Duncan Pritchard, CKTS director and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, received a grant award of nearly $400,000 for Educating for Virtuous Intellectual Character (EVIC), a transformative expansion of the innovative Anteater Virtues campuswide project at UC Irvine. Anteater Virtues brings educating for virtuous intellectual character into the heart of the curriculum of a leading R1 public university. With new modules, UCI undergraduate students will be able to progress through the Anteater Virtues materials from orientation all the way through to graduation. A new “Virtuous Learner” certification program will be available to all UCI undergraduate students who successfully complete all modules relevant to their major.
The Institutional Impact grant is one of 24 awarded by the Educating Character Initiative (ECI), a part of the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University, funded by Lily Endowment Inc.
With the EVIC grant, Pritchard and his team will develop these materials to serve other educational audiences, such as high schools, community colleges, prison education programs, and other four-year colleges. The subject area specific virtues education modules will be freely available for use by educators and educational institutions. EVIC will also contribute to ongoing research on educating for virtuous intellectual character.
Pritchard is also a project co-leader on a Templeton Foundation grant, Cultivating Intellectual Character in the AI Age, working with project leader Professor Shayan Doroudi in the UCI School of Education. In an age where artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly sophisticated and widely accessible, we are forced to think more deeply about what it is that makes us human. Much of this discussion centers around the nature of intelligence, but AI can also force us to reflect on our virtues and ethics, especially regarding the intellectual virtues. Through this project, Pritchard and his colleagues believe they will demonstrate that —if used properly—AI may actually help foster the development of intellectual virtues. Namely, AI (specifically large language models, LLMs, like ChatGPT) can be used as a testbed for youth to come face-to-face with the need for Intellectual Virtues to accompany intelligence, with the ultimate goal of informing their own intellectual character development.
Learn more about Anteater Virtues and the four intellectual virtues of intellectual humility, curiosity, integrity, and intellectual tenacity on the Anteaters Virtues website.