The December Periclean
Sharing updates and stories from our network of civic champions, delivered on the first Friday of each month.
A Year of Civic Innovation
As 2025 comes to a close, Project Pericles has much to be grateful for, and proud of. From releasing our Shaping Civic Futures strategic plan to supporting over 100 humanities-based courses and projects that reshaped teaching and learning nationwide, our team has worked tirelessly to champion democracy and strengthen the role that higher education plays in our civic ecosystem. With Project Pericles’ support, faculty from seventy-four institutions led students into state capitols, neighborhood libraries, historical archives, and art spaces, enabling the next generation to transform their passions into public action. Our team also collaborated with more than a dozen partner organizations to advocate for higher education’s civic purpose and to uplift the power of community-engaged pedagogy.
With an exciting new chapter ahead, we are incredibly grateful to the many campuses, administrators, faculty, staff, program directors, students, and community partners who make this work possible. Thank you once again, and we are looking forward to the opportunities that 2026 will bring.
In this edition we’ll be covering:
Spotlight: Building Community and Sparking Curiosity in The Philosophy Lab
Recap: National Student Vote Summit
Announcing Spring 2026 Periclean Faculty Leaders and Mini-Grants
Pericleans in the Press
Staff Reads
Periclean Course Spotlight: Building Community and Sparking Curiosity in The Philosophy Lab
At a time when people are facing uncertainty and information overload, philosophy offers something rare: space to think critically, question bravely, and find meaning. However, philosophy is a discipline that is often perceived to be gatekept within the walls of higher education–a perception that members of our consortium are working to change. With Project Pericles’ support, in the Spring 2025 semester at Carleton College, Philosophy Professors and Periclean Faculty Leaders (PFL) Daniel Groll and Hope Sample seized the opportunity to bring philosophy outside of the Carleton classroom by developing an innovative, community-engaged philosophy course in partnership with their local non-traditional high school, the Northfield Area Learning Center. Read our new spotlight article to learn more about the development, execution, and reflections from Groll and Sample’s course, Philosophy Lab: Leading a Pre-Collegiate Philosophy Program.
Recap: National Student Vote Summit
At the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition’s 2025 National Student Vote Summit, Project Pericles’ Civic Impact Assistant Jason Vadnos joined more than 300 students, faculty, staff, and nonprofit partners for three days of celebration and inquiry. At this tenth anniversary event, participants collectively reflected on a decade’s worth of organizing around the student vote movement and explored how the Coalition’s origins and evolution could inform the future of college voting mobilization. Roundtable discussions and workshops covered a wide range of topics, including strategies for facilitating nonpartisan election dialogues, cutting-edge research on student voting trends in the 2024 election, and best practices for combating political misinformation.
Jason co-led a session on inclusive coalition-building alongside the Campus Vote Project and OutVote and co-designed a poster with Every Vote Counts detailing how student voting groups can strengthen their events through relationships with local businesses. Looking back on his experience, Jason found the convening to be deeply motivating, describing how “the Summit brought joy and purpose to voting in a time when many young people are skeptical about democracy.” He looks forward to bringing this civic energy to his work at Project Pericles by uplifting the power of the polls—and civic engagement more broadly—for students nationwide.
New Periclean Faculty Leader Grantees: Transforming Courses & Communities
We are excited to announce the Spring 2026 Periclean Faculty Leadership (PFL) Grantees, a cohort of faculty leaders committed to integrating civic learning, community-engaged scholarship, and democratic skill-building into their courses.
Grantees will use $3,000 course enhancement or $4,500 new course/substantial revision awards to collaborate with community partners, develop innovative pedagogies, and guide students in applying academic knowledge to real-world challenges.
Beyond the direct impact of the courses themselves, the PFL program also empowers faculty to contribute scholarship, reflections, and public-facing work that showcase the importance of civic engagement in higher education.
Please be on the lookout for our Fall 2026 PFL Requests for Proposals in January.
Expanding Impact and Innovation with New Mini-Grantees
We are also thrilled to share the latest round of twenty new Mini-Grant awards, $1,000 grants which empower educators within and beyond Project Pericles’ consortium to design innovative pedagogical approaches that strengthen students’ civic agency and embed civic learning into the heart of higher education.
