic identities,” he said. 

Other reasons the S.B.P. became the organizing element for character work at Howard include the fact that it enjoys broad support throughout the university, with partnerships across departments; and it provides a robust laboratory for assessment. 

“Since Karsh and the Summer Bridge Program have already been doing this work, the research allows us to learn from these experiences and transfer that learning to other areas of campus,” said Tatianna Duperier, a doctoral student at Howard who was hired through a partnership with the ASCEND (Alliance for Scholarship, Collaboration, Engagement, Networking and Development) initiative at Yale University to assist in the research. 

This summer, Duperier will begin a series of student surveys and qualitative interviews that will be used to make improvements to the program while ideally serving as proof of concept for expanded character education throughout the university. Both Interim Provost Williams, and Burmicky believe the empirical evidence they will gather will inspire others on campus, particularly faculty. 

“With this data, we can say to others within the university: ‘Look at what we’ve done at Karsh and the Summer Bridge Program,’” Burmicky said. “‘What are you doing that is similar in the engineering department, in the professional schools? How is our medical school preparing physicians for their careers though this lens?’”

Unpacking a Complex History 

It was Martin Luther King Jr. who famously dreamed of a day when people would be judged not “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Indeed, the history of character — and character education — within the Black community is pervasive but also complicated by slavery and structures and policies that were not designed with communities of color in mind. 

It was Martin Luther King Jr. who famously dreamed of a day when people would be judged not “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

As part of the Howard initiative, Burmicky and his team are developing an H.B.C.U.-based theoretical model for character education and studying existing models and strategies for character education in higher education. In this work, they are looking at key considerations of character education through an H.B.C.U. lens, including the legacy of character within Black education and the paucity of Black-centric character education within the literature. 

As Burmicky points out in the E.C.I. proposal, Black scholars refer to character education as the “raison d’etre” of H.B.C.U.s (Shaw, 2006), but little has been studied or written about it. While many higher education institutions in the United States have implemented character education, much of the documented empirical evidence has taken place at predominantly white institutions or from white or ethnocentric lenses. “The absence of Black students and culturally and racially responsive methods and epistemologies in these processes has been documented in the literature” (Burmicky et al., 2025, p. 5).

Carol Moye serves as the E.C.I. grant’s director of assessment and program learning. She believes the exclusion of Black voices has had major implications for character in Black education and for the field of character education. 

“One of the things we have to look at is the perception of character education — but from whose culture and whose viewpoint,” she said. “We have always had character in the Black community, but it did not present in the way people wanted us to be perceived. There was this sense that we would impose character on these people with the assumption they did not already have it. We need to turn this narrative around for our students and urge them to find the character they have and utilize it in the work that they do.” 

The character imposition notion contrasts starkly with the undeniably rich commitment H.B.C.U.s have to social justice and public service. Most definitions of character education include a beyond-the-self element and a desire to serve one’s community. At Howard, as in other H.B.C.U.s, this concept is foundational. 

“Leadership for us has largely been about communal responsibility,” said Williams, who believes the most visible evidence of Howard’s commitment to service is the students themselves. “We don’t have to talk our students into being change-makers. That’s who we attract.” 

Building a Unique Contribution 

Given these strong traditions, the question may not be so much how to expand character education to include H.B.C.U.s as what the legacy of character work within H.B.C.U.s can add to the field of character education.

This is something that Michael Lamb, the senior executive director of the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University, will no doubt consider as they work to understand how character education is contextualized in diverse educational settings. 

“As we like to say, character is for all but not one-size-fits-all,” Lamb said. “Different institutions have different ways of understanding and educating character. At the E.C.I., we’re especially committed to helping institutions develop programs that fit their own institutional context and culture and to learning from them in the process.H.B.C.U.s have been educating character for generations, so they have much to teach us about how character can be developed in different contexts.” 

The final deliverables for Howard’s three-year grant include: the launch of the H.B.C.U. Character and Leadership Education Initiative at The Center for H.B.C.U. Research, Leadership, and Policy at Howard; and the development of a H.B.C.U.-based framework for character education that will be launched at a national convening, in conjunction with ASCEND, in 2028 at Yale University. The team hopes that, by then, the organizing effort they conducted at Howard, and the learning they will have shared, will benefit the university, the H.B.C.U. community, and all those who work to support character and social justice — what Howard calls Truth and Service. 

