Universities Must Start Graduating More Good Citizens, by Anna Saavedra and Peter Levine

Posted on August 13, 2026 by Peter

This post is by Anna Saavedra, Director of the Center for Civic Society at the USC Schaeffer Institute for Public Policy and Government Service, and me. I am currently a Nonresident Senior Scholar at the Schaeffer Institute as well as the Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs at Tufts University’s Jonathan Tisch College of Civic Life.

Seven in 10 adults feel the U.S. higher education system is going in the wrong direction, and half say American democracy is functioning poorly, or very poorly. One proposed solution could tackle both problems simultaneously: American colleges and universities could require civics curricula for all freshmen.

Students often arrive on campus without the insights, skills, and dispositions that are essential to the kind of civic behavior that sustains a democratic republic. Universities have a clear role to play in helping them become engaged, knowledgeable citizens, and to do so with academic rigor.

Most recently, a faculty panel at Yale urged the creation of a civic education initiative that would reach every freshman. Institutions considering such a step will face challenges, including how to staff a university-wide mandated curriculum. Presuming that practical problems could be overcome, any university would still have to address another hard question: What should a civics curriculum teach?

A lot will depend on how a university and its faculty views the major weaknesses and threats to the republic. For example, a course focused on America’s 250-year history might improve knowledge and appreciation of the Constitution and political traditions. One that encourages dialogues and discussions involving diverse perspectives could be a counterweight to polarization and social media trolling. Global challenges, such as climate change and disruptive technologies, could be the topic of a class that encourages students to develop solutions, perhaps with a large dose of scientific literacy.

The drive to improve civic education will not yield a single national template, nor should it. A civics course built around the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence looks different from one anchored in diverse political and economic theories, or from a program centered on community-based service, or from a practicum in public policy.

Each approach develops different competencies, and there is no reason to expect—or demand—convergence. Diversity of curricula is inevitable and desirable. Institutions need to articulate the skills, knowledge, and values they believe citizenship requires, and design programs deliberately aimed at those goals.

Skeptics worry that such a curriculum risks becoming either superficial or politicized. A course that reduces citizenship to a fact checklist will fail to inspire; one that substitutes advocacy for analysis will also fall short. Avoiding these pitfalls requires intellectual humility, institutional discipline, and a genuine commitment to pluralism—to engaging students across lines of disagreement rather than confirming the views they already hold.

Fortunately, universities need not start from scratch. Existing efforts offer resources, frameworks, and communities of practice. The states of Florida and Arizona already require a civics course for all public university students, and some private institutions have adopted requirements of various types. Tulane University, for example, requires all undergraduates to spend two semesters in courses that involve service in their community.

The greatest risk is inaction. For too long, many universities have assumed students arrive with, or will passively acquire, the aptitude and knowledge necessary for democratic life. Civic ignorance is widespread, confidence is uneven, and engagement is often shallow or polarized. Higher education cannot solve these problems alone, but it can no longer disclaim responsibility.

The Yale committee is right to insist universities take the goal of citizenship development seriously. Doing so will require resources, creativity, and, above all, a willingness to engage difficult questions about what it means to be a U.S. citizen in the 21st century. Today’s undergraduates are tomorrow’s voters, jurors, public servants, and community leaders. The quality of their civic education will shape their own lives and the health of the republic itself.

See also: “a civic common reading program“

a civic common reading program

Posted on August 10, 2026 by Peter

In the Alliance for Civics in the Academy, we say:

Civic education should be a shared intellectual activity, grounded in texts, aimed at building a practical capacity for listening to and acting together with others, including those of differing beliefs.

I believe that citizenship or civic engagement is about more than texts and spoken words. It is also about work–and sometimes, sacrifice. We can learn to be effective citizens by serving or fighting or working instead of talking. Acts of citizenship can literally be silent.

Still, authentic words are scarce today. Despite the torrent of gigabytes of characters and sounds that human beings–and now also machines–circulate every second, we are at risk of losing considered words, the words of embodied human beings who have memories and hopes and the capacity to suffer and who speak or write to engage other people. Hence I believe that today’s civic education should emphasize slow, attentive reading and the creation of new words.

In Our Declaration, Danielle Allen recalls teaching working-class students in night school in Chicago. She writes,

To my embarrassment, however, I never read the Declaration slowly, the way I had been taught to read, until I did so with my night students. It’s a cliché to say that we fell in love, but we did. Its words became necessary for us; they became our Declaration. Through reading them slowly, we came into our inheritance: an understanding of freedom and equality, and of the value of finding the right words.

