On Campus

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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 five years of work by Yale’s Civic Thought Initiative, the Center invites scholars, journalists and policy-makers 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.

The 2025-26 academic year will prioritize three areas of inquiry:

  • Constitutional Democracy in America at 250
  • The Role of Universities in Civic Life
  • Humanity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Constitutional questions about executive power, matters of war and justice in Ukraine and the Middle East, moral questions about how new technologies influence our characters, cultural questions about loneliness and masculinity, philosophical questions about how modernity changes our understanding of nature – all of these, and more, have been topics of Civic Thought discussions in recent years.

Guest Seminars & Dinner Forums

The Center brings scholars, journalists, politicians, and authors from a wide range of perspectives to campus to take part in discussions on policy matters and on underlying cultural and philosophical questions. 

Rather than sponsoring lectures to large audiences or debates on a stage, the Center creates small, seminar-sized conversations and uniquely structured dinner panels, where participants can try out new ideas, ask questions, and gain experience disagreeing with one another in enlightening ways. 

Guest seminars offer participants the opportunity to engage directly with invited guests  for 90 minutes in a unique format that prioritizes collective inquiry. Each seminar is focused on a big question, providing a space to explore complex issues that do not have easy or settled answers. Avoiding a more traditional Q&A format, attendance at seminars is capped to ensure all participants can introduce themselves and participate in the conversation. 

Following an initial exchange between the guest and a discussant, both are asked to step back and listen as the seminar participants engage one another in discussion about what they just have heard and read in advance. 

After about twenty minutes of silent observation, the guest and discussant are invited to rejoin the conversation for the remaining time to respond to what they’ve heard, add to the conversation, and pose questions of their own.   

Dinner Forums, lasting 3 1/2 hours, are more involved, organized into three distinct segments: 1) participants gather to listen to a moderated discussion between guest panelists 2)  participants engage in small group discussions over dinner to debrief and share thoughts about the panel 3) participants reconvene to partake in an open discussion among the larger group. 

Open to all members of the Yale community, these events bring together an interdisciplinary and intergenerational mix of undergraduate students, graduate and professional students, postdocs, faculty, staff, and administrators to share and test out ideas. In order to encourage a spirit of candid experimentation, these events are typically off-the-record and not recorded. 

View upcoming and past events here.

Yale offers many opportunities for students to listen to guest speakers in crowded auditoriums; the chance to talk with these guests around a small classroom table is much rarer…The environment that the Civic Thought Initiative fosters feels distinctly collaborative and dialogical. 

—

Tyus Sheriff ’25

Coffeehouse

Our weekly Coffeehouse is held Mondays from 4-5pm in the lobby of Rosenkranz Hall. Every Coffeehouse features a new discussion question, intended to spark conversation, related to one of our three annual themes. Yale students, faculty, and staff across campus are invited to attend and test out ideas over refreshments. Special guest coffeehouses allow participants to engage in thoughtful conversation with an expert scholar or partitioner with firsthand knowledge about the topic that week.

View the current Coffeehouse schedule, including Guest Coffeehouses, here.

Reading & Discussion Groups

Founded in response to student interest, the Center’s reading and discussion groups offer students a chance to shape intellectual life at Yale while building habits of inquiry essential to civic life. 

Yale students, staff, and faculty can propose their own reading groups here.

2025-26 Offerings

Liberalisms and Idealisms - led by Alex Battle Abdelal and David Rosenbloom

Surviving the attention economy with your sanity & integrity intact! - led by Professor Kevin Elliot

Civic thought & the Christian classical education movement - led by Professor Jennifer Herdt

On “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution” by Jill Lepore - led by Bryan Garsten

The Loose Cannon - led by Charlie Humphreys, Noah Torrance, & Siena Valdivia

Can politics in the United States de-polarize? - led by Professor Maria Jose Hierro

Hannah Arendt on the Human Condition - led by Agnes Sjoblad & Caroline Pecore

Intellectual Origins of the Rule of Law - led by Professor Daniel Schillinger

Agree to Disagree: Speeches and Debates that Made and Frayed America - led by Professor Kieran Mabey

Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement - led by Professor Robert Gooding-Williams

Monuments, Universities, and Civic Life - led by Professor Marisa Bass

Can Movies Teach us Civic Values? - led by Professor Noel Valis

Hans Jonas on Are Humans Special? - led by Professor Bryan Garsten

Merit: Meaningful or Myth?- The Hyper Selective Admissions Process and Its Role in Modern Society - led by Jeremiah Quinlan

Unprecedented Times: The 2025-26 SCOTUS Term, by and for Non-Lawyers - led by JT Timmers, William Mahoney, and Marko Gajic

The Origins of Democratic Thinking - led by Professor Daniel Schillinger and Professor Kieran Mabey

Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution - led by Noah Rosenfield and Caroline Pecore

Civil-Military Relations - led by Ed Cox 

Hannah Arendt (2024-2025)

Masculinity (2024-2025)

The Loneliness Epidemic (2024-2025)

The State and Global Order (2024-2025)

Undirected Studies (2024-2025)

Undergraduate Political Theory Reading Group (2021-2024)

10/7 and the War in Gaza (2023)

The Russo-Ukraine War: Causes and Consequences (2022)

Ethics, Technology and the Environment in the thought of Hans Jonas (2021)

Meritocracy, Aristocracy, and America’s Elite (2021)

Free Speech (2021)

The 2020 Presidential Election (2020)

The Civic Thought Initiative provides us with a forum to try out answers in an environment that is open-minded and judgment-free, to subject our time-tested beliefs to a fresh skepticism, and parse through ideas that have yet to be fully formed in dialogue with mentors and peers. 

