By Stephen Walker ’26 (Senior Fellow and DCI Co-Convener)
Following the inaugural Institute for Public Good October 13 event featuring a conversation between Senators Amy Klobachar, Thom Tillis, and Davidson College President Doug Hicks, Deliberative Citizenship Fellows hosted a discussion for those in attendance at the talk to debrief and continue pondering the nature of the “public good.” In their remarks, both President Hicks and Chris Marsicano, the Director of the Institute for Public Good, encouraged audience members to join the discussion after the event.
Fellows greeted and welcomed students to discuss the event over snacks in a classroom outside of the Duke Family Performance Hall, where the conversation took place, so that any interested attendees would have the opportunity to reflect and develop their own plans for promoting the public good in their own communities.
In a packed meeting room with extra chairs just outside the performance hall where some facilitators had to stand as they guided the discussions, a combination of reflections on the senators’ discussion and attempts to agree on their own definitions of the public good kept the students abuzz throughout their extended conversation.
The guiding questions for the discussion, provided by DCI Co-Convener Casey Scheiner and introduced to the participants by DCI Faculty Director Graham Bullock, focused the students on engaging with the Senators’ ideas and identifying their own perceived challenges to the public good and bipartisan action from government. Fueled by an assortment of desserts and beverages, they also discussed the ways government and citizens alike may all come together to promote the public good across a diverse array of sectors throughout society. Such questions enabled participants to focus their participation on defining and applying the public good to contexts that were relevant to their own lives so that they could take what they learned from their conversation with them into their own civic engagements in the future.
The enthusiasm of the students, passionately participating in a discussion of their own after listening to the Senators’ discussion shows the impact the work of the DCI has in providing an outlet for Davidson’s community to tackle our most pressing issues. It also shows how the DCI can complement the work of other organizations, like the Institute of Public Good (which the DCI is now a part), by creating structured yet informal contexts for participants at events they host to deliberate about ideas presented and apply them to Davidson’s own community.
See what the participants had to say for themselves after attending the event:
“[Our group] applied a lot of the things [the senators] talked about to real-world examples and talked about what we thought was a civil good […] and our duties as citizens. There was a wide array of opinions in our group; that was really interesting to get to hear people who had different opinions from myself.
“Every time we do a deliberation, I feel like I end up being able to [better] see the other side, which makes things become more complicated, which is a good thing because it helps all of us become more intentional but it’s also confusing because my opinions keep changing.”
Anna Kate Howell ’29
“I found [the discussion] very helpful to be able to process the information during the senators’ event; […] it was helpful to be able to reflect and to be asked questions that helped me put what they talked about in a proper context.”
“The facilitators were really helpful […] having guiding questions to push us to bring the conversation to different directions was super helpful, […] especially to see different perspectives and how you can apply [them] […] I now have a more nuanced answer for [what the Public Good means].”
Maggie Frampton ’29
