Welcome to the Anteater Virtues Project! Established in 2019, this is a unique educational project devoted to bringing the cultivation of intellectual virtues, and thereby virtuous intellectual character into the heart of UCI’s curriculum. While there has been a number of successful initiatives that have explored the relevance of the intellectual virtues for education, this is the first project of its kind to pursue this endeavor within the context of a leading R1 university. The project thus showcases the commitment to pedagogical innovation that UCI is renowned for.

The project focuses on four key intellectual virtues that we believe lie at the heart of the educational experience and which we aim to foster at UCI. These are the Anteater Virtues:

While the project spotlights the cultivation of these intellectual virtues, it is also concerned more generally with the cultivation of virtuous intellectual character and in particular avoiding intellectual vice. A range of disciplinary and historical perspective are represented throughout, including discussions of intellectual virtues as they are manifested in a variety of world traditions.

UCI The Year of Scholarly Values Launch event: a panel discussion with Richard Arum, Michael Dennin, and Julia Lupton. Introduced by Chancellor Howard Gillman & chaired by Duncan Pritchard.

The syllabus is structured around three tiers of online modules:  

There is also a stand-alone training module to help faculty and teaching assistants acquire the necessary skills to promote virtuous intellectual character in their teaching.

 The result is that from orientation through to graduation, UCI students are given the tools to conceptualize their learning within the framework of the intellectual virtues and thereby cultivate their virtuous intellectual character.

There are two Canvas course sites for the Anteater Virtues, one for UCI students/faculty, and a second, free, public copy. The public version includes the full set of the Anteater Virtues modules, and is available to everyone who is interested in using them, whether an individual or an educational institution.

The Anteater Virtues is not just a pedagogical initiative but also a research project. We are drawing on the very latest interdisciplinary research on the relevance of the intellectual virtues for education, some of it conducted by members of the project team, and bringing it to bear on the organization and delivery of the educational materials. In addition, we are partnered with the ground-breaking UCI-MUST project that is devoted to measuring undergraduate educational outcomes in order to conduct a major empirical study that demonstrates the effectiveness of this pedagogical intervention.

While this project is initially focused on improving the educational experience of undergraduates at UCI, our ultimate aim is to transform the wider conversation about the purpose of higher education. We believe that all education, and especially higher education, should be concerned not just with ensuring that students gain useful facts and cognitive skills, but that they also develop as individuals, where this includes the development of their intellectual character. Education is a lifelong process, and higher education should be geared towards preparing students for this. With this wider focus in mind, the project will be presenting the research case (both theoretical and empirical) for educating for intellectual virtuous character. It will also be making the teaching materials that it develops publicly freely available so that other educational institutions—whether in higher education or otherwise (such as high schools)—can make use of them.