Case Studies

Making a Whole-Campus Commitment to Citizenship: Longwood University

Josh Blakely
 

What does it look like for a higher education institution to make a whole-campus commitment to democratic values? Perhaps no campus offers a better example than Longwood University, a public four-year institution in Farmville, Virginia. The university embodies how classroom curricula and outside-the-classroom experiences can be leveraged toward cultivating the next generation of civic leaders.

In 1997, Longwood University’s board of visitors adopted a new mission, declaring Longwood “dedicated to the development of citizen leaders who are prepared to make positive contributions to the common good of society.” Longwood accomplishes this mission through its curriculum, off-campus programming, and robust student-affairs opportunities.

Core Curriculum

Longwood’s core curriculum, known as Civitae, is the general education program for all undergraduate students at the university. It begins with a course known as CTZN 110. During this introductory class, students investigate the foundations of citizenship, including ethical reasoning, critical thought, and civil discourse. Their core curriculum experience continues with “Pillar” classes. These disciplinary courses develop students’ foundational citizenship skills through the study of world languages and cultures and creative problem-solving using quantitative and scientific reasoning. As students progress through their general education into upper-level courses, they encounter “Perspectives.” Faculty in these courses help students develop an informed perspective on a civic issue. In addition, these courses challenge students to locate, evaluate, and organize information from multiple disciplines—a key skill for a modern citizen leader. A student’s academic experience reaches its zenith with the capstone course, the Symposium on the Common Good. During this seminar course, students consider citizenship itself and all the issues a citizen faces.

Off-Campus Experiences

To supplement the Civitae classroom learning, Longwood students engage in “Brock Experiences,” unique courses in which students explore an unresolved civic issue somewhere in America. This suite of courses immerses students by taking them to wherever that issue is most salient. One team of students might travel to Yellowstone National Park to consider the stewardship of public lands. Another group might travel to Arizona to consider immigration policy or to San Francisco to consider the future of human genetic engineering. Along the way, everyone on a Brock Experience reflects on contentious issues in their own community and ways to lead for positive change. Faculty and staff lead these academic courses, and significant effort goes into preparing them to do so. For many, the beginning of their training happens at the Chesapeake Bay Institute, a professional development version of one of the Brock Experience student courses. Faculty and staff experience a Brock course in miniature as they learn how to lead this style of class. Some faculty go on to propose new Brock Experiences and are chosen to be part of the Brock Fellowship—a two-year period of intensive professional development that leads to the launch of a new course.

Other Cocurricular Efforts

At Longwood, other campus activities, beyond the Civatae courses and Brock Experiences, are designed to further enhance students’ civic learning. Longwood offers many of the same activities as other campuses but suffuses these activities with a throughline of training citizen leaders. Cocurricular activities—collegiate programming outside the classroom—are organized according to a citizen leadership model and are intended to foster civic engagement, reflective and integrative learning, effective communication, professional and life skills development, intercultural engagement, and understanding of self and others. While the campus boasts the requisite student governing bodies and volunteer opportunities, it also features a robust community of secret societies that shape the student body toward such democratic ideals as service to the whole, servant leadership, and the joy of community. A robust fraternity and sorority culture is augmented by the university’s version of civil society, found in such groups as the Honors Student Association, the Wesley Campus Ministry, and the Rotunda student newspaper. Putting into practice what they were taught in the classroom, students from minoritized backgrounds united to form a new advocacy organization focused on making positive changes for nonwhite students. This resulted in campus-wide change and increased representation in university decision-making.

Overall, Longwood University is committed to its mission of developing citizen leaders who make positive contributions to the common good. This is manifest in its curriculum through a focus on civic issues and citizenship skill development, and in cocurricular programs via opportunities for students to put those citizenship skills to work in leading their peers or advocating for change. All these efforts are supported by citizen leaders in the faculty and staff who care deeply about the common good.
 

Leveraging Mission and Traditions to Prepare Democratic Citizens: The Ohio State University

Trevor Brown
 

The Ohio State University, a public four-year flagship institution, is illustrative of the power of mission and history to drive a university’s efforts to promote democratic citizenship.

Why Mission Matters

Most higher education institutions in the United States are organized to create and disseminate knowledge. While great insights and understanding come from free inquiry, some higher education institutions direct the generation of knowledge toward a societal goal. They are endowed with a mission to prepare students to serve the general welfare and engage in research that solves public problems. Private Jesuit universities, for example, are driven to educate students to live a life beyond the self, helping to care for the impoverished. Similarly, many public institutions—particularly land-grant universities created by the Morrill Act of 1862—are charged to expand access and prepare students to serve their states as workers and citizens.

