full-time college students spend 90 minutes per day on academics

Posted on October 6, 2026 by Peter

According to the American Time Use Survey, the median full-time college student in the USA spends 90 minutes per day on “non-work education activities, such as taking classes, conducting research and homework, administrative tasks, and extracurricular activities except sports.”

The graph with this post shows that more than 45% of full-time college students report spending less than one hour per day on academic work (including extracurriculars). But there is a long tail, with a few reporting 11 hours or more. The mean is almost 3 hours/day, pulled up by the high achievers.

It’s possible that I am naive, but I believe that students at Tufts, where I teach, spend enough hours on schoolwork that it can interfere with their sleep or even feel impossible to accomplish by the deadlines. But the national data show that they are unrepresentative.

If you are spending less than one hour/day on academics, including the time you spend actually “taking classes,” you just cannot be learning much. Maybe you are happy enough to be a college student living together with thousands of peers. But it is really hard to see why your family or the society should pay for this experience for four years of your young adulthood. Millions of families do pay, but they must see tuition as a kind of toll for entry to the middle class. I can see why they might view the toll-takers much as the Billy Goats Gruff viewed the Hungry Troll.

If you are getting so little out of your college experience that it occupies less than one hour per day, you might as well replace any remaining effort with an AI tool. And if your professors are so little involved with your education that you are able to get away with less than one hour per day of instruction plus homework plus extracurriculars, they might as well replace their teaching and grading with an AI.

Credit hours represent a kind of contract. A 3-credit course is supposed to require 9 hours of class plus homework per week, and most students take at least four courses. That takes them to about 40 hours of work per week, or more than five hours per day. If that is the official expectation, yet many students are doing 20% as much work, then the whole thing must seem like a travesty.

Finally, these data suggest that there is a qualitative difference among institutions. Some students are spending half their waking hours on demanding intellectual work. Others are not intellectually engaged at all. They may overlap on some of the same campuses, but they are probably concentrated in institutions that either demand a lot or not much of their students’ time. Nevertheless, the two kinds of institutions are both called “colleges,” and many students and families may not realize the difference.

Technicalities: This is my tabulation using data from Flood, Sayer, and Backman. I’ve amalgamated 2003-2025 to get a sample of 3,074. I do not show the trend during this period. For what it’s worth, the median rises in each decade from the 2000s to the 2020s, so the situation does not seem to be worsening.

In 2013, the National Survey of Student Engagement found that first-year college students spent about 2 hours per day preparing for class. That is a mean, not a median. It may be consistent with the 3-hour mean in the American Time Use Survey, since the latter includes class-time and extracurriculars.

Sources: Sarah M. Flood, Liana C. Sayer, and Daniel Backman. American Time Use Survey Data Extract Builder: Version 3.3 [dataset]. College Park, MD: University of Maryland and Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS, 2025. https://doi.org/10.18128/D060.V3.3. National Survey of Student Engagement. (2013). A Fresh Look at Student Engagement—Annual Results 2013. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research.See also: a conversation with Farah Stockman about American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears

public intellectuals and the fickle food of fame

Posted on September 28, 2026 by Peter

This weekend, at Amherst, I enjoyed a rich conversation about the purposes of liberal arts colleges. One proposal (not mine, but I appreciated it) was for liberal arts colleges to nurture public intellectuals.

The colleges represented at the meeting use basically the same criteria and standards for hiring and promotion that research-intensive universities use. Should their faculty be distinctive in any way? Universities tend to reward work produced for experts within fields. Liberal arts colleges could favor work that is meant for the public. Because they can be very selective, they could attract public intellectuals without compromising quality.

Sometimes, writing or speaking for the public is defined as reaching a large audience–in a word, as fame. But the most famous person who ever lived in Amherst refused to share her work with the public and wrote several trenchant poems about fame.

For instance, these four lines constitute Emily Dickinson’s poem #1788:

Fame is a bee.
It has a song—
It has a sting—
Ah, too, it has a wing.

The “song” is the attraction of fame, but the the “wing” refers to its tendency to fly away after causing pain. The ancient personification of Fame was winged, but I think she was envisioned arriving by air to announce someone’s success, rather than flying away unpredictably. Dickinson suggests a similar idea in the poem (#1659) that begins “Fame is a fickle food / Upon a shifting plate.” There is also: “Fame is the one that does not stay” (#1507).

