Raj Vinnakota is President of the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, co-founder of the SEED Foundation, and co-chair of the Civics and Civic Engagement Taskforce for the United States Congress Semiquincentennial Commission.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Raj Vinnakota discuss the best strategies for building a campus environment conducive to genuine conversations and the free exchange of ideas and opinions; the key skills and knowledge required of administration, faculty, and students to become productive members of their campus communities; and how we can bridge the gap in civic knowledge and values that have contributed to a breakdown in constructive engagement.
Read the rest of Persuasion’s series on “Universities, Liberalism and Democracy.”
The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: You've been leading an organization that, among other things, works with college presidents to help them think through how they can ensure that students at colleges and universities actually learn to be good citizens; that they get good civic education and do all the other things that are necessary for them to really engage with the world in a productive way.
I imagine it’s been a busy few months.
Raj Vinnakota: It has been a busy few years, Yascha. I'm a scientist by training—a molecular biologist, actually. So I look at this from a science perspective as well, seeing all of the inputs and really wanting to capture the data about what we're learning here.
Mounk: So tell us a little bit about the gap at universities that you were trying to address before everything exploded. And then perhaps we can go on to talk about how that manifested now in this situation of high tension on campus.
How are universities actually doing at trying to mold good citizens, at ensuring that students come out with a real understanding of what the American Constitution is and what the basic values of liberal democracy are? What, before this moment of crisis, was the gap that you identified to start your work?
Vinnakota: Our work around civic preparation actually started here at this organization when I became president in July of 2019. And I brought this broader notion that we need to reprioritize citizen development, civic preparation, as a societal responsibility. I started to have conversations with college presidents, and they kept telling me over and over again that higher ed, frankly, had lost its way; that the pendulum had swung way too far in its being viewed as a private good; and that actually higher education has a public good set of responsibilities around developing citizens and engaging in our democracy. And we heard that over and over again in the conversations we had with presidents.
At the same time, at the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, we've done a series of surveys of 18 to 24 year olds. We came out with a major one in September of last year that showed real deficiencies when it came to civic knowledge: whether or not our population was well-informed, whether or not they were engaged in and productive in their communities; and also (and this is the third part of how we define a citizen) in their commitment to democracy in America. So we were worried that across all three of those areas we were seeing deficiencies.
Mounk: So tell me a little bit about that survey. What is it that college students know and what is it that they don't know?
Vinnakota: So this was called the Youth Civic Outlook Report. And I want to be clear, it was 18 to 24 year olds writ large, so it went beyond college students. What we saw was significant deficiencies around civic knowledge. We had 82% of young people that age who were not civically well-informed.
One question was: Who breaks a tie in the Senate? And then another one is what political parties are in power in the House, in the Senate, and in the presidency. So it's part structures and part about understanding who's in charge right now.
So it depends on the question, but, by and large, less than 75% knew the answer to any of those questions. And with the more difficult questions, it was less than 50%.
Mounk: So this is something that my colleague Roberto Foa and I have been working on for a long time. And at the time, in 2014, we made the argument that people in general are starting to give less importance to democracy than they once did, and to be more open to authoritarian alternatives to democracy, including extreme ones like army rule.
Sometimes people misunderstood our argument as exclusive to the youth. But it is more pronounced among young people. We've since had attempts to replicate that data across a broader set of countries—the Open Society Foundation had a big study internationally asking some of the same questions and they have confirmed our interpretation of data at the time: that this is a very significant problem and it has grown worse. So what is it that you found specifically among American young people on some of these questions?
Vinnakota: We looked at a couple of different things. We didn't look at much over time, but what we did look at and ask was: When you think of democracy, what are the core pieces that are really important to you? And what you saw was a much greater focus around values. When people think about democracy, it's about fairness, equality, or specific aspects of how you think about democracy in an operational sense. So that there was a clear differentiation there.
One of the things that was actually very positive for us is that young people were twice as willing to engage in difficult conversations as the general population. So that's one of the ways that we started to think about how we can engage in these issues even at a young age and to think about K-12 and how to ensure that young people are civically well-informed.
