Ancient Greek members of the Skeptical School taught methods or habits that helped people to live better. One method involved pondering how different the world might seem to different animals, considering that other species have diverse types of eyes, ears, and tongues; preferences and aversions; and perhaps whole senses unknown to us.
Skeptics said that we are animals and not fundamentally different from the “so-called irrational animals.” Meditating on examples of animal psychology would prevent people from believing that their own experience was true or that the pursuit of truth was possible. In turn, suspending judgment was a path to inner peace and good treatment of others.
In this spirit, consider the octopus, as described in detail by the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith. People who study this animal almost universally conclude that it is curious, intelligent, and interactive and that each octopus has a personality that persists over time. Yet the species is so remote from us on the evolutionary tree that it is like an alien visitor to our planet. Or we could be the aliens on theirs.
For one thing, an octopus has quite different senses from ours, such as suckers that each have 10,000 sensors and eyes of a fundamentally different design. Since an octopus lives underwater and has a soft and flexible body, its whole relationship with its environment must be profoundly different from ours.
I gradually became who I am over many years–the first period now barely a memory for me–and I was deeply connected to other people from the start. I have persisted for almost six decades, building up (and losing) memories. An octopus emerges from an egg and for lives for two years, if it’s lucky, before it dies of old age. Its combination of substantial intelligence and a brief lifespan is unusual on earth and would presumably give it a different sense of time from mine.
An octopus doesn’t have a brain, because its complex nervous system is distributed through its body, and its arms have considerable autonomy. “Octopuses [may] not even track where their own arms might be” (p. 67). Nevertheless, each octopus functions as a coherent organism with an individual personality.
I think of myself as one thing, my body parts as something a bit different (because I control them imperfectly), and the external world as something distinct from both my self and my body. This experience deeply influences my assumptions about fundamentals like self and other, thought and matter, cause-and-effect, intention, and the objective world. It is hard to believe that an octopus feels the same way, yet my experience is no more valid or true.
If you doubt that an octopus has enough mental capacity to have a model of its own world, fine—just imagine an extraterrestrial creature with a similar design as an octopus and 10 times as many neurons. It doesn’t matter whether an alien like that exists on other planets, only that it is plausible. The thought-experiment is enough to tell us that we experience just one of many possible worlds.
The Tufts Survey of Equity in Health, Wealth, and Civic Engagement was a longitudinal study of a nationally representative sample of adults across the United States from 2020 to 2022. The data includes responses to our original questions plus more than 100 purchased archived variables previously collected by Ipsos. As many as possible of the same individuals were contacted across the waves. Items involve measures of health, wealth, and civic engagement, broadly defined.
The dataset is now available to anyone for free, courtesy of ICPSR. We have also built an interactive website where you can explore variables and produce infographics with very little knowledge of statistics. This is an example of a result produced by that website:
The interactive website is a few years old, but the ICPSR version of the dataset is new.
Citation: Levine, Peter, Stopka, Thomas, Allen, Jennifer, and Mistry, Jayanthi. Tufts Survey of Equity in Health, Wealth, and Civic Engagement, United States, 2020-2022. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2025-08-19. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR39204.v1
At the United Nations yesterday, our president told the assembled leaders, “Your countries are going to hell.” The Trump Administration extolls the unique excellence of the United States. An early executive order (14190, Jan 29, 2025) called on schools “to instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation.” But the same movement also paints a picture of decline in the face of overseas rivals and traitors within.
Aleksandra Cislak and Aleksandra Cichocka (2023) provide a review of research on “national narcissism.” This phrase does not mean a secure affection for one’s nation or a commitment to enhancing it. Rather, it is a belief that the nation with which one identifies is “exceptional and deserving of privileged treatment but underappreciated by others.” It “reflects a demand for recognition, privileges and special treatment … and predicts aggression and hostility when these are not provided to the nation.”
At the individual level, indicators of national narcissism are correlated with higher support for “populist” politicians (using that adjective in a pejorative sense) and lower support for democracy (Cislak & Cichocka 2023).
In the 2016 election, national narcissism predicted voting for and approving of Donald Trump even when many other variables were controlled (Federico & Golec de Zavala 2018).