Dickinson carefully designed her own funeral, a public event that launched her career posthumously. It seems that she wanted to reach an audience (hence becoming famous) but did not want fame to affect her work. She carefully timed her fame until after she could experience it (Crumbly 2017).

That sequence is clear in #1427:

To earn it by disdaining it
Is Fame’s consummate Fee—
He loves what spurns him—
Look behind—He is pursuing thee.

So let us gather—every Day—
The Aggregate of
Life’s Bouquet
Be Honor and not shame—

The addressee of the poem (Dickinson herself?) is moving toward an unnamed goal. That goal is not fame, which is behind her. Fame pursues her because she does not seek him. Perhaps an author or thinker who disdains to pursue fame is more likely to become famous because the quality of her work will be higher.

There is an air here of lovers, like Keats’ figures on the Grecian Urn (“What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?”). And there is something a bit creepy about Fame sneaking up from behind. You would think that turning around to see him would be a mistake, like Orpheus’ tragic error in looking behind him for Eurydice. But Dickinson’s narrator advises, “Look behind–he is pursuing thee.” Perhaps you should look back to remember the temptation that shadows you and then press forward to stay out of his clutches. Play hard to get.

The second stanza instructs us to attend to what life provides and to make art from it, not caring about the “shame” of becoming famous. We should be concerned with what we can gather, not with what people will think of us.

Nevertheless, Dickinson is a consummate rhetorician in the sense that she addresses strangers and tries to influence them, carefully considering what they may know, care about, and want to hear. Even though she eschews a contemporaneous audience, she writes for a public. Most readers feel that she is talking to them, and we certainly don’t have to be professional poets.

The kind of academic or intellectual work that I most appreciate (and try to support through the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts, the Institute for Civically Engaged Research, and other efforts) involves collaborations between scholarly experts and concrete groups, organizations, movements, or communities. The experts must talk in useful ways. It is exciting when their collaborative work expands to large scales and affects many people, but sometimes large scale is inappropriate or impossible. Aiming for big numbers can undermine integrity and quality. The goal is to share what Hannah Arendt calls a “world” with people who are independent and different from oneself.

If Amherst’s most famous resident is a model, the lesson would be to make things that have value for strangers, not just for colleagues and specialists. But treat fame as a threat to quality. Run away from it.

Source: Crumbley, Paul. “Emily Dickinson’s Funeral and the Paradox of Literary Fame.” The Emily Dickinson Journal, vol. 26 no. 2, 2017, p. 51-69. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/edj.2017.0014. See also: anxieties of influence; love of the world

the university between a club good and the commons

Posted on September 22, 2026 by Peter

The late Elinor Ostrom taught us many useful things, including how to analyze complex situations rigorously to reveal ways to improve them. Instead of reacting to the world with anger and confusion, someone who has learned from Ostrom can break down a problem and look for remedies.

I am teaching her work this week to undergraduates, and separately discussing the application of her framework to energy policy with colleagues in engineering. If you happen to want a primer to Ostrom, I have recorded lectures about her basic ideas (Part I, 17 minutes) and their application (Part II , 1 minutes).

To develop the mental habit of analysis, our students and I considered Ostrom’s framework for goods (things of value to anyone). We used her framework to model the situation in which we found ourselves, a classroom at Tufts University.

As shown in the graphic that accompanies this post, Ostrom divided all goods in two ways. Some goods are subtractable, meaning that they can be used up or ruined. But others are not. And some are excludable, meaning that it is possible to prevent individuals from using them. But again, others are not. These two distinctions create four categories.

In a college classroom, the private goods include the students’ property, such as their phones (neatly out of sight in our case) and their clothes. One student pointed out that a chair in the classroom, although legally the property of Tufts, functions as a private good during class because of an effective norm that you can’t take someone’s chair away.

Knowledge can be a pure public good. If I explain Ostrom’s theories, that doesn’t subtract or detract from them. And it is hard to block people from learning about her thought once it’s published.

Tufts is a club good, meaning that students benefit by virtue of being admitted to it. Other students do not detract from the benefits of enrolling, except that a very large student body would begin to dilute the “brand.” Yet it is easy to exclude individuals through the admissions process. I suppose that a diploma is a private good, as are the credits that add up to a degree. But the value of a degree depends on its indicating a club good that is owned by all alumni.

