When Jaydn Decuir was looking at colleges, her father asked her an instructive question: “What is it you need to solve the problems you wish to solve?” She thought about her own community and how she hoped she could someday lessen the burden of gentrification on those who were displaced. She decided she would become a civil engineer. Her first choice was Howard University. 

Students like Jaydn Decuir are the heart and soul of Howard. They are high-performing, civically engaged, and mindful of their positions as future Black professionals in careers where they’ve been historically underrepresented. The prestigious Research 1 university, which is also an H.B.C.U. (historically Black college and university), has graduated more African American Ph.D. recipients than any other university in the United States. Many of them serve in leadership positions focused on social justice. 

Howard University is now engaged in a campus-wide character education initiative that takes all of this into account, as it considers how to codify, promote, and integrate character work throughout the university. In 2025, the university received a substantial Institutional Impact Grant from the Educating Character Initiative (E.C.I.) at Wake Forest University. Funded by the Lilly Endowment, the program seeds and studies character education programs at colleges and universities of diverse profiles across the United States. 

“What we do here is create leaders, and you cannot have those conversations or that training without talking about character,” said Dr. Dawn Williams, the interim provost and chief academic officer at Howard. “What this initiative allows us to do is name it, and study it, and that leads to capacity building and replication.” 

The grant will help organize the formal and informal character education efforts already underway at Howard into a center. Research will inform an H.B.C.U.-based framework for character education that can be infused into the curriculum and shared with schools throughout the country. Perhaps most importantly, the work will help answer questions such as: What is different about character education at an H.B.C.U. with a rich legacy of social change? And what does character education look like for institutions that have both held it dear and been excluded from its record? 

What does character education look like for institutions that have both held it dear and been excluded from its record? 

“When you think about character, different things come to mind that may have been informed by books, experiences, or individuals,” said Dr. Jorge Burmicky, the principal investigator on the grant and faculty member at the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Howard. “Now we get to add to that word — its meaning and traditions — from the perspective of our work here at Howard.” 

Studying the Scholars

As a higher education scholar focused on racial equity, social justice, and leadership, Burmicky said the opportunity to lead the exploration of character at the nation’s premier H.B.C.U. was “by far my wildest dream.” Through a previous capacity building grant from the E.C.I., Burmicky had participated in the Common Good Character Trust project, where he met with other scholars and thought leaders to reimagine character education through a contextually relevant lens.  

Burmicky said the first part of the project, which is housed within the provost’s office, aims to study and potentially transfer exemplars of character education that exist within the university. In seeking a baseline, he immediately consulted Ron Smith, the executive director of the Karsh STEM Scholars and the Humanities and Social Sciences Scholars programs at the university. Smith had been running these highly selective learning communities since 2016. 

The Karsh program is modeled after the Meyerhoff Scholars program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, with the expressed intention of addressing the underrepresentation of African Americans in STEM professions. Its unique capacity to nurture leaders of good character made it the ideal subject by which to assess and organize character education at Howard.  

“Our programs are anchored by a set of values that can easily be discussed as building character within students,” Smith said. “We have expectations for our students on how to build community and to connect ourselves to what has always been central at Howard: our motto — Truth and Service — which runs deep through our veins.” 

The signature component of these initiatives is the Summer Bridge Program (S.B.P.), a six-week curricular and co-curricular living-learning community for emerging leaders that is capped by a two-week study abroad component. While sharpening skills within their disciplines, the S.B.P. challenges student to think more critically about virtues such as justice, courage, empathy, self-awareness, and humility. It upholds eleven core values, including “be honest and earn the trust of others” and “be open to new ideas and different perspectives.” 

As a Karsh Scholar, Jaydn Decuir became part of that community. She met her roommate and best friend on the first day of the S.B.P. and said her experience that summer will stay with her the rest of her life. 

“I imagined the Summer Bridge Program to be technically-heavy, but it was so much more than that,” Decuir said. “We had so many discussions about what was happening around us, around the world, and what our viewpoints were on different issues. I am forever grateful for it.” 

Activities of the Summer Bridge Program go beyond technical-skill building. Photo courtesy of Howard University
Photo courtesy of Howard University
Photo courtesy of Howard University
Photo courtesy of Howard University

This holistic preparation is meant to equip students with skills beyond their disciplines, as they navigate graduate schools and professions that have unique challenges for students of color. In this way, the S.B.P. reflects what Burmicky outlined as some of the larger goals of the character initiative. “Our approach focuses on how students develop character by seeking truth, engaging diverse perspectives, and making ethical decisions, all while navigating their racial and ethnic identities,” he said. 

