Amanda Christy was searching for something and so, it seems, were her students. As a faculty member at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, she was frustrated by her students’ lack of engagement and their reliance on A.I. even for basic work like classroom discussion. She was tired of persuading them of the value of their liberal arts education when they bemoaned not being in business classes. There were days when she thought, “What are we even doing here?” 

The burnout Christy was experiencing was soon replaced with renewed energy after she participated in a faculty learning community sponsored by the L.M.U. Intellectual Character Initiative. The initiative seeks to embed six intellectual virtues (“The Virtues of the Lion Mind”) into L.M.U.’s pedagogy and culture — helping students cultivate cognitive habits that lead to critical thinking and active learning. 

Christy designed a whole course around two of the virtues: intellectual curiosity and intellectual courage, introducing her students to the concepts, providing self-assessments, and assigning them curiosity journals in which they wrote from the heart in free-form style. At the end of her experiment, Christy found that her classroom had transformed into an active community of reflective learners. 

“The goal shifted from just learning the content to learning how to be good thinkers,” she said. “It was kind of utopian.”

To Dan Speak and Jason Baehr, the co-directors of the initiative, experiences like Christy’s are the ultimate outcome of the Intellectual Character Initiative. They hope that by inspiring and empowering faculty and academic leaders to focus on intellectual character formation, they will influence how students learn and grow.

Dan Speak and Jason Baehr are the co-directors of L.M.U.'s Intellectual Character Initiative. Photo courtesy of Dan Speak.

Though both Speak and Baehr are professors of philosophy, they are quick to emphasize that this is not principally a philosophical project. Professors across the university care about their students growing in curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual perseverance, and the like. Still, it is no accident that both philosophers are particularly interested epistemology — that is, in the theory of knowledge. And, indeed, Baehr is an expert in “virtue epistemology,” which is an approach to the philosophical study of knowledge that focuses on intellectual virtues. 

Furthermore, Baehr is a highly regarded educational theorist who, in addition to publishing widely on the application of virtue epistemology to education, founded a public charter middle school in 2013 in Long Beach, Calif. The Intellectual Virtues Academy, as this school is known, was built from scratch to help students practice and develop virtues such as curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, and courage. The idea for the L.M.U. Initiative began to take shape when Speak, who serves on the board of directors for The Intellectual Virtues Academy, noted the irony of the deep impact of Baehr’s research and academic vision outside but not inside L.M.U. In 2024, they teamed up to create the blueprint for the L.M.U. project.

Their idea was brought to life thanks to a $943,668 grant from the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University’s Center for Leadership and Character. The Center is funded by the Lilly Endowment to seed and steer innovative character education initiatives in schools throughout the country. Like most start-up ventures, the L.M.U. Intellectual Character Initiative is moving in many directions, and no one is exactly sure where it will land. Speak and Baehr are nonetheless pleased with the energy and activity it has already prompted on campus. 

“The goal shifted from just learning the content to learning how to be good thinkers. It was kind of utopian.”

In this first phase, it is both concept and practice, with university lectures on the virtues themselves and introductory modules for first-year students. A large part of its focus is on faculty training through summer workshops and learning communities. Speak said the initiative has three main delivery points: students, faculty and leadership. “We hope these concepts will take root so that they become part of the whole culture of the university,” he said. 

Speak and Baehr believe that the Virtues of the Lion Mind align nicely with the school’s Jesuit mission, which holds dear concepts such as truth, reflection, and discernment. However, they hope these beliefs will, over time, become as prevalent in the school’s pedagogy and culture as they are in its mission statement. Indeed, everything about the three-year initiative is designed to resonate with a campus grappling with a number of realities that exist across higher education, including a decline in the humanities, R.O.I. pressure, viewpoint polarization, and students who report to lack meaning and purpose. 

The leaders’ first cultural hurdle was to carefully choose the six intellectual virtues they found most relevant to an L.M.U. education. They arrived at: curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, intellectual autonomy, intellectual courage, and intellectual perseverance. “Curiosity gets the learning process started,” Baehr said. “We’ve also identified two pairs of virtues that complement and constrain each other. Intellectual humility helps us own our intellectual limitations, while intellectual autonomy compels us to own our intellectual abilities. Similarly, open-mindedness disposes us to give a fair hearing to alternative perspectives, while intellectual courage helps us have the courage of our convictions. Finally, intellectual perseverance keeps the process of inquiry going even when obstacles arise, as they always do.” 

