Abstract Universities are traditionally perceived as academic communities or learning communities. Socialist universities with Chinese characteristics, however, not only possess the defining features of academic communities or learning communities, but also stress the importance of fostering virtues through education, with an explicit goal that core socialist values should run through the whole process of talent cultivation. They can thus be reckoned as moral education communities. This cognition not only goes beyond the notion that universities simply serve as academic communities or learning communities, but it also reflects the essence of socialist universities with Chinese characteristics and is an essential step towards ″fostering virtues through education″ in a comprehensive manner. The common good is an ethical necessity for a moral education community and an inevitable choice for socialist universities with Chinese characteristics. While Western universities advocate the pursuit of neutral values and individual goods, socialist universities with Chinese characteristics, as moral education communities, place much emphasis on value-goal congruence and regard socialist core values as a value-goal. Towards this end, on the one hand, equal dialogues and cooperation are required among value subjects within the moral education community so as to reach a consensus on the value of common goods; on the other hand, ideological education and publicity campaigns on ideology and culture should be carried out in a top-down manner so that every individual in the moral education community can reach a consensus on common goods through value choices, value identifications and value beliefs. Moral responsibility is an essential prerequisite for a moral education community. It stresses the moral responsibility and self-construction of teachers and students and multiple subjects in a university. In the moral education community, faculties, staff, workers,students and the moral education community itself should take on the responsibilities or ″ cultivating talents by imparting knowledge″, ″cultivating talents through administration″, ″cultivating students by offering services″, ″self-education″, and ″building public morality in society″ respectively. Multiple subjects in the moral education community should also assume moral responsibilities in different fields. The classroom, as a crucial field of the moral education community, is not only the best teaching field for ″moral education″ but also the most effective space for ″moral education″; the living environment, as an important field of the community, can make up for the inadequacy of morality as knowledge in traditional classrooms and the drawbacks of professional knowledge education; and the Internet, as a community of relations, is a new essential field to publicize socialist core values and enhance college students' confidence and identity with the mainstream ideology of contemporary China. Collective collaboration is an internal logic of a moral education community. Socialist Universities with Chinese characteristics are regarded not only as collaborative and sharing learning communities with common goals but also as practice communities generated by collective cooperation. This kind of collective collaboration is a learning-based process of mutual growth and development for both teachers and students with three core elements: a common goal and vision, a common community and common practice. To achieve collective collaboration in the moral education community, teachers, students, administrators and staff members should make concerted efforts to yield a win-win situation and synergistic development among individual communities and the society by holding onto goals, clarifying responsibilities, optimizing and completing related mechanisms and setting rules.
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