Character College Access , Student Success , and the New Character Education

Over the past several years, there has been a resurgence of interest in—and reconceptualizing of— character education in primary and secondary schools across the United States. An important question, then, is how this new emphasis on character development at the K-12 level impacts the work of university faculty and student affairs professionals. Are graduates of these primary and secondary schools with an intensive character focus arriving at their respective universities with heightened levels of grit and social intelligence? Are such qualities facilitating their ability to thrive at the postsecondary level? Are university faculty and staff coordinating with their K-12 counterparts to support the continued development of these qualities in newly matriculated students? The authors pose these questions in interviews with four different university stakeholders who can speak to the effects at the university level of the new character education emphasis in many American primary and secondary schools. http://journals.naspa.org/jcc doi:10.1515/jcc-2013-0044 JCC © NASPA 2013 Civic Engagement on Campus VOLUME 14, No. 4, November 2013 Character education played an integral role in the original vision of both K-12 and postsecondary education in the United States. At the K-12 level, Thomas Jefferson cited the development of children’s character as a key motivation for the establishment of public schools in the United States (McClellan, 1999). John and Elizabeth Phillips founded New Hampshire’s Phillips Exeter Academy in 1781 to promote both the “minds and morals of the youth under their charge” (Phillips Exeter, 1991). Horace Mann, one of the founding fathers of universal public education, argued that public schools could instill in unruly children the values such as respect and self-discipline necessary for a productive adulthood (McClellan, 1999). However, the standards-based education movement ushered in by A Nation at Risk in the early 1980s, and further codified by No Child Left Behind in 2001, narrowed the attention of most American primary and secondary schools 1 Madora Soutter is a Glenn Fellow and doctoral candidate in curriculum and teaching at Boston University. E-mail: soutter@ bu.edu. Scott Seider is an assistant professor of education at Boston University. He is the author of Character Compass: How Powerful School Culture Can Point Students Toward Success (2012) and Shelter: Where Harvard Meets the Homeless (2010). E-mail: