GCPL newsletter, June 2025
The GCPL has had an exceptional year of programming, ranging from successful events both on and off campus, pioneering a civility course, and the most successful international trip that we have taken to date.
General Review of GCPL Programming for 2024-2025
The 2024-2025 academic year was definitely one of the strongest in the history of the GCPL. Both seminars brought highly regarded guests to the Hiram community, attracted sizeable audiences, and generated much positive feedback from attendees. Our crisis simulation maintained the level of excellence which we achieved last year, which reflects the advanced training we’re able to provide to Garfield Scholars as a result of our enhanced curricular elements. Furthermore, the study away trip to Switzerland was, without question, the most successful trip we’ve taken, in terms of the meetings held, the cultural experiences engaged in, and the level of prep and participation of the students.
Our trip to DC attracted the largest audience we’ve ever hosted for a GCPL seminar in that city, with an audience composed of many eminent political figures, including ambassadors, military officers, leading academics, and members of various US government agencies.
This was also our most successful year to-date in terms of attracting new funding for GCPL programming. Additionally, our recruitment efforts for the 2025-2026 cohort produced the same number of applications as we had for the previous year, and that previous year was the best recruitment season we’d had in a decade.
New Programming
We also launched new programming this year. For example, during the spring 2025 semester, the GCPL ran a course titled “Can’t We All Just Get Along?” The purpose of this course was to train students in the techniques and theories of civil discourse. This course grew directly out of the partnership between the GCPL and the Renew America Together Organization (RATO) which is run by retired US Army General Wesley Clark. The GCPL partnered with RATO during the 2023-2024 year so that members of the Hiram community could participate in RATO-run civility training. The course which we then ran in spring 2025 was the next step in the evolution of that training agenda, providing civility training to students in the context of a formal Hiram course.
On the one hand, the course achieved its high-level goal of facilitating very engaged conversation among the students regarding very controversial political topics. These discussions/debates focused on such topics as student debt, police funding, and gender issues.
Much useful learning took place in this context, and more generally, we were pleased that Hiram could provide a venue for discussion among people of differing viewpoints, which is especially important in our current era of strained public discourse.
However, it also became very clear just how much attention/monitoring/control is required by the course’s teachers in order to ensure that the conversation stays civil. This is the case even in a liberal arts environment where the participants are accustomed to in-depth conversation amongst small groups of people who have differing viewpoints, and in which students know that they need to ground their arguments in reference to coherent theories and/or reputable texts, and in which there is a level of familiarity amongst the students and between the students and teachers. It is a testament to the value of Hiram that the sort of environment which Hiram provides is evidently all-but-necessary in order to achieve what was achieved in this course.
James Thompson, Ph.D.
Department of Political Science
ThompsonJA@Hiram.edu
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