Stanford’s Founding Grant, signed in 1885, charged the new university with, among other things, “teaching the blessings of liberty regulated by law.” It is a phrase that sounds antique until one considers how rarely universities now say anything like it out loud. Citizenship has long been treated as something students were assumed to bring with them, or to absorb by osmosis between problem sets.
Two weeks before the Nov. 3 general election, Stanford is making a different wager: that the habits of democratic life can be taught, practiced and, in a modest way, structured. Two stories in the Stanford Report this month describe the scaffolding. One profiles the Frosh Civic Challenge Fellowship, a yearlong program for new undergraduates. The other introduces the Civic Profile, a free online tool built by scholars at the Hoover Institution. Neither is a grand pronouncement. Taken together, they amount to something more durable: a syllabus for citizenship.
A Fellowship Built Around a Challenge
The fellowship was launched last year by ePluribus Stanford, a university-wide initiative to strengthen civic engagement and constructive dialogue, together with the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society. It extends the Summer Frosh and Transfers Dialogue Program, which asks incoming students to practice engaging with differing viewpoints before they arrive on campus. Those who want to keep going can join the fellowship, which meets in small groups through the year.
The “challenge” is literal. According to the Stanford Report, fellows receive a list of civic and dialogue opportunities across campus and are urged to pursue six of them: a Stanford Civics Initiative course, a Stanford Political Union discussion, a meeting of the Associated Students of Stanford University. Some of the assignments are essays, among them one in which a student presents the strongest possible case for a view he or she rejects. It is the inverse of the straw man, and an old discipline of the seminar room given new urgency.
“It’s like offering a roadmap for them to continue to make the most of their Stanford experience,” Karina Kloos, executive director of ePluribus Stanford, told the Report. Fellows take workshops in skills such as active listening, led by Collin Anthony Chen of the McCoy Center and by the ePluribus postgraduate fellow, a post held this year by Lavi Sundar. Every other week they gather over dinner to argue through questions such as institutional neutrality, political diversity at universities, and DEI and meritocracy.
The Report’s account centers on two members of the inaugural cohort. Micky Chahcoi transferred to Stanford after more than a decade working in construction and property management in Oklahoma City and Los Angeles, followed by community college. Ronak Vyas, a classmate, found that steelmanning an opponent’s argument kept discussions productive. “People are more willing to engage in conversation with you when they feel they’re being respected,” Vyas told the Report. For their spring capstone, the pair founded Cardinal Unite, which gathers frosh and transfer students on the Oval for conversation and one-on-one coffees. With support from the ePluribus Community Grants Program, it continues this year.
A Profile, Not a Party Label
The second program begins from a different angle. The Civic Profile, developed at Hoover’s Center for Revitalizing American Institutions, opens with an anonymous quiz measuring civic values, knowledge and engagement. Participants then see where they fall across nine values about how a democracy functions best: change, civic openness, civic solidarity, community, constructive patriotism, equality, individualism, national belonging and tradition. They also learn their engagement style, whether institutional actor, community builder or change advocate, and can compare themselves with a nationally representative sample gathered with the polling firm YouGov.
Its designers compare it to a civic version of the Myers-Briggs. Chester “Checker” Finn, the Hoover senior fellow who co-led the project, put the underlying premise plainly: “A good citizen isn’t just somebody who votes,” he told the Stanford Report. “It’s also somebody who shovels their neighbor’s walk when it snows, goes to the school board meeting, or takes an interest in the safety of their community.”
The tool can be taken as a group, and since its launch in March 2026 more than 160 cohorts have been created, according to the Report. At Stanford, nearly 100 incoming students in this summer’s dialogue program took it together. Chen then used the three values the cohort’s results surfaced as a lens for discussing whether national monuments should be removed or renamed, and what the government owes workers displaced by AI. “Students with different values can come to the same conclusions, and vice versa,” Chen said. Aydin Alsan, a student in a seminar taught by Tom Schnaubelt, executive director of the Hoover center, said the exercise moved classmates past seeing one another as “very 2D characters.” A version for teachers is planned for early 2027.
Why the Small Things Matter
It would be easy to dismiss all this as modest: a fellowship of a handful of students, an online quiz, a few dinners. That would miss the point. Democratic culture has always been sustained less by grand institutions than by small, repeated practices: the town meeting, the reading group, the argument among friends that ends without anyone leaving the table. Universities were once among the most reliable nurseries of those practices. Stanford’s programs are an attempt, unglamorous and deliberate, to make them reliable again.
There are reasonable questions to ask. Whether such programs reach beyond the students already inclined to join them is one. Whether skills learned in a facilitated circle survive contact with a heated dormitory debate, or a ballot, is another. Those answers will come over years, not quarters. But the direction is worth noting, and worth encouraging. A campus that can teach its newest members to listen across differences before they have chosen a major is doing something its founders would have recognized.
For students who want to begin, the paths are open: the Frosh Civic Challenge Fellowship and ePluribus community grants through ePluribus Stanford, and the Civic Profile, free to anyone with a few minutes and an open mind. The election will come and go on Nov. 3. The habits it depends on are built the rest of the year.
Photo: King of Hearts / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
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