I submit that Donald Trump himself would score high on the group narcissism scale, answering questions like these positively:
“I wish other countries would more quickly recognize the authority of my country”
“My country deserves special treatment”
“I will never be satisfied until my country gets all it deserves”
“Other countries are envious of my country”
And 19 more (Golec de Zavala et al. 2025)
I do not know how many other Americans share these views. Some people certainly voted for Trump without being national narcissists. I also do not know whether national narcissism has risen in the United States. It is not a new phenomenon. However, I would guess that it has risen lately in response to anxieties about the US role in the world.
After all, the United States spent most of this century so far fighting two wars and essentially lost both. Typically, foreign policy issues do not register in national surveys as reasons for voters’ preferences. My suggestion is subtler and more difficult to document. Two long and costly military disasters discredited elites, worsened polarization as communities bore disparate burdens, and provoked deep self-doubt and resentment in a country that had seen itself as enormously powerful. At any rate, it is difficult to imagine that twin defeats at this scale would not affect the mood of an electorate; and one outcome could be national narcissism.
Sources: Cislak, A., & Cichocka, A. (2023). National narcissism in politics and public understanding of science. Nature Reviews Psychology, 2(12), 740-750; Christopher M Federico, Agnieszka Golec de Zavala, Collective Narcissism and the 2016 US Presidential Vote, Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 82, Issue 1, Spring 2018, Pages 110–121; de Zavala, Agnieszka Golec, et al. “Collective Narcissism and its Social Consequences.” Journal of personality and social psychology 97.6 (2009): 1074-96. ProQuest. Web. 24 Sept. 2025.
This is a 22-minute video of me offering suggestions and diagnostic questions for activists in nonviolent, pro-democracy movements in the USA right now, and for those want to get involved.
I have been offering these ideas in interactive webinars and in-person meetings. In those settings, I don’t lecture; we discuss. For this publicly accessible video, I have extracted some of my own thoughts and questions.
On the website of the Heterodox Academy, Jonathan Haidt writes, “it is clear that no university can have Truth and Social Justice as dual teloses [goals]. Each university must pick one.”
He undermines his own case in the previous paragraph by distinguishing between “finding and eradicating disparate treatment” and “finding and eradicating disparate outcomes.” The former is “always a good thing to do, and … never conflicts with truth,” whereas the latter “causes all of the problems, all of the conflicts with truth.”
This is a view of social justice. It is perfectly respectable. It sounds like classical liberalism. It also echoes Karl Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program. (Marx demands equal treatment–in the form of shared ownership of industry–as opposed to equal outcomes.) However, this view conflicts with Catholic social justice doctrines, the classical republican idea that citizenship requires rough equality, and many people’s sense that some levels of suffering are simply unacceptable. In short, it is a substantive and contested political view that Haidt is sure is always right.
We could delete this passage and try to envision a university devoted to truth, not to any form of (social) justice–Haidt’s or otherwise. I would ask whether such an institution can employ thousands of workers, confer valuable degrees and professional licenses, own extensive real estate, conduct research with military and medical applications, field quasi-professional sports teams, and invest in the stock market.
One answer, to be taken seriously, is: no. Socrates believed that he had to be completely independent–financially and otherwise–to be a gadfly. Unlike his Sophist rivals, he wouldn’t charge a drachma for teaching. There is a long tradition of creating spiritual or intellectual communities (monasteries, sanghas, communes, wikis) that have minimal social obligations so that they can focus on truth. But those are not like modern American universities.
Another answer is yes: the university can operate as a billion-dollar enterprise without views of social justice. I don’t see how that is possible. If you employ people, they must be employees or contractors, unionized or not, with or without various benefits and mandates. If you build a new building, it must either raise or lower rents in the neighborhood and consume fossil fuels or renewables. You can start a business school or an education school (or both, or neither). There are no neutral answers. You should welcome alternative opinions and arguments by students and faculty, but your actions reflect positions.
The University of Chicago’s famous Kalven Report mischaracterized that university. It said, “The mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge … It is … a community of scholars…. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.”
But the University of Chicago was a very powerful lobby, especially in its own city. In 1955, a report produced by UC employees lamented “the accelerated immigration of lower-income families, including lower-income Negro families settling in concentrated groups.” The university advocated “demolishing and rebuilding entire blocks of Hyde Park,” which then happened.
