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
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 where participants can try out new ideas, ask questions, and gain experience disagreeing with one another in enlightening ways.
“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.
Hannah Arendt
Masculinity
The Loneliness Epidemic
The State and Global Order
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