The National Ethics Project (NEP) was initiated through a collaboration between the Association of Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE) and the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University in 2015. With endorsement from APPE and Harvard, then APPE Board member, Deni Elliott, and the Edmond & Lily Safra Center leadership team, including Executive Director Jess Miner, engaged in talks about how to assess ethics education in U.S. higher education. This would be the first attempt in 35 years to do a systematic study of the field.
With initial funding from the Spencer Foundation, the NEP created a mixed-methods, multi-institutional approach for analyzing ethics education on particular campuses, which included examining ethics both in the curriculum and in campus life from institutional, faculty, and student perspectives.
NEP researchers continue to refine methods and collaborate with institutions and scholars to create useful tools to assess and improve ethics education in higher education. In 2021, NEP received a grant from the National Science Foundation to pilot the NEP mixed-methodologies tools on the New Jersey Institute of Technology campus to determine the commitment to, and baseline of, ethics education at their institution.