Like other universities, UC was definitely a club, and membership conferred substantial benefits. During the Vietnam War, Dow Chemical, the manufacturer of Napalm, recruited on the UC campus because students with Chicago degrees would be well-qualified executives. Dow’s recruitment became a specific target of student protest.
The first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in history had taken place under the Hyde Park campus as part of the development of the atom bomb. In that sense, this “community of scholars” had helped to destroy two Japanese cities.
UC also ran and still runs a hospital, which has made controversial decisions, such as shutting down its trauma center in 1988 and starting a new one in 2015. UC even has its own police department, which can arrest and charge anyone in its jurisdiction.
Universities do not have one telos. They are “multiversities,” in Clark Kerr’s 1963 phrase. The Kalven Report makes me think of a seminar room in a liberal arts department. That is where the pursuit of truth is most prominent, and we must be vigilant against challenges to freedom there. But the people mowing the lawn outside are employees or contractors, the building had a wealthy donor whose gift was invested in stocks, the lab across the street may be creating AI tools that could wipe out jobs, and the students in the seminar may use their degrees to enter monopoly professions like law and medicine.
It is better to do all those things justly rather than unjustly. Everyone in the community must be free and welcome to contest what justice demands, but the corporate body will act one way or another. A good university strives for both truth (a topic of debate) and justice (a criterion for assessing action).
I believe Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. coined the phrase “politics of nostalgia” in a 1955 article in which he observed, “Today, we are told, the bright young men are conservatives; the thoughtful professors are conservatives; even a few liberals, in their own cycle of despair, are beginning to avow themselves conservatives.”
This article is light but disdainful. Schlesinger dismisses the intellectual conservatives of his day as “irrelevant” and a “hothouse growth.” They feel nostalgic, and they officially endorse a principled form of conservatism that respects ancestors and inherited ways. But the USA “is a dynamic and expanding economy” whose elites are not landed aristocrats but plutocrats. So the real power on the right is not conservatism but business, which seeks lower taxes and less regulation and welcomes rapid change.
Schlesinger wrote a long time ago, and nostalgia seems much more widespread today, when relatively few people celebrate a dynamic economy or its attendant technological and social advances. Even our plutocrats (Silicon Valley barons) often sound scared of the future or bitter about present obstacles to their genius.
Not only is MAGA nostalgic, but so are never-Trump conservatives and, I think, many across the broad spectrum of the left. To be sure, progressives insist that progress occurred in living memory, especially on social issues. Nevertheless, they (or perhaps I should include myself and say “we”) tend to be deeply nostalgic for a remembered time when society seemed to be moving in the right direction and when crises–from climate change to polarization–had not reached their current levels.
Analytically, it might be worth distinguishing these political attitudes:
Despair: the attitude that things cannot or will not improve.
Fear, in the sense of Judith Shklar’s “Liberalism of Fear” (1989). Shklar’s starting point: “somewhere someone is being tortured right now.” Her philosophy is “a response to these undeniable actualities, and it therefore concentrate[d] on damage control.” She is “entirely nonutopian,” motivated by memories of disaster, not by hope for a better state. Her main recommendation is to limit state power.
Caution based on pessimism. Montaigne (1588) writes, “Our morals are extremely corrupt and have an amazing tilt toward getting worse; among our laws and customs, several are barbaric and monstrous: however, because of the difficulty of putting ourselves in a better state and the danger of further decline, if I could plant a peg in our wheel and stop it at this point, I would do so willingly.”
Nostalgia: A bittersweet appreciation for a past state, combined with regret for its passing. Nostalgia is compatible with hope, and it need not imply pessimism. However, the following common features of nostalgia can be obstacles to progress or can simply prevent clear thinking:
Nostalgia often assumes that a harmonious and integrated condition continued over a whole span of the past. “This is how things were back in the day … This is how my life was back then …” In contrast, we often perceive our present selves and our current society as inconsistent or even contradictory and as constantly changing (Hart 1973, Brewer 2023). This contrast biases us against the present.
