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Civic engagement took center stage at St. Olaf College on October 8, when Richard Guarasci, president emeritus of Wagner College, and Grant Cornwell, president emeritus of Rollins College, delivered a joint lecture on what they call “the art of democracy.” It was followed by a Q&A session moderated by St. Olaf President Susan Rundell Singer.

Speaking to students, faculty, and staff, the two presidents emeriti emphasized higher education’s responsibility to prepare students for active citizenship in a diverse democracy. Their message was reinforced by Alyssa Melby, the director of the new St. Olaf Svoboda Center for Civic Engagement, who tied the lecture’s themes to St. Olaf’s own commitment to civic learning and community partnerships 

“We are strongly invested in exploring how we as an institution can work with our community partners to ensure they are getting value and benefit from being in a relationship with us on a more holistic level,” Melby says. “I think one of our goals is to work with students to help them understand they’re probably going to be a small part of this much larger and longer relationship with a community partner, either through a community-based work study program or academic civic engagement (ACE) courses. We can help build skills that they can take with them, no matter where they go after college.”

While Cornwell and Guarasci’s lecture focused largely on civic engagement at a national level — exploring how ideas of integrity, civic professionalism, and colleges serving as “anchor institutions” can help solve larger-scale challenges — it also underscored how these same principles apply to local partnerships. 

Cornwell began by noting that higher education must prepare workforces “equipped with the knowledge and skills to participate, with wisdom and compassion, in a diverse civil society.” He continued, “higher education owes the students and the economy much more than just job training.”

Guarasci emphasized the concept of civic professionalism — the idea “that we want to graduate students, in whatever profession they enter, who will have the dimension to enhance the civic, professional, economic, social, cultural prosperity of those settings.”

Melby echoed these ideas, connecting them to St. Olaf’s approach to community-based learning and the Svoboda Center’s vision.

“Our students are a transient population,” Melby says. “We want to offer opportunities for them to get involved in this place while they’re here for their four years, knowing that many probably aren’t going to stick around in this community.” 

She added that community partnerships often extended beyond a single class or project. 

“There’s a long history with our community partners that stretched beyond any one ACE course,” Melby says. “The Svoboda Center is really thinking holistically about what these relationships look like — their histories and how they’re building for the future.” 

Cornwell also spoke about the importance of advancing knowledge across disciplines. 

“Higher education owes continuous advances in knowledge, through research, science, technology and medicine indeed, but also in the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts,” he says. 

Guarasci built on this point, linking the liberal arts tradition to what he calls “the arts of democracy.”

“The term ‘liberal arts’ dates back to artes liberales, which was the Greek notion that you should not be simply a prisoner of your own limited personal experience,” Guarasci says. “It’s about seeing the world  wider and deeper — seeing the full extent of the human experience as it’s been lived historically, culturally, socially. Our relationship to the natural world, to one another, and how we organize — all these pieces give you a sense of the cosmos. And through that education, you get closer to becoming cosmopolitan.”

Cornwell added that “the freedom from interference, from political pressure, or the policing of inquiry or expression by the state,” is essential to scholarship. 

“The pursuit of truth,” Cornwell says, “depends on it.”

Both speakers also addressed political polarization in the United States and its impact on collaboration. 

“We know that this kind of polarization is completely untenable to sustain a democratic culture and society,” Guarasci says. “You cannot have people who can’t be in the same room together and hope that they can govern collectively.”

Melby reflected on how St. Olaf hopes to bridge divides. 

“We’re really looking at intergenerational conversations as a way of hearing and understanding different perspectives as the first step to depolarizing,” Melby says. “If you don’t start with an openness toward understanding, we’re never going to get to the point where we can scale back this intense polarization.”

All of these ideas coalesced around the concept of civic preparation.

“When [students] learn to listen as keenly as they speak, when they learn to compromise and collaborate in order to achieve a common project, they are learning the skills of citizenship,” Cornwell says. “And crucially, they’re learning the skills that will serve them in the world of work. Career preparation and civic preparation are the same thing — they are the practices of freedom and a diverse democracy.”

Guarasci concluded that when students begin engaging meaningfully with communities, they better understand their place in the broader world. 

“When students really begin to touch what they consider the real world — the world of work, the world of life in their communities — in ways they feel that they’re making a difference, that they’re fully engaged, the community, by the way, is learning and growing as well,” he says.

Together, Guarasci, Cornwell, and Melby highlighted the idea that colleges and universities are anchor institutions within their communities. When these institutions and their local partners collaborate intentionally, both are nourished — and democracy itself thrives.