Mounk: I think the findings as you're presenting them seem to me to be broadly in line with what my read of the literature is, which is to say that most citizens of democratic countries, including in the United States and including young people, like democracy; they certainly wouldn't say that they're against democracy in the starkest way. But they prioritize, to put it nicely, their substantive policy goals or, to put it less nicely, their partisan political interests over the maintenance of democratic norms. So both from various polling questions, from various experiments in social psychology, and just from observing how voters actually act, you can see that in the abstract, of course, they think democratic norms and institutions are very important. But when these clash with particular policy goals, they have two ways of getting around that constraint. The first is to say, well, this policy goal is so important that it is fine to violate this long-standing democratic norm in order to pursue it. And that's roughly how I think not all citizens, but a majority of citizens in most democratic countries feel right now, and that's why it's so hard to protect against attacks on democracy.
So what's the theory of action here? How is it that you want to give these young people civic knowledge? How do you think that is going to improve political outcomes for our democracy?
Vinnakota: Let me kind of come at this both philosophically and practically. Philosophically, I actually think one of our superpowers at Citizens & Scholars is that we're able to build a community. Because that's what you have to recognize: What we have is interlocking concentric circles of community. People with very different perspectives and views engaging together. Let’s talk about our college presidents survey. We started with 15 last August. We're at 65 and growing at this point. And they also have a diverse set of perspectives and views, but we’re holding them in a community and saying, look, we're all in this boat together. We actually have to figure out how we work together on these issues.
On a practical level, we developed a set of civic commitments that everyone has to champion. That is kind of the entry point to being part of our work, which is called College Presidents for Civic Preparedness. And at its core, those commitments are really about affirming a flourishing, diverse, truth-seeking community that is working together so that you develop young people who are citizens who can engage in self-government. That's the North Star. That is where you want to get to. Embedded in that is that we're actually all in that same boat and we have to work on it and we don't necessarily know the exact right way to go. Many people talk about America being an experiment. And in similar ways, each of our institutions is experimenting with this to try to figure out what's the best way to actually go forward. To me that's actually one of the beauties of the work that we're doing. We have 65 institutions (we're growing fast) who are all trying to figure out how we hold ourselves in a community that is actually flourishing, diverse and truth-seeking.
I mentioned the joy of working with such a diverse group. Part of what we've been doing very deliberately from the beginning is to make sure that the group of college presidents and institutions we work with includes large state universities, regional state universities, small elite liberal arts schools, AAU institutions, ideologically very different campuses as well as presidents. You've got Wesleyan and Wellesley, to Dartmouth and Cornell, to Rutgers and Minnesota, and Wisconsin to Claremont McKenna College to Rollins College, to Sewanee and Johns Hopkins, and Georgetown. It's really important for us to be able to have that diversity, from a learning perspective, but also because it doesn't immediately categorize us. We actually just got our first community college presidents to join as well.
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Mounk: So let's speak about community for a moment, and then I want to come back to the college presidents. There's two kinds of communities, right? There's communities in which people have very diverse views, but because the members of the community know each other and trust each other, they are able to look past those views or perhaps even have genuine conversations about which of those views is correct in a way that is open-minded and might lead some people to change their own stance.
But there are also communities that enforce a form of homogeneity. And we see from experiments by Cass Sunstein and others that often communities where most members have a view exclusively in one direction actually radicalize. What he's shown is that when juries deliberate on what kind of damages to give the victim of a car that was faulty, often they might come in individually saying it should be $500,000 to a million. And after they deliberate together, among people who all thought this was bad, they end up with four or five million, right? The product of a collective deliberation ends up being more extreme than the product of the individual attitudes going in. And that's true not only in this context where you might have some sympathy for the victim but for all kinds of other things; when it comes to abortion policy, people radicalize in this kind of way in groups.
