As many of us in higher education plod through our spring semester, the mood on our campuses is unmistakable: exhaustion, unease, the quiet fear that the work we do in higher education no longer feels possible—or welcome. 
Robert Glover is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Honors at the University of Maine.
Across the country, public trust in colleges and universities has fallen to shocking lows. Faculty are being told to avoid “controversial” topics. Students are told they’re too fragile or too radical.
The students sitting in our classrooms right now are watching all of this closely. They see the political vitriol rising, elected officials mocking expertise, and higher education itself being cast as partisan. Many are disillusioned. But beneath that fatigue, we see something else—a hunger for authenticity, purpose, and pathways to tangible impact. Students still want to believe that their voices matter. They just need to see their college and universities believe it too.
This is not a time for despair, or retreat. In fact, it’s precisely the moment higher education was built for, so long as we lean into our mission to teach the next generation of leaders rather than shy from it.
For the past decade, we’ve worked with colleagues across the country through ENACT: The Abraham Feinberg Educational Network for Active Civic Transformation, a nonpartisan initiative based at Brandeis University that offers a promising model. ENACT links faculty and students at nearly fifty campuses across the country to engage directly with state policy. The emphasis is not on winning a policy fight, but on practicing democratic engagement in real time.
Through structured, faculty-guided learning, students begin by researching an active bill in their state legislature—learning the policy background, institutional context, and range of perspectives surrounding it. They translate that research into concrete forms of civic communication: written testimony, meetings with lawmakers, or brief advocacy memos developed under faculty guidance. Reflection is built in. Faculty push students to assess not just what they argued for, but how power operates, where constraints and obstacles arise, and what effective participation requires.
In our ENACT courses, these lessons play out in concrete ways. As one student with little prior exposure to politics wrote, “It reframed politics for me. Not as an abstract or divisive arena, but as a tangible, collective mechanism for advocacy and leadership.” Analyzing bills, meeting with legislators, and organizing constituents led directly to a paid campaign externship and eventually to her current role in Hennepin County government, where she now helps oversee health and human services policy.
Kathleen Cole is a Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Department of Social Science at Metropolitan State University.
Another student came in politically interested but unsure how to turn that energy into action. Through the course, they learned to read legislation, craft persuasive testimony, and build relationships inside the state legislature. “It brought me from a follower to a leader,” they explained. Since then, they have worked on multiple campaigns, served as a policy associate at Minneapolis City Hall, and helped pass local legislation holding utility companies to higher standards. For both students, the practice of civic engagement changed the trajectory of their lives.
In our new book, ENACT-ing Change: A Handbook for Teaching Advocacy and Civic Engagement, we profile educators doing this work in urban and rural institutions in red and blue states. Their classrooms look different, but the throughline is the same: civic learning that is inclusive, pragmatic, and hopeful.
And, as these students' testimonies demonstrate, it works. Surveys of alumni show lasting patterns of engagement. They vote, volunteer, contact elected officials, and stay involved at far higher rates than peers who didn’t participate in such classrooms. But the real outcome is harder to measure. It’s the restoration of civic confidence—the feeling that democracy, while messy, belongs to them.
For educators, that’s the work ahead. We can’t control the national climate. But we can decide what civic habits our students see modeled every day and equip them with the tools to ward off political cynicism.
That means creating spaces where inquiry is protected, disagreement is accepted as part of a functioning democracy, and engagement is encouraged rather than feared. It means re-imagining “public engagement” not as a branding exercise or a compliance category, but as the beating heart of what higher education contributes to democracy. And it means doing this work with students, not merely for them—showing that participation and reflection are not opposites but partners.
Our institutions also have a role to play. When state legislatures target higher education, the instinct is to hunker down and stay quiet. But the most effective response may be the opposite, demonstrating the value colleges bring to civic life. When our students testify on a local housing bill, help draft mental-health legislation, or facilitate a meeting with lawmakers, they gain skills and a sense of political efficacy. And they also reinforce the public value of our institutions in the eyes of our political leaders.
The past few years have tested higher education’s public mission more severely than any time in recent memory. Yes, the atmosphere is tense. But retreat and silence will not shield higher education from political attack. The more durable response is to demonstrate the public value of what we do: we help prepare a generation not just to navigate a divided democracy, but deepen students’ capacity to participate in it. We help to strengthen democratic life where it still exists and expand it where it doesn’t.
Robert W. Glover is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Honors at the University of Maine. He co-leads the Maine Chapter of the Scholars Strategy Network. Kathleen Cole is a Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Department of Social Science at Metropolitan State University.
