Core Commitments: Educating Students for
Personal and Social Responsibility

Call for Proposals Process

Our national Call for Proposals yielded the formation of a Core Commitments Leadership Consortium comprised of 23 institutions. Selected both on the basis of work already accomplished and on an articulated plan to extend that work, participants are strengthening existing efforts to foster personal and social responsibility. They are also developing new models that provide students with purposeful and progressively challenging educational experiences to foster personal and social responsibility in their students.

To significantly advance this work, 17 institutions of the Leadership Consortium also receive a $25,000 award and commit $25,000 in institutional matching funds over two years for specific work on campus. All Leadership Consortium institutions will administer a new Personal and Social Responsibility Institutional Inventory in the fall semester of 2007 and will use the results to inform ongoing efforts.

The purpose of the Core Commitments Leadership Consortium is to significantly enhance existing institutional efforts to deepen students’ personal and social responsibility; to test the use of the Personal and Social Responsibility Institutional Inventory in order to later make it available to the broader higher education community, and especially to bring together national experts in institutional change, assessment, and student moral and ethical development, thus providing opportunity to learn from and with other leadership institutions selected for the project. We also intend to give Leadership Consortium best practices the national visibility they deserve through AAC&U publications, meetings, and networks. Each Leadership Consortium Institution will develop an institutional case description of project work and accomplishments to provide other institutions with best practices.

To learn more about the Leadership Consortium team criteria and selection, see the complete Core Commitments Call for Proposals (pdf).