Announcements

Excited about celebrating the upcoming 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence? Interested in doing something substantive and interesting to celebrate the  founding of the world’s oldest democratic republic? Concerned that we might pass the nation’s Semiquincentennial without thinking about how far we have come, and how far we have to go to become a “more perfect union?” Want to help organize an opportunity for your institution, organization, friends, family, or neighbors to engage with our nation’s history, values, and policy debates in the lead-up to July 4, 2026?

Then we encourage you to attend our upcoming webinar on “The 250^th Anniversary American Values Deliberative Forum Series,” which will provide an overview of the series and ways both institutions and individuals can get involved. Join us from 12:30 pm to 1:30 pm on September 2, 2025 over Zoom to learn how you can take part in this timely opportunity to celebrate and examine our history in an engaging way. Co-hosted by Davidson College, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the series will include Expert Roundtables and Community Conversations over the course of the 2025-26 academic year.

These Roundtables will include scholars with a diverse range of perspectives and academic backgrounds who will deliberate about the role of different values in American history and policy debates. The first Roundtable, for example, will be held on September 30 and will explore the tensions and complementarities between our commitments to national unity and political equality, both generally and in the specific context of immigration and citizenship.     

The week following each Roundtable, Davidson, Duke, and UNC-Chapel Hill will be hosting Community Conversations that will enable members of their communities to engage with the same questions that the experts discussed. Each institution will design their conversations so that they best match particular contexts. The conversations organized at Davidson, for example, will follow the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative’s D Team model, which are two-hour small group discussions guided by a trained facilitator, but many other models will work as well.

We welcome other institutions and organizations – as well as individual citizens – to organize similar conversations for their communities that utilize the Expert Roundtables as a catalyst for deeper engagement with the values that have animated our history and continue to permeate our political debates. Hosting such conversations is a great way to help bridge the political divides in our country, improve our ability to deliberate with one another as citizens (broadly defined), and start celebrating the upcoming 250^th birthday of the United States.

To that end, in the upcoming webinar DCI Faculty Director and Associate Professor of Political Science Graham Bullock will provide more information about the series itself as well as some ideas for how you might organize something for your community. The DCI has developed a series of Deliberation Guides and Pathways Guides that it will be using for the Community Conversations it will be hosting, and Dr. Bullock will share how you might adapt these guides to your purposes. He will also outline a range of different deliberative formats and designs you might use so that you can select the one that makes the most sense for your specific situation, whether it is a small group of friends gathered for dinner or a large forum with 50-100 people (or more!).  

Please RSVP to attend this webinar at the link below – we hope you can join us, and feel free to encourage your friends and colleagues who might be interested as well.

Fall-2025-Webinar-Flyer

How should we engage in meaningful, productive disagreement, discussion, and problem-solving with others, especially when the issue at hand is highly contentious and politicized? This is the fundamental question the DCI has been working to answer, and we believe there is a way to do it well. We can disagree respectfully, we can discover the truth in spite of—and indeed, because of—our differences, and we can solve pressing issues democratically using the tools of deliberative democracy.

Deliberation, as we see it at the DCI, is a method of discussion that enables citizens—broadly construed so as not to limit this notion to persons with one particular legal status—to state their views and the presuppositions behind them, reconstruct the arguments for their positions, and to make progress toward solutions to problems where there is entrenched disagreement.

While such discourse can sometimes happen organically in conversation or in the political sphere, we often find that we are so uncomfortable in the face of disagreement that we would rather not engage. But living together requires coming to a shared understanding of difficult problems and making constructive decisions together.

Our experience, and the experience of similar programs around the world, has found that well-trained and intentional facilitators can help participants overcome these obstacles and engage in meaningful and productive deliberation, even when they disagree deeply.

This is why the DCI is hosting its seventh Deliberation Facilitator Training Program this year. The training will take place over two sessions from 1:30 pm to 5:30 pm, one on Sunday, August 31 and the other on Sunday, Sept. 7^th. The sessions complement each other and are both required components of the training. Virtual and in-person options are available, but space is limited so sign up soon if you are interested. 

This hands-on and interactive program enables participants to lead deliberation sessions in their community, with colleagues, with their families, or in their classrooms, and to facilitate DCI-hosted forums on matters of public interest. The DCI supports facilitators with learning materials we send out before the training days, and participants get a chance to practice facilitating a mock deliberation.

Do you feel your community, your family, your students, or your colleagues would benefit from deliberating about an issue with the help of a trained facilitator? Then sign up here by Tuesday, August 26th!

