If you are ready to sign-up for a Fall 2025 D Team Community Conversation, click here and it will take you to the registration form. If you’d like to learn more, read on below…
In 2002, Bruce Cole, then Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, asserted that the United States faces a “serious challenge that lies within our borders – and even within our schools: the threat of amnesia.” He feared that we are forgetting our collective traditions, stories, histories, and even values, and offered numerous examples supporting this concern.
The threat we are facing today, however, goes beyond a general amnesia. It also involves a selective form of memory – or partial amnesia – that only remembers parts of our heritage and then frames those parts according to our current political beliefs and personal experiences.
This fragmentation and misrepresentation of our history is in many ways worse than fully forgetting it, as it allows us to weaponize our incomplete and unnuanced understanding to advance our own group’s interests and denigrate, demonize, and dismiss those who remember and emphasize different parts of our history. The pitched battle between proponents of The New York Times 1619 Project and the Woodson Center’s 1776 Campaign is just one of many examples of this dynamic.
The upcoming 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence represents an important opportunity to address the historical amnesia that has become so common in American life. The Deliberative Forum Series on American Values being hosted by Davidson College, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill aims to engage diverse public audiences with a nuanced and complex understanding of our nation’s history and the underlying principles, traditions, and stories on which our country was founded. It will highlight the underlying pluralism and overarching unity that animate America’s past and present.
The series will be organized around a series of four forums over the course of the 2025-2026 academic year. Each forum will explore the meaning of the values at issue and connect them to current events and issues facing the American public. They will consist of an Expert Roundtable followed a week later by Community Conversations hosted by higher education institutions and other organizations across North Carolina and beyond.
To learn how your organization might host its own Community Conversation following one or more of the Expert Roundtables, you are welcome to join an upcoming webinar that will introduce the forum series and map out a range of different ways to get involved. Please encourage anyone who might be interested to register for the webinar.
The Community Conversations hosted by Davidson College will follow a format similar to the D Teams it has been organizing for the past five years. They will be held the week after each forum, and students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members can sign up for meetings that will be held during the day or in the evening on both weekdays and weekends. There will be two types of conversations — the first are D Team Community Conversations that will meet after both of the Expert Roundtables, allowing the members of the group to get to know each other over two conversations. The registration deadline to sign up for those conversations has passed, as they require some advanced scheduling, but Davidson’s Deliberative Citizenship Initiative is also organizing “Pop-Up” Community Conversations that you can still register for here.
The first American Values Deliberative Forum will focus on Balancing Equality and Unity: The Case of Immigration and Citizenship. To explore this topic, an Expert Roundtable will be held on September 30 at Davidson College and broadcast live online. The associated Community Conversations will be held the following week (October 6-12).
The topic of the second American Values Deliberative Forum is “Balancing Self-Government and National Stability: The Case of Presidents, Institutions, and the People” and will be held on October 30 at UNC Chapel Hill.
This innovative two-stage process is designed to connect expert knowledge with diverse public audiences. Scholars with diverse backgrounds and divergent interpretations of the topics at hand will be invited to the Expert Roundtables to ensure a wide range of perspectives is represented. They will share and discuss their perspectives on the values in question (e.g., unity and equality) and how they relate to the contemporary issue in focus (e.g. immigration and citizenship).
Then the Community Conversations will provide the public with the opportunity to share their own views on these topics, building on, contesting, or transcending the experts’ perspectives. A Deliberation Guide will be provided in advance of the forum to provide everyone with some baseline information about the topics and different perspectives on them. This process hopefully will help us break out of tendencies towards our selective amnesia so that we engage with the full range of American voices and how we each, individually and collectively, understand what our values are and how they are relevant to our current challenges as a nation.
So register for these Expert Roundtables and Community Conversations today to take part in this year-long celebration of our 250 years as a country, that was “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” and has since then been ever in pursuit of a more perfect union.
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