Join Campus Compact President Andrew Seligsohn as we kick off three days of learning, networking, and pursuing our ongoing commitments. Plus, some tips and tricks for getting the most out of the Virtual Gathering.

Raj Vinnakota, the new president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, has recently authored From Civic Education to a Civic Learning Ecosystem, a white paper that explores the existing landscape of civic learning and opportunities to improve it. He will share the key conclusions from the research, along with practical steps colleges and universities can take to contribute to democratic renewal.

Help us celebrate some outstading work! In December 2019, we presented the inagural winners of the Campus Compact Impact Awards. Join us as we recognize the outstanding facutly, staff, and institutions who were given these awards.

Members of the Campus Compact team share our vision for higher education’s role in advancing the public purposes of higher education and provide updates on the practical efforts we are taking in support of our mission.

In this presentation/workshop participants will learn how the dramatic shift from information scarcity to attention scarcity is eroding our politics, crippling our ability to sort truth from fiction, and leaving us open to political manipulation. We will show how our current approach to civic digital literacy may be making this problem worse instead of better, and outline an alternative approach recently tested in a nationwide pilot. It may not sound like it, but it's a fun session -- along the way we'll look into the "Swolebama" phenomenon, celebrity death hoaxes, and the bizarre but effective techniques of antivax community recruitment.

Sponsored by American Democracy Project

Join colleagues from across the country on Slack for virtual networking. These virtual networking sessions will provide space for unstructured conversation around various topics. Learn more about how to use Slack and how we'll be structuring our virtual networking at events.compact.org/conference/networking.

Epistemic justice foregrounds identity and power in an analysis of ethics and justice countering systems’ default processes that silence and delegitimize certain knowers and ways of knowing, creating epistemic exclusion. Attention to epistemic justice can shape institutional cultures, structures, and practices to identify and remove prejudicial exclusion of students and scholars from participation in the spread of knowledge, credibility discounting, and epistemic marginalization. It is a framework that examines and responds to the impact higher education systems have on privileging whose knowledge is valued, what research is legitimized, and who gets to participate in the creation and spread of knowledge. Story-telling contextualized within an epistemic justice framework validates the assets that each individual has and contributions that everyone can make, believing in their ability and worth, caring for them as individuals, honoring both their individual and group membership while challenging, confronting, and disrupting misconceptions, untruths, and stereotypes that lead to or exacerbate structural inequality and discrimination. A project website is available as a resource for session participants: epistemicjusticeiarslce2018.wordpress.com.

Underrepresented students encounter unique voting barriers that need to be addressed in general voter engagement campaigns to effectively interrogate sociopolitical inequities. When higher education institutions do not espouse an intersectional perspective towards realizing voter parity, educators and policymakers may perpetuate disparate voter outcomes and/or exhibit deficit assumptions about underrepresented populations. In an effort to realize equity, diversity, and inclusion for voter parity, this presentation shares best student political learning and engagement strategies and interventions in support of underrepresented student populations.

Process barriers prevented 46 percent of surveyed registered voters from voting in 2016, indicating a need for voter education on the practical steps of casting a ballot. In anticipation of the 2020 election, this session will look at common process barriers faced by students and promising practices for navigating these barriers. We will explore questions such as: What are some common voter engagement process challenges and opportunities? How do you institutionalize voting and create effective opportunities for students to address process barriers? Who can you recruit as partners, and how?

The chapter authors in William Flores’ and Katrina Rogers’ recent book, Democracy, Civic Engagement, and Citizenship in Higher Education: Reclaiming our Civic Purpose, respond to the deep challenges facing American democracy by describing and proposing efforts to make colleges and universities agents of democratic renewal. This plenary session is a conversation among four of those authors representing diverse roles at diverse institutions. Our goal is to link the high ideals of a just and inclusive democracy with the practical work of changing our institutions for the better.

Our current pandemic context teaches us that place and relationship are central to our communal flourishing. This session is an opportunity about place-based community engagement strategies designed on the principle that communities and higher education institutions should work in long-term partnerships to identify pathways to greater equity, justice, and sustainability. Participants will learn the core values of place-based justice and hear various institutional examples. Join the free PBJN Zoom call for follow-up on Thursday, May 14 at 10-11:15am PST.

Join colleagues from across the country on Slack for virtual networking. These virtual networking sessions will provide space for unstructured conversation around various topics. Learn more about how to use Slack and how we'll be structuring our virtual networking at events.compact.org/conference/networking.

This panel discussion will explore the intersection of equity and engagement. The panelists will discuss the both the landscape of higher education community engagement and equity practices. It will also explore the ways that what we do personally and institutionally become manifestations of fakequity that forgo progress towards LOVE. The panelists will provide recommendations for authentic equity-centered practices that lead towards social transformation.

The road to greater justice and equity runs through community colleges. This session will introduce work emerging from Campus Compact's Community Colleges for Democracy (CC4D) network. The session features contributors to a forthcoming publication focused on the use of civic and community engagement to advance community college priorities. Panelists will share highlights of efforts they successfully pursued at their institutions including how they leveraged resources and assets and overcame obstacles to build sustained, high-quality civic engagement programming.

Join us for final reflections on the Compact20 Virtual Gathering.