Finally, the learning environment is what Ostrom called a “common pool resource” or “commons,” for short. It is subtractable in the sense that a student (or a professor) can make it worse by acting badly or even by taking space in a classroom without contributing much. However, the learning environment is not very excludable, because it will benefit everyone who is present and wants to take advantage of it.

For me, the interesting question in an institution like mine is the relationship between the commons and the club goods.

Our business model depends on selling a club good. This is not true in other countries with different educational systems, or at least it is less important there. But institutions like Tufts cannot survive financially without charging people to join an exclusive club.

Perhaps it is good for the world that American colleges and universities provide club goods by selecting and labeling their students. For one thing, many people appreciate the club that is their own alma mater. And arguably, the sorting function sends useful signals, transmitting information about people who have graduated from Chicago or Oberlin or Vanderbilt. However, on the whole, I think the competition to generate club goods does harm. It sorts and separates young people, reinforces prior inequalities, and allows colleges to compete for exclusivity instead of offering educational value.

An institution’s value (in the more idealistic sense of that word) involves the commons that we create in which our people learn, grow, and form a community.

Thus we can measure our excellence by the degree to which we leverage our club goods for the commons, or (put another way) how we minimize the exclusivity of our club while maximizing the common-pool resource that we create here.

The cynical take on US higher education says that it maximizes its club goods and uses the commons (i.e., the learning environment) mostly for branding. Frank Bruni satirized that situation in a memorable 2016 piece in which he imagined that Stanford had finally reached the ultimate success, a zero percent admission rate. He wrote:

At first blush, Stanford’s decision would seem to jeopardize its fund-raising. … But over recent years, Stanford administrators noticed that as the school rejected more and more comers, it received bigger and bigger donations, its endowment rising in tandem with its exclusivity, its luster a magnet for Silicon Valley lucre.

In fact just 12 hours after the university’s rejection of all comers, an alumnus stepped forward with a financial gift prodigious enough for Stanford to begin construction on its long-planned Center for Social Justice, a first-ever collaboration of Renzo Piano and Santiago Calatrava, who also designed the pedestrian bridge that will connect it to the student napping meadows.

But real universities (including Stanford) actually create learning environments for those who get in; they don’t merely issue diplomas to those whom they admit.

A university also generates important pure public goods, new knowledge and culture that disseminate globally. And it can even offer worthwhile private goods, like t-shirts and dorm rooms. But I would focus on the degree to which an institution deploys the resources from its club goods to provide common-pool resources. The more of that, the better.

do the liberal arts accomplish civic education?

Posted on September 18, 2026 by Peter

Next weekend, I’ll participate in a discussion at a famous liberal arts college about the various crises facing such institutions.

All the other participants will be liberal arts college professors. Although my institution is a research university, the intersection of the liberal arts and civic learning also matters to me.

First, the crises that confront the liberal arts (from the cost of college to the rise of AI; from Donald Trump to cultural challenges within the academy) also threaten the parts of a university where I work.

Second, we face an important conceptual question whenever we try, at universities like mine and many others that I visit (and in k-12 education) to strengthen civic learning. Are the liberal arts automatically “civic”? In other words, is saving the liberal arts a way to accomplish “education for citizenship” (which will be the title of my talk next weekend)? In practical terms, can we say that a student who has a good basis in the liberal arts is also educated for citizenship? Or is there a distinction between civic and liberal education?

In short, my answer would be that the liberal arts provide education for a good individual life. But the specific question for citizens is how to do good things together. Citizens need collective agency.

Most or perhaps all of the liberal arts are useful for collective agency. A group of people concerned with the condition of their community can benefit from understanding economics, the carbon cycle, liberalism and its critics, and the origins of their language, to name just four examples. However, a mass of such knowledge may not sufficiently inform them about how to act well together. They also need the Tocquevillian art and science of association, the “mother science” in a democracy.

We can learn how to associate effectively and wisely from experience. If one grows up amid functioning voluntary associations and participatory democratic institutions, one may learn how to make them work well without having to study that topic extensively. However, most modern Americans lack such opportunities.

Besides, since the challenges of forming and sustaining effective groups have grown and changed in the 21st century, accumulated experience may not suffice. Civic education requires the explicit study of collective agency, often based on texts.

