Our Purpose
The Yale Center for Civic Thought aims to encourage thoughtful public discourse and civically responsible intellectual life in a rising generation of students, faculty, citizens, and leaders.
Our Responsibilities
Sustainable self-government requires citizens who see themselves as part of a shared project and take responsibility for understanding and meeting the challenges faced by constitutional democracies. It also requires universities to recognize their relationship to the larger society and their potential to strengthen its civic institutions and commitments.
Universities already contribute to society by supporting research in what has become, for better and worse, an ever-expanding number of fields and subfields in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. But they can do more. They should also advance a tradition of shared inquiry that we call “civic thought.”
What is Civic Thought?
Civic thought begins with the recognition that the most challenging problems of political life are profound, complex and long-standing, not easily solved by any one theory or approach. Civic thought therefore draws from every available source of insight – from history as well as contemporary experience, from classic works of political thought and literature as well as the most recent empirical research in the social sciences, from the reflections of policymakers and ordinary citizens as well as trained philosophers and scientists, from the young as well as the old, and – importantly – from a wide variety of ethical, political and religious perspectives.
Bringing together these different sorts of knowledge, civic thought proceeds dialogically, through informed and probing conversations about our fundamental moral and political disagreements. The best civic thought is accurate and answerable. It yields insights we would not have come to on our own. And it restores hope that we can manage our shared political predicaments together.
Yale’s Center is built on the conviction that the language of citizenship and civic thought should not belong to any one party or faction. We all have a stake in making our shared civic life more thoughtful.
Civic thought is especially important now, when different forms of knowledge are often siloed into separate faculties and when new technologies are tempting us to outsource the difficult work of integration and judgement to artificial intelligence.
Our Approach
Our approach to civic education prioritizes small, rigorous conversations, rooted in place, deepened by reading, and linked to practical expertise.
Students and faculty who take part in our Center’s activities will be encouraged to
- Engage thoughtfully with writings from the history of political thought and the American political traditions
- Explore the challenges that constitutional democracies have faced in previous eras
- Analyze how government and society function today
- Gain experience collaborating across lines of deep disagreement
In all its activities, the Center aims to cultivate habits of thought and expression essential for self-government: untrammeled curiosity; a responsibility to truth that emerges from an accurate survey and grasp of relevant facts; careful analysis and creative imagination; attentive listening and generous interpretation; a readiness for discussions that challenge our assumptions and expand our horizons; and an interest in persuading others along with an openness to being persuaded.
Distinct among programs of Civic Thought, Yale’s Center works on furthering these goals at three different scales: on campus, with New Haven, and nationally.
Our Work
The Center hosts events that emphasize real back-and-forth among students, faculty, and guest speakers about transformative texts and society’s most challenging public issues. Building on six years of work by Yale’s Civic Thought Initiative, the Center invites scholars, journalists and policymakers for guest seminars, encourages students to take the lead in designing reading and discussion groups, and supports faculty and postdoctoral associates in developing new courses and research agendas related to civic thought.
Since 2016, the Citizens Thinkers Writers program has been bringing local public high schoolers into college-style seminars on transformative texts from the history of political thought and linking those texts to live political questions. Sparked by the readings, students share reflections on how their own conduct and moral awareness relate to civic life in New Haven. They meet leaders active in the city’s government and civil society to explore the practical implications of their discussions, to learn how power works in the city, and to reimagine what they might do together as citizens. Mentored by faculty, graduate students and undergraduates, the high school students learn to translate their civic thinking into effective writing and speaking, key skills of citizenship, while the mentors develop a sense of responsibility for knowing and passing on civic knowledge and competencies.
The Center has formed a partnership with the Philosophy and Society Initiative of the Aspen Institute to give our students and faculty the opportunity to build a philosophical community with national-level political leaders, journalists, and policy experts in Washington, D.C. We will soon announce additional partnerships that will bring students from Yale and New Haven into dialogue with communities around the country.