The insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021; ongoing threats to democracy evidenced by the unproven and baseless claims made by a then-sitting president that an election was stolen; a relentless yet failed attempt to reverse results by badgering election officials in key battleground states; the passage of new laws across the country to make it more difficult for people to vote; and right-wing challenges to academic freedom need an effective counterpunch from higher education (Association of American Colleges and Universities 2021a, 2021b; Brennan Center 2021).

The State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (2017) elevated civic engagement as a desired core learning outcome of the undergraduate experience. Our institution created campus-wide Civic Engagement Learning Outcomes under the auspices of the James Madison Center for Civic Engagement (JMU Civic 2018) and the Center for Assessment and Research Studies (CARS) (Pastor, Schaefer, and Perkins Reference Pastor, Schaefer and Perkins2021). Our approach acknowledges the need for a foundational grasp of democratic principles, awareness of pressing public issues, and an understanding of how to engage political decision making across levels of government while also recognizing that meaningful engagement requires critical analytical and communication skills. Given the divisive and abrasive state of our democracy, we also emphasize dispositions such as empathy and open-mindedness and developing confidence in the ability to address public issues. Finally, we embrace the notion that students learn by doing and therefore incorporate civic behaviors into our learning objectives.

There are several means by which students across all majors should encounter the opportunity to develop civic skills, knowledge, and dispositions both in and out of the classroom and to develop a deeper understanding of how to address public problems through political participation. To increase internal and external efficacy, JMU Civic co-creates and co-implements with students, faculty, staff, and community partners programming that meets our civic and political learning outcomes. Students learn about political participation opportunities and programming through a robust communications strategy, including campus-wide emails, global alerts on our campus course-instructional tool, and social media.

Elections are one point of entry for students to learn more and participate in the political process (Thomas et al. Reference Thomas, Brower, Connors, Gismondi and Upchurch2019). Traveling town halls in partnership with JMU’s Office of Residence Life is one of our most novel programs, in which political candidates physically travel to the common areas of three residence halls in one evening (Schwartz Reference Schwartz and Dive2019). JMU Civic undergraduate democracy fellows facilitate the town halls and provide voter-registration opportunities for attendees. Students and community residents interact with candidates, ask unscripted questions, and learn about competing visions for addressing public issues. We also facilitated separate candidate town halls in 2020 with JMU Athletics and reached more than 250 student athletes, 100% of whom registered to vote. Trainings for resident advisors on how to facilitate difficult election conversations with hall residents is another partnership with our Office of Residence Life (Ong Whaley Reference Whaley and Carah2020).

Faculty, students, and community members also collaborate to create nonpartisan voter-education guides on candidates running for office at every level—from the school board to the presidency. The guide includes candidate responses to student questions about public issues as well as information translated into three languages about how to register and vote. It is distributed across campus and in the community in partnership with a local civic news media outlet.

To measure participation in civic engagement activities during the previous semester, JMU Civic created the Civic Engagement Index, which was administered by CARS during Spring Assessment Days (Pastor et al. Reference Pastor, Foelber, Jacovidis, Fulcher, Sauder and Love2019). Responses collected from 897 students in Spring 2021 suggest that the efforts of JMU Civic to promote political participation in Fall 2020 were effective. The majority of students reported engaging in discussion on and off campus about political and social issues or the election; 65% reported receiving communications; and slightly less than half self-reported registering to vote, updating their voter registration, or asking JMU Civic questions about voting.

To understand how engagement in JMU Civic activities may have affected change over time in student political learning and civic engagement, we analyzed student engagement in activities. We categorized activities in two ways: (1) those that involved discussing political or social issues or being aware of political information; and (2) more participatory acts (e.g., attending town halls). Although most of the programming was offered only virtually because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we found discuss/aware activities more common than participation activities: 55% of students participated in four or five discuss/aware activities compared to 68% who took part in none or one of the participation activities.

Although we cannot claim that student engagement in discuss/aware or participation activities has a causal effect,Footnote ¹ we found that student engagement in activities was associated with positive change over time in many aspects of political learning and civic engagement.Footnote ² Specifically, statistically significant results were obtained for 15 of the 29 subscales.Footnote ³ Analysis of survey results support that student engagement in either type of activity may positively affect the following indicators on our subscale: politically engaged identity, internal political efficacy, political interest, expectations for future political activities, perceptions of their competence with respect to the skills of political influence/action, and perceptions of their own foundational political-knowledge levels.

We also found that involvement in discuss/aware activities but not participation activities may affect the following indicators on our subscales: students’ moral identity, civic knowledge, and perception of how effective they perceive the political strategy of informing and collaborating with others to be. In addition, we found that student involvement in participation activities but not discuss/aware activities may increase both the extent to which students stay informed about political issues at the local level and how effective they perceive the political strategy of bringing public or institutional attention to issues to be.

As higher education contemplates its role in strengthening democracy as part of its long-standing public mission, robust institutionalized approaches to curricular and co-curricular programming focused on educating and equipping students with political knowledge, skills, capacity, and agency to address pressing public problems have the potential to benefit students’ civic learning and democratic engagement. Our work shows that campuses can effectively build and implement programs to strengthen political learning and engagement as a means to strengthen our democracy, even as it is being overtly threatened across several critical fronts.