Here is a proposal for a program that could be adopted across a college or university as part of its civic mission. It builds on existing “common read” or “common book” programs, but it is a bit different. Those programs tend to encourage every student–or every incoming student–to read a recent book. Often, the author visits, and the book is incorporated in various courses and special events.

There is suggestive evidence that these programs bring academic and psychological benefits (Soria 2015). But they would not necessarily enhance civic learning. And I am skeptical that most students will actually read and discuss an assigned book, especially post-COVID and in the era of AI.

I would propose the following tweaks:

The chosen text should be concise yet very rich, so that it is possible to read it (possibly aloud) before discussing it and producing a response–all in real time.

It should address the core civic question, the question of collective agency. In other words, the text should be about groups discussing “What should we do?” and acting accordingly.

The text should generally be old enough that it has generated criticism and creative responses or echoes from various perspectives. These responses can be recommended along with the main assigned text.

Students would produce their own responses to the text in the form of words (written or spoken), images, music, or performances, either as individuals or in teams. With exceptions, such as the use of recording devices, they would make these products without the assistance of machines.

This program would include all students, from incoming undergraduates to residents in a medical school. Whether to require or merely encourage participation would depend on the institution’s rules and culture, and might vary within an institution.

The institution would produce a discussion guide and offer professional development opportunities for teachers, but instructors and facilitators could approach the text in their own ways, grounded in their own disciplines, professions, methods, and interests.

Since a new text would be chosen each year, a student in a multi-year academic program would experience a diversity of texts. Here are some illustrative examples:

Addams, Jane, “The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements”
Arendt, Hannah, “Prologue” to The Human Condition
Auden, W.H, “September 1, 1939”
Brecht, Bertolt, “To Future Generations”
Brooks, Gwendolyn, “The Lovers of the Poor”
Dewey, John, The Public and its Problems, chapter 5 (selection)
Douglass, Frederick, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”
Du Bois, W.E.B., “The General Strike,” chapter 4 of Black Reconstruction in America (selection)
Hall, Prince, “A Charge, delivered to the African Lodge”
Heaney, Seamus, “From the Republic of Conscience”
King, Martin Luther, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
King, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”
Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (2026)
Lincoln, Abraham, The Second Inaugural
Lord, Audre, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”
Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, The Book of Nehemiah
Reagan, Ronald, Speech at Pointe du Hoc, France (June 6, 1984)
Thucydides, The Melian Dialogue, from The Peloponnesian War (5.84-116)
Tocqueville, Alexis de, “Of the Use Which the Americans Make of Public Associations In Civil Life”
The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy’s Great Binding Law
The Declaration of Independence
The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights

profiles of engaged scholars

Posted on July 16, 2026 by Peter

“Civically engaged political science (CER) research …. involves political scientists collaborating in a mutually beneficial way with people and groups beyond the academy to co-produce, share, and apply knowledge related to power or politics, contributing to self-governance” (Rasmussen et al 2021).

In this definition, the word “civic” refers to “How people govern themselves. Engaged research teams are self-governing collaborative groups (composed of community organizations, government actors, social movements, and others); their research strengthens self-governance for others.e with a central focus onquestions of power, politics, and governance.”

What does it look like to be involved in CER? Here are some successful trajectories. These are fictional profiles, but they are based on many real examples that I have known. I share the list partly to broaden people’s conceptions of what success might look like:

Hired as an assistant professor in a research-intensive university that grants PhDs in political science, a scholar does some CER before winning tenure–along with other research. Publishes some results of the CER along with much other work. Gets tenure on the basis of the publication record.
Someone with a PhD in political science takes those skills to a job in a nongovernmental organization (NGO). She works in research and evaluation, rising ultimately to be the CEO of the organization.
A political scientist in a college located in a smaller community becomes an important convener and civic leader in that community. This person brings public figures to town and organizes community forums. The college comes to value this role.
An experienced social movement activist earns a PhD by studying the movement (studying part-time while continuing to do practical work) and then continues to contribute to the movement as a teacher, scholar, and activist.
A political scientist takes a first job after earning a PhD is in a research lab based in a university that is entirely funded by grants and contracts. One grants leads to another, and this person ends up directing the lab.
A professor has a heavy teaching load in an institution that emphasizes teaching. This instructor incorporates students in applied research projects with the local community. They publish informally, for local audiences.
A scholar’s research agenda is mostly driven by a methodological or theoretical innovation, but they realize they need to do their research with partners. They gain skills in forming and sustaining partnerships.
A political science professor does positivist research by day and social movement activism in the evenings and weekends. There is little connection between these two full-time jobs.
An early-career scholar takes job in a community engagement center in a university and makes a career in that center and in others like it, ending as the vice provost for public engagement.
A graduate student interested in CER cannot find a way to do CER until after tenure, when his early ideas suddenly germinate, and he conducts a CER project.
An academic expert on a social group serves frequently on the boards of relevant organizations, moving from local groups to national and international ones.
A political scientist studies local issues, often in dialogue with local activists. This person runs for political office and leaves academia when elected mayor.

