In 1965, students at the newly established University of California, Irvine, chose, as their mascot, the anteater. The unusual selection was an attempt to distinguish the university from others within the state system, leading to a campus identity that remains unique.  

Today, U.C. Irvine has embraced a university-wide approach to teaching and learning that once again reflects its independence. Anteaters Virtues is a pedagogical and research initiative that promotes a set of intellectual character traits meant to underpin a student's educational journey. If this sounds like something critics of higher education might call indoctrination, Anteater Virtues is, in fact, the opposite. 

“We don’t just train people to be doctors or engineers or business leaders; we train people to think for themselves, and that is profoundly liberating,” said Duncan Pritchard, a distinguished professor of philosophy at U.C. Irvine and the creator of Anteater Virtues.   

The virtues — curiosity, integrity, intellectual humility, and intellectual tenacity —  are first introduced to students at orientation. Students work on them, in different forms, as they advance to their degrees. The hope is that these intellectual building blocks will help students develop a greater capacity to learn and to succeed in a rapidly changing world.   

Launched as a pilot in 2017, Anteaters Virtues is hitting its stride. The initiative has recently received a $400,000 grant from the Lilly Endowment as part of the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University, supporting schools dedicated to making character education central to their academic mission.  

The grant will fund, in part, a major push to bring Anteater Virtues to other institutions attracted to the method’s commitment to freedom of ideas and the development of durable skills. Indeed, the initiative’s leaders believe that a return to intellectual virtues may be what’s needed to address many of the problems facing higher education today. 

Anteater Origins 

Duncan Pritchard is an epistemologist from the U.K. who had a keen interest in the intellectual side of character education when he arrived at U.C. Irvine in 2017 from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. As a knowledge scholar, Pritchard sought to understand how intellectual virtues could be embedded into an educational setting.  

“A lot of people are focused on moral or civic virtue in terms of character education, but my interest is in intellectual character: How can we get students to understand that what they are doing is actually cultivating intellectual virtues that will stay with them for life?” he said.

Pritchard explored the idea of identifying and explaining a digestible set of  intellectual virtues that would be taught throughout a student’s trajectory. The vision included faculty training to infuse these virtues into the classroom. 

Pritchard admits that attempting to transform curriculum at an Research-1 university seemed like “absolute madness,” but he was surprised and encouraged when he received the full support of U.C. Irvine Chancellor Howard Gillman and Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning Michael Dennin.  

“When Duncan came to me with this idea of creating intellectual virtues that would be a framework for teaching and learning, I thought, ‘Yes, this is what anteaters are all about,’ and so that’s what we called it,” Dennin said. 

While Dennin was excited about the potential of Anteater Virtues, he said he always viewed the initiative as a “long game” effort.  

“We could have made a big announcement telling everyone they have to use these, but that was never going to work,” he said. “Instead, we said, ‘Let’s do this slow and steady, get the modules developed, and engage some early adopters.’” 

With leadership backing him, Pritchard focused on two tracks: implementation and assessment. After introducing the concept as a pilot, he expanded it to the entire university with a grant from the Templeton Foundation. To allow the initiative to scale quickly, he developed online modules. Core modules are included in the orientation course that all incoming U.C. Irvine students take, with other introductory modules embedded into regular courses or taken for extra credit. More advanced modules, including a capstone version, round out a more in-depth experience.

To help assess the work, Pritchard enlisted the expertise and support of Richard Arum, a professor of sociology and education and the former dean of the U.C. Irvine School of Education. The well-known sociologist and author is also the director of the U.C. Irvine MUST Project (Measuring Undergraduate Success Trajectories). Arum’s unprecedented data collection on undergraduate experiences and outcomes would now include measuring the effect of Anteater Virtues. Like Dennin, Arum became an eager partner.  

“This work really spoke to me as a faculty member and a scholar and as someone who has been thinking about how we educate individuals in the 21st century,” said Arum, who is the author of “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.” 

“A lot of character education to me is politically challenging and not very productive, given people’s different perspectives,” he continued. “But shifting some of that work into intellectual virtues — academic values — that can promote scholarly dispositions, I found to be a very useful intervention.”

It became clear that for the virtues initiative to be embraced on campus, even one as free-spirited as U.C. Irvine, it would need to be strategically positioned — from the chancellor’s endorsement to its distinction among character work to its iterative implementation. Perhaps the most important step to ensure the Anteaters Virtues’ acceptance on campus was the careful identification and communication of the virtues themselves.  

