KU wins grant to increase Lawrence campus awareness of university values

LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas won a nearly $700,000 grant to help raise awareness and extend the impact of KU’s IRISE Culture Charter for the Lawrence campus.

The IRISE Culture Charter was developed in 2023 to articulate five shared values — integrity, respect, innovation, stewardship and excellence — Jayhawks embody as members of the university community. A committee co-chaired by university governance and administration leaders developed the IRISE Culture Charter and values with input from KU community members.

The three-year, $699,287 grant, titled “Character Development at KU: The IRISE Virtues Initiative,” from the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University, will support KU’s efforts to bring greater awareness to the IRISE values, weave them into the fiber of the university culture and encourage KU community members to cultivate character within themselves. The grant follows a $46,040 capacity-building grant KU received last year from the Educating Character Initiative, titled, “KU IRISE: Values Adoption Initiative.”

“This latest grant will build on our initial work to develop a culture of character focused on the IRISE values as integral to the identity of being a Jayhawk,” said Nancy Snow, professor of philosophy and co-principal investigator on the grants.

During the 2024-25 academic year, Snow and Linda Luckey, assistant dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, led a group of IRISE Fellows on the Lawrence and Edwards campuses in exploring ways KU can more deeply embed the IRISE values in the university culture. The 12 faculty and staff IRISE Fellows were joined in that effort by a group of students and by the 2025 KU Staff Fellows cohort. The three groups met separately and collectively to ideate and plan ways to increase awareness of the IRISE values among students, faculty and staff. Those efforts culminated in the 2025 Staff Fellows Report, "IRISE for KU: Integrating IRISE Values into KU Culture."

“We are committed to our vision to be an exceptional learning community that lifts each member and advances society,” said Barbara Bichelmeyer, chief academic officer/provost and executive vice chancellor. “Our vision is driven by shared values that guide our engagement with each other and foster care, support and a sense of belonging that is necessary to facilitate success for each member in the KU community. I’m thankful to the faculty, staff and students who have taken leadership on this initiative.”

Work under the new grant will focus on five main points of impact:

1. Ensure service-learning activities, student organizations and sorority and fraternity life include references to and instruction in the IRISE values.
2. Conduct a publicity campaign to raise awareness of IRISE values among all members of the university community.
3. Create 30 engaging and entertaining public-facing online course modules featuring the IRISE values.
4. Guide faculty to create or revise 30 courses that cultivate character in students.
5. Publish three articles and one edited special issue of a journal featuring KU’s IRISE work, as well as the work of others, in character development in higher education.

The three primary goals of the project are to raise awareness and instill the IRISE values and virtues into the fabric of the KU community, integrate character and values into the KU curriculum, and share findings from the work with colleagues at institutions around the world, said Kimberly Beets, co-PI on the project and research analyst in the Office of Analytics, Institutional Research & Effectiveness.

“We want to extend our insights and share our KU experiences with other researchers in a mutually beneficial exchange of strategies, plans and ideas,” Beets said. “We hope to continue ongoing collaborations with colleagues in the U.S. and abroad on the challenges and rewards of educating for character.”

The IRISE Culture Charter of shared university values aligns with the Educating Character Initiative’s focus on recognizing the importance of character education and integrating it into curricula and institutional cultures within higher education. Wake Forest’s Program for Leadership and Character announced $15.6 million in grants to 33 institutions “to enable institutional leaders, faculty and staff to infuse character in undergraduate curricula and programming in ways that align organically with their mission, context and culture.”

The grant provides support for KU’s Center for Teaching Excellence Fellows who will work with instructors to integrate the IRISE values and character virtues into courses across a wide range of disciplines.

“The aim is not only to create new courses or completely redesign existing courses in various departments,” Snow said, “but also to ensure those courses continue to be taught in the future.”

The Educating Character Initiative received grant proposals from 170 institutions, according to Wake Forest University. Other grant recipients include Baylor University, Pepperdine University, the University of North Carolina, the University of Virginia, Villanova University and a collaboration among California State University-Bakersfield, Harvard University, DePauw University, Santa Fe College, Stanford University and St. Philip’s College.