A Letter from the President of the American Academy

September 2025
 

The crisis of American democracy has reached the nation’s higher education institutions. In the current moment, institutions of higher learning are the subject of heated debates: funding for research, including ongoing scientific and medical projects; the taxing of endowments; the disbursement and repayment of financial aid; the representation of race in curricula and hiring; larger equity-based initiatives often known as DEI; the enrollment and protection of immigrant and foreign students; the right to protest; the right to learn in an environment free of harassment; the institutional freedom to decide whom to admit, as well as the academic freedom to decide what, when, where, and how to teach. Colleges and universities are the epicenter of debates over political independence and the place of expertise in American life.

The last two years have been particularly fraught. Since October 2023, institutions of higher learning have also been the epicenter of the national debate over the American response to the war in Gaza, with protests, counterprotests, and disputes over institutional responses roiling university life. They have seen an acceleration in the use of artificial intelligence in everyday learning environments, bringing to the fore fundamental questions about how education must proceed. Since March 2020, they have been coping with the learning deficits that inevitably accompanied the educational hiatuses that COVID introduced.

Unprecedented pandemics and global events aside, this is not a new situation. One former national security adviser wrote, “The turbulence of the American university today has so many causes and needs so many cures. . . . War, race, revolution, reaction, numbers, money and lack of money, meaning and lack of meaning.”1 He wrote that before the White House began its attacks on funding for universities. In fact, he wrote it well before the outbreak of the war in Gaza. The advisor in question was McGeorge Bundy, and he was writing in 1970.

Bundy’s essay appeared in an issue of Dædalus, the American Academy’s quarterly journal. Fifty-five years ago, the editors of Dædalus saw fit to devote two issues to the role of colleges and universities in a democratic society. The titles of these issues speak to the challenges of the era: “The Embattled University” and “Rights and Responsibilities: The University’s Dilemma.” These issues came in response to crises that in many ways resemble those facing higher education today, including protests over foreign wars, debates over civil rights, legal and cultural challenges around freedom of speech, and the expansion of executive power. “We are experiencing . . . a crisis involving our political and educational institutions,” editor Stephen Richards Graubard wrote in the introduction to the first issue. “Political authority is suspect; so, also, is academic authority. . . . For the universities of the country, the crisis . . . involves delicate issues about the university’s responsibility to society.”2

These issues remain as bracing today as they were in the 1970s. Of particular importance is the responsibility of higher education not just to society as a whole but specifically to democracy. Colleges and universities are among the few institutions explicitly tasked with cultivating critical thinking and civic knowledge, both of which are essential for a thriving democracy. However, this responsibility has placed higher education in an embattled position. Institutions are accused of being at once too partisan and too indifferent. Too permissive and too quick to silence criticism. Too hierarchical and too responsive to student demands. The moment calls for an examination of how higher education can commit to its democratic mission: to prepare students for the obligations and uncertainties of democratic life.

In 2022, the Academy convened a working group to conduct such an examination. Composed of faculty members and university leaders from a range of institutions, the group deliberated on how higher education institutions can accomplish two goals: educate students about how democracy works and foster the civic skills, habits, and dispositions that will prepare students for life in a democratic society. This working group emerged out of the Academy’s ongoing effort to revitalize American democracy, based on Our Common Purpose, the 2020 report by the Academy’s Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship.3

I joined the working group as an elected member of the Academy and, at the time, the president of Middlebury College. The importance of this effort became magnified over the course of our convenings. When I assumed the presidency of the Academy in January 2025, it was clear that the organization could fill a need for higher education leaders to offer ideas about how to meet the present moment—a moment of change and challenges. The group met over the course of 2023, and in 2024, members prepared the materials that constitute this publication: an essay on higher education and democracy from the working group leaders; eight strategies for campuses to more fully embrace the work of bolstering democracy; and case studies of institutions already engaged in these efforts.

To be sure, in 2025, institutions everywhere are beginning to embrace the urgency of the moment. Most leaders understand preparation for democratic citizenship to be central to the durable skills that make their students employable in both the public and private sectors. Previously called “soft skills,” durable skills are those long-term, lasting skills such as creativity, communication, critical thinking, and resilience. Durable skills can future-proof a student’s career, as the technical skills they learn as first-year students may be outdated by the time they graduate. Employers are demanding such skills at a higher rate than any sector-specific training.

In our work over the past three years, we witnessed a surge in focus on civic learning. Many campuses now sponsor centers on civic learning or initiatives on civic life. These go beyond voter registration drives, treating civic learning as central to employability and well-roundedness. The skills necessary to participate in a democracy are indeed durable, requiring the application of a sound knowledge base, adaptability to the needs of the community, working across the aisle with those whose opinions differ radically from one’s own, resilience in the face of failure, and faithfulness to a larger vision.

We also learned that just having a center for civics is not enough. In the following pages, we describe campus practices that make civic learning itself durable, or, as I often like to say, “make democracy concrete.” In an age when democracy can often feel like an abstraction and democratic participation a burdensome chore, these practices make the knowledge and skills of civic learning real and relevant. I hope that these case studies—culled not only from across the higher education sector but from across the United States—also serve as recommendations for action. They can act as blueprints for how higher education can help democracy last.

Special thanks to Ben Vinson III and David E. Campbell, both members of the commission that produced Our Common Purpose, for leading the Working Group on Building Democratic Citizens in Higher Education, as well as the members of that group, many of whom contributed case studies. Thank you to the cochairs of the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship—Danielle Allen of Harvard University, Eric Liu of Citizen University, and Stephen Heintz of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund—as well as my predecessor David Oxtoby for their vision and leadership. And thank you to my Academy colleagues who staffed the working group and contributed to this publication: Phyllis Bendell, Jonathan Cohen, Zachey Kliger, Scott Raymond, Betsy Super, and Peter Walton; as well as Abhishek Raman, who previously facilitated the working group meetings.

Finally, my gratitude to the individuals and foundations who make it possible for the Academy to continue its work on American democracy: the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the Clary Family Charitable Fund, Alan and Lauren Dachs, Sara Lee Schupf and the Lubin Family Foundation, Joan and Irwin Jacobs, David M. Rubenstein, and Patti Saris.

“The university, which has for so long served as a prime agency for the study of other institutions, must now turn to a more serious study of itself,” Dædalus editor Stephen Richards Graubard argued in 1970. Today’s institutions of higher education should likewise examine their responsibility to society and commit themselves to the cause of improving civic life. By doing so, Graubard concluded, the university can “contribute to its own survival as a free institution, and in the process contribute to the survival of a democratic and humane America.”4

In 2025, even as we translate it into a new idiom for our time, this remains the work we must do to make democracy concrete.

Laurie L. Patton 
Cambridge, MA