—

Enza Jonas-Giugni YC ’25

Courses

Faculty associated with the Center, including the Center’s postdoctoral associate, create and teach courses that encourage students to reflect on fundamental questions of civic life. The Center offers course development grants to encourage the creation of new courses and pathways through Yale’s curriculum. 

Courses conceived and taught in recent years by Civic Thought Initiative faculty include:

  • The Common Good
  • American Political Thought
  • Demagoguery and Democracy
  • The Ethics and Politics of Artificial Intelligence
  • The Politics of Human Flourishing: Ancient Political Philosophy
  • Individualism and Community: Tocqueville and J.S. Mill
  • AI and Democracy
  • Commerce and Equality: Montesquieu and Rousseau
  • Liberty, Equality and Citizenship

It was inspiring to witness the engagement of students and faculty in a vigorous discussion of issues of fundamental importance to our democracy.

—

Alan Gerber, Director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies and Sterling Professor of Political Science

Student Fellowship Program

Undergraduate and graduate students at Yale can choose to participate in the Center for Civic Thought Student Fellowship program. Fellows play an outsized role in Center planning and programming. They suggest speakers, organize reading groups, and attend group trips and retreats.

More importantly, though, Fellows model the intellectual curiosity and civic-mindedness the Center hopes to engender across Yale and beyond. They encourage productive dialogue, think broadly about the world and their place in it, and grapple with the leading moral, political, and philosophical questions of the day. While most people tend to avoid messy conversations, Fellows seek them out. They believe that intellectual diversity is valuable not for its own sake but for what it is capable of producing: bold ideas to meet the moment and a thoughtful, more grounded citizenry writ large. 

Click to learn more about the Student Fellowship Program below.

We are thrilled to hear that you are interested in becoming a Student Fellow in Civic Thought!

First: There is no application process. Instead, there is work for us to do together. We will recognize as Fellows any and all students who become active participants and leaders in the Civic Thought community. Fellows are students who have gained experience through the discussions we sponsor and who have taken responsibility for helping to build the culture the Center aims to foster on campus. 

What does this mean in practice? Students will be inducted as Fellows if they complete the following steps of the Fellowship initiation: 

  • Attend a Fellows Intensive or Retreat
     
  • Participate in at least 3 Center events or activities such as:
    • Weekly Coffeehouse (RKZ lobby from 4-5pm)
    • Guest Seminar
    • Dinner Forum
    • Reading and Discussion Group
    • Residential College Collaboration
       
  • Take the lead on an event or a reading and discussion group
     
  • Write and submit a dialogue as part of the Center’s Dialogue Project

Upon completing these requirements, prospective Fellows should complete our Fellowship Induction Form. 

If you complete these requirements, you will be invited to become a part of the Civic Thought Fellowship for the remainder of your time at Yale and will be able to shape the future activities of the Center.  To start the process, please fill out our Student Fellowship Interest Form.

Only undergraduate and graduate students can become Student Fellows, whereas our Senior Fellowship cohort is made up of Yale faculty and staff. 

That said, Student and Senior Fellows undertake much of the same work. They both organize reading groups, attend events, shape programming, and convene with Center leadership.

The Dialogue Project

The Yale Center for Civic Thought aims to preserve space for thinking amidst the busyness of practical and political life. The Dialogue Project aims to promote civic thoughtfulness by encouraging the practice of inner dialogue.

Many civics programs focus only on external dialogues. They aim to encourage civil discourse by giving students experience in talking across lines of disagreement. While our Center does seek to include a wide variety of viewpoints in our activities, it recognizes that these external dialogues are most effective when we approach them with a reflective, thoughtful attitude. And we can cultivate that attitude by practicing not only actual conversations with others, but also imagined dialogues within ourselves. The political theorist Hannah Arendt, reflecting on Plato, defined thinking as the practice of an “inner dialogue.”

Dialogues may be submitted by email to civicthought@yale.edu or uploaded to the Student Fellowship Induction Form. 

Each year, the Center awards a prize for the best dialogue submitted to the project.

TD Think Tank

TD Think Tank

TD Think Tank began as an experiment in response to students in Timothy Dwight who wanted to play a more active role in shaping their college experience. Developed in partnership with Head Michal Beth Dinkler and Eric Liu TD ‘90, the group meets weekly throughout the academic year. Participants read selected texts and engage in sustained, thoughtful conversation about community, civic life, and the purposes of a Yale education. 

Think Tank encourages nonjudgmental dialogue and invites students to turn conversation into constructive action within TD and beyond. In its first year, participants self-organized into working groups on four topics: civic education, encouraging a culture of disagreement in the classroom, grade inflation, and Yale-New Haven relations. The working groups conducted research, met with campus and community leaders, and developed proposals to address each issue.

TD Students interested in ‘26/27, contact Head Dinkler.