������Ƶ

Dr. Emily Stacey is a Political Science professor and program coordinator at Rose State College in Oklahoma City, where she has taught for 14 years. A DaVinci Institute Fellow and a member of the first faculty cohort of The Great Questions Foundation – led by Austin Community College professor Ted Hadzi-Antich. Dr.Stacey has been a strong advocate for civic engagement and discourse both inside and outside the classroom.

These interviews have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Can you describe Rose State College and the community it serves?

Rose State is really — and I know it sounds cliche — but it’s truly a family-oriented environment. It’s a mid-sized community college with about 7,000 students in terms of enrollment. A good portion of that is online and some of it is dual or concurrent enrollment, so high school students. We have an interesting mix of population. We’re also adjacent to Tinker Air Force Base, so we see a good number of veterans, their families, and active duty members who matriculate. A lot of them take advantage of online classes for convenience.

What courses do you teach? How does civic engagement show up in your work? 

I teach International Relations every fall, and I typically secure grant money to take [a few] students to the Oklahoma Political Science Association Conference…where they present research posters focused on an issue within an international organization or country they had selected for the semester. That experience is a big part of how I help students understand that participation is essential. Politics, whether academically or as a citizen, isn’t just something you learn; you have to actively engage with it.

Comparative Politics is another one of my favorites to teach. I was in the first faculty cohort with The Great Questions Foundation, and for that fellowship, I completely redesigned the course. I transformed it from a textbook and lecture-based class into a course built around a reader…with excerpts from contemporary theorists like Manuel Castells, whose work on network theory and 21st-century social movements connects directly to my own doctoral research on mobilization… [as well as] thinkers like Friedman, Samuel Huntington, and Ernest Gellner. Students have strong takes on some of these older theorists, which makes for great discussion.

The class is entirely discourse-based. Students do literature reviews before coming to class, and then we work through the context of that week’s reading together. For example, a week on nationalism might pair something from Ernest Gellner with a more contemporary piece on ethno-nationalism or the relationship between nationalism and religion. We parse out the concepts through conversation and theory rather than through a textbook.

The results have been really incredible. I have colleagues who told us we were crazy — that kids don’t want to read, they won’t read, they just want to sit and get a grade. But when you challenge these kids, when you give them literature that isn’t cookie-cutter, when you give them real literature, you will be surprised. They want to read, and not only do they want to read, they want to relate it to their lives.

And I think that approach has been genuinely valuable. One of my students, for instance, received the Eli Whitney Scholarship at Yale. He’s one of 30 students selected nationwide for the coming academic year, and he’s from Midwest City, Oklahoma. I don’t take all the credit, but I do think that when he walks into that classroom, having wrestled with challenging literature, engaged in real discourse, and learned to sit with more questions than answers, he’s going to thrive. I also have a young woman who is entering her second year at Cornell this fall. We’re producing remarkable students out of Midwest City, and I’m incredibly proud of them.

What civic engagement work are you leading outside of the classroom environment? 

We just held our third annual this past April, where we hosted Joe Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Alan Weissman from Vanderbilt’s Center for Effective Lawmaking. The year before that, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison was our keynote speaker.

CivicsCon is a gathering of legislators, advocates, and citizens. We’re teaching people how to get engaged and how to advocate for themselves. Nonprofits, advocacy groups, Americans for Prosperity, the ACLU — they all come and host vendor tables. It’s a completely nonpartisan event. We just want to make sure that people who want to be engaged are empowered to be. 

I bring in panelists to discuss a specific issue. This year, both conversations were anchored in the Declaration of Independence, around the phrase “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

The first panel focused on rights and how we understand and effectively exercise our rights. I brought in representatives from across the political spectrum: a Libertarian, a Democrat, a Republican, an academic, and [Founder and CEO of Let’s Fix This] Andy Moore to represent the advocacy perspective. The second conversation explored the concept of Truth, and what that means for us as a political community. For that one, I brought in religious scholars, political academics, and an attorney.

I always make sure to include an academic voice on these panels, and I also make sure my students are involved. We have student panels at CivicsCon for real, meaningful engagement, not just spectators.

That’s my pièce de résistance in terms of annual civic engagement work. We also do Constitution Week programming. 

What does the financial and people infrastructure look like for this work?

Rose State is currently the only [higher education] campus in Oklahoma with a dedicated civic engagement center, but it is not funded. So as the program coordinator within the political science department, alongside James Davenport, the Executive Director of the Center for Civic Engagement, I’ve been securing grants largely from private external sources, as well as building partnerships within the state. One key partner is Andy Moore with. Andy and I do a lot together, including a podcast called and our civic engagement conference, CivicsCon.

The Institute for Humane Studies has been a wonderful donor. They contributed quite a bit toward the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this year, which helped fund CivicsCon as well as other programming. Beyond the , I work with the Teagle Foundation on general education course redesign, and I partner with and on voter engagement work. All In provides micro-grants. For example, a “Pizza to the Polls” grant of around $1,000, which in Oklahoma goes a long way: Fifty pizzas delivered to Rose State during a voter registration or voter education drive. The Jack Miller Center is another grant source, and Ted has been instrumental in connecting me with several of these partners.

I’ve gotten very good at identifying external funding because we’re in Oklahoma, we’re a community college, and state funding is tight. You learn to be resourceful.

