The Alliance for Civics in the Academy hosts "Can Civic Education be Liberal?" with Melinda Zook, Joseph Knippenberg, Benjamin Storey, and Dan Edelstein on Wednesday, May 13, 2026, from 9:00–10:00 a.m. PT.
Civic education and liberal education are often treated as complementary, but their aims can diverge in important ways. This webinar explores how efforts to prepare students for democratic citizenship intersect with, and at times strain against, the broader aims of liberal education, including open inquiry, intellectual autonomy, and critical skepticism. Panelists will consider how institutions can navigate these tensions while advancing a coherent vision of civic learning in higher education.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
As the Nehal and Jenny Fan Raj COLLEGE director, Dan Edelstein directs Stanford’s first-year general education requirement. He codirects the Stanford Civics Initiative and is the faculty codirector for the ePluribus Stanford initiative. He studied at the University of Geneva (BA) and the University of Pennsylvania (PhD). He is the author or editor of eleven books on European intellectual and political history, including most recently The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin (Princeton, 2025). He is currently working on a history of Western culture.
Benjamin Storey is a senior fellow in Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and co-director of AEI’s Center for the Future of the American University. He is concurrently an SNF Agora Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and a research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to coming to AEI, Dr. Storey served as Jane Gage Hipp Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Furman University, where he taught for seventeen years. He was the recipient of Furman’s highest award for undergraduate teaching, and the founding director of Furman’s Tocqueville Program.
Dr. Storey has been a visiting fellow at the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, and the recipient of a “Enduring Questions” Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has taught at the University of Chicago, and for the Hertog Political Studies Program, the Tikvah Fund, and the William F. Buckley, Jr. Program at Yale. Dr. Storey is the coauthor, with his wife, Jenna Silber Storey, of Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment (Princeton University Press, 2021). Together, the Storeys are working on a book titled, The Art of Choosing: How Liberal Education Should Prepare You for Life.
Joseph M. Knippenberg is Professor of Politics at Oglethorpe University in Brookhaven, GA, where he has taught courses on American government and political philosophy since 1985 and won numerous awards for teaching. He received his B.A. from Michigan State University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. Writing mostly about liberal political thought and liberal education, his articles and reviews have appeared in numerous edited volumes and professional journals (e.g., Perspectives on Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and the Journal of Religion, Culture, and Democracy), as well as on various websites (e.g., the Ford Forum, Minding the Campus, VoegelinView, and the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal). He has in the past served on the Georgia Advisory Committee for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the board of the American Academy for Liberal Education, and currently serves on the Board of the Association for Core Texts and Courses).
Melinda S. Zook received her Ph.D. from Georgetown University. She is a specialist in the history of political thought, religion, and women in early modern Britain. Professor Zook teaches courses on English and medieval history, as well as on such topics as Shakespeare’s Kings, great books and the search for meaning and the history of toleration. She has published articles on radical politics, martyrdom, political poetry, women, religion, and teaching. Her book, Radical Whigs and Conspiratorial Politics in late Stuart England was published by Penn State Press in 1999 and in paperback in 2009. In 2013, she published Protestantism, Politics, and Women in Britain, 1660-1714 with Palgrave, awarded Best Book on Gender for 2013 by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. She is the co-editor of Revolutionary Currents: Nation Building in the Transatlantic World (2004) and Challenging Orthodoxies: The Social and Cultural World of Early Modern Women (2014); and Generations of Women Historians: Within and Beyond the Academy (2018). She is currently the Germaine Seelye Oesterle Professor of History and Director of Cornerstone: Integrated Liberal Arts for the College of Liberal Arts, Purdue University.