Dispositions for Life 

“When I think about the core of a research university, I don’t think we could do much better than to start with curiosity,” Dennin said. “That’s what we’re all about. It is important as a virtue but also as an antidote to something I find disturbing in society today: that questioning things, which should be a positive, has become a negative.”  

“When I think about the core of a research university, I don’t think we could do much better than to start with curiosity. It is important as a virtue but also as an antidote to something I find disturbing in society today: that questioning things, which should be a positive, has become a negative.”

A major theme throughout the four virtues is a return to inquiry as a core value of education. After curiosity comes integrity, which at first glance may appear to be about plagiarism and misconduct in the age of A.I. Pritchard said Anteater Virtues turns this around, asking students: What does good conduct look like? The last two virtues — intellectual humility and intellectual tenacity — complement one another, though Pritchard said they are often misunderstood. 

“The reason we chose intellectual humility and intellectual tenacity is that a lot of students think of them as opposing concepts — that to have conviction is to not listen to another’s point of view and that humility is a lack of conviction,” Pritchard said. “What we are trying to convey is that intellectual humility is respect for others’ viewpoint and is critical to one’s capacity to learn new information, and tenacity means stick to your guns but also be sensitive to the fact you could be wrong.” 

Arum is particularly appreciative of this virtue pairing and believes it holds a strong message across the board.  

“Some of the problems we are having in the sector as a whole, with students and faculty alike, come from not embracing intellectual dispositions,” Arum said. “It’s great to have convictions and want to do good in the world, but the way that that is acted upon sometimes abandons humility and curiosity. So it becomes just advocacy, and that’s very off-putting. If faculty are not showing an openness to other perspectives, how can we expect that from students?”  

Getting faculty to embrace Anteaters Virtues is a large part of the effort. To gradually build the virtues into the curriculum, Anteater Virtues is now part of  pedagogical training for faculty and teaching assistants, hundreds of whom have taken the modules. Pritchard said the reaction thus far has been encouraging.  

“Now we’ve got engineers talking about intellectual grit, an educational theorist talking about humility. We have a Shakespearian scholar talking about integrity. In each case, they are connecting the intellectual virtues to what most interests them,” he said. 

Pritchard said they are well on their way to attaining their target of 80 percent of students being exposed to the virtues programs through general education courses, and all of them have taken introductory modules as part of their orientation. Students, faculty, and staff are also regularly reminded of the virtues by posters on campus and continuous references by Chancellor Gillman, who promotes the project whenever possible — from convocation to commencement.  

For those who remain skeptical, or less enamored by the virtues’ philosophical core, Pritchard said he uses the development of durable, enduring skills as his pitch. In a technology-based marketplace, specialized skills can quickly become redundant. “This is something that you learn at university that will stay with you for life,” he said.

Evidence of the program’s effectiveness is also convincing. Arum’s research on the effort is nascent though promising. Following pre- and post-studies of student and faculty experiences with Anteater Virtues, one report revealed: “The intervention was effective at promoting knowledge of what intellectual virtue is, why it is important, and how to implement it, suggesting the importance of instruction in virtue learning.” 

But despite the early data, Arum summons the integrity virtue in cautioning against broad conclusions. “Large public universities are very noisy places,” he said. “It is very hard to capture the attention of either students or faculty.” 

As the Anteaters Virtues team continues to communicate the project’s benefits, they are expanding the focus to other universities in the United States and abroad with support of their institutional impact grant from the Wake Forest E.C.I. program. Public versions of the model are now freely available and come with a commitment to help other universities learn how to implement and assess the program. 

“We’re sort of a beacon now,” Pritchard said. “We’ve done it here, and we want to use it to promote a conversation about higher education generally — what its purpose is and how we can use this model to help meet the existential challenges that are coming our way.” 

Dennin agrees, believing an intellectual virtues framework can address a number of the issues facing higher education from academic freedom to the value of a college degree to the myriads of opportunities and challenges posed by the proliferation of technology.   

Dennin even wonders if Anteater Virtues can help with a critical question about the use of A.I.: “What do we do that A.I. doesn’t do?” he asked aloud.

“What does faculty bring to class if A.I. can deliver information and answer questions?” he said. “How does a student learn if they are just using A.I. to do the work? This is where curiosity, integrity, humility, and tenacity come into play. You may have all the information, but what conclusions are you drawing?” 

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