06/02/2026
SUNY Cortland is one of 20 colleges or universities nationwide accepted into the Campus Discourse Challenge. The Challenge will help participants institutionalize civic discourse. The lessons that these participants learn will also be useful to others.
This program is an initiative by two leading nationwide organizations: Campus Compact and the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge. The program’s “long-term goal is to ensure that every college student graduates with the knowledge, skills, dispositions, and practical experience to engage in meaningful and productive civic conversations across political and other differences.”
The initiative’s organizers will provide participants with resources such as national programmatic models and opportunities to collaborate on the path to designing a campus discourse action plan.
SUNY Cortland uses SUNY’s definition of “civic discourse”: "The exchange of ideas about public matters. It is distinct from debate, which has as a primary purpose promoting one’s own ideas and attempting to convince others to agree with these ideas.”
Caitlin Goodwin (History), Jose Ortiz (Foundations), Karen Lister, and Kim Nguyen-Nalpas (both Psychology), and Jennifer Hall (Senior Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning) volunteered to serve as SUNY Cortland’s members of this Challenge. President Bitterbaum signed a letter of commitment. This team’s initiative strengthened SUNY Cortland’s application.
That application was reinforced by –
- SUNY Cortland’s representation in the SUNY Academic Fellows program
- Our CALP/DE Fellows program (described in another newsletter article)
- Our participation in SUNY's Empire State Service Corps program, which is directed by Career Services Director Rob Binnall
- The Galpin Institute’s Dragons for Democracy Internships
- The civic discourse and civics education programming conducted by SGA clubs such as BridgeCortland, Turning Point USA/Cortland, and NYPIRG and by our Heterodox Campus Community (a chapter of Heterodox Academy).
- The SUNY Journal of the Scholarship of Engagement (JoSE), which was launched by, and is housed at, SUNY Cortland. JoSE articles align with the Challenge’s
- Our long-term participation in the SUNY+ Team, an unofficial community of practice focused on applied learning and civic discourse.
- SUNY Cortland’s participation in ALL IN's Democracy Challenge, winning ALL IN’s highest honors in the past two years.
- SUNY Cortland’s 2025-2026 celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, during which students, faculty, and staff conducted 30 events that provided civic education and/or civic discourse workshops.
The Challenge’s organizers will host monthly campus conversations to create a space for networking, resource sharing, and exploration. The first of those conversations was on May 29.