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 the guest speaker for 90 minutes. Dinner panels, lasting 3.5 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.
“Are Men Necessary?”
Ross Douthat (The New York Times)
April 18, 2025
“Real News: Challenges in Covering Politics Today”
Molly Ball (The Wall Street Journal)
April 10, 2025
“Happiness in Action”
Adam Sandel (Harvard Law School)
February 28, 2025
“Grunt-work and Citizenship”
Samuel Ayres (Law Clerk for the Federal District Court in Washington, DC)
February 13, 2025
“What Just Happened?: The Significance of the 2024 Presidential Election”
Yuval Levin (American Enterprise Institute)
Russell Muirhead (Dartmouth University and the New Hampshire Legislature)
November 21, 2024
“How Best to Combat Polarization?”
Laura-Kristine Krause (Founding Director, More in Common Germany)
November 8, 2024
“On the Future of Content in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”
Luciano Floridi (Yale Digital Ethics Center, Cognitive Science Program)
October 31, 2024
“Presidents and the Law: An Insider’s View of the Office of Legal Counsel in the United States Department of Justice”
Steven Engel (Department of Justice)
October 10, 2024
“Interventionism vs Isolationism in American Strategy”
Aaron MacLean (Hudson Institute)
September 26, 2024
“Contextual Integrity: Positive Thinking about Privacy”
Helen Nissenbaum (Cornell Tech)
April 8, 2024
“Does Technology Change Human Nature?”
Antón Barba-Kay (Deep Springs College)
February 29, 2024
“From the Quantified Self to the Automated Life”
Prof. Natasha Schüll (NYU)
February 9, 2024
“Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln”
Diana Schaub (Loyola Maryland University)
November 9, 2023
“College and Citizenship: From Plato to Today”
Pericles Lewis (Dean of Yale College)
October 9, 2023
“Can We Still Govern Ourselves?”
George Packer (The Atlantic)
April 14, 2023
“W.E.B. DuBois’s International Thought”
Adom Getachew (University of Chicago)
March 7, 2023
“Are AI and Liberal Democracy Compatible?”
Allison Stanger (Middlebury College)
February 17, 2023
“What is Liberal Education For?”
Roosevelt Montás (Columbia University)
February 10, 2023
“The Ways of Music—and Politics.”
Martha Bayles (Boston College)
November 4, 2022
“Freedom, Communication, and Aesthetics in Kant”
Samuel Stoner (Assumption University)
April 1, 2022
“Can Politicians Be Moral?”
Rory Stewart (Yale University)
December 3, 2021
“Institutions and Alienation”
Yuval Levin (American Enterprise Institute)
April 7, 2021
“Alexander the Great in Political Theory”
Vickie Sullivan (Tufts University)
March 15, 2021
“The Tyranny of Merit”
Michael Sandel (Harvard University)
October 12, 2020
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
Reading & Discussion Groups
Founded in response to student interest, the reading and discussion groups offer students a chance to shape intellectual life at Yale while building habits of inquiry essential to civic life. The Center hosts an open house each semester to discover what questions are most urgent for students and then facilitates the creation of working groups, matching students with faculty expertise, providing logistical support, funding for books, and the chance to invite authors and scholars to campus to join the discussions.
2025-26 Offerings to Date
The Women’s Table in Yale’s Civic Life - led by Professor Marisa Bass
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
Hans Jonas on Are Humans Special? - led by Professor Bryan Garsten
Civic thought & the Christian classical education movement - led by Professor Jennifer Herdt
Sports & the Good Life - led by Ishaan Jajodia
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
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
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:
Step 1 - Become an Active Civic Thought Participant
- Participate meaningfully in at least one reading and discussion group
- Participate meaningfully in at least three of our Monday afternoon coffeehouses (RKZ lobby from 4-5pm)
- Attend at least one of our dinner forum events or guest seminar events
Step 2 - Become a Civic Thought Leader
- Attend and participate in the Fellows’ Council and an optional retreat
- Take the lead in creating and organizing at least one reading and discussion group, designing it to prepare you to write a dialogue that captures, with as much subtlety, insight and wit as possible, a wide range of perspectives on the subject of the group
- Write and submit a dialogue for online publication as part of the Center’s Dialogue Project, thereby becoming eligible to win the Dialogue Prize
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.
Student Fellows have special responsibilities and opportunities at the Center:
- Fellows’ Council. Fellows will participate in small-group discussions focused on one of three determined annual themes, based on short, provocative readings.
- Fellows’ Fall Retreat. Fellows will gain perspective and build a high-trust cohort ready to tackle difficult questions together in an annual retreat excursion.
- Dialogue Project. Fellows will take the lead on organizing a reading & discussion group that will prepare them to write a dialogue that will capture the best arguments on every side of a debate related to one of our themes. Fellows may access funds to invite an outside guest if it is helpful. Dialogues will be published by the Center and will be entered into a contest for the annual Civic Thought Dialogue Prize.
- Small guest seminar attendance priority. Fellows will have first priority in attending seminars with visiting policymakers, scholars and journalists.
- Aspen Institute’s Philosophy & Society Initiative attendance priority. Fellows will have priority for interaction with opinion-leaders in Washington, D.C.
- Monday Coffeehouses. Fellows will be asked to attend Monday Coffeehouses in the RKZ lobby.
- Induction Ceremony. Fellows will be inducted in a special dinner ceremony at the end of each semester.
Throughout your time as a Fellow, we will deliberate together on what themes to prioritize, what guests to invite, and what further initiatives the Center should begin. As the Student Fellowship grows, so will the student role in governing the Center.
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.