On April 10, the Tisch College of Civic Life, the Alliance for Civics in the Academy, and GBH (formerly WGBH-Boston) organized a national summit on civics in higher education. Some outputs from that summit are now public.
Joanna Kenty kindly published a version of my opening remarks in The Renovator, under the heading “What was civic education, and what can it become?” My whole original talk is also available as a video.
Videos of the conference’s main panels are on GBH’s webpage. These sessions discussed three major categories of civic work in higher education today: 1) community engagement, 2) curricula focused on civics, and 3) research in support of democracy:
- Keeping Community at the Core: Transformational Engagement in Higher Ed
- Civics in the Classroom: Curricula at U.S. 250
- Democracy Centers: Research for the Public Good
GBH also presents the opening remarks of Jonathan Holloway, a historian who is now the president of the Henry Luce Foundation and previously served as the president of Rutgers. And they present a talk by Eboo Patel, the founder of Interfaith America, on treating diversity as part of civic education.
An Instagram reel records an interview with UCSD’s Fonna Forman during the summit. Fonna is a leader of a remarkable set of community engagements in the San Diego/Tijuana metropolitan area, which (among other accomplishments) won the 2026 National Design Award.
GBH also interviewed my former advisee Seona Maskara (Tufts 2026) at the summit, to give a student’s perspective.