I would offer all of these as successful profiles, although one might argue that some represent structural challenges that individuals have partially overcome through unreasonable amounts of struggle.

Source: Amy Cabrera Rasmussen, Peter Levine, Robert Lieberman, Valeria Sinclair-Chapman & Rogers Smith “Preface,” PS: Political Science & Politics symposium on Civically Engaged Research (2021). See also: civically engaged research in political science.

civically engaged research in political science

Posted on July 15, 2026 by Peter

I am at the eighth Institute for Civically Engaged Research (ICER), a program of the American Political Science Association. Each summer, we gather about 20 political scientists (advanced PhD students, professors, and PhDs working outside academia) for four days of discussions about engaged research, which generally means research conducted in partnership with people or entities that are outside of academia. As we did last year, we are meeting at UCLA in Los Angeles, thanks to the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation and UCLA’s Ralph Bunche Center.

I have been thinking about the standing of this kind of research and how it is viewed by powerful institutions. You could think of the following as a draft of a “power map” for civically engaged research in political science.

To start, we might think that colleges and universities are powerful institutions. On the other hand, many organizations and communities or social groups lack power. A junior scholar who wants to remedy that gap should collaborate with a disadvantaged group in ways that empower it. This requires humility by the scholar. In turn, the university and relevant discipline will probably dislike this style of research because it tends to shift power away. Therefore, the scholar will have to struggle against the university. Finally, the government may support engaged research when progressive are in charge, but when the government is right-wing, it will attack engaged research.

This model is not false, but I would like to complicate it.

All communities have power. Some geographical communities that are poor nevertheless wield considerable power though their elected governments. On the other hand, colleges and universities face significant constraints, economic and otherwise.

Senior faculty in departments that chase prestige may not appreciate engaged research because it may seem methodologically unsophisticated and may not yield generalizable conclusions. On the other hand, the discipline of political science has conferred its highest honors on some scholars whose research depended on partnerships, people like Elinor Ostrom and Jenny Mansbridge (or Ralph Bunche, back in the day). Thanks to the original leadership of Rogers Smith while he was APSA president–sustained by his successors–the Association offers ICER to boost this kind of research.

Also, senior administrators in prestigious universities sometimes prefer engaged research because it is interdisciplinary, it engages students, it attracts philanthropy, and it can improve local relationships.

At this moment, federal funding for political science is endangered, and one would expect the Trump Administration to target civically engaged research. Yet political scientists are involved today in federally funded interdisciplinary engaged research projects, and private philanthropic support may be expanding.

In short, I think the power map is quite complex. My ideal end-state would not be a world in which every political scientist does engaged research. I admire other kinds of research as well. But I would like to see more and better civically engaged research, and moving toward that goal requires navigating a context of both opportunities and risks.

See also: the landscape for civically engaged research (2025; rather similar to these remarks); Civically Engaged Research in Political Science (2023); bootstrapping value commitments (2022)

from the spring summit on civics in higher education

Posted on July 1, 2026 by Peter

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:

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.

universities and newsrooms as laboratories or debating societies

Posted on June 16, 2026 by Peter

Higher education and the press are important sources of knowledge and insight in modern societies. I think that many people who are interested and concerned about these institutions view them as similar to either 1) labs or 2) debating societies. Both metaphors contain some truth but also mislead.

If you imagine an academic program or a newsroom as similar to a lab, then you will presume that its outputs are information and knowledge. You will probably expect the professionals (professors or reporters) to apply rigorous methods. Any good method counters biases, emotions, and other forms of subjectivity. For example, your own political views should not affect the results of a survey that you conduct if your sample is representative and your statistical techniques are appropriate. In this respect, sampling Americans’ views of Donald Trump is just like taking water samples to measure pH levels. Likewise, your opinions shouldn’t matter if you report on the municipal budget after interviewing a range of insiders and experts.

