CACTUS: Engaging Students Through a Campus Citizens’ Assembly

Abstract

Can a group of civically engaged citizens, given adequate education and information, deliberate and reason together, and make informed consensual political decisions? This is the question posed by democracy. Based on a variety of exercises from deliberative polling to citizen juries, advocates of what is conceptualized as not just a revitalization of democracy but a more advanced form of democracy, have answered in the affirmative.Can a group of university students, fulfilling general education, elective, or major requirements and working for a grade in a course, play the role of citizens and, given adequate education and information, deliberate and reason together, and make informed consensual political decisions? We have found that this is also possible as will be shown in this discussion and analysis of our five years’ experience with a three-credit hour course, “Citizens’ Assembly for Critical Thinking about the United States” (CACTUS). Originally created as part of our University’s Quality Enhancement Plan for SACS reaccreditation, CACTUS is modeled after the actual citizens’ assemblies on electoral reform convened by the governments of British Columbia (2004) and Ontario (2006-2007), which became the inspiration for subsequent, similar exercises in the Netherlands and Iceland. It differs from a typical simulation in that students are playing themselves as citizens rather than being assigned roles. Like its Canadian prototype, CACTUS is assigned the responsibility of studying a policy issue of contemporary importance and deciding whether a policy change is needed and, if so, what specifically that change should be. The semester is divided into three parts: 1) a learning phase involving typical readings, lectures, guest speakers, and exams; 2) a public hearings phase in which members of the campus community are invited to share their opinions with the Assembly; 3) a deliberation phase in which students work together to build two models for change, choose between them, and then between the chosen model and the current law or policy. They collectively write a final report that becomes part of the record on the University’s CACTUS web page and is sent to interested parties, and their recommendation is submitted to a campus-wide internet referendum.Our first topic, closest to the Canadian model, was electoral college reform. Since then, we have addressed the drinking age, the death penalty, war powers, presidential debates, and marijuana laws. The results have been both surprising and gratifying. In this paper we describe the process in greater detail including our experiment with an on-line assembly and a partial semester compacted assembly; we discuss some of the reasons behind the assemblies’ final decisions; we discuss some of the challenges of undertaking such a project at a large university and present some data based on pre- and post- student surveys. And we further explain why we conclude that the citizens’ assembly model may be a more useful tool for an academic setting than for the public government-mandated settings in which it was originally applied.