A deeply rooted mission can serve as the foundation for organizing the university’s basic functions, notably teaching, around democratic citizenship. This mission might be embedded in the university’s founding charter. Alternatively, a core mission might be born of a transformative leader at a seminal point in history who directed the university’s work toward supporting the democratic system. Narratives and stories about past leaders can enliven a founding charter, and university traditions, mottos, and symbols can complement a core commitment to the university’s over­arching purpose.

Contemporary leaders can utilize historical mission and traditions to focus core university functions on the preparation of democratic citizens. This historic purpose can serve as a counterweight or complement to the increasing pressure to deliver a transactional return on investment for all the university’s functions, notably its degree offerings. The artful leader can harness the university’s historical mission to focus on the preparation of democratic citizens through more malleable governing and guiding documents and programs, like strategic plans, university policies, and curricula.
 

The Ohio State University (OSU)

Founded in 1870 with funds from the Morrill Act as the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College, OSU initially focused on providing a curriculum in the agricultural, military, and industrial arts. As a land-grant institution, its charge was to expand educational access to the state’s residents and offer emerging fields of study aligned with state and national purposes. Ohio governor Rutherford B. Hayes located the new university in the state capital, Columbus, rather than in the state’s agricultural regions to ensure balance between agricultural, industrial, and other interests. Over the university’s first decade, Hayes and members of the board of trustees broadened the curriculum to include liberal arts disciplines. In 1878, the university was renamed The Ohio State University to reflect its comprehensive teaching and research agenda. In this first decade of operation, Hayes and his supporters on the board imbued the university with the responsibility to educate the state’s sons and daughters to be patriots and citizens in the post–Civil War era. Fast forward to 1952, when university architect Howard D. Smith was tasked with redesigning the university’s seal to reflect its founding purpose: Smith added the Latin words disiciplina in civitatem (education for citizenship), a phrase that, ever since, has served as the university’s motto.

Recent presidents and provosts have leveraged this founding purpose to further embed education for citizenship into the life of the university. Successive strategic plans (including current President Ted Carter’s “Education for Citizen­ship” strategic plan) have incorporated the motto “education for citizenship” as a focal point for planning and outlined a societal mission:

• creating and discovering knowledge to improve the well-being of local, state, regional, national, and global communities;
• educating students through a comprehensive array of distinguished academic programs;
• preparing a student body reflective of the state and the nation to be leaders and engaged citizens; and
• fostering a culture of engagement and service.

The combination of historical mission and strategic planning has resulted in curricular programs oriented around citizenship. For example, in the fall of 2022, OSU launched a new General Education (GE) program—the first in thirty years—in which all students must take four to six credit hours of courses in citizenship. The university has also created new organizational structures to further embed this commitment. Most notably, in 2015, the board of trustees created the John Glenn College of Public Affairs to pursue a motto coined by Senator Glenn, “to inspire citizenship and develop leadership.” More recently, with direction and funding from the Ohio legislature, the university established the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society, charged with offering courses in citizenship grounded in the U.S. Constitution. Finally, research centers and institutes across campus, notably the Civil Discourse Initiative run by the Center for Ethics and Human Values, offer citizenship programming under the banner of “education for citizenship.”

These curricular, structural, and programmatic efforts align with the values of the university’s founding purpose and enduring motto. Successive leaders working in collaboration with faculty, staff, and students have deepened this commitment to preparing democratic citizens by drawing on the past.
 

Workforce Development and Civic Education: Maricopa County Community College District

Brian Dille and Deanna Villanueva-Saucedo
 

Higher education institutions can and should take steps to improve democratic practice on their campuses and for their students. They can also help develop tools and programs that aid democratic life in their surrounding communities. That is what happened in the Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD), the home of ten colleges in the greater Phoenix area. With a total enrollment of around one hundred thousand students, MCCCD is one of the largest community college systems in the country.

In the spring of 2022, representatives from several civic groups in Arizona met to talk about the growing polarization in the country and in the state. The legislature had authorized a partisan and poorly executed recount of the 2020 election results, and public officials were being harassed and receiving death threats. At the meeting, a member of the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce expressed the concern that, in this volatile setting, conversations at the workplace could go badly and destroy the ability of work teams to function.

