Core Commitments: Educating Students for Personal and Social Responsibility

If students are to be more accountable for pursuing excellence, integrity, and responsibility, we as campus leaders must also become more intentional and effective in articulating these expectations for student learning, in creating ongoing opportunities for students to engage and address them, in assessing how well they are acquiring these capacities, and in learning—together as an academic enterprise—from our shared progress.

Leadership Consortium

Twenty-three institutions from across all sectors of higher education comprise the Core Commitments Leadership Consortium, which is designed to bring together the most promising institutional practices related to educating students for personal and social responsibility as well as to deepen and extend these efforts.

Chosen on the basis of work already accomplished and on an articulated plan to deepen and extend that work, these institutions were selected from a pool of more than 125 applicants in 2007. For more information about the Consortium selection, please see the Call for Proposals and the press releases for April 10, 2007, January 18, 2007, and April 17, 2008.

As part of the Consortium's efforts, campus leadership teams administered the new Personal and Social Responsibility Institutional Inventory in the fall of 2007 to students, faculty, student affairs administrators, and academic administrators. The inventory is designed to identify where different groups on campus see opportunities to foster learning about personal and social responsibility and to serve as a catalyst for dialogues across the institution about ways to make such learning more pervasive. Pre- and post-inventory dialogues were held at each of the Leadership Consortium institutions.