Note that the scale of collective action ranges from pairs of collaborators to the whole human species. A nation is one “we” among many others.

The precise topics of civic education may vary depending on students’ interests and needs. However, as illustrative examples, it can be very useful to understand how the grassroots leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement formed effective nonviolent organizations, or how a 21st century nonprofit should develop a strategic plan, or how to analyze an argument about values, or how to collect relevant environmental data, or (indeed) what James Madison advises about the problem of factionalism in Federalist #10.

These are classic topics in the liberal arts, likely offered in departments from history and biology to philosophy. What matters is the spirit and purpose of the inquiry, which must involve collective agency. The primary question is not how things work, or how things should be, or what someone thought, but what we (a group to which a person belongs) should do.

Both pedagogy and content are relevant. To learn to govern things together, it is valuable to practice discussing and writing about texts and data. These are forms of pedagogy. But it is also valuable to understand the difference between a labor union and a corporation–that is content, which can be conveyed in a lecture. Both matter.

Three quick historical illustrations may help to convey this ideal.

The earliest attested use of the phrase “liberal arts” occurs in an early and minor work by Cicero, De Inventione (1.35). He is not discussing the liberal arts. The phrase occurs in a long list of ways that people differ. A person can be male or female, strong or weak, Greek or barbarian. (I would like to ask a classicist whether Cicero, a Roman writing in Latin, considered himself a barbarian on account of his country or a Greek because of his education.) A man’s character also depends on “who he had as teachers of the liberal arts” and “who has instructed him in living.”

This brief mention is hardly a theory of the liberal arts. However, Cicero opens the book with this problem: wisdom is moot without eloquence (no one will act wisely unless persuaded), yet eloquence is morally neutral and can be used for evil. His stated objective is to serve “our republic” by uniting wisdom with eloquence. In that context, the liberal arts appear, along with moral exhortation, as ways of making men lead good lives–men who are not only individuals but also citizens of a republic.

Now compare the image of Philosophy and the Seven Liberal Arts by the remarkable woman Herrad of Landsberg (ca. 1185), which accompanies this post. Here Philosophy is the Queen. Philosophy says that the liberal arts flow from her as seven streams of wisdom, and she gets her wisdom from God. At the bottom of the picture are four bad men (listening to black birds instead of Philosophy) who violate the liberal arts. One of those is a Magician, and another is a Poet, consigned to the bottom because he makes up false stories.

Herrad may have been an exemplary participant and leader of a group–the abbey whose nuns elected her as their abbess in 1167. Nevertheless, her conception of intellectual life is religious as opposed to republican. For her, knowledge is abstract and divine, discovered not created by people. Education leads one up and out of human affairs.

Finally, Hannah Arendt aimed to recover the republican ideals that animated the young Cicero but for modern times. In 1958, she wrote:

There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves.(The Human Condition, p. 4).

Herrad of Landsberg’s truths are definitely beyond speech and relevant to the individual soul, because they are truths about God. But I think the ordinary modern liberal arts also pursue truths beyond “speech” (in Arendt’s idiosyncratic terminology). For example, pure mathematics belongs to the liberal arts. One might think that any science which relies on impersonal methods pursues truths without intrinsically requiring “speech,” and its truths can matter to people. But the liberal arts also involve truths that we make together by talking and acting. That is where the liberal arts and civic education intersect.

navigating the social sciences

Posted on September 2, 2026 by Peter

Here is a tentative effort to map the social sciences for a novice, such as a student who’s thinking of taking some social science courses. (It is a counterpart to my recent post on the humanities.) I will risk over-generalizations to offer some pointers.