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 250^th 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.  

Fall-2025-D-Team-Flyer-8-x-11.5

If you are ready to register to attend the Expert Roundtable either in-person or online, click here. If you’d like to learn more first, read on below.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” (Declaration of Independence)
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union…” (Preamble)

250 years ago next July, the Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson and approved by the Second Continental Congress, formally separated the 13 colonies from British rule, placing the nascent country on the path to democracy. Beyond the Declaration’s grievances against the Crown or assertions about the nature of government, one line stands out in the collective memory of the American people: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

Those thirteen words and the doctrine of equality they promote have proven remarkably durable in American political culture. Referenced by the Seneca Falls Convention in its pleas for women’s rights, Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King Jr. in his “I Have A Dream” speech, the foundational commitment to equality established in the Declaration has guided the country in some of its most pivotal moments. However, equality has never stood alone as the nation’s guiding value.

In 1787, as the US transitioned from the aspirational ideals of the Declaration to the practical governing framework of the Constitution, another value emerged as the Founding Fathers’ first priority: unity. They open the Constitution’s preamble not by echoing Jefferson’s emphasis on equality, but by anchoring the preamble in a sense of shared purpose through the words, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union.”

After the 1786 Shays’ Rebellion exposed the weakness of the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution’s predecessor, Americans increasingly saw the need for a stronger framework to preserve the unity of the new republic. Since then, the importance of such unity would connect with many broader purposes and issues. As Abraham Lincoln’s famous line, “A house divided upon itself cannot stand,” suggests, a modicum of shared values that unites the country might be necessary for the American experiment to succeed.

This emphasis on unity, together with the Declaration’s statement about equality, represent the importance of considering both the nation’s egalitarian founding principles as well as its need to promote an enduring national identity. From the slavery debate to the New Deal to the failed adoption of the Equal Rights Amendment, the complementarities and conflicts between equality and unity have been a key feature of the American experiment. National unity fundamentally relies on recognizing and achieving equality and the inherent dignity of all individuals. However, the pursuit of equality – particularly policies addressing longstanding injustices and social disparities – can sometimes intensify societal divisions and challenge the existing sense of unity that holds the country together. Conversely, appeals to unity without adequately addressing existing inequalities risk perpetuating injustice and providing justifications for social unrest.

Davidson College’s Deliberative Citizenship Initiative is hosting an Expert Roundtable that will explore these dynamics both conceptually and historically. It will also explore how they are relevant to contemporary policy debates about immigration and citizenship, a domain where arguments about both unity and equality are frequently deployed from all sides of the political spectrum. The Roundtable will be held on September 30 from 7 to 8:30 pm in the 900 Room on the Davidson College campus, and it will also be broadcast live online. Register here to reserve a ticket today (deadline is 9/23).

The roundtable will include the scholars listed below, each of whom brings a unique set of expertise and knowledge to the conversation, both on the general questions related to unity and equality and on the specific topic of citizenship and immigration. Specifically, they will address the question, “How should immigration policies balance national cohesion with a commitment to the equal dignity of all people?”

Expert Roundtable

• Danielle Battisti is an associate professor of history at the University of Nebraska at Omaha where she specializes in immigration and ethnic history. Her book, “Whom We Shall Welcome: Italian Americans and Immigration Reform” (Fordham University Press, 2019) examines both the liberal and conservative elements of Italian American efforts to influence American immigration policies in the 1950s and 1960s. It was awarded the Immigration and Ethnic History Society’s best first book award for 2019. She is also the co-editor of Hidden Histories of Unauthorized Migrations from Europe to the United States (Illinois University Press 2025). One of her current projects is examining the immigration laws that largely facilitated Euro-Americans’ efforts to adjust their status from “illegal alien” to “legal permanent resident.” 

• Philip Cafaro, a philosophy professor who recently retired from Colorado State, is the author of the book, How Many Is Too Many? The Progressive Argument for Reducing Immigration into the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2015), which argues that current immigration levels—the highest in U.S. history—undermine efforts to achieve a more economically just and ecologically sustainable society. He is also the co-editor of Life on the Brink: Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation (University of Georgia Press, 2012) and Virtue Ethics and the Environment (Springer-Verlag 2010) as well as the author of Thoreau’s Living Ethics: Walden and the Pursuit of Virtue (University of Georgia Press 2004) and “The Impact of Immigration Policy on Future US Population Size” in The Journal of Population and Sustainability (2025).

