Carnegie Mellon University has been awarded a $50,000 grant from the Educating Character Initiative (ECI), administered through the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University and funded by Eli Lilly. The Center for Leadership Studies will lead the university in efforts to explore character development across the personal and professional lives of the Carnegie Mellon community.
As part of the initiative, Carnegie Mellon will offer faculty, staff, and students the opportunity to participate in professional development activities to deepen their understanding of character and its role in higher education. These experiences will support individual growth, foster a learning community of engaged stakeholders, and serve as a foundation for broader character-focused efforts across campus. Participants will be selected through a rolling application process and will be asked to share key takeaways to extend the impact of their learning.
To embed character education beyond the classroom, the mini-grant program will support staff and student organizations in creating events and experiences that explore character within their unique contexts. Through a rolling application process, 6–12 groups will receive $1,000–$2,000 each to pilot activities rooted in best practices and tailored to their communities. The initiative encourages creativity within a structured framework, supporting both undergraduate and graduate groups, and will include simple evaluation tools to assess impact and promote reflective learning.
This initiative invites faculty to enhance existing courses by integrating character-focused content through modules on ethics, leadership, teamwork, or values-driven decision-making. Through mini-grants, faculty across disciplines will be supported in refining syllabi to make explicit the role of character as a learning outcome. These proof-of-concept efforts will build a foundation for future curricular development and help identify scalable, interdisciplinary models for embedding character across CMU’s academic landscape.
The Center for Leadership Studies, in partnership with cross-campus partners, will host a series of six interactive community events designed to bring together faculty, staff, students, and alumni in meaningful conversations about character and its role within the university’s culture. These experiences will intentionally create space for cross-constituent dialogue and shared learning experiences to build a stronger, more cohesive understanding of character and its relevance across disciplines.
Save the date for the Community Connection Series.
Pittsburgh, PA — Carnegie Mellon University has been selected as one of 42 institutions nationwide to receive a grant from the Educating Character Initiative (ECI), a program of the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University. This initiative awarded 40 grants of up to $50,000 to support colleges and universities committed to embedding character education within their distinctive institutional missions.
This capacity-building grant will allow Carnegie Mellon University to engage faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community members in a university-wide exploration of character as both a personal virtue and an organizing principle in education and leadership. Through thoughtfully designed programming and dialogue, the initiative aims to foster a deeper understanding of character while creating opportunities for participants to reflect on and strengthen their own character-building practices. This foundational year will lay the groundwork for a long-term vision that centers character and character-adjacent values—such as integrity, empathy, and a bias toward action—within the university’s culture and impact.
The Educating Character Initiative seeks to empower colleges and universities to integrate character education across academic disciplines, co-curricular programming, and institutional culture. This new cohort of grant recipients reflects a broad diversity of institutional types and missions, including public and private universities, community colleges, liberal arts colleges, and religiously affiliated schools.
Carnegie Mellon University’s participation underscores its ongoing commitment to not only academic excellence and innovation, but also to the moral and ethical development of its students as leaders in a complex world.
Learn more about 2025 Educating Character Initiative Grant Recipients.
Learn more about the Educating Character Initiative and the Program for Leadership and Character.
Dr. Meghan Bollens
Executive Fellow
mbollens@andrew.cmu.edu
Sophie Clarke
Educational Program Assistant
sdclarke@andrew.cmu.edu
Praveena Thathireddy
Educational Program Assistant
pthathir@andrew.cmu.edu
Dr. Michael Murphy
Executive Director, Center for Leadership Studies
mm1v@andrew.cmu.edu