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Core Commitments: Educating Students for
Personal and Social Responsibility

The AAC&U Call for Proposals:

As an educational community strongly committed to the value of a liberal and liberating education, the Association of American Colleges and Universities 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 as citizens in a diverse democracy.

In support of that effort, we proudly announce Core Commitments — a major new initiative on educating students for personal and social responsibility.
Five Key Dimensions

AAC&U has identified five key dimensions of personal and social responsibility that form the core of this initiative:

1. Striving for excellence: developing a strong work ethic and consciously doing one’s very best in all aspects of college;

2. Cultivating personal and academic integrity: recognizing and acting on a sense of honor ranging from honesty in relationships to principled engagement with a formal academic honors code;

3. Contributing to a larger community: recognizing and acting on one’s responsibility to the educational community (classroom, campus life), the local community, and the wider society, both national and global;

4. Taking seriously the perspectives of others: recognizing and acting on the obligation to inform one’s own judgment; engaging diverse and competing perspectives as a resource for learning, for citizenship, and for work;

5. Developing competence in ethical and moral reasoning: developing ethical and moral reasoning in ways that incorporate the other four responsibilities; using such reasoning in learning and in life.

While these five dimensions do not encompass all aspects of personal and social responsibility, their claim as the initial focus for a widespread re-engagement with these outcomes is compelling.

18 Institutions, including Rollins, were chosen nationally, and later expanded to 23.

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 and to deepen and extend these efforts.

Chosen both 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.

The Leadership Consortium members are:

Allegheny College, Pennsylvania
Babson College, Massachusetts
Bowling Green State University, Ohio
California State University at Northridge, California
Concordia College - Moorhead, Minnesota
Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania
Miami University, Ohio
Michigan State University, Michigan
Middlesex Community College, Massachusetts
Oakland Community College, Michigan
Portland State University, Oregon
Rollins College, Florida
Sacred Heart University, Connecticut
Saint Anselm College, New Hampshire
Saint Mary's College of California, California
St. Lawrence University, New York
United States Air Force Academy, Colorado
United States Military Academy, New York
University of Alabama at Birmingham, Alabama
University of Central Florida, Florida
University of the Pacific, California
Wagner College, New York
Winthrop University, South Carolina

As part of the Consortium's efforts, campus leadership teams will administer a 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.

Eventually the Leadership Consortium members will also be assessing whether students have acquired new capabilities in the five dimensions. Future events planned for the initiative include institutes, workshops, and programs.