On campus, I’ve had a wonderful collaborator in Dr. Kirby Harzman, our Vice President for Student Engagement. She oversees the President’s Leadership Class, Student Senate, and a range of student-centered programming, and she’s been incredibly helpful in identifying student leaders and bringing new audiences to our events. We’ve worked CivicsCon into the President’s Leadership Class requirements, so those students are getting that civic exposure. A lot of them leave with internships or a clearer sense of what they believe and who they want to support.

For faculty, I also want to highlight , which has been a wonderful partner. I’ve spoken on panels for them, but more relevantly for faculty reading this, they offer fellowships and micro-grants to encourage discourse-based programming at your institution. They have several grant categories, and I believe the one currently open offers up to $3,000 to implement some form of structured discourse on your campus. They serve both K–12 and higher education. I was one of their Deliberative Dialogue Fellows and fell in love with the organization.

[Professor] Aaron Bachhofer has also been an invaluable partner. He helps me with everything at the conferences, from moderating panels to hauling water upstairs. And my students themselves have been remarkable. I just graduated from a cohort of about six Political Science students, and they took it upon themselves to set up a monthly voter registration table in the student union. I found out about it in mid-March, but apparently it had been running since August. These students just decided something needed to be done and did it.

We’re really lucky in that way. Between Andy Moore and Let’s Fix This, our network of nonprofits and advocacy groups, and students like that, it’s a pretty special thing we’ve built. 

Can you expand more on what the funding environment is like for faculty within a community college context?

Faculty need to know these resources exist and I don’t think enough of them do. As you noted in your email, the civic engagement world is incredibly insular, which is both a strength and a problem. We need to be more intentionally expansive.

Part of that insularity comes down to funding. We’re all digging through the same rabbit holes looking for grants, and when we find them, we’re often competing against each other. Fortunately, a lot of these organizations are supported by private money and are genuinely generous about distributing it to institutions like Rose State. I can’t compete with a school that has 70,000 students when I have 7,000, but it’s meaningful that organizations recognize those inequities and try to address them. Still, it’s not as widespread as it needs to be.

Which brings me to a larger point: I want my state legislature to fund my civic engagement center. Oklahoma is, for lack of a better phrase, something of a civic education desert. We’re doing yeoman’s work as professors and educators, but the legislature isn’t paying attention to the gap at the higher education level. They’re focused on K–12 social studies standards, which matters, but civic education doesn’t stop at 18. I’d argue it actively begins at 18. That’s when students are navigating real civic life. We need real, sustained investment in this work. Not just grants that professors cobble together on their own. 

Having worked within different institutions in Oklahoma City, how do engagement models translate across space and place?

It’s incredibly stratified. Programming is hyper-local and campus dependent, which makes consistency difficult. I think everyone involved has the right intentions. Most institutions are at least doing voter registration drives, whether monthly or quarterly, but broader engagement and programming beyond that depends heavily on each institution’s funding stream. Some are better resourced than others, and some simply don’t know about all the grants that are available to them.

Have there been any particular issues that your students or staff have tried to address through civic engagement efforts?

Not specifically. As a minority Professor working in Oklahoma and trying to maintain tenure, I walk a very fine line when it comes to controversy. Whenever I host events, I’m very intentional about representing all perspectives. If it’s political, I make sure all ideological bases are covered: a Republican, a Libertarian, and a Democrat, which are the three officially recognized parties in Oklahoma, plus an academic expert.

A lot of that comes from my time at the state capitol, where I worked for a nonpartisan legislative tracking and press firm. I learned quickly that staying nonpartisan was essential to keeping a job, but it also just served me better in the broader game of politics. This is a majority-conservative state, and most of my students have no idea what my political affiliation is. I’ve gotten very good at neutrality.

And I tell my students at the beginning of every semester: I don’t care how they vote, I care that they vote. 

I don’t wade into specific issues or debates. When I host campus conversations, I bring in voices from across the ideological spectrum. And they really are demonstrations of civil discourse. 

What new technologies are you using to engage students in civic efforts?

I absolutely adore . It has been a real game changer in terms of breaking down the intimidation barriers that a lot of college students have around political discourse today.

We’re in a cancel culture environment where students are afraid that if they say the wrong thing, they’re going to be attacked in the classroom. That fear shuts down discourse entirely, which is deeply problematic in a democracy that depends on diverse voices and perspectives.

This is especially true for what I call the COVID generation. You’d be surprised: I’ll walk into a classroom of 35 or 40 students on the first day — and I’m a fairly popular professor, so my classes fill up — and it is completely silent. Everyone is staring at their phones, not talking to one another, because they genuinely don’t know how. So for the first 20 minutes, I make them introduce themselves to each other. I also make clear upfront that this is going to be a discourse-heavy class. 

That’s where Unify America has been invaluable. What they do is match college students from across the country based on at least three demographic points where they differ: Democrat and Republican, rural and urban, Black and white, religious and non-religious, and so on. Students fill out a survey and on the day of their session, they log onto a self-contained platform at an agreed-upon time and are prompted with a series of questions. One of the most provocative is something like: “Free speech should be allowed on campus regardless of whether it’s controversial.” Students rank their response from strongly agree to strongly disagree and then they have a conversation about why.

They work through around 25 different topics that way. It’s now mandatory in all of my American Government classes. The Unify Challenge is worth 80 points, nearly a test grade, and students also write a reflective essay afterward.

Reading those essays genuinely gives me chills. On the first day when I announce the assignment, students look at me like I’ve lost my mind: “You’re going to make me talk to a stranger online?” I tell them “you’re already talking to strangers online.” Let’s do it about something that actually matters.