And I worry that this is particularly true in parts of the American elite in New England, where a lot of colleges are located and particularly in those elite colleges. So when I speak to Europeans, they often think that America continues to be Puritan in significant ways, and they usually locate that in the Bible belt. But to me, the most Puritan part of America in many ways is precisely the places where the Puritans have historically been the strongest. The nature of their views has changed radically from the views of the people who founded those institutions. But the nature of the moral imaginary of how that community works is still remarkably similar in my mind. And part of that is if you somehow place yourself outside the community through action or word, if you somehow go outside the acceptable bounds of what you're supposed to say and think, then you are a danger to it, you are a pollutant, and we need to purify the community—I think that is actually a Puritan inheritance, even though there are no Puritans left at these institutions. So that's one of my theories of the case.
And so then the question becomes, all right, so you do have college campuses where you have people genuinely of great ethnic and geographic diversity, to some extent real political diversity; but because the predominant set of views among students, among faculty members, and perhaps especially among administrators skews very clearly in one direction, I don't know that they are very good at the moment at creating communities where people feel empowered to have genuine conversations and exchange. And so, is the community aspect a boon or a problem, and how can we turn it from being in many cases a problem into something that is actually a boon?
Vinnakota: So I'm gonna set aside as much of the New England piece as possible as someone who now lives in a town of 8000 people in Maine. We could have that conversation for the rest of our time.
Mounk: I'm fascinated by small towns in New England, so talk to me about your small town in Maine as much as you like.
Vinnakota: Well, one of the reasons that I love living up here is because there is an ethic of communitarianism, and that kind of Bob Putnam social capital—and especially when you have one elementary school, one middle school, one high school, and two grocery stores, you're gonna see everyone everywhere, right? And I think that that actually helps create some bounds in how you talk about each other and how you work together, because you're in a community and you're not leaving. So you do actually need to work towards solutions. But let me also now talk about how I see this happening on college campuses: One of the most exciting pieces of our work is that in the late fall, a number of college presidents came to us and said, “We've been working with you now for a few years around how do we bring the knowledge, skills, and dispositions of civic preparation on our campus. But it seems to us that this may be a moment to actually really leap forward.”
And we started having a series of conversations, and we decided to take on an audacious goal, which was to bring both the teaching, the education of civil discourse, constructive dialogue, community problem solving, and then the practice of it to our campuses not as an opt-in, not as a single faculty member, not as a debate in front of you, but rather as a campus-wide approach so that every single student develops these skills and graduates with them—that's an audacious undertaking because when you looked around we didn't see any institution doing it at that level. They're almost always opt-in. So we started working with those three presidents. When we shared it with the other portion of our consortium, 18 presidents raised their hand and said, “We're in. Let's go do this, now is the time.” And so we're developing action plans with these 18 institutions. And it has to be a very broad approach that takes into account orientation, student life, academics and curricular (but also co- and extracurricular).
We are also going to measure whether we're actually being effective not only at the intervention level but at the campus climate level: What are we seeing in terms of affective polarization? What are we seeing in terms of students being comfortable speaking up for their points of view? What are we seeing about students being comfortable hearing different points of view? And then every president can decide other measures they want to use as well. But these are ones that we've said we will measure across all of our institutions.
Mounk: We'll have to have you come back to give us those results when they're there, but tell us a little bit more about those different buckets that you're exploring right now and what your best guess is at the moment as to what would work.
If a university president comes to you and says, “Hey, I'm in, give me some advice about which direction I should go in,” what, at this point, do you think would be the set of best practices that can actually Increase civic knowledge among students, deepen their commitment to democracy, and, perhaps most importantly, create the kind of community in which people can be their authentic selves and have difficult conversations across political divides?
Vinnakota: From a theory perspective, when we look at our work on campus-wide immersion, we often talk about the fact that the skills development piece is one of three aspects of the work. You have to start actually by creating the motivation to want to do this. You have to create an internal reason to do this both on a societal level but also frankly on a selfish level. You then have to create the social permission for it; the good news, as we know from research, is that social permission doesn't even have to be a majority. You just have to see one other person or two other people acting the way you want to act, and that really breaks open the floodgates. And so in cases where we're talking with our presidents and working with our schools, it's everything from getting captains of athletic teams and leaders on campuses to come together and voice the ways in which we want people to be acting, and in that way actually to be role models for others.