While many organizations focus on promoting civic engagement among K–12 and higher-education students, this group in Arizona determined that the problems facing society are rooted more in adult behavior than in student actions. The group felt that adults needed a refresher course on the value of democratic citizenship and on cultivating the skills associated with democratic life. The easiest place to find adults is in the workplace. This led to Creating Community, a workforce-development tool designed for civic groups and industry to inculcate the skills a person needs to succeed in business and society.

The Maricopa County Community College District convened and led a coalition of civic groups to develop three modules. The district provided subject-matter experts from multiple colleges and facilitated the editing and publication of the modules. Each module emphasizes the value of citizenship in a diverse society. The modules are designed to be delivered in person or online. They review the skills needed to function as an engaged citizen and develop the habits of using those skills in public settings, with an emphasis on how to develop consensus. The modules were written in nonacademic terms to enable non-subject-matter experts, such as human resources officers, to facilitate the conversations.

The modules were also informed by a Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement study on perceptions of civic language. Per the study, the module avoids terms that are divisive and promotes terms that reflect shared values. The first module includes a civic engagement “Rosetta Stone” to connect the academic terms for civil discourse to equivalent terms for soft skills in a business context. “Community-based learning” is essentially the same idea as “public/private partnerships,” for example. This reflects efforts to use language that appeals to the widest audience across partisan, demographic, and urban/rural divides.

The Creating Community workforce-development tool has been delivered to a variety of groups in the state. These include parole officers in rural Mohave County and retirement groups in urban Mesa. The Maricopa colleges have also used the modules internally, such as with employees of Maricopa Corporate College who, in turn, are sharing the modules with their contacts in business and industry. The modules are available for download free of charge and in print through a grant from the Vitalyst Health Foundation, a public health philanthropy. Its support was the result of the realization that, if communities lose the ability to have difficult conversations, none of the health problems they work on can be solved. The Creating Community workforce-development tool can be viewed at https://learn.maricopa.edu/courses/1102445.
 

Civics and Campus Life: Stanford University

Josiah Ober
 

A higher education civics curriculum should ensure students can do more than simply pass a naturalization exam. In addition to providing a basic grasp of American history and government, it should explain to students why democracy is difficult to get and to keep; how those difficulties have been addressed in the past; and the contemporary challenges to democracy. Stanford University, a four-year institution in Palo Alto, California, has made a whole-campus commitment to this effort, especially through its curriculum.

The Stanford Civics Initiative began informally in 2017 with discussions among a group of Stanford faculty from schools and departments across the university who agreed that Stanford was failing in its historic responsibility to teach the next generation the fundamental knowledge and skills required for effective participation in a constitutional democracy.

The result, in 2018, was the Stanford Civics Initiative (SCI). SCI coordinates teaching on topics related to civics by regular Stanford faculty and senior fellows of the Hoover Institution, a think tank on Stanford’s campus. SCI also pays for three postdoctoral teaching fellows who offer two or three courses each year in the areas of political thought, history, and economics. Fellowships are financed by individual donors and foundations and managed by a volunteer faculty committee.

The Initiative has two primary areas of focus. The first is the development and implementation of an introductory course, Citizenship in the 21st Century, for first-year students. Next, and currently in development, is an academic minor in Civic Thought and Practice, to be offered to second- and fourth-year students, as well as an honors program.

In 2020, the Stanford University Senate approved a three-part sequence of courses, dubbed “COLLEGE: Civic, Liberal and Global Education.” First-year students are required to take any two of these courses. As a result, in the winter 2025 quarter, around 1,200 of the approximately 1,800 first-year students on campus took Citizenship in the 21st Century. Pending Senate approval, all three courses will soon be mandatory.

The course is taught seminar-style to groups of fifteen students (currently about fifty-three instructors teach around eighty sections), using a common syllabus designed and annually reviewed by a faculty committee (see text box for more about the syllabus). Each seminar meets twice per week. Students read texts that take contrasting positions on inherently difficult, value-laden questions on which students are likely to have diverse views. Class time emphasizes discussion, employing norms of mutually respectful civil discourse, and assignments include responding to discussion questions, annotating readings, a midterm paper, and a final paper.

