Our events bring thought-provoking conversations about democracy to the Penn State community and beyond. We also partner with organizations across Penn State and throughout the State College community to co-sponsor programming. All events are free and open to anyone.
Ronald Scott: The Legacy of Vietnam Era Student Activism
Wednesday, March 18, 2026, 12:00 p.m.
Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library
As a Penn State student in the early 70s, Ron Scott joined protests against the Vietnam War and racial inequality on campus. In this dialogue, Scott shares his experiences as a student activist and how it shaped his perspectives on diversity and free speech on college campuses. Responding to resurfaced audio of a speech delivered after the Kent State massacre in 1970, Dr. Scott reflects on what it means to hear his younger voice 55 years after those events.
The conversation explores questions like:
- What was campus culture like in the early 1970s?
- How did student organizations like the Black Student Union change the university
- What can today’s politically engaged students learn from the student movements of the 1960s?
Scott was Vice President Emeritus and associate professor of Media, Journalism, and Film at Miami University. He joined Miami in 1988 after receiving his doctorate in communication from the University of Utah and his bachelor of arts degree in theatre arts from Penn State.
This event is sponsored by the Center for Democratic Deliberation.
Danielle Allen: 250 Years of Our Declaration of Independence
Why an Old Text Still Serves Us Now
Thursday, March 19, 2026, 5:00 p.m.
Freeman Auditorium, 117 HUB-Robeson Center
As we celebrate 250 years of American democracy in 2026, join us for a lecture from one of the country’s leading democracy scholars and practitioners, Danielle Allen. In this talk, Allen draws an arc from the American founding to the present to explore how the original vision of the Declaration of Independence can serve us still, even as we also recognize and remedy its imperfections. She will also discuss reforms that can strengthen American democracy moving forward.
Danielle Allen is James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University. She is also Director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at the Harvard Kennedy School and Director of the Democratic Knowledge Project, a research lab focused on civic education. She chairs the board of FairVote, the nation’s leading advocate for ranked choice voting, and is a co-chair of the Our Common Purpose Commission at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where she is a member. Her books include Justice by Means of Democracy, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, and Democracy in the Time of Coronavirus.
This event is co-sponsored by the Africana Research Center, Humanities Institute, and the Richards Civil War Era Center.
Join or Die: A Film About Why You Should Join a Club
Sunday, March 22, 2:00 p.m.
The State Theatre, 130 W. College Ave., State College
Reserve your Ticket
Join the Center for Democratic Deliberation for a screening of the film Join or Die on Sunday, March 22 at The State Theatre in downtown State College The film draws on the work of Robert Putnam’s seminal book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Putnam’s book, which came out 25 years ago, was based on his research as a political scientist about the importance of participating in clubs and organizations. His message was clear and simple: a healthy democracy depends on our sense of connection to each other.
Putnam’s research outlines how a decline in clubs and organizations (a.k.a. “third spaces”) negatively impacts our faith in each other and our system of government. The film was created by Putnam’s former student-turned filmmaker, Pete Davis, and his sister Rebecca Davis. Together they tell an entertaining and upbeat story about the life and research of a favorite professor through interviews with Putnam himself accompanied by Pete Davis’s enthusiastic narration, interviews with prominent figures like Hillary Clinton and Pete Buttigieg, and visually compelling archival footage. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with professors, community members, and civic leaders.
Can AI Foster Democratic Open-Mindedness?
Experimental Evidence from the Ideological Turing Test
Wednesday, April 1, 12:00 p.m.
124 Sparks Building
Victor Bruzzone studies how how institutions can foster mutual understanding and civic virtue in democracy. In this talk, he will present results from an experimental adaptation of Brand et al.’s (2025) Ideological Turing Test (ITT) study to examine whether interacting with an AI can enhance open-mindedness in democratic deliberation (the ability to faithfully articulate opposing views). While several recent studies suggest AI dialogue can help shift people’s beliefs, our findings suggest that soliciting open-mindedness to one’s political opponents may not be as successful.
Bruzzone received his Ph.D. in political theory from the University of Toronto and is now a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State. His research combines democratic theory, phenomenology, and empirical design to examine what kinds of institutions can cultivate both epistemic and solidarity benefits.
Infected by Politics: Medicine and Public Health in a Divided Democracy
Wednesday, April 8, 12:15 p.m.
409 Carpenter Building
What are the consequences of political polarization for medicine and public health? While affective polarization has reshaped elections and policy debates, we know less about whether it penetrates professional domains built on trust, neutrality, and expertise. This project examines how partisan identity structures beliefs, clinical interactions, and public health environments in the United States. Using national surveys of physicians and the public, embedded experiments, geographic analyses of physician partisanship, and clinician focus groups, Julianna Pacheco investigate whether partisan cues shape evaluations of seriousness, communication, and trust; how partisanship structures beliefs about medicine’s social mission; and whether communities differ in public health contexts based on the partisan composition of their physician workforce.
Pacheco is professor of political science at the University of Iowa. She received a PhD in political science from Penn State and postdoctoral training as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at the University of Michigan. Her research sits at the nexus of political science and population health. She was among the first to examine how health shapes political participation, most notably finding that poor health reduces turnout.