Introducing the Democracy in Action Podcast
More than a year after my college graduation, I find myself back at Olin Library, searching the archives for an audio clip that captures the eagerness, energy, and sense of possibility that emanates from Wesleyan’s campus. I had returned to serve as the presidential fellow in University Communications, diving headfirst into the Democracy in Action Initiative.
The Democracy in Action Initiative is a visionary project spearheaded by the President’s Office that explores the role higher education plays in our democracy. In my role as a fellow working for University Communications, I am producing and hosting a podcast that explores how institutions of higher education foster participation in civic life. Each episode narrows in on a topic where universities and democracy intersect, beginning with an episode about free expression on college campuses. Future episodes will cover topics ranging from affirmative action, racial belonging at predominantly white institutions to media literacy and historic coalitions formed between colleges to imagine a world worth striving for.
In the digitized archives at Olin Library, I find recordings of student protests from the 1960s. This audio animates the first episode, breathing life and authenticity into the legacy of Wesleyan students’ tradition of political activism and civic participation. The intimacy of audio allows me to tell Wesleyan’s story through the voices of students, faculty, and alumni at the center of these topics. The Democracy in Action podcast serves as a resonant platform for thought-provoking dialogues, unearthing the paramount role higher education institutions play in molding democratic values. The first episode delves into interviews with passionate faculty members, spirited students, and impassioned alumni, all of whom share their firsthand experiences and scholarly insights into how students express themselves on campus, and how institutions respond to their speech. In a moment fraught with political tension, we turn to college campuses to discover how the next generation wrestles with the issues confronting our world today. The question at the center of the Democracy in Action Initiative is an urgent one, and the launch of this podcast illustrates Wesleyan’s commitment to nurturing an inclusive, expressive, and intellectually rich environment.
With the first episode ready to air on November 8, one year before the general election that decides the next United States president, the Democracy in Action podcast asks how institutions of higher education can cultivate the ways we show up as citizens. It underscores Wesleyan’s unwavering dedication to preparing future generations for a world where the free exchange of ideas and the vibrant clash of perspectives reign supreme. It’s a thrilling full-circle moment for me, transitioning from graduate to advocate for the boundless potential of democratic values on campus.
Anya Kisicki ’22 is the presidential fellow in University Communications. Having majored in the College of Letters and minored in film, Anya continues to feed their fascination for media and cultural studies in their work on the Democracy in Action audio series.
Democracy in Action is produced and hosted by Anya Kisicki and executive produced and edited by James Sims.
Democracy in Action: Free Expression (Transcript)
[Intro music and montage of historical protests at Wesleyan University]
Anya Kisicki:
Almost exactly five years ago, a gaggle of hallmates piled into my freshman dorm and we screened an infamous peace of Wesleyan lore, the 1994 cult classic, PCU. If you’ve ever turned on Comedy Central in the middle of the night in the early 2000s, you’re probably familiar with this movie. It’s a raunchy parody of PC culture on college campuses. The screenplay was written by two Wesleyan graduates, Adam Leff and Zak Penn, and the inspiration they draw from their alma mater is something short of subtle if you know what to look for. The first scene features panning shots of Wesleyan’s College Row on High Street. The film follows the misadventures of a disenchanted senior and his team of misfits as he attempts to unify a campus of “cause heads.”
Film Dialogue:
This place is kind of insane.
Wait till you meet the “cause heads.”
The what?
What don’t we eat?
Red meat.
Why don’t we eat it?
These, Tom, are your cause heads. They find a world threatening issue and stick with it for about a week.
Anya Kisicki:
While Wesleyan is the film’s inspiration, Port Chester University could stand in for any small liberal arts college plagued by performative political activism. PCU is an early example of cultural backlash against political correctness. I hear updated versions of this critique even now, rebranded as a war on woke. Whether you call it PC culture, or social justice warriors, or wokeness, this cultural frustration continues to pop up in opinion articles and books and movies, many of them characterizing college campuses as places where free expression isn’t available, especially for right-leaning viewpoints. PCU is my favorite example of this. It’s campy and counter-cultural, and most of all, it characterizes the liberal arts as quintessentially defined by dissent. And that’s why five years later, now serving as a presidential fellow in University Communications, I’m still talking about PCU as a piece of a Wesleyan lore. Hi, I’m Anya Kisicki, and this is the Democracy in Action podcast, an audio series that explores the role higher education plays in shaping our democracy.
