Marta Shcharbakova was attending Bennington College in August 2020 when anti-government protests erupted in her native Belarus against the authoritarian regime of Alexander Lukashenko, who was widely seen as having stolen the recent presidential election. Shcharbakova, then 21, immediately flew home to join the demonstrations.
“My dream has always been to participate in the freeing of my country,” she said.
The pro-democracy rallies, the largest in Belarus history, sparked a swift and brutal government crackdown.
“People were disappearing from their homes,” Shcharbakova recalled. “You would go to the shop to buy bread, and you would not come home because everyone was kidnapped and thrown in jail and tortured. It was just insane.”
Among them was Shcharbakova, who was arrested twice and spent a total of three weeks in jail before finally fleeing the country. She has been unable to return ever since.
The 2023 Bennington College grad, who now lives in San Francisco, returned to her alma mater last month to share her story in an on-campus forum called “Civic Education, Gen Zers, and the Future of Democracy.” The free event, sponsored by the Patrick J. Leahy Public Policy Forum, was part of an ongoing campus series this fall called “Saving Democracy Together,” which aims to boost youth participation in the electoral process. More than 200 people attended in person or online, including some from around the country.
Millennials and Gen Zers now comprise nearly half of all eligible U.S. voters. Yet recent studies suggest that these generations, the most diverse in American history, are also the most cynical about the role of government and the future of democracy.
Programs such as “Saving Democracy Together,” as well as similar efforts at other Vermont colleges and universities, are trying to convey a different message to students: Democracies are not self-propagating. Like gardens, they require constant tending. And we ignore them at our peril.
“It’s far easier to cast your ballot to strengthen the democracy than to rebuild it from scratch.” Abraar Arpon
“I have witnessed the collapse of democracy firsthand,” said Abraar Arpon, a Bangladesh native and Bennington College junior who also spoke at the event. After decades of progress, Bangladesh has seen a dramatic deterioration in human rights and the rule of law in recent years, he said.
Recognizing that many young Americans take for granted their right to vote, Arpon created a nonpartisan website, myballot.info, that provides easy, accessible and anonymous information on how to register to vote in every state.
“Believe me, it’s far easier to cast your ballot to strengthen the democracy,” he said, “than to rebuild it from scratch.”
Recognizing that the greatest threats to American democracy are coming not from foreign powers but from within — in the form of apathy, divisiveness, disinformation, voter disenfranchisement, intimidation and violence — Vermont’s colleges and universities have taken a variety of approaches. At Middlebury College, the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge is organizing voter registration drives, get-out-the-vote events and debate-watching parties with faculty-provided analyses. The University of Vermont‘s political science department is teaching courses this semester titled “The 2024 Election” and “The Struggle for Democracy.”
Saint Michael’s College recently hosted a lecture by a visiting Jesuit priest about the role of Catholicism in voter ethics. At Norwich University, students are polling the political leanings of tens of thousands of college students across the country. And Middlebury College and Champlain College are teaching students how to have difficult conversations about divisive issues — without resorting to shouting or name-calling.
Several of these programs were borne from the strife that roiled college campuses nationwide earlier this year after Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Though no such protests took place at Champlain College, Monique Taylor, the college’s provost and chief academic officer, knew that the school needed to arm its students with the skills necessary to engage in civil discourse.
“On any given day, there are hundreds of topics we could take on: guns, reproductive rights, affirmative action, the climate, this war, that war. It’s exhausting,” Taylor said. “We’re supposed to help people talk and understand and think critically and arrive at new points of knowledge.”
To that end, Champlain College launched a series of on-campus workshops in the spring called “Learning to Listen, Listening to Learn.” The goal, Taylor said, is to provide students with skills and techniques for seeing beyond partisan and ideological differences. And they’re teaching those methods without ever broaching a hot-button issue.
The first “Learning to Listen” event of the semester, held in mid-September, was moderated by Mason Crochetiere, a 20-year-old junior from Springfield, Mass., who’s majoring in computer game design. Crochetiere, who described himself as “not especially political,” likened a conversation to playing a game, in that both have a defined set of rules, mechanics and unspoken conventions. Rather than focusing on “winning” a discussion, he said, fruitful conversations foster greater mutual understanding of differing points of view.
