Last April, I traveled to Rose State College, a community college a few miles outside Oklahoma City, to sit in on political-science professor Emily Stacey’s class, American Federal Government. The course is required of every undergraduate at a public institution in the state, whether they major in public affairs or dental hygiene. The day I visited would be the culmination of several weeks of students’ research and collaboration: a policy debate.

For many students, the class is not only an orientation to the U.S. government but to understanding themselves as political persons. “A lot of these kids don’t have nearly as much inclination towards politics as perhaps we’re seeing portrayed in the media,” Stacey told me. So she administers the Pew Research Center’s political typology survey to help them become aware of where they stand on the political spectrum.

On the debate day, the twenty-two students sat at three tables, each representing a political leaning: liberal, conservative, and independent. The liberal group was the largest. As class began, a woman at the independent table, a bit older than most of her classmates, suggested strategies and talking points. At the conservative table, a student pulled on a new sport coat over his T-shirt and shorts; his classmates poked fun at him for leaving the price tag on it.

After a few minutes, Stacey announced, “Alright, it’s 9:35. Let’s get it on!”

In the past few years, college students have sat at the nerve center of American political discourse. As a whole, the group is ambiguous: part fretted-over constituency, part rhetorical football, part radical bogeyman. They have real numerical power; fifteen million strong, students voted in 2020 at a rate similar to the general public, though the rate probably declined in 2024. Students may have greater power as characters in political narrative.

In a story repeated often by conservatives and some liberals, students are almost uniformly radical, censorious, and closed-minded. To some, last year’s student encampments protesting Israel’s war in Gaza proved the story true. Backed by this perception, states have passed laws curtailing what students can be taught, and Republican officials have threatened the accreditation—and therefore eligibility for federal funds—of schools they say violated the civil rights of Jewish students during the protest wave.

But as I know from long experience as a college teacher and from interviewing students and faculty members across Texas and Oklahoma, the narrative about pervasive, strident campus radicalism is false. Most students are not very interested in politics, and those who are have more varied and nuanced views than their critics acknowledge. The distorted picture is based on selective attention to a handful of elite schools. Most students attend community colleges and regional universities. Most people go to college within seventeen miles of home and remain nearby after they graduate. Encampments appeared last year mainly at expensive, highly selective institutions.

It remains to be seen how students will respond to the second Trump presidency. Crackdowns on last year’s protests could very well stifle demonstrations before they even begin. But even if the quads are quiet, onlookers should not conclude that students are unwilling or unable to meet the demands of citizenship.

Far from the top-ranked universities and out of public view, something arguably more powerful than a protest occurs every day: future civic leaders in states and counties across the country learn to think and work together toward common ends. For that reason, the long-term health of American democracy does not primarily depend on the prestigious campuses that grab public attention and boast of alumni in the White House and Senate and on the Supreme Court. It depends on places like Rose State.

The responses to Stacey’s first debate question—“Did Obama get it right or wrong regarding ISIS in his 2014 speech?”—were halting. The topic was tricky, and the students seemed nervous. When Stacey called on the independents to state their position, one replied, “That’s us? Alright, cool.”

But the discussion soon picked up pace. A conservative student spoke about a recent reduction in the backlog of immigration cases. One of the liberals had statistics on the disproportionate conviction rates of people of different races charged with drug crimes. A student from Germany explained how proportional representation works in a multi-party parliamentary system.

The students spoke not just from their research but from a wide range of experience. One student said he only learned that the Islamic State had moved into Africa once he was deployed there. Experience often scrambled partisan commitments. After a student at the liberal table said, “the United States is built on the backbone of undocumented immigrants,” a conservative replied that he agreed. He had seen firsthand how hard undocumented people toiled at his workplace.

When the debate turned to marijuana legalization—a question of federalism, Stacey noted, and a major issue in a state whose boom-and-bust cannabis industry has earned it the nickname “Tokelahoma”—a liberal argued for raising the legal age to consume the drug to twenty-five, to prevent younger teens from getting it from eighteen-year-old friends. “That just happened to my little brother!” a fellow liberal added.

Students at other institutions also told me that meeting peers with different backgrounds played a big role in shaping their political thinking. Pranav Nagajothi, a student at Rice University in Houston, told me that in comparison to high school, “there’s such a diverse array of perspectives” in college. Some political issues, like the legal status of undocumented immigrants, might seem abstract at first, “and then all of a sudden you meet someone who’s uniquely affected by that issue,” he said. “I realized, oh, this isn’t just some issue politicians are using for their benefit,” he added. “These are real people who live real lives.” Such personal encounters can sometimes lead students’ political views not just to deepen but to change. Isaiah David Rodriguez, a recent graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, said he began to rethink his high regard for Second Amendment rights after he met students who had experienced gun violence.

At a community college, students are unlike each other not only in terms of race, class, religion, and sexuality. They also come from different generations, with different experiences of work and family life. In Stacey’s class, Stephanie Lopez, the thirty-five-year-old woman who coached her fellow independents before the debate, is a married mother who served in the Air Force. Across the room from her sat Ylleana Berryhill, who was nineteen and right out of high school.