This first episode tackles the topic of free expression on college campuses. I wanted to investigate how free expression really shows up in a moment as politically fraught as the one that we’re in. Are campuses ideologically diverse? Is there space for conservative voices on campus? And finally, when difference shows up, how do students rise to the occasion? To get to the bottom of how speech shows up, I started at the top with a Wesleyan alum and current president of the university, Michael S. Roth. I asked him why he thought that Wesleyan provided such fodder to films like PCU that depict college campuses as radically liberal.
President Michael S. Roth:
Wesleyan was probably more intensely political in the ’90s than many other places like it. It wasn’t unique, but it was more intensely political than probably Williams or Amherst then. I don’t think that’s true anymore, or Middlebury then. But I’m not really sure that as a Wesleyan guy, I probably don’t know enough about those schools to say. But for people at Wesleyan, we certainly had this self-image that we were more political.
Anya Kisicki:
During my time at Wesleyan, there were a bunch of students who were very politically vocal, but the thing that doesn’t really sink in until you spend a lot of time on college campuses is that not every student is speaking out with a megaphone.
President Michael S. Roth:
I always like to remind people who think of Wesleyan as such a radical place that the largest major here is economics, not known for attracting the radical students, and the fastest growing major is probably math. So you don’t always know that from the student government or the student newspaper because sometimes people in math and economics are busy doing other things.
Anya Kisicki:
Apparently, before I came to Wesleyan, there were a bunch of student groups that promoted conservative ideology on campus. There were the college Republicans, conservative thought groups, et cetera. But I started at Wesleyan in the trenches of Trump’s presidency. I watched the 2020 election results come in with my housemates on Brainerd Street, and I was on campus when the insurrection took place in the Capitol. In other words, when I was at Wesleyan, I didn’t know of any groups on campus that were eager to claim any terms that carried the banner of conservatism. While researching for this episode, however, I heard whispers of a new conservative ideological group. They’re calling themselves the Wesleyan Burke Society. This is Emmett Gardner, one of their co-presidents.
Emmett Gardner:
I’m Emmett. I’m a sophomore at the moment, and I’m studying in the College of Social Studies.
Anya Kisicki:
I asked Emmett to tell me how the Burke Society got started.
Emmett Gardner:
The Burke Society is a group that was founded by CSS students. So a few of us, I’d say a month or so ago, a month and a half, identified each other as bringing up sort of conservative views in our classes. We started to talk about these things and realized that we think there could be a value to creating a group on campus.
Anya Kisicki:
The Burke Society is just beginning to take shape this fall. The thing that really surprises me though is the group’s willingness to use the label of conservatism in a time when there’s a lot of debate about what that term means. Emmett sees The Burke Society as a group that will enrich the discussions on this campus by bringing in a perspective that has not always been amplified to the same extent as some left-leaning ideologies.
Emmett Gardner:
We understand that the conservative umbrella covers so many different philosophies and ideas, and generally we want to be inclusive, as inclusive as possible.
Anya Kisicki:
Emmett didn’t claim that he felt silenced, and he still identified a need on campus for a space that could wrestle with these unpopular ideologies. To get a better sense of how students are thinking about expression on campus, I asked a few of them whether they felt that ideological diversity could really thrive here.
Student:
Wesleyan students tend to be very liberal. So on the political spectrum, they might be on one extreme, a lot of them. But the people I’ve met, they’re very thoughtful. Discourse can happen anywhere.
Student:
I can say that not everyone has the same ideological background. And at least within the classes I’ve been to, everyone is respectful about it.
Anya Kisicki:
I was already deep into the production of this episode when violence erupted in the Middle East. There was a protest in support of freeing Palestine on October 12th, only a few days after the initial attacks.
Student:
End the siege on Gaza now.
Anya Kisicki:
Wesleyan’s student body finds itself on both sides of this ideological issue. I spoke with President Roth about this. It was October 10th when we had this conversation.
