Executive Summary

College students today face unique and formidable epistemic challenges. They must learn well and think well in the era of social and digital media, amidst a crisis of confidence in legacy news sources, newly confronted by the emergence of artificial intelligence, and in the face of unprecedented political polarization. In light of these challenges, the demand for an intellectually transformative university education has perhaps never been more urgent. Such an education should enable students to navigate and, in fact, overcome these challenges.

The epistemic challenges students now face, however, have wider ethical implications. Moral competence also depends upon good thinking and learning. To the degree that students are unable to think well, it is unlikely that they will be able to act well. To the degree that students are unable to learn well, they are likely to be exploited by powerful social, economic, and political forces that have no essential commitment to moral concern. By empowering students to face the epistemic challenges, an intellectually transformative education also promotes the common good.

The Intellectual Character Initiative will profoundly enrich LMU's efforts to offer such a transformative education by inspiring and supporting an innovative emphasis on educating for intellectual virtues.

From its original sponsorship by the Jesuits, LMU has placed consistent emphasis on character formation in its educational vision. Our project aims to deepen the Ignatian vision by empowering a new and integrated focus on intellectual character formation. We propose a systematic emphasis on the cultivation of the "Virtues of the Lion Mind": curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, intellectual courage, and intellectual perseverance. The goal is to build a culture in which our students come to understand these virtues and in which they are trained to become intellectually virtuous.

The project addresses this goal at three institutional levels. At the fundamental level of student experience, it aims to give students frequent and well-supported opportunities to learn about these intellectual excellences, to appreciate their academic, ethical, and vocational value, and to practice and develop them. At the level of faculty development, the project offers our colleagues multiple layers of training and incentivization to build or update their courses with a focus on the cultivation of our target intellectual virtues. At the level of structural leadership, the project supports various efforts to bring the language of intellectual virtues into institutional discussion and to integrate a focus on intellectual character development into LMU's central academic vision.

The initiative will equip LMU students directly as learners and inquirers; but it will also benefit them beyond the university context—by enabling them to engage with digital media responsibly, to confront cultural disagreement intelligently, to participate in public discourse and political life ethically, and to pursue their respective vocations wholistically. It promises, in short, an expansive and transformative enrichment of the Ignatian educational vision of our institution. Given its scope and innovative focus, as well as the models and resources it will generate, the initiative also promises to support and expand the wider character education community.