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).
See also: primer on free speech and academic freedom; academic freedom for individuals and for groups; Holding two ideas at once: the attack on universities is authoritarian, and viewpoint diversity is important
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:
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.
See also: nostalgia in the face of political crisis; phenomenology of nostalgia; nostalgia for now.
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.
The graphs show incidence of political violence in the USA recently, per The ACLED Explorer. See also: nonviolence in a time of political unrest; a checklist for democracy activists; the current state of resistance, and what to do about it; tools people need to preserve and strengthen democracy; learning from the Great Salt March: on civil disobedience and breaking through to mass opinion; countering selective harassment in the Trump Administration; building power for resisting authoritarianism etc.
Crime’s power as a political issue is troubling.
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.)
See also: what voters are hearing about in the 2024 election; what must we believe?; civic responses to crime; and more data on police interactions by race
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. |
See also: “democracy’s crisis: a system map (a longer and revised version of which is forthcoming in Studies in Law, Politics, and Society); the current state of resistance, and what to do about it; tools people need to preserve and strengthen democracy; and a flowchart for collective decision-making in democratic small groups.
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 APSA Civic Studies Related Group: If you would like to join, first join APSA and then navigate here: https://apsanet.org/resources/related-groups/. (You do not have to be a political scientist.)
§ 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.”
§ 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.
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
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.
§ 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).
§ Boontinand and Forstenzer, “Educating About, Through and for Human Rights and Democracy in Uncertain Times: The Promise of the Pedagogy of the Community of Philosophical Inquiry” in Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 57 no. 7 (2025)
§ Harry C. Boyte, “Revitalizing the American Commonwealth,” in The National Civic Review, vol. 114, no. 2 (Summer 2025)
§ “Restoring Power and Agency to the Public for Civic Studies and Renewal,” a “Friends & Fellow Citizens” podcast with Harry Boyte and Peter Levine, interviewed by Sherman Tylawsky
§ Albert W. Dzur and Carolyn M. Hendriks, Democracy in Action: Collective Problem Solving in Citizens’ Governance Spaces (Oxford, 2024). See also their summary article in the National Civic Review
§ 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.”
§ Benjamin Storey & Jenna Silber Storey, “Why Civic Thought?” AEIdeas, May 14, 2025
§ American Enterprise Institute/Johns Hopkins University conference on Civic Thought and Practice: The Intellectual Foundations of Citizenship (May 16-17, 2025) with archived videos of the panels.
§ 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
Ball State
Ball State University is launching a Civic Studies Minor this fall (2025).
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.
§ 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.
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!
Peter Levine, Tufts University
Tryg Throntveit, Ball State University
I’m offering these interactive webinars for Crossroads and Connections, which is related to Indivisible.
Session 1 – Tuesday, September 2, 2025 – 6:30 – 8:00 PM Eastern Standard Time
What do people need to know for resistance? (And how can we learn it?)
Session 2 – Wednesday, September 10, 2025 – 6:30 – 8:00 PM Eastern Standard Time
Is MAGA part of a global right wing? A revival of US nativism? A personality-driven authoritarian movement? A symptom of polarization?
Session 3 – Thursday September 18, 2025 – 6:30 – 8:00 PM Eastern Standard Time
What do people need to know for resistance? (And how can we learn it?) (Repeat of 9/2)
I will begin these sessions with some offering remarks, but I intend them to be conversations. You can sign up here.
Artificial Intelligence is already disrupting education, especially in the humanities and portions of the social sciences. It is part of the “toxic brew” that makes my friend Austin Sarat, an Amherst professor, say that he’s “not ready to return to the classroom” this fall.
Students can use AI to extend their learning–to pose demanding and advanced questions or to summarize bodies of material so that they save time for reading other texts closely. But they can also use AI to reduce the total amount of valuable effort that they would have otherwise committed to a course, thereby learning less from it. As Clay Shirky writes, “If the student’s preferred working methods reduce mental effort, we have to reintroduce that effort somehow.”
I think writing and reading are distinct issues.
AI can assist writers in valuable ways. It can be a thought-partner, a preliminary reader, a copy-editor, and even a drafter of routine passages. Writing for school or college–writing to learn–is a special case, because the goal is not to generate the text but to develop one’s understanding and skills. There can be no substitute for struggling mentally with this task. A student can use AI to help, but a reliable question for students to ask themselves is whether they have invested effort in the document that bears their name. If not, they can’t have learned much or anything.
To some extent, we instructors can alter incentives so that students write without relying on AI. In a course that I am co-teaching this fall, we’ll require an in-class midterm. Oral presentations and exams are worth considering. A new independent study finds that commercial tools are quite good—right now—at detecting AI-generated text.
Nevertheless, students will probably get away with learning less by relying on AI to write in college. My general philosophy is that you can lead the horse to water but not make it drink. Capable college students have always been able to cut corners to the detriment of their own learning. I did so, to some extent, long before AI. (I would sometimes read summaries in secondary sources instead of hard primary texts.) The main question is whether we can inspire and guide students who want to learn to work intensively on forming and expressing their own ideas.
Reading seems more problematic to me. Using AI to summarize texts is both more tempting and harder to monitor than using it for writing. When I open any PDF document in Chrome right now, Adobe pops up to tell me that it can summarize the file for me. ChatPGT usually does a credible job of producing notes on a text, including a whole book–and including whole books that I have written.
