Core Commitments: Educating Students for
Personal and Social Responsibility

A Need for Action

While the commitment to educate students to be ethical and moral leaders, workers, and citizens is grounded in the history of American higher education and is today centrally acknowledged in college and university mission statements, it has faltered in practice.

In the face of widespread uncertainty about the academy’s appropriate role in examining values and beliefs, issues of personal and social responsibility have been pushed to the edges of the college curriculum and addressed in only limited ways in the co-curriculum.

As a result, many students:

• Experience a disconnect between their academic studies and the personal exploration that inevitably occurs in college;
• Are left to their own devices to address personal and interpersonal concerns as well as moral and ethical challenges;
• Receive few opportunities to place those experiences in a larger context of history, culture, and society.

Yet college can and should be a time when students make a commitment to reach for excellence in the use of their talents, take responsibility for the integrity and quality of their work, and engage in meaningful practices that prepare them to fulfill their obligations as students in an academic community and as responsible global and local citizens.

Core Commitments aims to invent purposeful, transparent, and developmental pathways for students to become more responsible to themselves and to others both during and after college.