Some commitments are chosen. Others are recognized — moments when you encounter an idea or a community of practice and realize it has named something you already believed. For me, that recognition came early, at the intersection of Robert Putnam's diagnosis of American civic decline and the American Democracy Project's conviction that regional public universities were uniquely positioned to do something about it. The result has been a twenty-year project of building — programs, assessments, partnerships, and institutional cultures — aimed at the proposition that higher education's most important civic contribution is not what happens in a single course but what kind of citizens an institution, taken as a whole, helps produce.
I think of this work as civic architecture. Architecture is not decoration. It is the deliberate design of structures that shape how people move through space, encounter one another, and accomplish things together. Civic architecture, as I practice it, is the deliberate design of institutional structures — curricular and co-curricular, formal and informal, campus-level and statewide — that shape how students encounter democratic life and develop the knowledge, skills, and motivation to participate in it. The structures I have built over twenty years include voter engagement programs that have earned national recognition across three institutions, a statewide legislative simulation conducted on the floor of the Virginia House of Delegates, a campus-wide civic learning assessment system, and a coordinator's guide that has helped dozens of institutions build or rebuild their own civic engagement infrastructure.
The definition I return to most often is Thomas Ehrlich's: civic engagement means working to make a difference in the civic life of our communities and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values, and motivation to make that difference. It means promoting the quality of life in a community through both political and non-political processes. That definition matters because of what it insists on — that civic engagement is not simply participation but preparation for participation, not just acting but developing the capacity to act well. The distinction has shaped every program I have built. Registration drives matter, but so does the civic knowledge that makes registration meaningful. Simulations are powerful, but only when students arrive prepared to engage with real procedural and substantive complexity. Co-curricular programming is valuable, but its value compounds when it is connected to what students are learning in their courses.
Civic engagement is also, at its best, a high-impact educational practice — one that improves student retention, deepens learning, and prepares graduates for careers as well as citizenship. The research on this is consistent, and it aligns with what I have observed in twenty years of deploying civic engagement programming alongside rigorous assessment: students who participate meaningfully in civic learning activities are more likely to persist, more likely to develop transferable professional skills, and more likely to report that their education prepared them for life beyond the classroom.
Civic engagement is not only a programmatic practice for me — it is a scholarly one. I have produced scholarship of engagement across my career, including regular presentations at the ADP Annual Meeting, peer-reviewed publications on civic pedagogy, and co-authored work on the assessment of civic learning outcomes. The Civic Incomes Assessment project at Radford University, which establishes baseline measures of student civic knowledge and skill at matriculation and tracks development across the undergraduate experience, is both a campus program and a contribution to the broader research literature on how civic learning happens and how to measure it honestly.
I have also worked to ensure that engaged scholarship is recognized in faculty evaluation. In my multiple department chair roles I have advocated explicitly for the inclusion of civic engagement work in tenure and promotion criteria, on the grounds that scholarship which makes a demonstrable difference in communities is scholarship — and that institutions which claim a civic mission but refuse to count civic scholarship in personnel decisions are not being honest about what they value.
When I arrived at Fort Hays State University in 2003, campus civic engagement was an aspiration at most institutions and a program at very few. Through the American Democracy Project I was part of the first generation of campus coordinators who built the infrastructure that is now taken for granted — voter engagement programs, deliberative dialogue initiatives, civic learning assessments, community partnership frameworks. I have chaired the Georgia Caucus of ADP institutions, served two terms as an ADP Civic Fellow, joined the ADP National Steering Committee, and co-produced the ADP Coordinators' Guide, a comprehensive resource that has helped new and restarting ADP chapters across the country build their own programs.
The pages in this section of the portfolio document the specific programs that have grown from that foundation. Each one represents a different dimension of what civic architecture looks like in practice — from the campus-level voter engagement infrastructure of Highlanders Vote, to the cross-institutional legislative simulation of the Virginia Government Simulation, to the assessment and institutionalization work of the Civic Incomes Project and the American Democracy Project. Together they represent a coherent body of work, built over two decades, in service of a conviction that has not changed since I first encountered it: that regional public universities are among the most important civic institutions in American life, and that building the programs that make that true is among the most worthwhile things an academic leader can do.