Once again, we can use these tools to extend learning. I sometimes use AI to summarize material that (frankly) I do not deeply respect but feel I should dip into. Although I don’t use the time that I save as well as I should, I do reserve some of it for close-reading hard texts.
The case I would make for reading is fundamentally spiritual. We are at grave risk of being caught inside our own limited heads. When we read carefully, we follow someone else’s thinking for a significant time. We are not merely notified of the authors’ main points; we learn how they think, word by word and paragraph by paragraph. We learn what counts as a persuasive point or a telling example or a provocative question for another human being.
I think that many people would concede this point if the author is a literary genius. If you’re going to study Shakespeare at all, you obviously must read his work, because his language is admirable and integral to his project. But I want to make the same point about routine academic authors.
The typical contributor to the Journal of Politics is no William Shakespeare. Yet each competent scholarly author has a distinctive way of constructing an argument, and each subfield or scholarly community has its own shared ways. (Linguists would say that authors have idiolects of their own and dialects for their groups.) Struggling to make sense of a routine yet capable piece of academic writing is a way of getting out of one’s own mind. Of course, it is not the only way. Among many other activities, we should listen to people speak. But reading is one way to escape solipsism, which is a form of spiritual death.
See also: what I would advise students about ChatGPT (my 2023 iteration of these points); a collective model of the ethics of AI in higher education
I first explored similarities between Montaigne’s Essays (1580-88) and the ancient Buddhist texts called the Pali Canon (particularly the “Chapter of Eights”) on this blog in August 2024. I have been developing these ideas into a longer article or perhaps a portion of a book. One shared theme (among several) is that we should be committed to other people rather than to our own ideas. We can be unattached to our opinions while still deeply caring.
Last week, I discovered and read Stephen Batchelor’s The Art of Solitude (2022), which emphasizes precisely the same pair of texts. He translates the whole Chapter of Eights and discusses Montaigne at length.
Batchelor is a great writer on solitude. He does not define it as being alone, but rather as being deeply attentive to what’s going on inside yourself. In fact, you can hide away in your room or retreat to a forest and yet be mentally consumed by other people and events, or you can genuinely talk and listen to others while retaining an inner space. Montaigne makes these points well, as does the Pali Canon.
Montaigne, a Renaissance European, knew nothing of Buddhism, but he was impressed–at least during a phase of his life–by the Skeptical philosophy of the Greco-Roman author Sextus. The Skeptical School traced its origins to Pyrrho of Ellis, who had visited India with Alexander the Great in 327-326 BCE and may even have become a Buddhist. In my view, the strongest evidence of Buddhism’s influence on Greek Skepticism is this passage, which purports to represent Pyrrho’s teaching:
Whoever reflects on how to attain happiness must see three things: First, what are matters like by nature? Second, in what state should we approach matters? And last, what happens to those who are in this state? … Matters are without an essential nature, unmeasurable, and unfixed, and for this reason neither our senses nor our opinions are true or false. For this reason, therefore, do not believe them, but be without opinions and without biases and without agitation. …
Eusebius of Caesarea, Praeparatio Evangelica, 14.18.1-4 (my trans)
Christopher Beckwith (2017, p. 32) shows that this text “is so close to” a specific, early Indian Buddhist text “that it is virtually a translation of it,” and he argues that some of the Greek words were coined to translate Sanskrit words that were important in early Buddhism, such as anatman (without an essential nature) and duhkha (unsteady or unstable).
At any rate, Greek Skepticism developed during a period when Greeks were in dialogue with Indian Buddhists in a large region where many schools and sects taught overlapping ideas. And Montaigne was strongly influenced by Greek Skepticism.
Batchelor is less interested in such historical links and influences than in sheer similarities. He presents Montaigne as having rediscovered principles of solitude, meditation and compassion from personal experience and experimentation, which is how Montaigne describes his own journey.
Montaigne is far more empathetic and compassionate than Sextus, who often tries to attain inner peace by ridiculing the various views of past philosophers. There are more than 1,300 quotations from Latin alone in Montaigne’s Essays (Selevold 2010), and his usual mode is to demonstrate that he appreciates the quoted author’s stance without necessarily endorsing it. By introducing compassion to Sextus’ Skepticism, Montaigne actually moves closer to Buddhism (without knowing anything about that tradition).
There is pretty good evidence that Montaigne also remained a believing Catholic, in private as well as public life, which means that some of his deepest commitments were incompatible with Buddhism. But he could write long passages in which his religious commitments appear irrelevant and he is fully guided by ideals that we could call compassion and mindfulness. Just for example:
When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts have been absorbed by external events for part of the time, I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude and to myself.
Montaigne, 3:13 (“On Experience”), my trans.
Batchelor beautifully translates this and other relevant passages–as I can attest, since I have been translating an overlapping set of excerpts from Montaigne for my own use. (I do wish, however, that the Yale Press book provided notes or other references, because it is quite a task to locate Batchelor’s original texts.)
Batchelor also writes about meditation and his own experiments with hallucinogens. Those sections are engaging and interesting but beyond my capacity to evaluate.
Sources: Stephen Batchelor’s The Art of Solitude (Yale University Press 2022); Christopher I. Beckwith, Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia (Princeton, 2017); Sellevold, Kirsti. “Quotation in Montaigne’s Essais: communication across time and contexts–A case study,” Symbolae Osloenses 84.1 (2010).
See also: Montaigne and Buddhism; three takes on the good life: Aristotle, Buddha, Montaigne; Montaigne the bodhisattva?; does skepticism promote a tranquil mind?