Envy easily attaches to nostalgia. We wish that we could be like the people back in the time for which we feel nostalgic. We may envy individuals or groups who benefited from causing those good times to end for us. However, as Walter Benjamin notes, we never seem to envy the people of the future. Someone living in 1925 might have anticipated the amount of technological and economic progress that has occurred since then, yet they didn’t envy us. Likewise, we don’t envy our successors, even if we are optimistic. Envy is problematic because it is zero-sum and promotes conflict.
Nostalgia can erase the salutary kind of fear that Shklar recommends. Near the beginning of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera’s narrator says that everything is bathed in nostalgia in the face of dissolution, even the guillotine. People feel nostalgic for moments of crisis and action, such as the French Revolution: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” (Wordsworth). They forget the violence, confusion, failure, and vices of the moment. Of course, good things also happened, but nostalgia distorts our estimation and causes us to discount present dangers.
Nostalgia suggests that the best choices were obvious and makes us angry at those who chose badly, or self-critical if we think that we were unwise. We think: Why didn’t they (or we) prevent harmful change? But we always act under conditions of deep uncertainty and confusion, and the best choices are rarely obvious until it is too late.
Nostalgia tends to discourage action. It is not a sharp analysis of trends that can recommend concrete reforms to restore broken institutions or to reverse declines. Nostalgia is a hazy, elegiac, twilight feeling; an attitude for spectators rather than actors.
To summarize: Nostalgia can cause symptoms of bias, envy, complacency, anger and/or disdain, and passivity. As one who exhibits all of its symptoms, I recommend trying to avoid it.
Sources: Judith N. Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” in Nancy L. Rosenblum, ed. Liberalism and the moral life. Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 27, 26; Montaigne 2.17 (“Of Presumption”), my trans.; Marshawn Brewer, “Sketch for a Phenomenology of Nostalgia,” Human Studies 46.3 (2023): 547-563; J.G. Hart “Toward a phenomenology of nostalgia,” Man and World 6 (1973), 406-7; Walter Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte (1940), II.
It’s not yet clear whether the US has entered an authoritarian period or a right-wing period (or both), because the political struggle is still underway and by no means resolved.
But it is pretty clear that we have entered a period of instability or unrest, which is quite common in global perspective but especially dangerous in a superpower. As I wrote on this blog in 2023, “We will know that we are in that situation if the daily news often includes reports of violent clashes, dubious arrests and prosecutions, threats, firings or resignations connected to politics, and occasional assassinations and politically-motivated mass murders.”
All those boxes are checked in 2025.
I also wrote: “I believe we need broad-based nonviolent social movements to get us through any unrest and ideally to bring us to a better place. Such movements will generate protest actions, some of which will involve reported violence–if only as a result of hostile responses by other groups or police. Thus we should be striving for a high ratio of nonviolence to violence.”
I wrote that it was “time to plan, educate, organize, and train” for nonviolent mobilization in the context of unrest and state violence. I tried to do some of that work– for example, at the 2024 Frontiers of Democracy conference. I do not think I succeeded or was part of larger efforts that were successful. I wish we had prepared better.
It’s not too late. As many people as possible must participate in broad-based, visible, nonviolent political resistance. Please feel welcome to join me at a Crossroads and Connections Webinar on Thursday September 18, 2025 from 6:30 – 8:00 PM Eastern to discuss tactics and strategies. I am happy to do other events like that if I can be helpful.
On one hand, the US experiences far too much crime. Our homicide rate is almost five times that of Britain, almost three times that of Canada, and 17 times that of Japan.
On the other hand, crime rates have tended to fall in the USA since 1992, and today many people assess crime as much more pervasive than it is. Many voters seem to have the idea that urban communities were safe earlier in their own lifetimes but are now very dangerous, even though crime rates were distinctly higher in the late 20th century, and most urbanites are doing fine today. This belief motivates reactionary and authoritarian policies.
An obvious explanation for the mismatch between public opinion and trends is … the media. If it bleeds, it leads. Some major news sources evidently want to fuel hostility to migrants, people of color, and cities by relentlessly presenting crime. And politicians, such as the current president, amplify the media’s attention to crime.