On this model, you would expect students and novice professionals to learn methods and to be aware of the best supported findings of previous research. Methods and findings should constitute the primary content of education.

When you see a professional consensus about a topic, that is a sign that its methods are working well. Disagreement is problematic, although you can hope that new data or new methods will resolve any temporary dispute.

On the other hand, if you imagine a college as similar to a debating society, then you will think first of a seminar room where there is a free-flowing discussion of a contentious issue (or perhaps a late-night argument in a dorm room). Similarly, you will think first of the op-ed page of a newspaper or a broadcast talk show.

Then you will expect to observe people expressing opinions. Disagreement is desirable–a debate is pointless if everyone agrees–and consensus can be a warning that the whole institution is biased. When someone makes an authoritative claim, along the lines of “We know that X,” you will be quick to suspect them of suppressing alternative views. Your evaluative criteria may include whether the expressed opinions are diverse, whether participants are appropriately open to alternative opinions, whether certain views should be excluded because they are out of bounds, and whether the institution reflects the range of opinions of some appropriate population. (For example, maybe a US broadcast network should present all opinions popular in the US electorate–although that claim is debatable.)

One drawback of the debating society model is that it overlooks the main activities of most professors and reporters: collecting information, applying methods, and reporting results. A session of a college course is much more likely to be spent discussing p-values or prosody than debating politics. In the case of journalism, the number of Americans paid to collect news has fallen by about 77 percent, on a per capita basis, since 1990. There may also be a declining public commitment to academic research across a range of fields.

Also, people who see universities and newsrooms as debating platforms may simply fail to reckon with stubborn information. Sometimes a professional consensus reflects facts, whether we like it or not.

However, if you assume that a university or a newsroom is like a lab, then you will not admit that any question pursued by a journalist or a professor reflects values–beliefs about what is important and why–and assumptions about which methods and sources are legitimate. There may be a neutral way to apply Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression to a dataset, but there is no such thing as a neutral dataset. Someone chose to measure certain things because they seemed important.

Instead of being willing to debate and justify your own values and hear critiques of them, you may try to claim that values are irrelevant to your professional work. You will be most comfortable with domains where methods and findings seem relatively uncontroversial, such as the natural sciences and certain kinds of “hard news.” (There either was or was not a fire on Main Street last night).

As topics become controversial, you will become increasingly wary of the observers’ objectivity. For instance, humanities scholars study religion without endorsing specific religions, but you may wonder why something as contestable as a religious belief is a worthy topic, let alone whether an interpretive scholar of religion can be reliable.

For people who see research as value-free science, ethics is unintelligible. It clearly isn’t like a lab science, but if it’s just a matter of opinions, then it isn’t a discipline at all. At best, ethics is a set of legalistic boundaries around the research enterprise, like “Don’t collect data without people’s permission.”

In the modern world, we are confronted with the challenge of navigating both facts and values when the two are deeply connected. We must respect both rigorous methods and free debates. We are trying to grasp truths and honor other people who believe different things. These combinations are difficult.

We might also remember that institutions that are a bit like labs and a bit like debating societies are also other things. Colleges are literal homes for resident students, large-scale employers, institutional investors, landlords, developers, performance venues, and gatekeepers to valuable credentials. Many news agencies are for-profit companies, employers, advertising platforms, and entertainers. Blindness to those realities can make us too comfortable with either model–the lab or the debating society.

an overview of civics in higher education

Posted on May 19, 2026 by Peter

On April 10, the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University and the Alliance for Civics in the Academy (ACA), with support from GBH, held a one-day national summit on civics in higher education. All day, we heard from leaders of exemplary programs that emphasize various combinations of community engagement, academic coursework, and research and experimentation on democracy.

GBH has posted a video of the substantive portions of my opening remarks. My 7-minute talk may also serve as an overview of civic education in the academy as I see it today.

(The subtitles are a little inaccurate, but close enough …)

What Counts As Success? Assessing The Impact Of Civics In Higher Ed

Posted on February 25, 2026 by Peter

On February 18, the Alliance for Civics in the Academy hosted a webinar on “What Counts as Success? Assessing the Impact of Civics in Higher Ed” with Trygve Throntveit, Rachel Wahl, Joseph Kahne, and me.

