Core Commitments: Educating Students for
Personal and Social Responsibility

Initial Findings Released!

Over 20,000 students and over 8,800 faculty, academic administrators, and student affairs staff participated in the Personal and Social Responsibility Institutional Inventory in the fall of 2007. Initial findings are published in the report titled "Should College Focus More on Personal and Social Responsibility?" Please also see the accompanying press release from April 17, 2008.

Overview of Core Commitments

At a time when our nation faces unprecedented ethical and civic challenges of daunting complexity, it is essential that we acknowledge personal and social responsibility as a learning outcome that is no longer optional.

Core Commitments asserts that ethical, civic, and moral development should not be addressed separately from students’ basic responsibilities as learners. Instead, it should be tied to a substantive vision for student learning in college and understood as a collective obligation across institutional units. Personal and social responsibility must be woven into the educational goals of a college degree and developed with increasing sophistication over time.

Core Commitments seeks to foster leadership that generates innovative and transparent opportunities for student learning and assessing student and institutional progress. As a major multi-project initiative, Core Commitments includes a presidential Call to Action, a climate survey instrument (the new Personal and Social Institutional Inventory), and a Leadership Consortium of 23 institutions that will identify and disseminate promising practices and innovative programs to the field – all designed to promote a national reengagement with personal and social responsibility.

Through Core Commitments, AAC&U calls on its members to test and adopt new ways of engaging students with core questions about their ethical responsibilities to self and others, and about their responsibilities in a diverse democracy and interdependent world.

Core Commitments is supported by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

For more information, please call Michèle Leaman at 202-387-3760, ext. 429, or email leaman@aacu.org.