Both students said they began the course with a lot to learn. Lopez described herself as politically “naïve” before the semester. She hadn’t registered to vote until she was twenty-eight. Berryhill saw politics as “intimidating” because it seemed to demand extensive knowledge and featured so much conflict.

The class gave both students more confidence. Lopez was among the most active speakers in the debate, giving context for the appearance of ISIS in Iraq and making connections between the Patriot Act and immigration issues. Berryhill was quieter in class, but when we spoke afterward, she explained her views on the debate questions, including why, if she had been eligible, she would have voted no in the state’s 2023 recreational-marijuana referendum.

The age diversity that’s typical of community college may even offer a new way to frame issues in a multigenerational society. “American politics, in the way that I teach it, is a whole lot less partisan and a whole lot more generational,” Stacey said. “And that’s something that can really break down a lot of those wedge issues.”

Classes are not the only places where students quietly develop their political ideas. In fact, Alfred Dozier, a student at the University of North Texas (UNT) in Denton, told me that classes don’t contribute much at all. “Our political views aren’t being shaped by our professors,” Dozier said. “They’re not being shaped by people in the administration. They’re not being shaped by the classes we go to. They’re being shaped by what we see online and by the conversations we have with our friends.”

One friend Dozier talks with about politics is Jaidyn Watkins. She serves as vice president of UNT’s student government, with Dozier as president. Watkins said that while they mostly agree on substantive issues, they take different approaches. Regarding the conflict in Gaza, for instance, Watkins said she looks more at the humanitarian issues, while Dozier is interested in the political aspect. As their conversation weaves around the topic, she said, they keep coming back to a common idea: “People shouldn’t die.” She said she has learned a lot from talking to Dozier. “He won’t admit it, but I’m sure he’s learned a lot from me as well.”

Their friendship exists in a context—unusual outside of college—where they have countless opportunities to keep learning. Despite Dozier saying classes don’t have a big impact on students’ political thinking, he named three that helped him deepen his understanding of politics, including one on the presidency. Watkins mentioned a philosophy class that helped her break out of either-or thinking. She also pointed to a mentor with whom she discussed politics. And both students have written about political issues for the student newspaper.

Over and over, students told me that their policy views do not line up with either of the major political parties. This does not mean they are all centrists, just that their leanings are often complex. Shalin Mehta, a recently graduated Rice political-science major, saw politics in binary terms when he began university. But “having learned about policy and engaged with policy for four years,” he said, “you tend to see how much more nuanced politics is and how politics and policy often misalign.”

The students and faculty members I spoke with rejected the idea that students are brainwashed radicals. “There’s a big narrative being pushed about indoctrination,” Nagajothi said. “And that’s not something I’ve ever seen in any class.” Still, many students are reticent where politics is concerned. My own writing students at Southern Methodist University in Dallas tell me they would never voice a political opinion in class for fear of crossing either their professor or judgmental classmates. Students at other campuses also reported some political self-censorship—though they usually told me it was other students who did so—and worried that political divisions could inhibit friendships. James Davenport, director of the Center for Civic Engagement at Rose State and a political-science professor, said he thought his students worried about voicing opinions others might disagree with—“but none of that is particularly new to the college experience,” he said.

In a political-science class, particularly one like Emily Stacey’s that features a debate as a major assignment, students can hardly avoid addressing political topics. And Stacey finds that students can voice divergent opinions without rancor. Her classes have had “contentious debates,” she said. But “over the years, they’ve gotten much more tame as the outside society has gotten much more wild.” Far from being a site of cowed unanimity, then, a college classroom can be among the few places anywhere in America where reasonable disagreement is blessedly possible.

On the day I visited Rose State, students at Columbia University set up their first encampment in protest of the war in Gaza. To some observers, protests like the one at Columbia were a paragon of student political activity, in line with the tradition of campus demonstrations in the 1960s. Students, it might have seemed, were making their voices heard in acts of necessary democratic dissent.

But in fact, the protests were a great spectacle that won few gains. The protesters’ chief demands went unmet. There was no meaningful divestment of university resources from companies the protesters saw as linked to Israel’s war. Instead of condemning the war, many universities adopted “institutional neutrality” policies, pledging to take no stand on political issues. And in some cases, backlash against the protests has made it even riskier to criticize Israel on campuses. In January, in response to two discrimination lawsuits, Harvard University approved a broad definition of antisemitism that, critics say, will make it much harder to debate Middle Eastern politics.

The often excessive, militarized crackdowns on encampments might make it seem like the protests posed a grave threat to entrenched power. But that was never true. And the encampments’ sometimes disruptive theatricality made it easier for Republican officials to discredit higher education altogether and to pressure universities to replace their leaders with ones more amenable to a conservative agenda.

Davenport contrasted the typical student at Rose State—working class, often older, perhaps without strong high-school preparation—with the students who were protesting at Ivy League schools. If you’re a full-time, younger, more privileged student, he said, “you don’t have to worry about, ‘How am I going to provide for my family?’ or ‘Where am I going to get child-care while I’m in class?’” The result, he added, is that most students at Rose State “don’t have the luxury of focusing on more divisive issues.”