We discussed some of the advantages of developing reliable and consistent measurements of civic education, particularly the opportunity to learn from data and the need to be accountable. We also discussed some drawbacks and risks, including Campbell’s Law (a remark by Donald T. Campbell): “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

We asked ourselves who should use assessments, and for what purposes. For example, it is a different matter for a college professor to get feedback from the students in a course or for a university to measure student outcomes. I thought the conversation was both intellectually serious and relevant to practice.

Panelists:

Rachel Wahl: Associate Professor in the Social Foundations Program, Department of Educational Leadership, Foundations, and Policy at the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Virginia
Joseph Kahne: Ted and Jo Dutton Presidential Professor for Education Policy and Politics and Director of the Civic Engagement Research Group at the University of California, Riverside.
Trygve Throntveit: PhD, Research Professor in Higher Education and Associate Director of the Center for Economic and Civic Learning (CECL) at Ball State University.

I was the moderator. The video is here:

Jaspers on collective responsibility and polarization

Posted on February 11, 2026 by Peter

Here is a scene that has certain resonances with the present, although the circumstances were certainly different. …

It was the winter of 1945-6 in Heidelberg, Germany. Karl Jaspers, a distinguished professor, offered a lecture to a room full of demobilized solders, women, displaced civilians, and a fair number of wounded.

Jaspers had been banned from teaching since 1933 because he didn’t endorse the Nazi regime (except to sign a loyalty oath in 1934) and because his spouse was Jewish. He and his wife had been listed for arrest–and presumably death–but they were saved when the US Army arrived the previous March. The US military trusted Jaspers, who been mediating between them and the university.

In the lecture, Jaspers notes that the Allied occupation is authoritarian; Germans have no say in their own governance. Later, he will insist that the fault for this situation lies with Germans alone. In the meantime, the occupation is not interfering with their freedom of speech.

Jaspers says that a university should never be a place for politics, in the narrow sense. “Dabbling in political actions and decisions of the day” is “never our business.” I suspect he is echoing Max Weber’s “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality’ in Sociology and Economics,” a lecture from 1917. Jaspers says that he and his audience are free to do what they should always do in a university. But what is that?

Jaspers is giving a lecture. He acknowledges that it can become propaganda even if the theme is democracy or freedom. “Talk from the platform is necessarily one-sided. We do not converse here. Yet what I expound to you has grown out of the ‘talking with each other’ [Miteinandersprechen] which all of us do, each in his own circle” (p. 5). He adds, “We want to reflect together while, in fact, I expound unilaterally. But the point is not dogmatic communication, but investigation and tender for examination on your part” (p. 9).

Reflecting together is essential, Jaspers argues, because it can change “consciousness,” which is a “precedent for our judgment in politics.” To accomplish this transformation, “We must learn to talk with each other, and we mutually must understand and accept one another in our extraordinary differences” (p. 5). This “self-education” (Selbsterziehung) is not politics, but perhaps it’s a preparation for politics (p. 9).

The need for dialogue is especially acute because Germans have had radically different experiences. Most Germans have experienced tragic losses, but it matters greatly whether one’s loved-one was killed on the battlefield while invading the USSR, bombed at home, or executed by the regime. Because there was no free speech, Germans have been unable to discuss such profound differences. Jaspers says, “Now that we can talk freely again, we seem to each other as if we had come from different worlds” (p. 13).

He never mentions how he was treated by the government or by his fellow Germans. Some of the people in the lecture room had different experiences from him–in the specific sense that they were actively involved in killing people like his wife. The proportion who supported the regime was vastly larger than the proportion who resisted it. Nevertheless, Jaspers diagnoses the situation as what we would call “polarization” (a deep disagreement among people), and he validates everyone’s experiences while attributing guilt to himself.

The solution that he proposes for polarization is dialogue. He says, “We want to learn to talk with each other. That is to say, we do not just want to reiterate our opinions but to hear what the other thinks. We do not just want to assert but to reflect connectedly, listen to reasons, remain prepared for a new insight. We want to accept the other, to try to see things from the other’s point of view; in fact, we virtually want to seek out opposing views” (pp. 5-6).

Jaspers’ opening is a very strong statement in favor of pluralistic dialogue and institutional neutrality, as we might call those things today. I find it moving because he humanizes everyone despite having every reason to be furious at them. But I also think his stance is debatable. Should universities be as detached from politics as he advocates? (Would it have helped if they had been less detached in 1925 or 1930?) Was the problem really “division,” or was it Nazism?

