During the last few months, the COVID-19 pandemic has (re-)clarified ecological interdependence through a global health crisis, while the murders of unarmed Black people have placed a global focus on how historical and contemporary structural violences manifest in specific communities. This moment clarifies that civic thinking must be done through a lens of interdependence – across borders and time.  A civics of interdependence grounds itself in considerable portions of the Western Civic Imagination, as exemplified by Kwame Anthony Appiah’s treatment of cosmopolitanism. Yet – with and beyond Appiah – it also reaches beyond the limitations created by positioning rights and responsibilities within the Western Imagination and resists the colonial construction of borders as the primary arbiters of rights and responsibilities.  Vitally, it identifies locations of civic action that are not dependent on conventional understandings of citizen-government relations.  A civics of interdependence positions civil society, and its intersections with states, politics, and policies, in conversation with market, business, and government systems…

A statement of solidarity from the 2019 and 2020 Newman Civic Fellows. On May 25th, 2020, George Floyd, a brother, a father, and a friend of many was killed by four police officers of the Minneapolis Police Department. We are devastated by the murder of George Floyd, and we are standing in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and racial justice organizations across the nation in calling for policing reform and justice, not only for George Floyd, but for all Black people who are routinely murdered by the police. We know and see how Black communities have been suffering from violence, oppression, exclusion, and discrimination since colonial America. These effects are evident and factual, and we must confront not only the global pandemic, but the pandemic of racism. We condemn police brutality and mourn the loss of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless members of the black community who have died at the hands of police officers…

The rage and frustration on display in communities across the country are visible manifestations of the centuries-long legacy and continuing reality of racial injustice and racial hierarchy in the United States. Campus Compact stands on the side of justice. While the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer served as the trigger for the recent wave of protests, police disregard of the rights and lives of African Americans is one aspect of the systemic injustice that continues to pervade American life. As a coalition of colleges and universities committed to a vision of full participation of everyone in all aspects of public life, Campus Compact calls upon higher education to take action in pursuit of equal justice, equal opportunity, and equal power for all. While institutions of higher education cannot on their own end racial injustice, there is much they can do, both by addressing the inequities that continue to characterize access and success in college and by…