Asked why the initiative feels particularly relevant at this moment in time, the scholars described the need to navigate what they call “a polluted information landscape.” “We need to be appropriately skeptical and cautious, but we also need to be trusting of the right sources, and in today’s digital world, that makes significant demands on who we are as thinkers,” Baehr said. “Intellectual virtues equip us to do this responsibly and competently.” 

Another issue the initiative addresses is polarization and the inability of all parties to give a fair hearing to another’s point of view. “We can’t have a democracy, if we can’t listen to and learn from one another,” Baehr said. “Here is where intellectual humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness come to the fore, but also a certain amount of intellectual firmness and courage to engage in public discourse with appropriate confidence and firmness.” 

Speak and Baehr said that the growth and ubiquity of artificial intelligence loomed large over their thinking about the project and prompted the late addition of “intellectual autonomy” to the Virtues of the Lion Mind.

“We knew the A.I. stuff would be an issue,” Speak said. “So, we identified intellectual autonomy as a way to frame how students and faculty ought to think about A.I. This intellectual virtue involves thinking for yourself. When you exercise it, you are making the ideas and knowledge your own. The knowledge didn’t just pass through you. You got to the point of understanding by your own agency.” 

Practical Virtue

One of the advantages of the initiative is that it provides a language and pathway for a variety of stakeholders on campus, from Amanda Christy’s need to reinvigorate her classroom, to the university librarians who, in service to enlightenment, have embedded descriptions of the virtues in their basic “how to use the library” modules.  

For Father Dorian Llywelyn, the virtues promise to awaken fundamental principles of scholarship and learning, and perhaps, a resurgence in Jesuit spirituality. A theologian and historian, Father Dorian leads the Center for Ignatian Spirituality at L.M.U. and sees his role there as connecting Jesuit values to the academic pursuits of the university. 

As part of his work, Father Dorian said he seeks to reach people who have diverse beliefs with some kind of common platform. 

“I want to give people something of use and value that somehow belongs to them, and they belong to it,” he said. “That is why I was particularly interested in the work of Dan and Jason. What they are doing is 100 percent in keeping with the tradition of Jesuit education, but it rearticulates it in a way that is relatable to many who may see religious terminology as a barrier. Even though they are not coming at this from a distinctly Christian or Jesuit viewpoint, there is great synergy there.” 

Father Dorian recently hosted a weekend retreat for people involved in the initiative. Each participant took personal time to ponder what the work might look like in their respective roles. He also sat in on the faculty learning community and came away feeling the virtues could help address some of the lingering ills within higher education, including siloing and what he called “misguided zeal” among faculty. 

“Intellectual humility works against indoctrination because you can’t be doctrinaire when you are intellectually humble,” he said. 

On the faculty learning communities, he said, “bringing people of all different disciplines together to share their diverse viewpoints is what we should be doing all of the time. Doing so is an intellectual delight that raise us up and brings out the very best of us.” 

In supporting this work, Father Dorian can’t help but wonder if the virtues initiative might ignite a resurgence in the interface between academia and spirituality, something that has fallen away over time in most Jesuit institutions. 

“What is it to be a thinking person of virtue but also a thinking person of faith?” he asked. “My area of interest is trying to articulate that relationship better.” 

With champions like Father Dorian, Speak and Baehr hope that the Intellectual Character Initiative may eventually become an integral part of both the academic and co-curricular life of the university. But there is a long way to go before it transforms from an overlay — a program — to part of the DNA. As cultural change theory dictates, it will be the accumulation of small developments that will eventually move the needle in that direction, which is why the experiences of individual students may be the most promising. 

In describing what she learned in Amanda Christy’s class, a young woman wrote in her curiosity journal, “Curiosity helps you question your own assumptions and it pushes you to see different perspectives which can make you more thoughtful when facing problems in the world. Curiosity isn’t about knowing every fact but putting yourself out there to learn and grow. In all, that kind of curiosity is something I’ll carry with me far beyond this class.” 

You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.