You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

Ethan Barden spent most of his life striving to be a person of good character without thinking about it in those exact terms. He grew up the youngest of four children, with a mother who often reminded him he didn’t need to be older to lead by example. He’s also an army brat, whose frequent moves across the country and overseas acquainted him with the world as well as service and sacrifice. After high school, he imagined participating in the Reserve Officers Training Corps program in college and, one day, becoming a physician in the army.

At the University of Dubuque in Dubuque, Iowa, good character became something Barden could pursue with new intention. Not only did he join the R.O.T.C. program but he got involved at the Presbyterian university’s Wendt Center for Character and Leadership, which offers students a formal opportunity to reflect on and develop their character. While the Wendt Center launched more than 20 years ago, Barden, now a junior, arrived at a time when the program was turning a page. With a change in leadership has come added avenues for young people, like Barden, to begin realizing who they want to be long after they graduate. 

More colleges and universities have recently begun launching character education initiatives, but far fewer are dedicating entire centers to the work. That U.D. carved out this focus decades ago means it now occupies a well-known space not only on the physical grounds but in the spirit of the school. The Wendt Center’s location on campus right next to the president’s office indeed reflects its support from the highest levels of the university. From the top down, U.D. is cultivating a culture of holistic education with character at its core.

Multiple members of the faculty and staff said they chose to work at U.D. because of a distinct sense that the school invests in its students and employees as people, not just academics. That’s what drew in Liza Johnson, who is now in her second year as the director of the Wendt Center. “What makes us so unique is that it’s not just a mission,” she said of U.D.’s emphasis on whole-person education. “We actually live that out.” 15 years ago, Johnson arrived to work in career services before taking on a role of her own design as the director for personal empowerment. She created this position and program after participating in a professional development workshop that focused on emotional intelligence, living purposefully, and modeling those capacities for students. Over the next decade, she crafted similar opportunities for U.D. faculty and staff as well as a course for students, which can now fulfill a general education requirement. 

For Johnson, taking the reins at the Wendt Center has been an opportunity to pull from her expertise in personal empowerment to deepen the impact of character education. She’s pinpointed four primary “pursuits,” or outcomes, that emphasize both individual and communal growth to serve as the Wendt Center’s new pillars. They are: seeking knowledge and insight, supporting wellbeing, strengthening community, and serving others. “Those four things have to be part of the culture — have to be part of what we are doing as a community to be able to cultivate good character,” she said.

Essentially, the plan is to imbue character work into every element of the college experience.

Johnson is also taking a fresh approach to implementation. She doesn’t just want students to know in their heads that it’s important to exhibit good character. She wants to empower them to feel it in their hearts — for the lessons to take root in ways of thinking and belief systems that last far beyond graduation. She’s betting this kind of resonance will only be possible through programming that is particularly relational and experiential. “We’re not just having them sit and listen,” she said. “We’re actually creating experiences for them so that they can really feel and live what we’re trying to inspire them to do.”

Essentially, the plan is to imbue character work into every element of the college experience. On the academic side, Johnson and her team have ramped up work with faculty to assess and support infusing character into coursework. One example is the inclusion of character-focused curriculum in the World View Seminar series, which is also a general education requirement. Meanwhile, professors like Rafic Sinno, who heads U.D.’s business and accounting department, have led efforts to bring character topics relevant to their field — emotional intelligence or ethical behavior — into their classes. “That’s been an intentional development across the whole curriculum,” Sinno said, “where we really emphasize some of those soft skills that make all the difference in the business world.”

Outside the classroom, the long-standing Character Scholar program selects 11 to 12 students from each class and engages them in in-depth character development work, including weekly activities, mentorship, and service work. These scholars also receive an annual stipend of $3,500. For all other interested students, Johnson will be launching a co-curricular program called Pathways to Purpose. Additional offerings include faculty and staff-focused character discussions, programming, and training; cross-campus awards for upstanding character; and lectures on character for the U.D. campus and wider Dubuque community. 

“It’s all sorts of different little activities,” Barden said of his work in the Character Scholar program. “But at the end of the day, it’s always about inward reflection and how we can change our mindset, perception, or our actions in hopes to grow our character and evolve, I guess, as humans.” In their weekly Monday meetings, the scholars might practice mindfulness, discuss a book they read, or hear from guest speakers. Barden’s been especially focused on embodying compassion and leadership, as those are the capacities he sees himself needing not only now — as a student, friend, and, most recently, husband — but in his future career in the military. He doesn’t take that responsibility lightly. 