In 2016, the Cooperative Election Study (now housed at Tisch College!) fielded an extensive battery of questions about crime. As one might expect, whether respondents viewed crime as a very important issue was related to which kinds of news they watched. The percentage who rated crime very high was 52% among local news viewers, 49% among national TV news viewers, 49% among readers of print news (which usually means a local newspaper), 34% among readers of an online news source, and 45% among those who followed no news at all. These differences are not very large but would probably expand if we compared specific outlets, such as Fox News versus the online New York Times.
However, it is always worth trying to put media effects in context. No one has to watch Fox News or the local TV news; that is a choice. Media effects probably connect to other factors, such as demographics and values, in a complex system that has no single “root” cause.
I am not an expert on this topic, but I wanted to get a rough handle on it, so I ran a regression using the 2016 CES data. This method purports to predict how highly people will rate crime as an issue based on a set of variables taken together.
For example, I included both whether a person was a victim of crime in the last four years and their education level. We know that people with less education are more likely to be victimized, but a regression disaggregates such relationships so that you can see how much education matters regardless of whether people are victimized by crime, and vice-versa.
The results are shown above and can be explored a bit more here. The units are standardized Betas, a measure of how much each factor matters compared to the others. All the results are statistically significant at p <.05. I had included two variables in the model that I omitted from the graph because they were not significant (social media use and approval of the local police department).
Most of the patterns are intuitive. People are more likely to view crime as a major issue if they are white, Republican, male, less educated, and willing to admit that they fear people of other races. Watching the TV news is related to greater concern about crime, even when considering the other factors separately. And reading a newspaper is related to less concern. Younger people, parents, and richer people are more concerned.
The whole model is not very predictive, explaining only 16% of the variance. That is interesting in itself, suggesting that these factors–including TV viewership, race, and partisanship–do not really explain what is going on. Perhaps more depends on which specific channels and social media accounts people watch–but that would have to be shown.
(The labels on the graph suggest that these are binary variables, e.g., either watching TV or not watching it at all. But the questions were multiple-choice scales, so the labels are really my shorthand.)
Many Americans are working to defend democracy, but we need even more. People with diverse agendas and various diagnoses of our current problems must take action right now. There are several legitimate theories of our crisis. We need people to address whatever aspects resonate most with them, coming from their diverse backgrounds and viewpoints.
I think these (below) are our most important tasks. And I believe that if many people do them, our disagreements about diagnoses and strategies will not matter very much, because a stronger civil society will preserve democracy:
One-to-one interviews: Fanning out in a community and asking people what they care about, looking for individuals who have various kinds of leadership potential and networks, and bringing them together in meetings. Use a guide like this one.
Local news: Collecting information that would otherwise go unreported because of the collapse of local journalism, and sharing it. Local news is highly relevant to national events, because everything from budget cuts to ICE raids plays out in locations.
Caring for affected people: Raising money, serving food, driving people where they need to go, taking care of their children and pets, helping them find work.
Advocacy in local institutions: We need concerned citizens to meet with their school superintendent to ask how undocumented children are being protected, their local college president to ask about free speech, and their local TV station to ask about biased news coverage. Some of this advocacy can be friendly and low-key. Sometimes, local leaders just need our quiet support. But some issues may have to escalate to public conflict.
Registering and turning out voters: It is fine to do this in a partisan way: party activism is an important aspect of democracy. It is also possible to register and motivate voters in a genuinely nonpartisan way to expand the electorate and protect everyone’s right to vote as they wish.
Recruiting and supporting candidates: This is important at all levels, from school boards to 2028 presidential candidates.
Nonviolent resistance: Civil disobedience is a spectrum, from easy and safe actions to very courageous ones. The method of banging on pots in big cities has spread globally in the last decade and has now reached Washington, DC. It is an example of a relatively safe action. Standing in the way of armed government agents is much more dangerous. Effective nonviolent movements offer and celebrate a wide range of actions.
I did not list protests on this table. They can be valuable, but I want to suggest that they are more means than ends. For example, a march can be a powerful way of publicizing that there is a resistance and collecting the contact-information of people who might do the other tasks. I often think that the most important people at a rally are not the speakers on the podium but the folks at the back of the crowd with clipboards.