Jaspers then offers an analysis of the question of German war guilt. Central to his analysis is a famous four-way distinction among:

Criminal guilt, which is attributable to individuals who have broken specific laws. It merits personal shame and punishment.
Political guilt, which belongs to all members of a polity (a democracy or otherwise), because “Everybody is responsible for the way he is governed.” However, political guilt does not imply criminal guilt or the need for an individual penalty or shame. Germany as a whole is rightly occupied because of political guilt, which is not the fault of individual Germans. Similarly, I might say, “I didn’t vote for George W. Bush or the Iraq war, but I have responsibility for Iraq as a US citizen. I needn’t feel bad about it personally, but I must accept the political consequences.”
Moral guilt: This is what one ought to feel as a result of being connected to an evil, even if one wasn’t personally responsible for what happened. It is what we would now call bad “moral luck.” For example, it is a matter of luck whether one was born a German or a Dane in 1905, but those who were born Germans have a form of guilt that is not due to their individual choices. Jaspers’ former student Hannah Arendt wrote (completely independently at about the same time): “That German refugees, who had the good fortune either to be Jews or to have been persecuted by the Gestapo early enough, have been saved from this guilt is of course not their merit.” If your conditions lead you to be good, you should reflect on your good fortune and not attribute your virtue to your self. If your conditions make you bad, you need penance and renewal.
Metaphysical guilt: “There exists a solidarity among men as human beings that makes each co-responsible for every wrong and every injustice in the world, especially for crimes committed in his presence or with his knowledge.” The outcome of accepting metaphysical guilt is what Jaspers calls “transformation before God.” Again, Arendt wrote something similar at about the same time: “It is many years now that we meet Germans who declare that they are ashamed of being Germans. I have often felt tempted to answer that I am ashamed of being human.” I would paraphrase their idea as follows (without invoking God): acts of evil remind us that we are flawed creatures, and we should be mindful of that fact.

Jaspers’ lecture must have given his audience much to wrestle with, but it’s not clear that it went over well. Much later, his student Harry Pross recalled:

No one would have dared interrupt the lecture. There was not supposed to be any conversation between the students and the professors in the old lecture hall. Then [at the end of the lecture] the philosopher left, somewhat stiffly, without casting a single glance left or right. The students sat tight, as they had always done. “Pretty meshuggener,” one murmured as he walked out. “At least you don’t have to say ‘Heil’ any more,” his friend replied.

Quoting Jaspers from E.N. Ashton’s translation: The Question of German Guilt (Fordham, 2000). The German words come from a 1971 German edition of Die Schuldfrage (note that Germany is not named in the original title), published by Joseph Buttinger. Pross is quoted in Antonia Grunenberg and Adrian Daub, “Arendt, Heidegger, Jaspers: Thinking Through the Breach in Tradition,” Social Research, vol. 74, no. 4, 2007, p. 1013.

the case for viewpoint diversity

Posted on January 28, 2026 by Peter

Here is a quick interview of me for Tufts’ Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education. I think the question was something like this: “Why is it important to include diverse points of view?” Even though I appear to be looking heavenward for answers, I stand by my claim that ethical reasoning is comparative; and we need direct exposure to diverse views to be able to make comparisons.

A subtle point: for reasons that Andrew Perrin and Christian Lundberg present in this Boston Globe editorial, I don’t love the metaphor of viewpoints. It implies that each person has a stance that explains all their specific views, and we either stand in the same place as another person (in which case our mentalities are identical) or in a different place (therefore destined to disagree). I prefer to think in terms of networks of beliefs that may overlap.* Nevertheless, John Stuart Mill’s basic argument for diversity of values applies.

I would also note that the argument for value-diversity conflicts with the goal of objectivity. If we can use objective methods to settle issues related to policy or social criticism, then it doesn’t matter what values we bring to the conversation. On the other hand, if values are simply manifestations of our viewpoints or identities (or preferences), then there is no point in reasoning about them. Ethical reasoning is neither subjective nor scientific but discursive and comparative.

*See Mapping Ideologies as Networks of Ideas (Journal of Political Ideologies 29 (3), 464-491) and People Are Not Points in Space: Network Models of Beliefs and Discussions ( Critical Review 36 (1-2), 119-145)

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