My son is playing baseball right now, and one thing he’s learning is that becoming a good hitter requires practice and repetition. The same is true for becoming good citizens: We have to do our reps.
Democracy is a living and breathing thing that requires all of us to engage. It’s a participatory sport, not a reality TV show. It doesn’t work if we cynically sit on the sidelines, as I discussed on a virtual panel last week on the role of higher education in our democratic republic as part of Wesleyan University’s Democracy 250 celebrations.
I was delighted to join leaders at the University of Virginia, Bard College, and Cuyahoga Community College, along with our hosts at Wesleyan, to discuss how each institution is helping students embrace the skills and knowledge that our democracy requires of its citizens.
Melody Barnes, the former Obama administration official now serving as a professor and the executive director of the Karsh Institute of Democracy at UVA, shared how they are helping students build the skills and dispositions to engage across difference.
At Bard, Jonathan Becker, the Director of the Center for Civic Engagement and professor with expertise in Russian politics, shared that civic engagement is the enemy of authoritarians and detailed the Center’s work with students to study and protect voting rights.
Katie Montgomery, at Cuyahoga Community College, Ohio’s oldest community college fondly known as Tri-C, shared the campus’ Democracy Fellows program, which focuses on peer-to-peer voter education. Their creative work includes an original non-partisan voting anthem, created by Tri-C Fellows and artist Corey Bapes.
Learning to be an engaged citizen of our democracy should anchor on a core of knowledge about how our system works, like an anatomy class for pre-med students. It means knowing what your county commissioner does. It also means knowing who’s on your city council. When you hear a debate about redistricting, which is all over the news now, it means knowing how that issue ties to census data and why it matters in the primary process.
It means understanding that activism, which is an important part of our democratic republic, is one tool of many to affect change. It means understanding that freedom of speech is also about the freedom to hear diverse viewpoints, especially those that are challenging.
It is not just college students who need these reps – we all do. One way we practice this at the George W. Bush Institute is by focusing on principled leadership through our Presidential Leadership Scholars program.
This highly selective program is a partnership between two Republican and two Democratic former presidents and their presidential centers – George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Lyndon B. Johnson. The scholars, all mid-career leaders who spend six modules together developing their own leadership skills – like decision-making, influence and persuasion, strategic partnerships, and vision and communication – while working on personal projects to make a difference in their own communities.
We build cohorts that span sectors, geography, and political ideology, and then bring these leaders together to focus on problem-solving across differences in very practical ways. We have over 600 alums who are now able to take these lessons of applied democracy back to their communities. Applications just opened for the 2027 cohort.
We prioritize analyzing how policies and messages were built and advanced in each of the partner administrations. We focus on how coalitions were built, decisions were made, and problems were solved, often requiring work and relationships across the aisle.
This kind of governing is still a big part of America, particularly in state legislatures and local government. It may not always be in the headlines, but there are many examples of policy that serves Americans in big and small ways around the country.
Our democracy needs people with practical citizenship skills, the ability to engage across differences to get things done, and a desire to be of service in our communities. When I look forward to America’s next 250 years, that’s what I hope for, for all the young people that I know and love in my life – my son and his friends – and for every young person around our nation.
