JMU Launches New Center for Civic Engagement

On Tuesday, September 26, 2017, National Voter Registration Day, James Madison University officially launched it’s new James Madison Center for Civic Engagement.

The James Madison Center for Civic Engagement will provide critical support for the University’s efforts to be a national model for civic engagement and to advance the legacy of James Madison; ensure strategic visibility for the University’s civic engagement efforts; track and record curricular, co-curricular and extracurricular civic engagement activities; funnel data to and from different units on camps as a one-stop civic engagement resource center; and disseminate information broadly to both internal and external constituents.

 

More than 50 guests — faculty, staff and students — gathered in Madison Union to hear remarks from inaugural executive director and associate professor of political science Abe Goldberg; JMU president Jon Alger; ADP’s Jen Domagal-Goldman; the Center’s associate director, Bill Wilson; and student Samantha Cantrell from the student government association. Samantha and President Alger then registered a student to vote during the ceremony.

JMU has played an increasingly prominent role in our American Democracy Project and is being awarded one of AASCU’s three inaugural Civic Learning and Community Engagement Awards this fall. We look forward to continued collaborations with JMU and its new Center.

JMU and the new James Madison Center for Civic Engagement truly are Madison’s legacy. He was an ardent advocate for higher education and wrote in an 1822 letter, “Learned institutions throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty….What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable than that of liberty and learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual and surest support.”

Liberty and learning do indeed go hand-in-hand and we at ADP look forward to watching both flourish at JMU.