These are not tasks for individuals to do alone. None of us can accomplish much by ourselves; we can’t even think wisely unless we discuss what to do with others. Therefore, the tasks listed above require organizations, and there is an equally important agenda for building and sustaining groups:
Recruitment: Individuals must be invited into organizations and made to feel welcome, notwithstanding their previous experience and views, and encouraged to commit to the group. (This is where protests belong on the checklist.)
Logistics: A group can’t get anything done unless someone finds a space, buys the pizzas, arranges childcare, and does all the other scutwork. Some of this requires skill and experience; all of it requires effort. By the way, the people who contribute in this way must be recognized and thanked.
Decision-making: Groups must make decisions efficiently, yet without ignoring dissenters who have genuine disagreements. Effective groups treat meeting time as a scarce resource and use it economically. They know what they are doing at any given moment during a meeting. (Are we venting? Brainstorming? Advising someone? Choosing between two courses of action?) I recommend distinguishing between contested values and merely practical questions and reserving discussion time for the value-conflicts that need resolution. I would delegate practical issues to volunteers to decide. It is also crucial to record all decisions so that it’s clear what the group has committed to do.
Leadership-development: Groups need leaders. Even the most non-hierarchical groups actually have leaders, although those people may not have titles or official powers. Leaders should be recognized and thanked. They should have opportunities to grow. They should also be held accountable and, if necessary, removed.
Raising and holding money: The typical anti-Trump resistance group raises money, but not for itself. Members pass the hat (metaphorically), and their funds go to political candidates or name-brand national nonprofits. This is unsustainable. In the first month of the first Trump Administration, 350,000 people donated to the ACLU, disproportionately funding one organization that had one strategy. Then the money tapered off. Groups need their own bank accounts and budgets, reserving some funds for their own continuous fundraising.
Hiring: We need more people whose jobs involve organizing for democracy, and we need pathways for those who want to do this work. Organizers can be young, part-time, and (frankly) underpaid, but they need salaries.
Scaling up: Once there are three resistance groups in a given county, there should be an umbrella group for the county. This should not just be forum where like-minded people share news; it should make decisions. That implies a leadership structure at the county level–and then upward from there.
Coalition work: There should be many flavors of organizations, and they should coordinate. I completely respect the big emerging networks, such as Indivisible and #50501, but they need company, and not everyone will want to join any given network. Groups have various identities and agendas. To work in coalition is not only to express mutual support or to agree on general principles. (In fact, it’s fine if different groups disagree on principles.) A coalition can coordinate concrete actions at key moments. That requires empowering selected representatives from the various member organizations to meet and make decisions.
My friend Trygve Throntveit and I sent the following email yesterday to a list of 508 people who have been involved with Civic Studies institutes in the USA, Germany, or Ukraine over the years. It offers some news from the field. If the email missed you even though you have participated in Civic Studies, it’s because of my imperfect list-management, and I apologize; but please let me know.
Dear Colleagues,
We are writing as the co-chairs of the Civic Studies Related Group within the American Political Science Association (APSA). This group is a cluster of activity for Civic Studies. Under a previous name, it launched The Good Society journal, it organizes annual panels at the APSA national conference, and it has its own list of 50+ members (who are included on this email).
We also realize that the APSA group is less relevant to our colleagues in Civic Studies who are not political scientists or not based in the USA. Here we will offer a selection of news and opportunities for the Civic Studies field, defined broadly.
§ The Alliance for Civics in the Academy: Inaugurated in Spring 2024 at a meeting sponsored by Stanford University and the Hoover Institution, the Alliance for Civics in the Academy is a nonpartisan network of instructors in higher education involved in teaching courses and developing academic programs aimed at civic education. Peter serves on the Executive Committee, and Civic Studies has been frequently discussed at ACA events. See: https://www.hoover.org/research-teams/alliance-civics-academy.
§ The possibility of a Civic Studies Association: Harry Boyte, Marie Ström, and Trygve Throntveit have written a post entitled “A New Approach to Politics and Professions: The What and Why of ‘Civic Studies,’” which ends by asking, “How should proponents (like ourselves) develop and expand Civic Studies as a field in these times?” Please contact Tryg if you are interested in helping to form a Civic Studies Association or a broader association for “citizen professionals and other likeminded Americans to promote a civic political alternative to today’s dysfunctional politics.”