The event began by breaking the 40 or so participants into small groups, each with a facilitator. Students were instructed to have a very structured conversation in which one person was the speaker and the others, the listeners. The process began with very benign questions such as: Where are you from? What’s your favorite kind of pizza? Those built up to: What is the most contentious issue that came up at a recent family gathering?
Ultimately, the goal wasn’t to move on to more politically fraught topics. Rather, it was to help students see beneath the surface of other people’s identities and become more open-minded, empathetic and curious about their values and points of view. Taylor described the process as “heartwarming.”
At Saint Michael’s College, Father Thomas Massaro took a different approach to exploring students’ values as they relate to politics. A Jesuit priest and professor of moral theology at Fordham University in New York City, Massaro is a theologian whose research focuses on the role of religion in American public life. On September 24, he visited St. Mike’s campus to give a talk called “Toward a Catholic Voting Ethic: Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship.”
Though politicians often assume that Catholics vote as a monolithic bloc in the U.S., Massaro reminded the roughly 100 students in attendance that, while the Catholic Church has a defined body of teachings, “It does not dictate how you should vote.”
Indeed, every four years the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops publishes a document called “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship.” The 30-page treatise addresses a range of political issues, from the environment to poverty to ending war. Though issues directly related to life — abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, cloning — are considered the “preeminent priority,” Massaro said, that doesn’t mean that Catholic voters should not consider other factors when choosing a candidate.
Failing to do so “would be objectionable to me, frankly,” added Massaro, who described himself as politically moderate.
How did students respond to Massaro’s message? While St. Mike’s is considered among the more liberal-leaning Catholic colleges in the U.S., Massaro noted that some students were surprised to learn that Pope Francis recently described both U.S. presidential candidates as “against life.” Indeed, the pontiff advised Catholic voters to search their souls and — without naming names — choose the “lesser evil” when casting their ballots in November.
In short, Massaro concluded, a good Catholic need not be a single-issue voter to remain true to their faith.
On the campus of Norwich University, America’s oldest private military college, expressions of overt partisan politics are rare. Because the majority of undergraduate students are members of the Corps of Cadets and will eventually serve in one of the five branches of the U.S. military, they swear an allegiance to the Constitution, not to a political candidate or specific politician occupying the White House.
Which is not to suggest that politics has no presence on the campus. Spencer Rada and Hector Aponte are 20-year-old juniors and political science majors. Last year, the pair resurrected Norwich’s political science club, Politeia, after years of inactivity. The club, which now has about 20 formal members, has brought speakers to campus, organized field trips to the Vermont Statehouse and the Supreme Court, run voter registration drives, and held debate-watching parties.
Some of the club’s work was motivated by a sense that Norwich students seemed disengaged from the political process — an observation, members learned later, that’s reflected in Norwich students’ traditionally low voter participation rate.
“I don’t see too much political interest in the election that’s being outwardly expressed,” Aponte said. While they don’t know what is being discussed behind dorm room doors, he and Rada said they’ve heard very little talk on campus about the upcoming election, except from their fellow political science majors.
So about a year ago, Aponte and Rada decided to see how students at other colleges and universities feel about the upcoming election. They launched a national survey to gauge the political attitudes of college students on such issues as the economy, reproductive rights, immigration and foreign policy. Aponte and Rada will analyze the results to see how those views are influenced by demographic factors such as geography, gender and race.
Thus far, they’ve contacted more than 1,100 colleges and universities across the U.S., as well as 50 national academic and political science organizations. Their goal is to survey 51,000 students by October 18, or at least 1,000 from each state plus the District of Columbia.
Due to the study’s protocols, Aponte and Rada were not permitted to discuss their results yet but expect to publicize their preliminary findings before the November 5 general election. They’ve also created a new course on campus — Political Science 199 — that has brought in 12 students to help them analyze the survey results and compare them to youth voting patterns in past elections.
Historically, U.S. colleges and universities have largely avoided wading into the treacherous waters of partisan politics, said Sen. Brian Campion (D-Bennington), director of public policy programs at Bennington College’s Center for the Advancement of Public Action and one of the organizers of the “Saving Democracy Together” series.
But given the broad consensus, on college campuses and elsewhere, that the upcoming election is no longer business as usual, “We can’t do that anymore,” Campion said. “If institutions of higher education aren’t going to get engaged in protecting our democracy now, there may not be another opportunity.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Democracy 101 | How Vermont’s colleges and universities are preparing their students for the November election”
This article appears in Oct 9-15, 2024.
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