Another major part of the scholar program — and Johnson’s relational approach — is mentorship. Nathan Hough, an associate professor of psychology, serves as a mentor for close to a dozen scholars, including Barden. Once a month, he hosts his students in his home for dinner, as do the other mentors. The personal setting, he’s found, is more conducive to deeper conversations among the scholars about their lives and struggles. “I think it’s vital when you’re looking at character development that you have someone who can mentor you and help you process and talk about it. ‘These are the parts of me that I need to work on and to improve on so that my character is where I want it to be.’” 

Indeed, character work isn’t easy, and students and faculty alike may need some handholding to get their footing. In certain academic departments, the connection to character education can be less clear. That doesn’t mean it’s not there. “If you look at someone in a math class, they still have to look at things like tenacity and work ethic and honesty and openness,” Hough said. He is a member of the Wendt Center’s advisory board designed to steer the way forward and galvanize support from all corners of campus. 

For Barden, who has been learning about character for more than a year now, the process has never been easy, but it has been worth it. “I think character is probably the hardest thing to teach — definitely one of the hardest — because it’s a lot of judgment and individuality that comes into character,” he said. “But to me, it’s a journey of self-discovery.”

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

In their book, “The Real World of College,” Harvard Graduate School of Education researchers Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner discovered something concerning about how today’s students view the world. After interviews with over a thousand students at 10 diverse campuses, they found that students had said the word “I” eleven times as frequently as they said “we.”  The researchers took that to mean that students had a preoccupation with themselves and less of an interest in, well, “us.”  

“As a result of that research, we became very concerned that students were so focused on themselves — their grades, their resumes, their getting that first job — they had little interest or time to think about any campus problems, local challenges, or world-wide issues,” Fischman said.  

While there are many in higher education, indeed in the country, who share that concern, Fischman and Gardner are exploring how college experiences might address it. Their new research initiative is aimed at understanding what it takes to broaden students’ perspective so they might consider how their actions influence those “beyond the self” — from the student down the hall to the wider world.  

All of this work is part of Project Zero, a research center at Harvard dedicated to understanding and nurturing human potentials, such as learning, thinking, ethics, intelligence, and creativity. Characterized as a study of “character education,” this latest research involves rigorous interviews with students and alumni from schools that make character a priority, particularly through efforts that encourage caring for others. These may span strong missions and first-year seminars to service-learning capstones and reflective courses. Fischman and Gardner’s goal is to understand if any are having an impact — both for students over the course of college and for alums beyond college — in moving the needle from “I” to “we.” 

Fischman believes the research fills both a need and a void. “There are a lot of resources and efforts ostensibly focused on character education, but we don’t know what actually works, what endures over time,” she said. “What we are trying to do is to understand what students and alums take away from these messages, initiatives, and missions, so we can begin to understand which are most effective. More importantly, with empirical data, we may be able to show that higher education makes a difference in how individuals think about, act toward, and possibly make a difference in the lives of others.”

Evaluating how well colleges produce good citizens might seems like an “off-trend” effort in a world seemingly obsessed with financial and employment metrics. But given that this easier-to-get hard data has dominated the debate over the value of a college degree, the researchers believe that providing strong evidence of higher education’s more enduring outcomes, including awareness of and empathy for others, is more important than ever.  Without this pursuit, Gardner asks, “What is the point?” 

“If universities and colleges simply have as their goal helping students to get jobs, they will either become vocational institutions or will cede their whole raison d’etre to the private sector, which can train more quickly and less expensively,” Gardner said. “Institutions of higher education should have a broader goal. And especially in the U.S. at the present time, helping others in the community and in the broader society as well as helping oneself would seem highly desirable on all counts.”

Beyond the Self

The Harvard team’s “I” to “we” work is closely aligned with another related finding reported in “The Real World of College.” In their analysis, Fischman and Gardner discerned mental models among students that included a transactional view of college (do what is required to get the degree) and a transformational view of college (question and reflect about one’s own values and beliefs with the possibility and aspiration of being changed, hopefully in constructive ways.)

The researchers identified a measure called HEDCAP (Higher Education Capital), defined as intellectual capacities that students gain as a result of going to college — skills they use to analyze, reflect, connect, and communicate about issues, ideas, and perspectives. For many like Fischman and Gardner, HEDCAP is the ultimate metric on which to gauge the value of a college degree, but currently, it is very difficult to demonstrate. 

“With empirical data, we may be able to show that higher education makes a difference in how individuals think about, act toward, and possibly make a difference in the lives of others.”