Summer Institutes of Civic Studies in 2025
§ Chad Hoggan and Tanja Hoggan-Kloubert (Summer Institute 2015) led the European Institute of Civic Studies and Learning for Democracy in Augsburg, Germany in June
§ Peter offered a short course on Civic Studies at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) in Ukraine in June and discussed the experience in “Teaching Civics in Kyiv” on the Kettering Foundation blog.
Teaching Civic Studies in Kyiv, June 2025
And, looking forward to 2026 …
§ Tanja Hoggan-Kloubert and Chad Hoggan are co-chairing the International Transformative Learning Conference on Oct. 21-23, 2026, with a pre-conference symposium on Civic Studies on Oct. 20, at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. Peter will provide a keynote address.
Civic Studies Journals
The Good Society journal
The Good Society is the journal of Civic Studies. The latest issue (vol. 33, no. 1) is half of a special issue on “Dialogue, Deliberation, and Community in Civic Life,” guest-edited by David J. Roof and Sarah M. Surak (JMU Summer Institute ‘23). The second half of the special issue is being edited now.
Introduction
Cultivating the Commons in Uncertain Times: Dialogue, Deliberation, and Community in Higher Education and Our Democracy. –David J. Roof and Sarah M. Surak
Articles
§ Higher Education and the Commonwealth. Harry C. Boyte
§ Validity and Reliability of the Civic-Minded Graduate Scale in a Place-Based Experiential Learning Context: Integrating Ethical and Self-Construal Theory. -Danka Maric, Grant A. Fore, Brandon H. Sorge, Francesca A. Williamson, and Julia L. Angstmann
§ Beyond Red v. Blue: A Four-Part Model for Cultivating Moral Vision in Higher Education. – Brandon Neal Edwards
§ Teaching Teachers With, For, and Through Dialogue: Demonstrating Democratic and Ambitious Social Studies Teaching Through an Education Foundations Course. William Waychunas
§ Integrating Lessons about Community into the PreK–12 Curriculum. Katharine Kravetz (Summer Institute ‘09)
New Political Science
Sarah Surak is also a co-editor of New Political Science(the journal of APSA’s Critical Political Science section, newly transitioned to Duke University Press). She says that they are open to publishing and have published Civics Studies-related pieces that align with the journal’s mission.
Many appearances of Jürgen Habermas at a Tufts Summer Institute of Civic Studies
An open position
Tufts University is seeking an assistant professor of political science in the subfield of political theory. Teaching topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to, civic studies, the pursuit of justice, citizen behavior under conditions of injustice, the intellectual foundations of liberal democracy, and political rhetoric.
Recent publications and talks or podcasts related to Civic Studies
§ Vachararutai (Jan) Boontinand and Joshua Forstenzer (both Summer Institute 2016) and Fufy Demissie, eds, The Pedagogy of the Community of Philosophical Enquiry as Citizenship Education: Global Perspectives on Talking Democracy into Action (Routledge 2024), also including a co-authored contribution by Jonathan Garlick (Summer Institute 2016).
§ Joshua Forstenzer’s paper, “Do the Unexpected! Democracy as a Way of Life and Real Politics, Or Why Deweyan Democrats Should Be Pluralists About Tactics and Strategies” won the Educational Theory/John Dewey Society 2024 Outstanding Paper Award.
§ Chad Hoggan and Tetyana Hoggan-Kloubert, Learning for Democracy: A Framework for Adult Civic Learning (Palgrave Macmillan, in press)
§ “Professional Study of Civics,”a Great Battlefield podcast in which Nathaniel G. Pearlman interviewed Peter Levine
§ Prof. Sachi Ninomiya-Lim, Rikkyo University (Japan) used Civic Studies concepts in a keynote address on “The modern value of ‘pollution studies’ from the perspective of environmental education.”
§ Shigeo Kodama (President, Professor, Shiraume Gakuen University) and Tryg Throntveit delivered papers on aspects of Civic Studies at the International Political Science Association in Seoul in July
The Ball State project entitled Cultivating Civic Character for the Common Good (C4G) was funded by the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest. A major aspect of this project will be faculty development and student activities connected to the Civic Studies Minor and Third Way Civics.