I would start with three familiar cases:

Researchers want to understand and, if possible, predict a situation in which many individuals face a similar choice that is concrete and observable. For example, people can buy a specific good at a given price, apply for a job, pursue a particular kind of education, marry, or vote. Although individuals’ motives and beliefs vary, there is a typical reason that one would do each of these things (e.g., one buys a good to possess it) as well as costs, disadvantages, and competitors. Thus it should be possible to model the whole situation with an equation that shows the outcome on one side of the equal sign. To test the model, we want to collect as much data as possible, and the data tend to be concrete and unambiguous. It may not be necessary to work with samples if data can represent all the relevant behavior, as a price reflects all the recent purchases of a given good or an election tallies all the votes. Economics relies heavily (but not exclusively) or large-scale data that markets generate or that bureaucracies collect for planning purposes. The mathematics that’s most useful includes statistics (especially statistical tools for inferring causality) and calculus, which reveals maximum values subject to constraints.
Researchers want to understand a mental characteristic that is not measurable with a single datapoint. For example, they want to understand anxiety, hand-eye coordination, prejudice, or knowledge of the American Civil War. They will probably study specific human subjects, rather than use data to describe populations, and they will devote attention and ingenuity to deriving measures of unobserved, latent, and/or unconscious characteristics. This is the point of a laboratory test of perception, a multi-item survey that measures an attitude, an in-depth interview, or an exam, which might include graded essay questions along with multiple-choice items. Again, statistics is a useful tool, but now often the main statistical question is whether an individual differs from the mean of a relatively small sample that shows a lot of variation. Qualitative research becomes more prominent. And a different kind of math emerges as useful: factor analysis and related methods that turn many datapoints into scales.
Researchers want to interpret a whole human situation: a cockfight in Bali, adolescence in Samoa, a ceremonial feast in the Pacific Northwest, or indeed, a US high school or a physics lab or a Manhattan apartment building with a doorman. The key questions are what happens and what that means. Often the important happenings (cockfights, gifts, rites of passage, holiday tips) recur regularly and may not seem optional or determined by the individuals’ characteristics, such as their personal desires. Quantitative data become less relevant. Instead, the researcher’s main method is to spend a considerable amount of time in the community, observing intensively and listening to many informants.

The bastions of these approaches are, respectively, economics, psychology, and anthropology. Each discipline arose to study a restricted range of topics and then expanded by applying its favored methods to other topics.

Economists began with markets but have studied topics like voting since at least 1942 (Schumpeter) and probably earlier. Some of the pioneering anthropologists sought to understand what they then called “Man” by conducting ethnographies of people who were presumed to live as early humans had lived. Several assumptions of that approach are now rejected, and ethnography is now applied to all kinds of communities. And psychology emerged from early studies of perception and cognition by people like Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) and William James (1842-1910) plus efforts to define and treat mental illnesses by doctors like Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). The discipline now extends to all areas of human and animal life.

As a first approximation, I would say that sociology and political science are not defined by their favored methods; they are methodologically pluralistic. Instead, they are defined by their topics: respectively, society and politics. That said, both make more use of representative surveys of populations than other disciplines do. (Economists would rather work with revealed preferences, and psychologists often intensively study smaller samples.)

Also, economics and psychology are often (not always) methodologically individualist, meaning that they seek to analyze group phenomena as aggregates of individuals’ behavior. But sociology has contributed powerful models and methods that treat other things–such as classes or institutions–as the causes of outcomes. Similarly, political science contributes a focus on power, which can be missing in models that presume that people have psychological traits and choose accordingly.

Unfortunately, I do not read much research in geography, but its unique contribution is spatial analysis. A characteristic tool of geographers is a map. Public health employs many of the methods favored in the other social sciences (including maps), but it addresses diseases and syndromes that affect human beings. “Epidemiology” is derived from the Greek words for “upon the people.” Focusing on non-human factors that are “upon us” requires studying phenomena like contagion and mutation that apply to bacteria and viruses in relation to people.

Disciplines like public policy, communications, and education are methodologically pluralistic and defined by their topics. In fact, some professors of these disciplines hold PhDs in the liberal arts and apply methods that they learned there. However, experts in these fields might rightly emphasize their distinctive approaches to research. For instance, public policy research has a distinctive emphasis on feedback loops (how policies affect society, which then affects policy). And education thinks developmentally.

Finally, history is often classified among both the humanities and the social sciences. A cultural historian who seeks to enrich our perception of human artifacts is very much a humanist. Likewise, a narrative historian who weaves events and intentional action into a nonfiction narrative is humanistic. But it is also possible to employ methods like econometrics and epidemiology to the past, in which case history operates as a social science.

