At Reagan Institute Summit, Chancellor Mnookin reaffirms commitment to civil discourse and the public mission of higher education

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Amid sharpened rhetoric and shifting public trust in universities, Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin attended the Reagan Institute Summit on Education (RISE), participating on Sept. 18 with other national leaders in higher education in a panel titled "Higher Ed at a Crossroads: The Civic Mission and Trust."

There, she affirmed the University of Wisconsin-Madison's commitment to free expression, civil discourse and serving the best interests of the public.

Mnookin began her remarks by denouncing recent political violence at Utah Valley University.

"What happened to Charlie Kirk was a tragedy. It was wrong," she said. "Nobody should ever experience violence because of their beliefs and their words. The fact that it happened on a college campus is even a step worse-because … college campuses should be one of the places within society where ideas are explored and bump up against each other."

She continued: "It is a call to all of us to double down on the importance of what we are doing on our campuses-to encourage our students and our faculty to learn to disagree better, to learn to engage with one another."

But she, along with other panelists, noted that creating those conditions for civic engagement, requires intentional effort-especially when many students arrive at college already shaped by social media, by their communities, and without necessarily having learned much about how to engage across their differences.
Panelist Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, addressed the complexity of that challenge.

"Let's remember we're asking colleges to do something that's pretty remarkable," Mitchell said, "which is to take 18-to-22-year-olds who have grown up in the most segregated neighborhoods since the Civil Rights Movement, who have gone to the most segregated schools since Brown (vs. Board of Education), and who are convinced by social media to live in silos, and we now expect them to be able to talk with, respect, and understand people they've never dealt with before. That's a heavy, heavy burden."

Mnookin agreed that national trends-especially the polarizing effects of social media-can distort both students' and the broader public's perceptions of campus climate. "But what happens at the fringes should not define our lived experience," she said.

Efforts to turn the values of inclusion, open dialogue and civic responsibility into lived experience are already well underway at UW-Madison. Programs such as The Discussion Project -a professional development initiative that helps instructors foster better classroom dialogue-and Deliberation Dinners, which brings students with diverse viewpoints together for structured discussions about controversial issues - exemplify this work.

In the run-up to the 2024 elections, UW-Madison's LaFollette School for Public Affairs took civil engagement efforts statewide with its Community Conversations, part of the Main Street Agenda it led in conjunction with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

And in the classroom, courses like Public Policy in a Divided America are giving students the tools to engage across difference. One engineering student told the course's professor, Amber Wichowsky, that PA:230 was the best class they'd taken at UW-Madison because it made them think more deeply about their role as a citizen.

As a former law school dean, Mnookin was unequivocal about the role public universities must play in both fostering civic dialogue through efforts such as these and protecting freedom of expression.

On a public university campus like UW-Madison, "The First Amendment regulates the limits of speech," she said. "And I think we have to be crystal clear about that."

She added: "The vast majority of students, faculty and staff on our campus recognize that."

The panel conversation also included discussions about affordability and institutional return-on-investment, during which Mnookin touted UW-Madison's record number of applicants in 2025, the fact that two-thirds of graduates earn a UW-Madison degree with zero debt, that the average time to degree for an undergraduate is less than four years, and that the six-year graduation rate is approximately 90 percent, well above the national average.

"We've never been an ivory tower," Mnookin said. "We are open and we live by the Wisconsin Idea, which is the notion that universities should matter to broader communities and make a positive difference across the state."

Looking ahead, she returned to the core value of engaging across difference: "Five-to-10 years is really a blink of the eyes," she said. "But I would like to believe that universities will be doubling down on civic discourse and viewpoint diversity."

She added, "We want to make sure that we're preparing [students] for a future that is complicated, and what it takes to succeed is going to look very different than it did 20 or 50 or maybe even five years ago."