David Roof developed a new course at Ball State titled Citizenship, Community, and Leadership (HONR 390) based in large part on Civic Studies and Learning for Democracy and using Third Way Civics. methodology. He will be teaching two related courses in the Netherlands this summer/
Huston-Tillotson University
The Politics Lab at the James L. Farmer House at Huston-Tillotson University leads the Texas HBCU Democracy Schools Alliance, now in its fifth year. The Alliance serves as a statewide platform for designing civic architecture rooted in Black institutional leadership. By integrating institutional design and broad-based cultural and community organizing into a unified practice, the Lab builds Democracy Schools and creates civic infrastructure, lasting institutions, networks, and capacities that sustain democratic life.
This fall, the Alliance will convene alongside a public forum series on the future of higher education. These events extend a method that links legislative outcomes, campus leadership, and scholarly production in a single strategic frame.
Tufts University
Tufts’ Civic Studies Major was launched in 2019. About 50 majors and minors are declared at any time. The requirements include an “Introduction to Civic Studies” course that is regularly taught by Peter Levine and Brian Schaffner, who is the Newhouse Professor of Civic Studies; it enrolls 50 students. There is also a required internship and a capstone course on communicating civic ideas, along with a menu of courses that meet requirements for normative reasoning, the empirical study of social action, and civic skills, such as dialogue and deliberation, conflict-mediation and peacemaking, community-based research, communication and media-making, public art, community organizing, evaluating nonprofits, or financing social enterprises.
All incarcerated or formerly incarcerated students in the Tufts prison program are Civic Studies majors.
University of Sheffield (UK)
Joshua Forstenzer regularly teaches an advanced undergraduate course and an MA course that is largely inspired by the Summer Institute of Civic Studies. It is called: “How to Change the World From Here: Utopian Vistas, Reformism, and Democratic Action”. It involves reading philosophical texts related to political technology (or the question of political means) from different historical eras, and students engage in a personally-selected service learning practice throughout the semester and reflect on it. It is very popular with students, regularly reaching full capacity, and receiving very strong student evaluations.
Forstenzer also leads an ‘Impact Case Study‘ at Sheffield, which involves engaging in research-informed practice-based activities with non-academic partners (mostly collaborating with European non-profits) on the question of flourishing in challenging educational contexts, with a special focus on climate crisis education.
Individuals’ News
§ Tahima Yesmin Shova (European Institute 2023) defended her doctoral dissertation in Philosophy at University of Sheffield, advised by Joshua Forestenzer (2016), with Peter serving on her committee
§ Yuriy Petrushenko, who has attended the Institute of Civic Studies more than once and serves as President of the Eastern European Network for Citizenship Education, was appointed director of the Fund of the President of Ukraine to Support Education, Science and Sports.
“Class Notes”
Among the first cohort of Civic Studies alumni (2019): Paula McAvoy is a Professor of Education at NC State; Whitney Barth is Executive Director of the Emory University Center for the Study of Law and Religion and professor of law; Michelle Bellino is professor of education at the University of Michigan; Meenakshi Chhabra is Vice Provost for Mental Health & Wellbeing at Lesley University; James Croft is University Chaplain at University of Sussex; Connie K. Chung is a researcher and consultant on youth engagement; Andrea Finlay is a Research Health Scientist for the US Dept. of Veterans Affairs; Elizebeth Gish is the Senior Program Officer for Democracy and Education at the Kettering Foundation; Katharine Kravetz is emerita at American University and has an article in the current Good Society; Meredith Mira founded and leads Choice Points Coaching; Vedant Nanackchand teaches printmaking and human rights/democracy at the University of Johannesburg; Sung-Wook Paik is Professor of Political Science at York College; Anna Rosefsky Saavedra co-directs the University of Southern California’s Center for Applied Research in Education; Tim Shaffer is the inaugural Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Chair of Civil Discourse and director of the SNF Ithaca Initiative at University of Delaware; Laura Wray-Lake is a Professor of Social Welfare at UCLA; and Nick Zavediuk teaches at High Point University
We welcome additional news for future (occasional) emails!
