Keene State College has recently gotten involved in a partnership with Tufts University and the American Democracy Project (ADP), a program of the American Association of State College and Universities (AASCU).
Gerald Alfieri / Equinox Staff
According to the AASCU, this partnership is one that will help KSC to “educate, inspire and prepare college students for a life of active civic engagement in order to cultivate a more vibrant democracy.”
Kim Schmidl-Gagne, ADP campus coordinator said, “Tufts began to work with the American Democracy Project in D.C., and they did a very small-scale piece of research, and now they are trying to scale up to more diverse institutions.”
KSC is a college that enjoys being involved in many different partnerships and organizations to help boost engagement on campus.
Mark Gempler, senior manager of scheduling and event services and KSC ADP steering committee, said, “For KSC to be asked to be part of this initiative, it recognizes the work we have already done in civic engagement within our peer group of AASCU schools.”
KSC was one of 12 institutions to be part of this study, Schmidl-Gagne said. “The National Director, Jennifer Domagal-Goldman, recommended KSC and it worked because we fit the parameters.”
Service Learning and Internship Coordinator Karen Balnis said, “Choices and policies set forth now will impact the lives of the current generations of college students in the future, and this partnership will help us to learn how best to set a campus climate that encourages political engagement.”
This project is broken up into two phases that will be going on around campus. The first phase, which is already in effect, is getting a benchmark for what the climate is for political engagement on KSC’s campus. The next phase will be centered around outreach and getting the students involved.
Schmidl-Gagne said, “We will obviously want to reach out to certain groups, like the student republicans and the student democrats, the student leaders, maybe some students in different majors, to try and get a real cross section.”
Over the past two elections, KSC has hosted events for not only students, but that were made available to the ADP institutes across the country. Schmidl-Gagne said, “We try to share the excitement that we experience around getting the first look at these candidates.”
This partnership is expected to change the political climate at KSC in a positive way. Balnis said, “I hope that as a result of this project, we learn how to better engage a broader range of students, that civic learning and engagement is clearly part of every student’s college experience.”
Gempler said, “Perhaps we can better identify some of our strengths and weaknesses and address programming and resources in those areas for KSC, or to contribute to the dialogue with our fellow ADP institutions.”
When looking at the partnership between ADP and Keene State College, Schmidl-Gagne said she hopes that “we actually find that we have done an okay job, that students feel safe and that they can talk about things and become politically engaged, and maybe they don’t know how yet and that’s okay.”
Molly Spooner can be contacted at mspooner@kscequinox.com