See also: navigating the disciplines (from 2020, with a video); the humanities for specialists and for everyone; against methodological individualism; three cores of contemporary social science (which is worryingly similar to the current post, but written in 2016); is social science too anthropocentric? etc.

the humanities for specialists and for everyone

Posted on August 24, 2026 by Peter

Imagine a person giving attention to an artifact, something that another human being has made. A toddler listens to a story, a runner hears a song on a headset, a tourist observes a painting in a museum, or a believer listens to a sermon.

This is one fundamental experience of the humanities. Notice that anyone can do it, even a baby.

Now imagine that several people attend together to something that one or many other human beings have created. Perhaps several students discuss a written text, or a congregation responds to a sermon about a passage of scripture, or a musical group explores a composition.

Attention has now become far more complex. One may attend to the object (such as the text, the song, or the image) and perhaps to the person who created it; to the other people who are also attending to it; to the thoughts and emotions that arise in one’s mind; and to whatever one expresses, often to one’s own surprise. The situation is dynamic in the sense that your view of the artifact can change, eliciting a response from you that others may hear and counter, changing your view again.

Third, imagine that the participants in a discussion are concerned about issues and problems beyond the artifact and beyond their group. In a book club about a current novel, a reader may offer a comment or a question about gender roles in our society. A purpose of a musical performance may be to motivate the audience to take action. Congregants may discuss what they should do in response to Amos 5:24, “But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.”

The complexity of the actual world vastly exceeds our capacity to reason about it. We must reason using models, which are simpler artifacts that resemble selected aspects of the world. A cultural artifact is often a model of the world that we can employ or criticize.

To summarize the argument so far: the three fundamental experiences of the humanities are private attention to an artifact, collective attention to an artifact, and participation in a public sphere in which an artifact serves as a model for deliberating on what we should do.

These experiences should remain connected. Even in a public debate, one has–or ought to have–a private relationship to the artifact, what we might call a space of “solitude” even when in company. The public sphere gains its richness from the contributions of many people who have retained their individuality.

We can explore the benefits of these three categories of experience. As just one example, a meta-analysis of the effects of reading fiction finds benefits for literacy, empathy, happiness, and even longevity (Mar, Dunk & Shoemaker 2027).

However, I would not rest the case for the humanities on their outcomes. Results probably vary. Other activities may also have benefits, perhaps even clearer ones. If you try to maximize mental health by finding the optimal mix of reading, running, meditation, and medication, reading might drop out of the formula. Finally, whether an experience of the humanities yields positive returns depends on how we do it. Reading fiction (for example) is not like a pill that lowers cholesterol. It is part of a life, and what happens next depends on us.

Instead of resting the case for the humanities on their outcomes, I would emphasize their intrinsic value. After all, what is the point of living at all? Not to boost our abilities to accomplish the next task until we die, but rather to use our time well. One way–not the only way–to employ our time well is to attend to what others have made, both alone and in company.

I noted that all human beings can have these experiences of the humanities, and probably almost all do so, at least to some extent. Expertise is not required. At the same time, any exercise of attention can deepen with time, focus, and guidance from other people. I can get more out of a poem by Elizabeth Bishop today than I would have gleaned from the same work 30 years ago. Fifty years ago, I was alive but had not even heard of Bishop. And today, some other people can get more from her work than I can because they have developed more relevant expertise. In this sense, anyone can be on a journey to heighten or enrich or broaden our attention.

Today we have expert humanists, such as professors of the humanistic disciplines, curators, editors, critics, and clergy and schoolteachers. Considering that all human beings can experience the humanities, what is the value of their expertise?

First, the scholarly humanities are valuable for their ultimate influence on the layperson’s experience of artifacts. This does not mean that every specialist must always address a lay audience directly. Specialization allows experts to exchange ideas efficiently without having to reexplain their methods, background knowledge, or basic concepts every time. Jargon has immense practical value. Nevertheless, the purpose of a whole body of scholarly literature is ultimately to influence the experience of non-specialists.

Elizabeth Bishop died in 1979, and I never came close to meeting her. A vast amount of verse by all kinds of people is available on the Internet. Why then do I sometimes read Bishop? Scholars and critics, who have read much more poetry than I have, have made her canonical. She features in anthologies that I (as a light reader of poetry) am likely to encounter. Sometimes, an anthology offers useful notes or prefatory comments or a biographical sketch that helps me to understand a poet in her context. When things go well, an extensive and perhaps somewhat technical scholarly discussion can filter down to an entry in an anthology that gives me an experience that I would otherwise miss. Similarly, a professional jazz performance benefits from musicology, often transmitted to the performers during their education. And any k12 or college course should benefit from scholarship.

