Photos by Ralph Freso
Universities have an overriding goal: to educate.
But Grand Canyon University wants to wade in the waters beyond that – do something bolder.
It wants to create an ecosystem of character, where character will permeate everything across campus, through its 10 colleges and every aspect of campus life.
“What would it look like for educators to contemplate character and practice character and encourage each other to live virtuously?” asked Dr. Peter Anderson, executive director of GCU’s Canyon Center for Character Education. “What would it look like for engineers? Or scientists?"
What would it look like when smaller groups – communities of practice – begin to embrace character together, “and it becomes a vision for life, a flourishing life, that can deepen culture through a commitment to Christian character in a particular space?”
Anderson asked those questions at “Flourishing Together: Advancing Christian Character at GCU.”
It is one of a slew of workshops peppering campus during Character and Integrity Week, hosted by the university’s Honors College, a campaign in partnership with the National Society of Collegiate Scholars.
In 2025, GCU received a five-year, $10.7 million Kern Family Foundation grant to significantly expand the CCCE, which got its start a little more than three years ago in the College of Education.
But with the new Kern grant, character education is expanding universitywide as the center aims to weave Christian character education into the fabric of academic programs, co-curricular activities and leadership development across campus.
Anderson, at the session focused on faculty and staff, clarified the university’s mission, structures and strategies for the expansion. He also spoke about what the next few years will look like in character education, specifically Christian character education that sparks “human flourishing that is rooted in faith, oriented by hope and inspired to love.”
“There’s a deep commitment,” Anderson said, “not simply to cognition or awareness of ideas, but a commitment to a Christ-centered vision for life.”
He asked, "What do we mean when we speak of Christian character?"
Christian character is a way of seeing, knowing, loving and doing what’s good – so, perception, motivation and conduct, which point to Christ, Anderson said. The center envisions sparking those strategies in students by sharing the virtues of faith, hope and love.
“You’ll begin to, hopefully, hear and see around some of this initiative, conversations and practices focused on faith, hope and love because of the transformative quality of these virtues,” he said. “… In the simplest way, (the idea is) to consider what role and connection do faith, hope and love have with human experiences that shape our character and how they might guide us as we seek to form the character of our students."
Anderson described faith as the root system, rooting us in identity, courage, humility and other virtues. Hope orients us and points us to the ultimate purpose of our creative purposes in God. And love is a keystone virtue, an ultimate expression of other virtues aimed at serving others.
Those virtues, rooted in faith, lead to a fruitful life, he said.
Goals for this first year of scaling character education campuswide are to expand staff, come up with a shared framework – a glossary or common language that the university will use when it comes to character education – pilot training for faculty, forming an advisory board and putting Christian character champions in place across the university.
Over the next five years, just a few of the other goals will be to establish a speaker series, reach 30% integration of character education across every academic program, have a centralized repository of reusable resources from various colleges, and establish expectations for resident assistants, the Associated Students of GCU and other student leaders.
Anderson emphasized, too, how Christian character education won’t just be limited to the Phoenix campus and its ground students, staff and faculty, but it will be expanded to GCU's estimated 108,000 online students.
And there’s the final piece to that five-year plan: research.
“We hope to fund some microgrants for faculty and students to research what character means on our campus,” Anderson said. “That would mean impact studies – what it means to live a life of character that brings positive change to the world around us.”
Ultimately, the goal of creating this ecosystem of character at GCU supports the university’s mission, which is not just to transfer knowledge to students. It is more holistic, Anderson said. “We want to train graduates who carry purpose, integrity and service into every vocation.”
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