Twenty new Spring 2026 grants were awarded based on their ability to advance rigorous humanistic inquiry, deepen civic engagement, and be scaled and replicated across institutions. Projects span a wide range of topics, from narrative medicine to civil dialogue to homelessness.
Look out for the request for proposals for our Fall 2026 Mini-Grants in January.
Periclean Thought Leadership
Democracy Notes: The big tent strategy isn’t working
Scott Warren, Fellow at SNF Agora Institute and Project Pericles Board Member
Project Pericles’ Board Member Scott Warren recently published a piece in Democracy Notes, arguing that America’s “big-tent” pro-democracy strategy is failing because it focuses too narrowly on opposing Trump instead of building a genuinely ideologically diverse coalition united around a positive, long-term democratic vision.
Today at Elon: Amanda Tapler named new director of Project Pericles
Amanda Tapler, Periclean Program Director (Elon)
Elon University recently published an announcement that Public Health Studies professor Amanda Tapler will serve as the new director of Project Pericles work on their campus starting in the 2027-28 academic year.
Dillard University President Monique Guillory Leads a New Era of HBCU Leadership
Monique Guillory, President (Dillard)
Dillard President Monique Guillory was recently profiled in HBCUBuzz. She reflected on the importance of leadership from multidimensional experience and her priorities on academic expansion, community impact, and strategic partnerships as an anchor institution in New Orleans.
Documented: Voters of New York
Erin Mysogland, Periclean Program Director (Pace)
Pace University Program Director Erin Mysogland was recently quoted in a piece in Documented about the New York City mayoral election.
Hendrix News Center: Center for Civic Leadership Launches Civic Impact Series with Dr. Jay Barth ‘87
Jay Barth, Periclean Emeritus Program Director and Ima Graves Peace Emeritus Professor of Politics (Hendrix)
Hendrix College’s Center for Civic Leadership launched its new Civic Impact Series with a public lecture by alumnus and longtime political scholar Jay Barth. Barth highlighted the role and challenges of public service in times of crisis.
Carleton College Voice: How a Carleton statistics project is making a real-world impact in one of Minneapolis’s most diverse neighborhoods.
Emily Seru, Periclean Program Director (Carleton)
Carleton College Program Director Emily Seru was recently quoted in an article about a Carleton statistics and community-engagement project. Students partnered with Minneapolis’s Confluence Studio to map police use-of-force data in Ward 9, helping residents visualize patterns of policing and co-direct research that supports community understanding, organizing, and calls for reform.
Social Policy Report: Informal exclusionary discipline practices in US schools: Recent evidence and policy considerations
Rebecca Gleit, Periclean Faculty Leader (Skidmore)
Rebecca Gleit, a Fall 2025 Periclean Faculty Leadership Grantee, recently published an article about K-12 student disciplinary policy. Gleit received a PFL Grant to work with Saratoga Springs City School District as a community partner as she teaches the course “Schools: The Problem or the Solution?”
What Staff are Reading
Sanda (Executive Director) is reading Choose Wisely: Rationality, Ethics, and the Art of Decision-Making by Barry Schwartz and Richard Shuldenfrei. The book examines how people make choices under uncertainty (something increasingly relevant today!), why seemingly “rational” decisions often miss the moral and human dimensions that matter most, and how ethical reflection, context, and human judgment together can shape wiser choices in complex environments.
Arielle (Associate Director) is reading Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt which follows an incredible friendship between Tova, a grieving 70 year-old widow who works night shifts at an aquarium and Marcellus, an extremely clever giant Pacific octopus whose keen observations unlock the truth behind her son’s decades-old disappearance.
Jason (Civic Impact Assistant) is reading The Disengaged Teen by Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, which leverages investigative journalism and academic research to provide practical strategies for supporting teens’ academic and emotional flourishing.
Harry (Civic Impact and Communications Coordinator) is reading James Clear’s Atomic Habits, which explores effective habit-formation and their applications to daily life.
Maddie (Human-Centered Designer) is reading about the historical development and linguistics of the Hawaiian language through articles such as “The Historical Development Of The Hawaiian Alphabet” by David B. Walch.