The syllabus includes the following questions and topics: 
What is citizenship? Why should we study it? Can citizenship work in a divided society? How can we communicate across differences? How should we study citizenship? Citizenship as cooperation: Thomas Hobbes’s challenge and the dangers of free riding. Institutionalizing citizenship: constitutions, norms, and rules. Free speech in divided societies. Technology and citizenship. Race and the contested boundaries of citizenship. Immigration, naturalization, and taking on new forms of citizenship. Citizenship, diversity, and culture. Social class and citizenship. Economic inequality and citizenship. The threat of authoritarianism. Civil disobedience, exit, and revolution. The possibility of global citizenship.

Instructors who have not taught the course before are offered training sessions conducted by those who helped design the course and taught it during the testing period. Training emphasizes techniques for promoting respectful and vigorous debate on contested questions. Groups of instructors meet weekly throughout the quarter to discuss issues and compare approaches. Detailed notes and reading guides are available to instructors for each module.

Stanford has now offered Citizenship in the 21st Century at full scale for three years—previously, the course was tested with only a small number of sections. Initial results of student evaluations are positive, suggesting it is meeting a real need.

Meanwhile, the minor and honors programs in Civic Thought and Practice are in the planning stages. The goal is to enable Stanford students with a serious interest in civics, regardless of their major, to take a coordinated sequence of advanced courses along several tracks, including constitutionalism and law, political thought, political history, and political economy.
 

Teaching Faculty How to Incorporate Civic Engagement into Their Curricula: Salisbury University

Sarah Surak
 

Faculty need access to training to integrate civic engagement into their classrooms, especially in disciplines without an obvious connection to civics. To do so, universities need to ensure faculty are prepared to incorporate civic topics and democratic practice into their curricula in an academically grounded way. Salisbury University, a public four-year institution that is part of the University System of Maryland, has developed the kind of programming necessary to help faculty make democratic practice part of their classroom experience.

Salisbury University prepares faculty to incorporate civics into their classroom through a faculty-development program called Civic Engagement Across the Curriculum (CEAC). Developed in 2014 by the university’s Institute for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement, CEAC begins from the standpoint that a substantive civic engagement component (approximately 20 percent of course material and assessment) can be adopted into any course. CEAC itself takes various forms, including a ten-week, ninety-minute seminar with six to eight faculty members and a fifteen-hour, online, self-paced module.

The seminar begins by introducing and defining civic engagement—drawing particularly upon the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s Elective Classification for Community Engagement. From there, CEAC uses a “discipline-oriented citizenship” conceptual framework to support civic education across disciplines. The framework assumes that faculty members are experts in their own disciplines and thus will be the ones best suited to see how civics might fit into their coursework.

CEAC invites faculty to consider a few key questions:

• How does your discipline characterize ways of knowing and forms of inquiry?
• How does your field contribute to society, and what are the responsibilities of practitioners in your discipline toward society?
• How do members of your discipline interact with individuals and communities on local, national, and/or international levels?
• What skills can your discipline leverage toward examining social issues?
• What knowledge in your discipline comes from the community?

A discipline-orientated citizenship approach to civic engagement in the classroom stresses three elements: grounding the design of civic engagement activities within the academic discipline, fostering reciprocal relationships with partners in the community, and providing students with mechanisms to demonstrate the knowledge needed to engage their community. Without this three-part grounding, course activities (for example, volunteering to pick up litter in a park) might benefit a community without necessarily enhancing the course’s discipline-based learning objectives. Rather than provide a list of examples that may not fit a course’s learning objectives, CEAC facilitators encourage participants to find examples of engagement within their fields and subfields.

In addition to introducing community-engaged teaching, CEAC also presents theoretical frameworks for civic education, such as ecological systems theory, situated learning theory, and action civics. These theories of education provide faculty a basis for best practices in the conveyance of knowledge in teaching and learning. From this base, faculty work to revise an existing syllabus or design a new course. The goal is to leave the seminar with a syllabus that includes project-related readings, assignment guidelines, and reflection and assessment mechanisms.

Another strategy CEAC encourages for developing syllabi is backward design: identifying a course’s intended outcomes and designing it backward from those outcomes. This process helps faculty embed civic components throughout the semester (rather than relegating them to a single stand-alone module) and ensures civic materials align with course objectives.

