Eugene Lang founded Project Pericles in 2001 on a conviction: a college’s civic mission should be as rigorous as its academics. He wanted the Pericles name to be a seal of approval, earned and re-earned. A college could demonstrate its fit to join the consortium by making meaningful commitments: naming a program director, securing a trustee-level commitment to the mission, and creating a standing trustee committee on civic and social responsibility. Mr. Lang wanted the work to deepen year over year in the classroom, on the campus, and in the community, ensuring civic engagement was more than volunteerism. He also envisioned Periclean influence extending well beyond individual campuses.
Twenty-five years later, Project Pericles aims to be intimate and influential. Intimacy comes from choosing depth over breadth in community-engaged civic learning on our member campuses. Influence on the field comes through partnerships and thought leadership, working with and beside others committed to civic impact and democratic revitalization.
The last two and a half decades have been threaded with partnerships, from being part of the launch of The Campaign for Civic Learning in College in 2004 alongside Campus Compact, AAC&U, and more than 100 college and university presidents, chancellors, trustees, and legislators, to a multi-campus study of student well-being with Bringing Theory to Practice, through this year’s launch of the Higher Education Democracy Exchange (HEDEX). Community-engaged civic learning advances when organizations move together.
Built with others from the start
Mr. Lang’s vision drew on his 1999 Daedalus essay, which made a case for the liberal arts college as an engine of democratic life. He recognized that this would require a consortial approach and saw deep value in drawing in advisors from across the emerging field of community-engaged civic learning.
David Scobey, who had recently launched the Arts of Citizenship Program at the University of Michigan, joined Project Pericles’ first national advisory board, one of many early connectors with the broader movement. Scobey indeed describes Project Pericles as “the liberal arts college wing of the community engagement movement.”
Collaboration shaped Periclean programs. Debating for Democracy, which became a Pericles flagship was, in Scobey’s telling, “Gene Lang’s baby,” created to push civic engagement beyond service and toward public issues and debate.
An early copy of the Basic Requirements for Periclean Institutions.
Signs of institutionalization
Where Scobey offers a view from the founding years, Bobbie Laur offers one from the center of the field today. As president of Campus Compact since 2022, the national coalition of colleges and universities committed to civic and community engagement and a longtime Pericles partner, Laur has watched this work move from the margins into the fabric of higher education in many places. One change that some read as a loss, she reads as a marker of success: college presidents invoke community engagement as “signature initiatives” less than they once did.
“There was a long period of time when there was no infrastructure on campuses to advance this work for the long term, so the people we depended on to hold the mantle and make the case were the college presidents,” she says. “Today, because there are people who lead and do this work across campuses, the expectation is for faculty and administrative leaders to hold the mantle and sustain it. That is a sign of institutionalization.”
She points to other signs. Service learning is practiced so widely it has become standard high-impact practice: “It’s in the water.” Civic and community engagement sits somewhere in most campus strategic plans, and the work has become a recognized professional career path for faculty and staff.
Such deepening has been midwifed through partnerships. Scobey’s path shows how: after leaving Michigan in 2005 for Bates College, he directed its Harward Center for Community Partnerships, helped start Imagining America, and worked with AAC&U on its national report A Crucible Moment. Through Bringing Theory to Practice, founded by former Bates president Don Harward, Project Pericles ran a multi-campus study of what civic engagement does for student well-being.
The premise, as Scobey describes it, was that “the crisis of student civic disengagement, the crisis of student intellectual disengagement, and the crisis of student emotional disengagement were the same crisis.” Well-being, he argued, “is not just a condition for great student education. It’s a goal of a great college education, part of what it means to educate the whole student.”
Meeting the moment
“If you really care about the work, partnership is at the core of sustaining it,” Laur says, pointing to a multiplier that no one group produces alone. That logic runs through the field’s newest infrastructure, the Higher Education Democracy Exchange, launched this year to connect civic resources and practitioners across institutions.
Laur also argues that this moment demands we approach this work holistically and radically break down silos across our campuses, including those that have historically existed across functional areas like civic engagement and learning, anchor and community-based partnerships, and economic and workforce development.
The moment is also precarious. Scobey describes a “best of times, worst of times” contradiction. Community-engaged learning has the potential to become a trust-building engine at the center of institutional life. At the same time, fiscal pressures, enrollment decline, and political attacks are forcing cuts to the centers and staff who carry it. His stance, which Laur and Project Pericles share, is to refuse a defensive crouch and to both “protect what we have created and transform what we have created” at once.
In practice, this means weaving civic and community engagement into the core of the curriculum rather than as a separate, sidelined program. It means asking historians and English professors to teach in integrative core programming rather than watching as departments get cut.
Through our recent strategic planning process, on which both Laur and Scobey provided feedback, we reaffirmed our commitment to being ecosystem actors. Twenty-five years in, this means building upon what Mr. Lang set out to do: deepening work on each campus while extending reach well beyond any one of them.