• Fernando Tesón is Eminent Scholar Emeritus at Florida State University College of Law. An Argentine-American legal scholar, he is a leading authority on humanitarian intervention and the philosophy of international law. He is the editor of The Theory of Self-Determination (Cambridge University Press 2016) and co-author of Debating Humanitarian Intervention: Should We Try to Save Strangers? (Oxford University Press (2017) and Justice at a Distance: Extending Freedom Globally (Cambridge University Press 2015). He has also published articles supporting less restrictive immigration policies, including  “The Bourgeois Argument for Freer Immigration” in The Cambridge Handbook of Classical Liberal Thought and “Brain Drain” in the San Diego Law Review.

• Hrishikesh Joshi is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, where he also serves as a core faculty member at the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom. His research focuses on normative issues at the intersection of philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE). He has published several chapters related to immigration and citizenship, including “Immigration Enforcement and Fairness to Would-Be Immigrants” (in The Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy), “Immigration” (in The Routledge Companion to Libertarianism), and “Immigration: Some Arguments for Limits” (in The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics and Economics of Immigration). He has also published a book on Why It’s Okay to Speak Your Mind (Routledge).

John Wertheimer, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of History at Davidson College, will serve as moderator of the roundtable discussion. Dr. Wertheimer’s research and teaching focuses on modern U.S. history and legal history; his two books – Law and Society in the South: A History of North Carolina Court Cases (University Press of Kentucky) and Race and the Law in South Carolina: From Slavery to Jim Crow (Amherst College Press) – explore the legal history of the U.S. South.

In the week following the Roundtable, the DCI will be hosting a series of Community Conversations that will build on the scholars’ deliberations. These two-hour deliberative discussions of 6-10 people will be moderated by trained facilitators and will use a similar format to the DCI’s D Teams. To learn more about this opportunity and reserve a spot at a time that works for you, click here (the deadline to do so is September 5). Duke, UNC, and potentially other institutions will be hosting similar conversations for their communities. If you are interested in hosting a conversation yourself at your organization, click here to learn more about a webinar we are hosting on how both individuals and institutions can get involved — and how the DCI can help you with doing so.

The Expert Roundtable and Community Conversation are both part of the Deliberative Forum Series on American Values that Davidson College, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill are co-hosting in the lead-up to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the nation’s founding. Approaching this milestone in an era marked by historical amnesia and selective memory, the series aims to foster a more complete understanding of our nation’s past and present. To learn more about and register for the other forums and community conversations that are a part of this series, visit this webpage for more information and updates.

Inviting participants to reflect on the foundational ideals that have shaped our republic, each of the four forums in the series will draw from both the Declaration and the Constitution’s Preamble to explore a pair of core American values that often complement each other but also have been – and remain – at the heart of deep tensions, particularly during moments of national change. Through dialogue grounded in history, informed by philosophical inquiry, and connected to current policy challenges, this series and this guide is designed to encourage thoughtful deliberation on how best to uphold and balance these enduring commitments in an ever-changing democracy.

Unity-Equality-and-Immigration-Roundtable-Poster

On Friday, August 29, as part of Davidson’s back-to-school Welcome Week, the DCI is hosting a Semester Kickoff Party in the 900 Room at the Alvarez Student Union from 11:30 AM to 12:30 PM. We welcome all Davidson students, faculty, and staff to join us for pizza, deliberation about some hot topics, and even a few prizes…No need to RSVP—bring your friends and drop in any time!

Our Kickoff Party is a place to learn how you can get involved in deliberation about contentious topics of public interest on campus and beyond, and to meet others interested in deliberation on campus. You will also get a chance to meet current DCI Fellows, Senior Fellows, and some members of the DCI leadership team along the way. You’ll also be able to talk with us about our upcoming programs and to find your own way to get involved—whether that means joining a D Team, becoming a Fellow, attending a Deliberative Forum, and/or attending our Deliberative Citizenship Speaker Series.

You will also have a chance to practice your deliberative skills as we talk about some engaging topics and play some deliberative games over free pizza courtesy of the DCI. The theme of this year’s fall semester kickoff party is “Build the Best Democracy!” Come discuss with others what you think are the most important aspects of a democracy and then build a Lego structure that reflects those democratic elements. What colorful combination of economic rights, type of elections, executive authority, judicial power, legislative representation, and civil rights and liberties make for the most responsive, resilient, and effective democratic republic? You decide!

You’ll have a blast discussing some key questions in a low-key context — and you’ll be able to win some prizes in the process! We hope you’ll join us for a fun event that will help us get energized for the coming year.

Fall-2025-Kickoff-11×17-1