Other reasons the S.B.P. became the organizing element for character work at Howard include the fact that it enjoys broad support throughout the university, with partnerships across departments; and it provides a robust laboratory for assessment. 

“Since Karsh and the Summer Bridge Program have already been doing this work, the research allows us to learn from these experiences and transfer that learning to other areas of campus,” said Tatianna Duperier, a doctoral student at Howard who was hired through a partnership with the ASCEND (Alliance for Scholarship, Collaboration, Engagement, Networking and Development) initiative at Yale University to assist in the research. 

This summer, Duperier will begin a series of student surveys and qualitative interviews that will be used to make improvements to the program while ideally serving as proof of concept for expanded character education throughout the university. Both Interim Provost Williams, and Burmicky believe the empirical evidence they will gather will inspire others on campus, particularly faculty. 

“With this data, we can say to others within the university: ‘Look at what we’ve done at Karsh and the Summer Bridge Program,’” Burmicky said. “‘What are you doing that is similar in the engineering department, in the professional schools? How is our medical school preparing physicians for their careers though this lens?’”

Unpacking a Complex History 

It was Martin Luther King Jr. who famously dreamed of a day when people would be judged not "by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Indeed, the history of character — and character education — within the Black community is pervasive but also complicated by slavery and structures and policies that were not designed with communities of color in mind. 

It was Martin Luther King Jr. who famously dreamed of a day when people would be judged not "by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

As part of the Howard initiative, Burmicky and his team are developing an H.B.C.U.-based theoretical model for character education and studying existing models and strategies for character education in higher education. In this work, they are looking at key considerations of character education through an H.B.C.U. lens, including the legacy of character within Black education and the paucity of Black-centric character education within the literature. 

As Burmicky points out in the E.C.I. proposal, Black scholars refer to character education as the “raison d’etre” of H.B.C.U.s (Shaw, 2006), but little has been studied or written about it. While many higher education institutions in the United States have implemented character education, much of the documented empirical evidence has taken place at predominantly white institutions or from white or ethnocentric lenses. “The absence of Black students and culturally and racially responsive methods and epistemologies in these processes has been documented in the literature” (Burmicky et al., 2025, p. 5).

Carol Moye serves as the E.C.I. grant’s director of assessment and program learning. She believes the exclusion of Black voices has had major implications for character in Black education and for the field of character education. 

“One of the things we have to look at is the perception of character education — but from whose culture and whose viewpoint,” she said. “We have always had character in the Black community, but it did not present in the way people wanted us to be perceived. There was this sense that we would impose character on these people with the assumption they did not already have it. We need to turn this narrative around for our students and urge them to find the character they have and utilize it in the work that they do.” 

The character imposition notion contrasts starkly with the undeniably rich commitment H.B.C.U.s have to social justice and public service. Most definitions of character education include a beyond-the-self element and a desire to serve one’s community. At Howard, as in other H.B.C.U.s, this concept is foundational. 

“Leadership for us has largely been about communal responsibility,” said Williams, who believes the most visible evidence of Howard’s commitment to service is the students themselves. “We don’t have to talk our students into being change-makers. That’s who we attract.” 

Building a Unique Contribution 

Given these strong traditions, the question may not be so much how to expand character education to include H.B.C.U.s as what the legacy of character work within H.B.C.U.s can add to the field of character education.

This is something that Michael Lamb, the senior executive director of the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University, will no doubt consider as they work to understand how character education is contextualized in diverse educational settings. 

"As we like to say, character is for all but not one-size-fits-all,” Lamb said. “Different institutions have different ways of understanding and educating character. At the E.C.I., we're especially committed to helping institutions develop programs that fit their own institutional context and culture and to learning from them in the process.H.B.C.U.s have been educating character for generations, so they have much to teach us about how character can be developed in different contexts." 

The final deliverables for Howard’s three-year grant include: the launch of the H.B.C.U. Character and Leadership Education Initiative at The Center for H.B.C.U. Research, Leadership, and Policy at Howard; and the development of a H.B.C.U.-based framework for character education that will be launched at a national convening, in conjunction with ASCEND, in 2028 at Yale University. The team hopes that, by then, the organizing effort they conducted at Howard, and the learning they will have shared, will benefit the university, the H.B.C.U. community, and all those who work to support character and social justice — what Howard calls Truth and Service. 

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