Students at elite colleges have more opportunities to gain advanced knowledge about politics than ones at Rose State do. At Rice, some students with a keen interest in politics write for the Rice Journal of Public Policy, which is sponsored by the Baker Institute for Public Policy. Nagajothi has written essays for the journal on topics that get few headlines, like naval procurement and U.S. sanctions on China’s semiconductor industry.

Mehta, who had been the journal’s editor-in-chief, said that he has seen how the act of writing and revising can itself shape political thinking. “I think writing forces students to think more about their beliefs,” he said. “And because having to defend an argument is much different than simply believing it, I think students come to realize a lot more of the counterarguments and issues with their own beliefs.”

For most students, college can offer their very first step toward gaining political knowledge and a sense of political belonging. For long-term civic engagement, that first step is crucial. At Dallas College, a community college in Texas, Kacem Ayachi, an assistant professor of political science, assigns his Federal Government students to research an issue and write a letter about it to one of their state or federal representatives. “If they are passionate about that particular issue, they will take the extra step,” he said. In the future, he added, a student might reflect on the letter and think, “Maybe I can do this in real life. I could really engage in this activity.”

Berryhill said Stacey’s class made her realize a lot about democracy “and how we have to make it work, and that we just can’t let the people in power do as they wish. We kind of have to push, and we have to call, and we have to correct where it’s needed.”

Democracy, at its core, is conversation. As the religion scholar Jeffrey Stout writes in his 2003 book, Democracy and Tradition, democracy rests on “a remarkably widespread and steady commitment, on the part of citizens, to talk things through with citizens unlike themselves.” In order for citizens to give accounts of themselves and hold others accountable, they need to “identify to some significant extent with a community of reason-givers,” he writes.

Stout’s description already sounds like Emily Stacey’s classroom. But the comparison goes deeper. The reasons citizens give each other often include personal experience, which makes consensus possible. In a later book, Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America, Stout profiles the community organizations in Louisiana and Texas that helped people displaced by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 advocate for themselves. He argues that telling personal stories within a community can strengthen people’s emotional bonds and clarify shared concerns, enabling them to stick up for each other in the face of government or corporate power.

College is not the only place people can learn democratic participation; labor unions and civic organizations are such places, too. But college offers a rare combination of factual knowledge, skill-building, and pluralism that can form highly engaged citizen-leaders. James Davenport said he wants students to come away from his classes appreciating, first, the size and complexity of the United States’ system of government, and second, how they can affect it. It’s a paradoxical lesson. The government is colossal—it’s Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan—and yet, if you know how it works, you can nudge it in a new direction.

The social scientist Theda Skocpol has shown just how true this paradox is. Major political victories, she has found, are won not primarily through public demonstrations or savvy media strategies but through the effort of small citizens’ organizations working on the state and local levels. The Tea Party movement featured Tax Day protests, but it stymied the Obama administration’s agenda and won Republican control of Congress in 2010 because its members knew their local political apparatus—the officeholders, the public-meeting schedule, the precinct map—and where they could apply pressure.

The same playbook worked for the thousands of local “Resistance” groups that formed after the 2016 election, mostly led by college-educated women who had participated in the Women’s March following Donald Trump’s first inauguration. But the march itself was not the movement’s key to success. The pussy-hatted protesters did not vow to occupy the National Mall until Trump left office. Instead, they went home to recruit and promote candidates at all levels who could win races and push for change. In a January article for The New Republic, Skocpol contended that this playbook can be effective against Trump again in 2025.

“The actual grassroots are pervasively pragmatic,” Skocpol and the historian Lara Putnam wrote in a 2018 article. The leaders of Resistance groups “have honed their skills in the ‘slow boring of hard boards,’ to use Max Weber’s definition of politics, over years of professional and community life—and are now bringing those skills to bear full-strength on local political action.” These leaders exhibited skills—prioritizing, collaborating, analyzing, communicating—that people develop in college. More than that, they exhibited the educated citizen’s duties to share what they’ve learned and contribute to the common good.

The hallway outside Stacey’s classroom is decorated with Depression-era Works Progress Administration posters. One of them advertises “free neighborhood classes for adults” and shows a man reading a book over a desk, pencil at the ready. In that time of global crisis, New Deal administrators believed widespread, publicly funded adult education was crucial to preserving democracy. It still is.

After the debate, I stuck around for Stacey’s comparative-politics course, in which each student gave a presentation on a country’s electoral system. One of the students, Alice Morris, profiled South Africa. Her voice quavered a bit, but she spoke with conviction about politics as depending less on leaders than on the citizens who stand with them.

Morris, a political-science major from a small city near Rose State, told me that, in her view, politics flows from values, but it’s also about making decisions to benefit a community. She said many people are critical of government because they don’t understand it. “They think politics is somewhere over there,” she said, gesturing beyond the room. “But no, it’s everywhere. Politics is at your job. It’s at school. It starts here. It starts with you.”

She compared being an elected official to her work as a soccer referee. “I get yelled at just for making a decision,” she said. Players, coaches, and parents all attack her. “They know I’m going to be there to make decisions for them, but they get mad at me for it.” She nevertheless plans to go into public service.