To date, faculty from across Salisbury Uni­versity have participated in CEAC. A few examples of civic engagement projects include:

• a finance class assessing a local food assistance program and presenting results at a community forum to increase understanding of the barriers to access;
• a geography class collaborating with community groups to evaluate local water issues;
• an environmental studies class surveying the community to support the implementation of a city sustainability plan; and
• a student-led forum outlining the moral, ethical, and political implications of animal rights legislation proposed within the Maryland General Assembly.

Surveys show that, after seminar participation, faculty are likely to incorporate elements of civic engagement in a variety of courses, even those without a specific “civic engagement assignment,” accounting for 20–30 percent of the course grade. Through this seminar, faculty are empowered to incorporate civic work into their classrooms, thereby empowering students to incorporate civics into their collegiate journeys.
 

How Higher Education Institutions Can Engage Students with Local Government: University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Marianne Wanamaker
 

On many campuses, discussions of civics and democratic values are a decidedly national project, meant to strengthen American democracy. But, dating back to the colonial era, American democracy is rooted in local politics and governance. At the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the project of instilling democratic values takes a decidedly local approach, focusing on teaching students how to engage with the local issues, the local institutions, and the local leaders whose work constitutes the frontline of democracy in action.

The Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has pioneered initiatives to connect undergraduate students with their local government. The Institute, housed in the Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs, was established by the Tennessee General Assembly in 2022 to increase civic knowledge, civic skills, and civic engagement among all Tennesseans, including students at the state’s flagship land-grant campus. Although the Institute is housed in the Baker School, its influence is campus-wide.

The Institute’s work in local government involves three distinct programs:

• a forum for discussing the issues most pressing for local policymakers;

• a Local Government Fellows program, in which students attend local government meetings; and

• local government internships.

All three programs are designed to establish a mutually productive relationship with local city and county governments.
 

Public Forum

In 2023, the Institute launched a Public Square lecture series. The series seeks to educate students, the public, and local lawmakers about issues that are resonant for the local government. The Institute invites experts to campus to educate attendees and engage in discussions with faculty members, elected officials, and community leaders. Topics have included community-based strategies for curbing gun violence; land use and the housing crisis; the challenge of homelessness; and the application of theory to practice.

Discussions of these topics are not limited to the lectures. Baker School undergraduate policy lab courses have picked up some of the issues from the Public Square series and, working with local government partners, provided evidence-based recommendations for potential solutions. Baker School students benefit from regular small-group discussions with local elected officials and policymakers on these and other policy challenges. They ask tough questions and explore the political hurdles facing any proposed policy.
 

Fellowship Program

The Institute provides an opportunity for students to learn about the local legislative process through the Local Government Fellows program. Any undergraduate across campus is eligible to apply for the program. Students are compensated for their time but do not earn course credit. The heart of the fellowship entails attending Knoxville City Council meetings with Institute faculty and staff members. The program also includes class sessions prior to and following these public meetings to help students prepare for and then fully appreciate what they witness. Topics for the class sessions include how items make it onto the government agenda, the difference between ordinances and resolutions, the impact of Roberts’ Rules, and norms of councilmember conduct.

Fellowship participants report a renewed confidence in the democratic system as a result of their experiences, perhaps because the city council process produces measurable outcomes each week and community voices are heard and acknowledged routinely. Several students have since become involved in local campaigns for office because of this program.
 

Internship Program

Hands-on experience has no substitute.

The Institute’s approach starts with the typical internship structure, in which a student is embedded in a public-sector department and works on projects in that department. Institute officials worked with the City of Knoxville, Knox County, the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce, and selected nonprofits to secure a commitment to host paid internships. Officials meet prior to each semester with Institute faculty and staff to match student interests and skills with an appropriate department.

The Institute internship experience is designed to exceed that of the typical public-sector student internship. As part of the program, students engage in a classroom discussion where they learn how their internship department interacts with other units, how it interfaces with the public, and how it implements the policy priorities of its respective administration. In some cases, students attend public meetings in which their department, and sometimes their own work, is discussed or even challenged.

Through the internship, students not only get involved with local government, but they learn how sound policy is proposed, implemented, and evaluated.
 

Conclusion

The Institute of American Civics at the Baker School is pioneering ways to engage students with local government and to engage local government with institutions of higher education. The Institute’s Public Square lecture series, Local Government Fellows program, and internship program have led to a greater sense of ownership over local issues among University of Tennessee, Knoxville, undergraduate students and a renewed appreciation for local government as a key arena for political problem-solving. By helping students get involved with local issues, universities can prepare them to be the local—and national—leaders of tomorrow.