President Michael S. Roth:
Last night, for example, I was invited to a gathering in front of Usdan by a Chabad rabbi and the student group that’s affiliated with the Chabad Center adjacent to Wesleyan, and I went. This was described as a gathering of people who were concerned about what was happening in Israel, and that they wanted to take positive action, I think. And what we meant by that was Jewish ritual action, like a tzedakah box and reciting a psalm. A student who spoke said she… “A lot of us,” she said, “feel afraid to take a pro-Israel position on this campus. And we shouldn’t be, and it is a time we should stand in solidarity with other Jews” was her message. And I thought that was interesting. I was worried there would be a counter group there that would’ve made things challenging, I think in this environment right now, but there wasn’t. It was a very low key, maybe 15 students. So on the one hand, she was afraid to speak up because she was going to be yelled at by anti-Israel folks, but she was speaking up. And so I think…
And we do have Israel studies program and we have Israeli cultural events all the time. So I think that there’s some tension, there’s some fear. It’s a very polarized environment. On the other hand, we do events or have activities on campus that are not identified with the progressive wing of the Democratic party, and they’re never disrupted. In the spring, there’s apartheid week, a protest against Israeli policies in the occupied territories. And at the same time, it’s usually around Passover and you see people learning how to make matzah a few yards away from the anti-apartheid protestors. They all may be Jews for all I know. But I think they managed not to fight.
Anya Kisicki:
I can hear President Roth really wrestling with these issues, both as a person and as an institutional leader. In moments like these, students look towards university leadership for recognition and direction and support. I asked President Roth about his perspective on responding to this world event with an institutional voice.
President Michael S. Roth:
I have this either inconsistent or paradoxically nuanced view, depending on one’s point of view, that the university shouldn’t always be neutral. There’s this dogma and American educational philosophy that institution should be neutral on political matters. And I think most of the time that’s true, but sometimes being neutral is an abdication of educational and moral responsibility. So I do think when a fascist is trying to take over the country, the institution shouldn’t be neutral. So all that to say there are times when the president and the institution shouldn’t stay neutral. Even this weekend, watching the horrors in the Middle East, I thought, okay, if I write something on my blog, there are going to be a lot of people who say, “You didn’t condemn apartheid in Israel. You didn’t condemn violence in Gaza, open air prison, et cetera.” And so I definitely thought about that as I wrote my few sentences about the brutalities there. And I wondered, should I say anything because I don’t comment on all the news stories of the day. And as I thought about it, I thought it’s just too big a deal. It’s just too big a thing.
Anya Kisicki:
This really begs the question of what institutions can do for their students in moments that are so rife with conflict. Should the institution respond? And how can the university foster discussion? A public statement from the university isn’t the only resource that institutions of higher education have to support the students in moments like this. To get a better sense of how students are looking for support, I turn to the Dean of Equity and Inclusion at Wesleyan.
April Ruiz:
Name is April Ruiz. I use she, her, and ella pronouns, and I’m the dean for Academic Equity, Inclusion, and Success. I talk a lot with students about how to actively listen, and this means really hearing one another, listening to what someone is saying to you and not trying to formulate your response before they’re done talking. One of the things that is certainly true of college students and absolutely true of Wesleyan students is that they’re curious, and they want to know more. They want to learn. And of course, that’s carried them through as students and got them into Wesleyan. It helps them to succeed in their courses here, and it’s something that they carry with them into other pieces of their life outside of the narrow context of being a university student, right? They carry that forward into the way that they engage in activism, the way that they politically engage, the way that they approach their social relationships, and the ways that they are going to become fully formed members of communities and countries and societies in the future.
Anya Kisicki:
April’s office is just one of the many resources at the university that we have to support students in learning how to express their perspectives and listen to one another, even when issues like this come up and get really personal and emotional. So what else can an institution do to support this? How can it foster conversations across difference? I asked President Roth what role the university has in cultivating productive norms around expression.
President Michael S. Roth:
Oh, I think the university has an important role to play in helping students learn how to have conversations on important subjects about which people have strong views, but different views, and that since we in the United States tend to segregate into like-minded groups and economic groups that are similar or racial groups that are similar, I think it’s really important for a university that says it values diversity, as we do, to create the conditions where students can get better at listening to different points of view, opposing points of view, so that they develop skills for sorting through ideas and improving their ability to make judgements about the world and about their own lives.
Anya Kisicki:
The university’s intentional curation of a diverse student body is one of the many ways it teaches us how to exist in the company of others, but diversity on its own doesn’t really ensure that anybody learns how to engage with difference. Our capacity to listen and respond and learn has a lot more to do with the norms of expression and the forms that we find ourselves in. This is Professor Chakravarti. I took a course of hers that really changed the way I think about power and practice.