You use the words “best practices”—I want to shy away from that because, frankly, there's been very little measurement in this space, and as a scientist I would say I don't have data yet that tells me what a best practice is. There's some theories of the work. Best hunches. And there are multiple ways of getting at this and we know that there are five or six or seven different projects and programs that are working on this. Some of them you've had on this podcast, like Eboo Patel and Interfaith America; Braver Angels and so on are doing this work.
Our best hunch is it's some mix of doing this with pre-orientation work, in the student life, and in curricula, but led by students who are providing the social permission and then implementing all of these skills in a different manner.
Mounk: Let's address the elephant in the room, which is October 7th, Israel's war in Gaza and the very deep tensions this has led to on campus. I assume that this has woken up many university presidents to not just the importance but also the urgency of doing this kind of work. But I wonder whether it's also, in some ways, shown the limits of how much you can achieve once this culture has eroded and you're in a moment of crisis.
I'm trying to decide in my mind between two different hypotheses: Hypothesis A is that the universities that have done a lot better at giving students civic knowledge and, more importantly, at modeling constructive disagreement between students—of creating that kind of healthy community where you can live with tension—have had better outcomes in the last months, have had fewer students feel that the campus is not safe for them, have had forms of protest that were more likely to conform to basic rules of university and basic laws beyond the university, and have therefore perhaps avoided the kind of showdown between encampments and police that have characterized many campuses (but by no means most or all campuses.)
Hypothesis B is that all that stuff matters a little bit at the margins and at the edges, but what is more important ultimately is different kinds of things from the specific composition of the student body, whether there's an elevated number of students on one side of these issues or on both sides of these issues; whether your campus is in a major city where there's lots of outside activists who can come in and use the campus as a staging ground; whether you have a student body that is just much more inclined to forms of activism that perhaps see challenging authority as part of this repertoire of protest and the model of how to push for social change. And if all of those things are true, then perhaps the best civics program and the best culture you're trying to build on campus is just always going to be overrun by these other factors, when push comes to shove.
Do you think it's clear which hypothesis is closer to the truth?
Vinnakota: It’s too soon to tell, because there's not yet enough remove and enough data to really give us a sense of what's happened and why it's happened. We're still unearthing things every week. Here's what I would argue. There are things that you can do on your campus to ameliorate the issues that we're seeing. I have no idea what ends up being the spark that sets off a conflagration in one place versus not another.
Part of what's gotten very difficult, especially when you think about holding people together in a community, is the difficulty of navigating false binaries. What you have is people going to their own corners and the work right now is actually about bringing people back into the community—and that's really hard, as you know, when you create really hard and fast lines where people can't navigate between them, or when you burn bridges. And so for me, so much of the work of the last six to nine months has been to support presidents who want to keep those bridges. I get very excited when I see institutions where professors come together and say, “It is our responsibility to educate our students on these issues and to be role models.” One of the things that brings me great joy is that we have these presidents who are a bit of a microcosm in holding community with people of very different views. If you look at the list of our presidents, they are all committing to being part of this community and working and learning from each other, even if they don't necessarily come with the same views and frankly are at very different stages of the journey towards actually championing the civic commitments.
I think part of the question you're asking is what to do practically. And I'm not a college president (thank God). But one thing I would talk to them about as they plan for the fall is to remember to set conduct rules and enforce them consistently and communicate them constantly. (And it can't just be you, the president, communicating those.) Then, practical things like no masks, keeping outsiders outside (now, that's a lot easier to say at a private institution than a public institution). Differentiate between violence and civil disobedience. To the extent possible, engage in good faith, especially with students, who are, a lot of them, coming because they're seeing a moral issue that they want to engage with deeply. The good faith portion is really important as well because if the goalposts keep getting moved, that's not good faith. I want to be clear about that.
You want to model constructive civil discourse, so do that as much as possible so that you're modeling the things you want to see from students and administrators and others in your community.
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Raj Vinnakota on How to Stop Campus from Boiling Over