The University of Notre Dame’s Democracy Initiative is establishing the institution as a leader in the study of democracy in the United States and worldwide through the Democracy Talks, Democracy Fellows program and Democracy Catalyst Funds for research projects.
David Campbell, director of the Notre Dame Democracy Initiative, highlighted that the initiatives focus on advocacy and student engagement.
“The initiative is designed to deepen and broaden the work we do related to democracy. That includes faculty research, student formation, that is the education we provide to students, and then our public outreach beyond the University,” he said. “In each of those three areas, we want Notre Dame to be recognized as a world leader in both the study of and advocacy for democracy. In the case of student formation, it means we run a democracy fellows program.”
He also shared that it including assisting research faculty members and students alongside programs engaging in policy or civic work.
“It also means that we support professors who are doing research and can hire undergraduates as research assistants. We have a hand in promoting the Washington program and other similar undergraduate programs that give students real-world experience working in policy or in the nonprofit sector,” he said.
To foster dialogue on campus, the initiative organizes events that serve its mission, including hosting a recent conversation between governor Spencer Cox of Utah and governor Michelle Lujan-Grisham of New Mexico.
More recently, the initiative was accepting applications for its undergraduate Democracy Fellows program. According to Joel Day, the managing director of the Notre Dame Democracy Initiative, the program is for any student interested in a career in public service.
“The Democracy Fellows Program finds students not just in political science and in the social sciences, but really from across campus,” he said. “That could mean in academia, studying democracy or it could mean that they want to go into Washington, D.C., or run for office themselves. We have a cohort of juniors and seniors who come in every single year that are going to be working together as a cohort on individual projects that have something to do with democracy.”
He further described what these projects looked like for the juniors and seniors conducting it and discussed special opportunities given to students in this cohort not shared by the rest of the campus.
“Everybody’s doing some sort of project. Usually, it’s a capstone or a senior thesis on a democracy-related topic. In addition to being part of a cohort of people studying democracy, we think that it’s important that they have extracurricular opportunities that maybe the rest of this campus doesn’t have. So, when governor Lujan-Grisham and governor Cox were here in September, they were able to have lunch with both governors,” Day said.
Senior democracy fellow Alice Lei was initially drawn to the program because of its ability to allow students to research topics they are uniquely interested in.
“I was a part of pro-Palestine demonstrations that happened my sophomore year, and we were arrested. We were totally quashed by University administration and arrested,” Lei said.
She then questioned a typical motto shared by the University administration across campus and how the program helped her in exploring its practical meaning.
“That got me thinking, what does it mean to be a force for good? On this campus, there’s the motto that we hear all the time, which is ‘be a force for good,'” she said. “I think Democracy Fellows is an opportunity for me to parse out this disparity that exists between the ideal of a university as a space for critical thought – for students to develop their morals and their moral roots and then to continue this pursuit, even after they leave the University – and what’s actually exercised like on the ground level.”
Lei, who is now working on her senior thesis with the program, recommends Democracy Fellows for anyone interested in gaining insight into the inner workings of democracy and developing their own projects.
“It’s a great opportunity by Notre Dame, but I also think it’s really important to maybe attend some of the events to get this diverse palette of what democracy means,” Lei said. “Not only [examining] what democracy means in this day, but what democracy could mean by analyzing and looking inward at our own country.”
She mentioned the importance of seeing how democracy can be improved upon in the United States by using critiques to adjust its methods and systems.
“Not seeing democracy projects as something that we have to execute elsewhere but looking inward at in what ways is this notion of a democracy deteriorating within our society, and articulating these critiques … Because critique doesn’t necessarily mean tearing something down. Critique means you want something to be better and so you are fine-tuning it so that it could be better eventually,” she stated.
Day praised the Democracy Talks for addressing core social issues and problems in a national and global perspective.
“It’s an accessible way to learn about the burning issues of the day. There’s professor Victoria Hui, who is bringing in activists who are in exile from China and exile from Asia who are real proponents of democracy. And they’re talking about their experiences advocating for democracy in their home countries,” he stated.
Looking toward the future, Day identified three areas of interest that will realize the initiative’s mission and create high-quality results, with a particular focus on research.
“We are going to be a leading institution that is studying democracy and that means we’re hiring the best faculty in the world. We’re producing the best research in the world,” Day shared. “We are bringing in new resources for scholars to do cutting-edge work, so at the end of whether it’s five years or 10 years, this initiative is about investing in the entire campus community to do their work at a really high caliber.”
Day also shared that public service is another area that they are looking at for students to take part in during and after their time at Notre Dame.
“We are also really concerned about making sure our students are formed for public service. We’re interested in upskilling our students to do public policy analysis through the Hesburgh program. There are a lot of good opportunities for our students to be formed to really contribute to the public good once they graduate, and we’re investing there,” Day said.
Lastly, he described how conferences also help support the mission by creating an open dialogue on how to uplift democratic values and practices.
“We hosted a conference in May on social media and democracy that brought in dozens of academics and dozens of public policy experts to chart a path forward for regulating social media to be conducive to democracy, not corrosive to it,” he said. “That is establishing Notre Dame as a leading place where the most serious conversations about democracy are taking place.”