Sonali Chakravarti:
My name is Sonali Chakravarti. I’m professor of government at Wesleyan University, and I teach courses in political theory. This semester I’m teaching two courses. One is the Moral Basis of Politics, and the other course I’m teaching is called Questioning Authority: The Politics of the Teacher-Student Relationship.
Anya Kisicki:
I thought Professor Chakravarti could shed some light on the cultural debate around free expression on college campuses and the implications it has on our democracy.
Sonali Chakravarti:
One of the things that is a misconception about campuses as place of free speech is the idea that all ideas are welcome at all times. And really, universities are structured places of learning. We have different disciplines where we learn, we have different formats that we use for learning classes, seminars, public lectures, and each of them has its own set of norms for how you behave there. And also, each of them has expectations for what preparation means for that space, and also knowledge, what counts as knowledge in that space. And going back to the class that you took with me on authority, what gives someone authority to speak as an invited speaker on a campus is that they are familiar with the history of ideas that have preceded them and that they’re entering into this semi-structured conversation on campus.
Anya Kisicki:
I noticed a distinction between Professor Chakravarti’s characterization of college campuses as a place where there are a multitude of different forums where speech takes place and the media’s characterization of free speech on campus as if it were a single open forum where all ideas are entitled to equal airtime. The opinion articles that I keep coming across are usually concerned with whether college students are protesting a conservative speaker or whether the administration sends out a memo to faculty about trigger warnings. Why is the media and the public so concerned with the types of expression that happen on college campuses?
Sonali Chakravarti:
I think it’s because of the richness of what goes on there, and so I think everyone on the outside is interested in when you have that much freedom, what do you do with it? How do people organize themselves? Where are the points of conflict? And it feels like in these difficult moments, we should lean into that.
Anya Kisicki:
The public obsession with university politics is a product of the important role that higher education plays in shaping our democracy. The university is a collection of smaller forums: the dorm room, affinity spaces, club meetings, rallies, and of course the classroom. President Roth pointed towards the classroom when I asked him what tools the university has to support students’ capacity to wrestle with uncomfortable ideas.
President Michael S. Roth:
Certainly in the classrooms, you can formalize these things and create controversies that are contained by a classroom, and so people can argue about something that has high stakes in the world. But in the classroom, you can change your mind. You can learn how to explore things and make mistakes and recover from them.
Anya Kisicki:
This classroom dynamic described by President Roth brings to mind the campus culture that Emmett described.
Emmett Gardner:
I would like to see on this campus, more voice and more strength given two perspectives that are not represented. Knowing the people at Wesleyan, I don’t think that’s going to be an issue. The students here are very politically active, but also very nice and very curious and interested in a good discussion.
Anya Kisicki:
The culture of discussion and engagement across difference that President Roth and students like Emmett describe runs counter to the many opinion articles I’ve read, portraying college students as radical leftists, too eager to protest, and too unwilling to listen across difference. Being on Wesleyan’s campus today, I don’t notice much resemblance to Port Chester University’s woke mobs. What I hear from April was a much more positive outlook on why and how students protest.
April Ruiz:
I think one of the things that’s true, particularly on a college or university campus, when students demonstrate, protest, amplify their voices in whatever shape that might take, is that they expect better of their community in some kind of way, and they expect better because they know that the community is capable of better. When our students show up, it’s because they know it’s worth showing up, because they know that there’s a pathway forward that’s possible. You don’t show up when you’ve lost all hope, when you’re not invested, and when you’re not engaged.
Anya Kisicki:
The Wesleyan April describes sounds a lot more like the campus I remember than the one portrayed in PCU, and that’s the Wesleyan we’ll continue to explore as we dig further into topics at the intersection of higher education and democracy. Throughout the series, you’ll hear how the university is pivoting in a moment when race-based affirmative action has been struck down in college admissions. We’ll talk about the way that campuses impact the communities they find themselves within and how students can help and hurt that process. We’ll also be talking about social media, algorithms, and the way they affect our democratic participation. Stay tuned to the Democracy in Action podcast to keep learning about how higher education shapes the political moment that we’re living in, and how one school, Wesleyan, is conceiving of its role in this democratic process.