Scholarship can have a positive valence, helping us to see why and how to enjoy an object more. It can have a neutral valence, simply helping us to analyze an artifact. Or it can be critical, in the sense of negative–revealing flaws in the original. The point of scholarship is not to maximize the pleasure that we take from any given artifact or to convince us to value it more, but rather to help us attend to it better. In the extreme, research can persuade us to turn away from a text after we know more about it, although in that case, I think we should turn to another work rather than giving up.

Second, just as ordinary people employ cultural artifacts to make points about the social world, so do professional humanists. Because a cultural artifact is a model of our world, professionals and experts can use it effectively to argue about the world beyond.

I agree with at least two points from the Washington University/Vanderbilt Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences. First,

The problem is not that many scholars are politically active, or that they see their scholarly work as relevant to their activism. Scholars are members of the polity who rightly take an interest in social problems. Moreover, insofar as their scholarly competence provides them with relevant expertise, it is perfectly acceptable — some would say obligatory (Chomsky 1967) — for scholars to advocate for concrete reforms in light of their expertise

Second:

The problem is not that scholarship in these areas is often critical or oppositional, aiming to debunk or correct the presuppositions of previous scholarship and the wider set of established cultural norms that scholarship reflects.

For the authors of this report, the main problem is not either of these but rather “distortion,” which arises in its “most straightforward form … when otherwise traditional scholarship is constrained by disciplinary norms to yield results that have been determined in advance to be required by a political or social project.” The report claims, “Every field we have studied shows some signs of … a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of long-standing ideals of rigor and objectivity.”

I recognize examples that meet this description, but I am not sure that I would characterize them as prevalent or getting worse. Instead, I would ask the following evaluative question (which I do not find in the Report): Do humanist participate in the public sphere?

To enter a public discussion, you can have a political agenda; in fact, it can be a contribution. You can adopt radical and unpopular views. And you can even come from a homogeneous community of thinkers. Intellectual diversity is an asset, but not the only one; and in any case, groups of people who appear philosophically homogeneous from afar are often focused on their own worthy debates–whether they happen to be comparative literature professors or evangelical pastors.

However, to participate genuinely in the public debate, you must attend to a real audience. Attending to them means figuring out what they think, value, and aim for. You might decide to change your own mind or at least adjust the questions that you consider timely and pressing. Or you may want to change their minds, but that requires knowing them. If your goal is to inflience the world, you must also thoughtfully choose which audiences to engage. No change will come from offering persuasive arguments to people who already agree.

One reason that some humanists–I do not know how many–fail to engage the public is that they reject or abhor millions of their fellow citizens on moral grounds. Another obstacle is a romantic view that all real people agree, or would agree if only they were liberated from propaganda. Effective rhetoric requires investigating what other people really think, in all their diversity and complexity. This is partly a question for research, but there is no substitute for interacting with a variety of fellow citizens and paying attention to the response.

To conclude: the core of the humanities is a set of solitary and collaborative experiences that all human beings can have and whose primary value is intrinsic, although the humanities also help us to debate the social world. Expertise and professional scholarship can enrich those experiences, even when the scholarship is critical. Experts need not always be directly engaged with non-experts, but the scholarly discussion and the public sphere must be connected.

I would ask to what extent the public and professional humanists are genuinely attentive to each other, in the sense of striving to understand and influence one another. If there is a gap, I would charge professional humanists with fixing it. Perhaps laypeople would be well advised to pay more attention to scholarship. However, only the scholars themselves can convince everyone else to give us tuition, donations, royalties, and tax revenues and to entrust their children’s education to us. And that requires attending to them.

Source: Raymond A. Mar, Rebecca J. Dunk, Lilly H. Shoemaker, “The benefits of Reading Narrative Fiction,” Current Opinion in Psychology, volume 73, 202; the Washington University/Vanderbilt University Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences. See also: “The world wants the humanities”; why the humanities could never be automated; the humanities as civic education; paradigms of attention, etc.

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)

Civic Studies

An intellectual community of researchers and practitioners dedicated to building the emerging field of civic studies

Category Archives: academia