Shortly after the release of “The Real World of College,” Fischman, Gardner, and their team embarked on a project called “Beyond the Self,” aimed at understanding how a more transformational college experience, involving engagement with community, might move the “I” to “we” student needle. With 150 students on three different college campuses, they piloted the program aimed at “nudging” students to become more sensitive to campus problems and ethical dilemmas, recognizing that their responses, behaviors, and actions meant something. 

The students were asked to keep portfolios of different dilemmas and problems they had heard about, learned about, read about, or observed and to document their thinking about them through writing, illustrations, or news clippings about them. The researchers talked with the students four times a year about their reflections and were pleased with the results they gathered after the first year.

“We were able to demonstrate that this approach made a difference. We were able to move students from just thinking about themselves to also thinking about others,” Fischman said. 

With evidence of their intervention, Fischman, Gardner, and their team were poised to implement the program at other schools, but a number of factors led them to change course. There were already a myriad of character-based programs and messages in schools throughout the country. Adding another, albeit a promising  one, seemed redundant. Instead, the team focused on what was missing: a larger assessment effort that could show the efficacy, or lack thereof, of these efforts.  

“When we began to ask people how they knew their programs and missions were working, we’d be met with blank stares,” Fischman said. “To our knowledge no one was evaluating or assessing the longer-term impact of efforts that focused on helping student think beyond themselves.” 

With continuous support from the Kern Family Foundation, the team’s new research initiative aims to examine character programs that have a specific outward perspective, not just those that develop individual dispositions such as humility, intellectual curiosity, or honesty, though there is a fair amount of overlap. The researchers are now working with about 30 schools — some with a religious orientation, some with strong public service programs, most with a well-defined mission about doing good in the world.  

The launch-pad question is always the same: For those institutions that make character and ethics a priority, what is the value-add? This exploration leads into three follow-up questions: “Does an institution’s mission, programs, and/or courses on character, ethics, and leadership deepen students’ and alums’ understanding of their role as workers and citizens? Do these initiatives shape students’ perspectives and development over the course of college — and, if so, how? Can we find evidence that these efforts have a lasting impact on students’ and alums’ professional and civic lives?” 

This is not the kind of information one can get from surveys, and it’s certainly more difficult to obtain than economic data like first-year earnings. To meet this challenge, Fischman, Gardner, and their team employ a qualitative method that brings deep, iterative reflection to the analysis, something that has become their signature contribution to the field.   

“We meet with students for 45 minutes to an hour in in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews,” said Sophie Blumert, one of the lead researchers on the project. “We never tell students what we are looking for. We ask them a wide range of open-ended questions, so it feels like having a good conversation with another person but someone who isn’t connected to your school. So students feel more free to open up.”  

Fischman said the approach involves listening carefully to what students say and what they don’t say. “When we ask people about their college experience, what they are getting out of it, and what they want from it, if they don’t mention these efforts, those are data.” 

The third-party nature of research means that they are able to go beyond just “self-reporting” to make sense of what the students are telling them. For example, they ask questions about the news as an unobtrusive way to understand students’ and alums’ interest in others beyond themselves. The prompt might be: “Do you stay informed about current issues in the news?” And then: “If so, how? If not, why not?”

The team also asks about mission with open-ended questions such as: “From your perspective, do you think that your school has any particular goals for its students? How do you think your school makes these goals known?”  

Understanding how well students comprehend their school’s mission is a reflection of an existing theory on the negative effects of what Fischman and Gardner coined “mission mishmash.” 

“Schools have so many priorities and so many aspirations for students that mission becomes all over the map,” she said. “And in the wake of that, students are forced to make assumptions about what is most important themselves. When all they hear about is jobs and resume building, then that’s what they focus on.” 

The inclusion of alumni in this work is particularly important. Interviewing graduates who are one year out, five years out, and ten years out about how their experiences in college influenced who they are as people can show whether these programs have any effect on the older adults who once participated in them as students.  

If Fischman knows the answer, she won’t yet reveal it, as the team is in the midst of taking on new schools, continuing to collect information, and analyze the data. She did, however, mention that in analyzing HEDCAP relative to mental models, she’s seen that students with transactional views of their college experience are more likely to have a lower score of HEDCAP, whereas students with a transformational mental model are more likely to have higher HEDCAP.  

Fischman said findings like this give her hope, and perseverance. 

“We can develop higher education capital. We can move students from a transactional mindset to a transformational one. We can get students to go beyond themselves, but we need to show that higher education can do this with empirical data, and, currently, that doesn’t exist.” 

You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.