Campus Clips

With the aim of encouraging “thoughtful public discourse and a civically responsible intellectual life,” the university is launching the Yale Center for Civic Thought on July 1. The center is an expansion of the Civic Thought Initiative created in 2019 by political science professor Bryan Garsten, who will direct the center. “I think you need to give students the experience of talking with people who may come from a very different perspective and feeling the discomfort of the disagreement, and then working through that,” says Garsten. The center will host seminars and reading groups at Yale and incorporate the “Citizens Thinkers Writers” program that introduces New Haven high school students to “foundational texts of philosophy, political science, and literature.”

In April, President Maurie Mcinnis ’96PhD announced the creation of a faculty committee to “better understand public perception and envision ways of strengthening trust in higher education.” The Committee on Trust in Higher Education is a response to national polling that shows a sharp increase in the percentage of people who lack confidence in higher education and believe it is headed in the wrong direction. Sociology professor Julia Adams and history professor Beverly Gage ’94 are cochairs of the committee.

This fall’s Devane Lectures will focus on United States history as the nation prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary next year. “America at 250: A History,” will be cotaught by history professors David Blight, Joanne Freeman, and Beverly Gage ’94. Established in 1969, the DeVane Lectures are a semester-long series that is both open to the public and available to Yale College students as a for-credit course. The lectures will be recorded and posted on Yale’s YouTube channel. 

Psychology professor Laurie Santos had already adapted her popular Yale course Psychology and the Good Life for the online platform Coursera—and created a version for teenagers called The Science of Well-Being for Teens. Now it’s their parents’ turn. Santos’s seven-hour course The Science of Well-Being for Parents debuted on Coursera in May. “Parents are facing stressors today that they’ve never faced before,” Santos told YaleNews. “It’s made an already challenging job even harder, and to top it off, this is the first time in human history we have parenting influencers giving updates all the time, making many parents feel like they’re not doing enough.”