Can Civic Thought Reach Students Alienated from Civic Life?

By Ari Kohn
February 10, 2026

To think like a citizen is to take responsibility for a shared world. Yet for many college students today, that world no longer feels shared—nor does it seem worth taking responsibility for. Any attempt to reestablish a civic mission within the contemporary university confronts a basic condition: civics cannot find a durable home without student buy-in. Even required courses will fail to achieve their aims if the students they seek to form experience civic participation as hollow, coercive, or irrelevant to their lived realities. What is at stake is not only the success of Civic Thought, but whether the expressive form that disaffected political life takes today can be incorporated in the university, an institution that privileges rational deliberation.

Civic Thought, a movement to renew higher education’s civic purpose, encourages students to adopt an active orientation toward citizenship, grounded in the disposition of self-rule. But for some students, especially those shaped by histories of marginalization, this invitation does not feel empowering. Instead, it is experienced as a demand to participate in institutions, and in a public life, they perceive as alienating, disappointing, or structurally unjust.

This raises some foundational questions: Can Civic Thought include students who reject the civic framework it aims to restore? Can it remain genuinely pluralistic while offering a meaningful account of civic formation? More specifically, can it accommodate students who do not identify with liberal democratic ideals—those disillusioned with public institutions, skeptical of deliberation, or committed to radical critique? And must it presume the exclusive value of civic engagement, or can it also make space for principled refusal to participate in systems perceived as complicit in harm?

Answering these questions requires reckoning with the normative architecture of Civic Thought itself. At the Civic Thought and Practice conference, many presentations—Professor Carpenter’s Res Publica syllabus, UNC School of Civic Life and Leadership Dean Jed Atkins’ appeals to civic virtue, and Professor Paul Carrese’s calls for cultivating civic friendship—tended toward a broadly republican conception of citizenship. In this tradition, freedom is not conceived as the protection of private interests, but as the achievement of self-rule through public participation. This model rests on several key assumptions:

1. Political life is ethically formative;

2. Shared civic identity is both possible and necessary;

3. Students can be trained in judgment, public reason, and civic virtue;

4. Pluralism can be sustained within a framework of shared norms.

Yet these assumptions increasingly sit uneasily alongside the lived experience of many students who, having watched repeated cycles of petitions, listening sessions, and student government resolutions produce negligible change—on issues ranging from fossil fuel divestment to campus policing—conclude that deliberation functions primarily as a delay tactic, such that meaningful agency requires disruption, escalation, or media pressure.

For these students, civic participation appears not just foreclosed but undesirable. Some reject not only the content of contemporary public life but the premise that civic belonging is valuable at all. The gay or transgender student who experiences public civic participation—speaking in open forums, running for student office, or attaching their name to institutional critique—as a site of exposure and regulation may therefore push back against a conception of citizenship that demands certain standards of visibility, self-disclosure, and institutional loyalty as conditions of self-rule. In such contexts, the language of civic responsibility risks being heard not as aspirational, but as coercive.

This philosophical dissonance is sharpened by F.R. Ankersmit’s “aesthetic theory of politics,” which directly challenges the deliberative assumptions of the republican tradition. For Ankersmit, politics is not mimetic or consensus-oriented. It is aesthetic: it gives form to disunity, stages conflict, and makes rupture visible without resolving it. Representation, in this view, is not valuable because it promotes legitimate rule through consent, but because it dramatizes the fragmentation that structures public life. By resisting the imposition of a single moral or rational framework and preserving the openness and possibility of political change against premature closure, pluralism is safeguarded.

The “aesthetic theory of politics” resonates with how many students now practice political life. In the wake of October 7th, campus encampments and protests were not attempts to deliberate or identify collective solutions. They were expressions of grief, outrage, and alienation. The Israel–Palestine conflict became a symbolic site through which students voiced a broader experience of being unseen. Their actions were not oriented toward consensus-building but toward disruption, refusal, and symbolic rupture—forms of political expression that republican civic education is ill-equipped to recognize, let alone cultivate.

Civic Thought often presumes a desire to be formed as a citizen. But many students resist such formation—not from apathy, but because they perceive civic identity as a means of incorporation into systems they distrust. In this context, appeals to public reason and civic virtue may be heard not as invitations to participate, but as demands to assimilate. Rather than opening space for dissent, they may be perceived as institutional strategies for managing it.

Yet Ankersmit’s critique exposes a deeper institutional dilemma. If politics is not rational, not oriented toward truth, and not aimed at consensus, then it is unclear whether the university—structured around inquiry, clarity, and critical reasoning—is a suitable home for politics at all. The very epistemic norms that ground the university may be inhospitable to the expressive, affective, and non-resolutional forms of politics now taking center stage. There is a structural mismatch: Civic Thought seeks to bring politics into the university, but the forms of politics most visible today may be precisely those the university is least able to host.

The stakes of this tension are high. On one hand, the republican ideals animating Civic Thought—deliberation, mutual obligation, civic virtue—struggle to resonate within a political climate marked by deep distrust. On the other, the university’s capacity to engage with emergent forms of student politics is constrained by its own institutional logic. If the university depends on rational deliberation and Civic Thought depends on pluralism, what happens when political life takes forms—refusal, disruption, symbolic action—that conform to neither?

This is not a critique of Civic Thought. But it is a call for institutional and conceptual adaptation. Civic Thought cannot simply revive the idealism of an earlier civic tradition. It must reckon with the structural and affective realities of how students encounter civic life now: as a domain not of agency, but of powerlessness.

Still, Civic Thought cannot surrender its normative core. Without guiding commitments, civic pedagogy risks collapsing into relativism–or worse, dissolution. The challenge is to hold the contradiction open: to affirm the formative potential of public life without presuming the legitimacy of existing institutions; to recognize that between resignation and rupture lies the slow, difficult work of engaging with a civic world one does not fully trust—yet refuses to abandon.

In the classroom, this may require treating contestation and refusal as Civic Thought’s background condition—designing pedagogical spaces where students are asked to deliberate about shared ends in which they are mutually implicated, despite irreconcilable disagreement.

I left the conference with a clearer sense of Civic Thought’s role in the university—as a permanent, self-reflexive commitment to its democratic vocation. Civic Thought reclaims the university as an Arendtian space of appearance: a forum where plurality is made visible, where the capacity for action and beginning is affirmed, and where political judgment can unfold without the imperative to resolve.

Whether the university can meet this challenge without rethinking its own epistemic and procedural commitments remains an open question. But if Civic Thought is to find a durable home, it must embrace the paradox at its core: to form self-governing citizens who may, in turn, refuse to be formed.