Bryce Richter
The Deliberation Dinner at Gordon on Oct. 8, 2025.
A group of students share conversation and a meal at UW-Madison's first Deliberation Dinner in the Gordon Dining and Event Center on Oct. 8, 2025.
Civic engagement is all the buzz at UW-Madison.
Just look at any commencement or convocation speech from Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin over the past few years, each of which have mentioned the words pluralism or polarization at least once.
“In your time here, we’ve begun to focus on addressing polarization by helping students build skills to communicate across differences, even on issues that evoke strong feelings,” Mnookin said during her May 9, 2026, commencement speech. “These efforts have helped you practice something our world needs: how to speak honestly, listen seriously, and disagree without contempt.”
In October 2025, UW-Madison launched the Wisconsin Exchange: Pluralism in Practice. Under that banner are existing efforts, such as the school’s Deliberation Dinners, at which students discuss hot button issues over meals, and new ones, including a grant program for student and faculty projects focusing on civil discourse; the university also sponsors a series of visits from leading free speech advocates, including Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and Colleen Shogan, the 13th archivist of the United States.
Efforts to bolster civil discourse, including through new campus centers and consortiums, are underway at other universities as well. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in April that about half of 100 such initiatives catalogued by one philanthropic foundation were created after 2023.
Allison Prasch, a UW-Madison communication arts professor who studies U.S. presidential rhetoric and is a member of the steering committee for the Wisconsin Exchange, says that this trend is due in part to the realization that “the civics education that used to happen in high school is not happening anymore.”
“[So] how do we help students develop these skills? Because if we're talking about political issues, they can feel really divisive, and divisiveness can feel scary.”
Also, student illiberalism is on the rise. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s 2026 annual survey of 68,000 students, students are increasingly willing to shut down speakers. At UW-Madison, 76% of students the foundation surveyed said shouting down a speaker would be acceptable in rare cases while 37% said “using violence” to interrupt a speaker would be acceptable in rare cases. That’s an increase from 2021, when 72% of those surveyed said it would be okay to shout down a speaker and 24% were okay with using violence to interrupt a speaker.
At a May 21 moderated conversation with Mnookin, according to The Daily Cardinal, Lukianoff called shutting down a speaker an “authoritarian impulse.”
“That’s something that’s illegal, that is something that is not okay, and frankly, it’s one of the oldest forms of censorship that exists.”
Universities also see a political benefit to establishing civil discourse programs, given conservative criticism of a perceived illiberal campus culture. Those issues came to a head in 2024 with pro-Palestine encampments on university campuses, including at UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee; one conservative senator suggested to Isthmus at the time that state lawmakers would consider the events when discussing the university system’s funding in the upcoming budget.
In a November 2023 letter to Assembly Speaker Robin Vos obtained by Isthmus, Mnookin and UW system President Jay Rothman, mentioned their commitment to creating “an environment in which difficult issues can be passionately and vigorously debated in a civil manner” while negotiating for the release of funding to the university system.
”As we have discussed, we know there are continuing challenges that need to be addressed, and
we acknowledge that there is more work to do,” Mnookin and Rothman wrote, noting the Deliberation Dinners and recent launch of the Wisconsin Institute for Citizenship and Civil Dialogue, a systemwide consortium providing grants and resources for civic engagement efforts.
Vos, for his part, noted such efforts in a January statement acknowledging the resignation of Mnookin, who departed for Columbia University on May 17: “Chancellor Mnookin had many great accomplishments during her tenure, such as bringing more free speech to campus and closing its division of DEI.” (Rothman was fired by the UW Board of Regents in early April.)
UW-Madison has sought to establish relationships with both presidential foundations and philanthropic organizations to create such programming, according to records obtained by Isthmus.
On Sept. 18, 2025, Mnookin was a speaker at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute’s Summit on Education. Her appearance alongside other university presidents and chancellors was in part aimed at discussing campus discourse — it occurred just a week after the assasination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk during a campus visit at Utah Valley University.
But it was also a chance to strengthen relationships with two key power players in the civic engagement sector: Frederick J. Ryan Jr., Reagan’s former chief of staff and the institute’s chair, and Shogan, who served as U.S. archivist under President Joe Biden before President Donald Trump dismissed her in February 2025.
Neither Ryan nor Shogan responded to a request for comment.
The chancellor was set for a Sept. 18 coffee with Shogan, according to a memo from Prasch to Mnookin obtained by Isthmus through a public records request; Prasch had previously developed a professional relationship with Shogan through the Reagan Foundation and shared academic study of the former president.
Mnookin’s meeting, according to Prasch’s memo, was to discuss Shogan’s work and consider how Shogan could contribute to UW-Madison intellectually or as a connection to “various presidential foundations and philanthropic organizations around the country.” Shogan is a senior advisor at More Perfect, a nonprofit that links together 34 presidential centers, and a senior fellow at Stand Together, a Koch Foundation-funded philanthropic organization dedicated to "identifying universities tackling issues of civil engagement and supporting them in their endeavors.”
The latter organization has been a key funder of many campus civic engagement efforts, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
UW-Madison spokesperson John Lucas confirms in an email to Isthmus that the meeting occurred.
Prasch wrote in her memo to Mnookin that both individuals could benefit UW-Madison’s efforts in pluralism and connect them with other organizations interested in doing so.
“Mr. Ryan is the most prominent face of RRPFI in elite DC circles and relishes this role. He is also the person responsible for all major programming decisions (and institutional/philanthropic partnerships),” wrote Prasch.
Ryan was, among other things, invited by College of Letters and Sciences Dean Eric Wilcots to visit campus in fall 2025 (though, due to scheduling issues, the visit never happened) and invited by La Follette School of Public Affairs Director Susan Yackee to come to campus as part of the school’s journalist in residence program — Ryan is the former publisher and CEO of The Washington Post.
The Reagan Foundation and Institute, per Prasch, embraces Reagan’s optimistic, economy-focused messaging while “subtly rejecting the ways that contemporary Republican leaders have co-
opted Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign slogan ‘Let’s Make America Great Again’ for their
own purposes.”
“RRPFI leaders walk a fine line between upholding Reagan-era conservative principles and democratic ideals while operating just two blocks from the White House,” she added.
Prasch wrote that Ryan is “interested in what UW-Madison is doing in the democracy/civility space,” citing an April 2025 meeting between Ryan, herself, College of Letters and Sciences Dean Eric Wilcots, and Marit Barkve, who was at that time the Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association’s senior development director for the College of Letters and Sciences.
Lucas says there is “no formal partnership” between the foundation and UW-Madison and that the university is not seeking, nor has it sought, philanthropic support from the foundation. The organizations were set to collaborate on a “Common Ground Forum” this spring, according to an October press release, though Lucas says schedules did not align.
“The dialogue with RRPFI is ongoing and we may consider a similar event in the future, but there are no plans currently,” Lucas says. “We’re open to working with RRPFI in the future in relation to the Wisconsin Exchange initiative, or efforts around viewpoint diversity, civil dialogue and civic engagement.”
