Welcome back everyone. It’s hard to believe that this is already the last day of the conference! We have really enjoyed "seeing" and "hearing" from everyone this week, if only virtually.

This morning we are joined by Nancy O’Neill, Director of Programs at the Office of Education and Institutional Renewal and Assistant Director of Core Commitments at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) in Washington, DC. She is here with us today to discuss AAC&U initiatives in working with U.S. colleges and universities in fostering students’ personal and social responsibility, and how these initiatives promote systemic and organizational change. Please join us in welcoming Nancy O’Neill.

Hi everyone! My name is Nancy O’Neill, and I’m the director of programs in the Office of Education and Institutional Renewal at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). I’m also the Assistant Director of an initiative at AAC&U called Core Commitments: Educating Students for Personal and Social Responsibility, which we’ve been running for the past three years. I’m very pleased to be speaking with you today and look forward to our conversation about institutional change in higher education as well as the particular work campuses have been doing to reclaim education for personal and social responsibility as a central component of student learning in college. A PowerPoint presentation and some background materials, posted in the resources section, provide an introduction to AAC&U and to the Core Commitments project.

This is an excellent question and an important one that faculty raise all the time. While we know that students develop their sense of personal and social responsibility from many different sources, including family and prior schooling, we also believe it to be a critical outcome of college. For example, with regard to academic integrity, we know from sources such as the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University that students do exhibit cheating behaviors in college, though the reasons why students cheat vary and sometimes have to do with a lack of clarity about how to responsibly cite sources in their work, etc.

With regard to social responsibility, we know students themselves expect this to be part of their college experience and want to contribute to the larger good, but we also know that they benefit from having practical experiences doing this while in college, in ordre to become more equipped at working within communities, across differences, etc.