The week Charlie Kirk was killed on a campus across the country, a group of undergraduate researchers at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Penn. used their Friday meeting to talk about peace.

To guide their conversation, they turned to the records of students who came before them — who grappled with different controversies, but ones that similarly shaped their young lives and emerging beliefs. In 1960s editions of Seton Hill’s century-old newspaper, The Setonian, these archivists-in-training discovered voices both in support and rejection of the war in Vietnam. They analyzed photographs of their predecessors in protest, carrying signs insisting “Apathy Kills,” as well as an op-ed from the bipartisan National Student Committee for the Defense of Vietnam, which decried its radical peers and their “irresponsible opposition to our country’s policy in Vietnam.”

The past may not be prescriptive, and Vietnam-era editorials may not offer a how-to guide for peace in 2025, but there are lessons to be learned from shared history. That’s the idea behind Seton Hill’s new character education initiative, of which exploring The Setonian archives is one key part. The institution-wide endeavor centers efforts to derive and promote the values and virtues the Catholic liberal arts university was built on. That pursuit, its organizers hope, can strengthen students’ individual intellectual and personal development, while uniting the broader campus in collective understanding.

Literature professor Sarah Marsh, who is also the director of university curriculum, began spearheading Seton Hill’s entry into character education last year. She was inspired, she said, by a growing recognition that the purpose of higher education should encompass “making people,” rather than simply transferring degrees. From there, the direction for a character project at Seton Hill fell into place, given the strong sense of institutional identity she said already grounds school and student life. “Many universities have missions,” Marsh said. “Ours is present in the day-to-day.”

Seton Hill’s lasting mission stems from its unique origins as a project of a Catholic order of women religious, the Sisters of Charity. This congregation was founded in the early 19th century by Elizabeth Ann Seton — the first American-born saint for whom Seton Hill was named — and was devoted to spiritual as well as humanitarian work, particularly in service of the poor, education, and medical care. In 1882, what became the Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill purchased the plot where Seton Hill University now sits, using it to educate younger pupils before launching a junior and then four-year college for women by 1918. 

A century later, Seton Hill is a coeducational university home to around 2,000 students of any (or no) denomination, yet loyal to the Catholic social values that started it all. “Anytime we're having a conversation about curriculum, anytime we're having a conversation about student wellbeing, anytime we're having a conversation about student life, we are talking about the history and the charism of the Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill,” Marsh said. 

“You feel a deeper connection in knowing and understanding who you are, how you've been formed, and the people who have come before you.”

A charism, Marsh clarified, is a set of values or “spiritual gifts” that the Sisters of Charity, who are still active, strive to embody in their vocational life. For those at Seton Hill, these gifts are expressed by four pillars — welcoming, learning, celebrating, and serving — that guide their work in the world and the university to this day.

In 2024, the pillars took on new meaning when Marsh decided to make them the crux of her vision for character education at Seton Hill. Awarded a $50,000 Capacity-Building grant from the Educating Character Initiative (E.C.I.) at Wake Forest University, she assembled a team of interdisciplinary faculty and staff to devise a unique definition of character education for the university. The succinct, one-page document that came out of their year’s work outlines how each of the institutional pillars reflects different character virtues. 

The pillar of welcoming, they write, refers to the virtue of hospitality, which involves a “conviction of the fundamental, and therefore equal, dignity of every human being.” The pillar of learning refers to humility and wisdom, virtues that allow people to recognize the limits of what they can know, as well as their personal biases. Celebrating refers to gratitude for others and life itself. Serving refers to prudence, or the translation of wisdom into practice to promote good.

With the clarity of these definitions, Marsh expanded the project further, applying for a second round of support from the E.C.I. This one, secured in July 2025, is an Institutional Impact grant of $438,000 to convert the character concepts Marsh and her colleagues developed into practice. Over the next three years, this process will feature two main initiatives: incorporating a series of character education courses into the required curriculum and enlisting students to pioneer research into the student newspaper archives.

The added coursework will form a “vertical pathway,” Marsh said, with one character education class for each grade level. For the youngest students, the First Year Seminar will introduce them to the fundamentals of character education and the Seton Hill mission. For sophomores, another pre-existing course called Faith, Religion, and Society will be infused with character theory to, Marsh said, “make students more aware of the virtues that they are practicing as they work through the content of that particular class.”

As for the subsequent two, higher-level courses, they have not yet been realized. When they are, juniors will take one called Setonian Mission, offering a more advanced understanding of the institutional virtues and taught by interdisciplinary faculty. Finally, seniors will engage in a Setonian Seminar, which Marsh called “a liberal arts capstone” to consider the purpose of their education and its translation to professional life. 

But even as this coursework emphasizes the virtues Marsh worked hard to pin down, she is sensitive to the idea that they intend to control or limit students’ thoughts or behaviors. “We're not trying to create a person who votes in a particular way. We're not trying to create a person who worships in a particular way,” she said. “We are trying to create the kind of person who has made commitments based on an authentic and rigorous experience of some fundamental things that we think are true about being human.”

A key part of this work is to help students find out who they are and who they want to be; that’s where exploring the student newspaper archives comes in. University archivist Casey Bowser, who is leading this research alongside Marsh, said the newspaper is an ideal point of reference for institutional character because it is the richest source of student voices. “It really defines a culture of our community in a way that almost few other records do,” she said. 

Seven undergraduates have embarked on the archival project, wherein the first semester offers training in how to use the newspaper archives and the second lets them pursue an original research question about character. As the students use the paper to ask how and why character has appeared at Seton Hill, they are also exercising the institutional intellectual virtues, like the humility to accept what they cannot know. Moreover, at a moment when student interest in the modern-day student newspaper has been waning, they will consider how to refresh the content and the value of journalism more broadly. 

According to Bowser, engaging with the archives has already left her research interns more energized about the legacy of not only The Setonian but the institution as a whole. “It's almost like your own family,” she said. “You feel a deeper connection in knowing and understanding who you are, how you've been formed, and the people who have come before you.”

That sense of connection to the past, Bowser said, has also been powering students’ express desire to do justice to the publication going forward. In fact, the research project will culminate in the production of a governing document to guide the future of the paper — by drawing from its history. 

“It's meant to be a bridge,” Marsh said, “between what we have done before and what we are doing next.”

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.