Lee University was recently awarded a $1,828,251 grant from the U.S. Department of Education to promote civil discourse on its campus. The award is part of the federal Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) program.

The grant is allocated for a four-year project titled, “Enhancing Lee University’s Civil Discourse Infrastructure,” which seeks to foster interdisciplinary discussion in various spaces across the Lee campus. The university’s grant proposal received a perfect score from the Department of Education. Through initiatives such as Lee’s Center for Responsible Citizenship (CRC), which frames civil discourse through the lens of community, and the Kairos Honors program, which promotes interdisciplinary instruction and conversation, Lee has already cultivated many of the practices and spaces that this grant will deepen and expand.
 
“A cornerstone of Lee’s identity is its commitment to charitable dialogue in a fractured world,” said Dr. Thomas Pope, the grant project director. Pope is a professor of political science at Lee and director of both the Center for Responsible Citizenship and the Kairos Honors Program. “Through patience, perspective, and understanding, we hope to heal some of the rifts within our communities and country. Since 2021, Lee’s CRC has fostered sustained conversations about the conditions necessary for healthy civic life. Similarly, its Kairos Honors Program equips students to engage ideas across disciplinary lines, placing the various parts of the university in conversation, moving beyond facts towards wisdom. I’m so pleased that this grant can help us deepen this work to impact our students and community.”
 
In addition to strengthening the work of the CRC and the Kairos Honors Program, the grant has been allocated for various new on-campus initiatives. Current plans include a national speaker series hosted by Lee, which will bring the community together to reflect on the role of civil discourse in the modern world. Additionally, the university will work with individual professors to implement conversation surrounding civil discourse in their respective disciplines.
 
The grant will also be used to invest in various local high school programs creating stipends to support individual teachers and their fostering of civil discourse in the classroom, as well as allowing local high school students to participate in Lee programming. Outreach to local speech and debate communities will strengthen Lee’s connections to classical and homeschool communities, building bridges to its competitive Mock Trial program. Together, they will work through civil discourse-centered questions from multiple perspectives.
 
“This grant enables us the opportunity to engage in meaningful discussions with regional middle and high school history and government teachers about the American founding, its structure of government, and its regime of civil rights and liberties,” said Dr. Mark Scully, Lee professor of political science. “Now more than ever, it’s important to provide the opportunity for students of all ages to address their peers with clarity and empathy. We hope that by working through challenging topics of American politics together, we can effectively model and cultivate excitement among students for civil discourse in the classroom.”
 
FIPSE is a unit of the Higher Education Programs within the Office of Postsecondary Education, U.S. Department of Education. FIPSE’s mandate is to “improve postsecondary educational opportunities” across a broad range of concerns. Through its various grant competitions, FIPSE seeks to support the implementation of innovative educational reform ideas, to evaluate how well they work, and to share the findings with the larger education community.
 
For more information about FIPSE, visit ed.gov/about/ed-offices/ope/fipse.
 
For more information about the Center for Responsible Citizenship or the Kairos Honors program, visit leeucrc.com or kairoshonors.com.