UT’s Jefferson Center Teaches the Value of Civility and Connection Beyond the Classroom

On the second floor of Waggener Hall—a slightly musty building with hardwood floors and paned windows still intact from the earliest days of campus construction—you’re likely to find some of the brightest young minds at the University curled up under the lamplight of the Jefferson Center’s student lounge.   

Erik Dempsey, associate professor of instruction and the assistant director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for Core Texts and Ideas, will often bustle in to refill the snack bins or observe a lively debate between his students, known as UT’s own Jefferson Scholars. The cozy camaraderie of this room, however, belies the stakes of an increasingly fraught conversation nationwide about the state of higher education and free speech on college campuses. Together with Dempsey, the Jefferson Center’s founders and co-directors Tom and Lorraine Pangle are working diligently to defend their vision of a classical liberal arts education, within the larger environment of Texas’ flagship research university.  

When the professors Pangle arrived at UT in 2004, the College of Liberal Arts invited them to a steering committee for developing some sort of Western Civilizations curriculum. But even then, partisan disagreement between not only ideologies, but also departments, threatened to scupper the fledgling effort before it could take shape.   

“Our vision was something completely nonpartisan. Completely pluralistic,” Lorraine Pangle says. “We’re interested in the great books. We even changed the name to Core Texts and Ideas—we didn’t care whether they were Western or Eastern.”  

Over the next five years, the Pangles built up a coterie of affiliated faculty and interested students from departments such as classics, English, philosophy, and government. They put together a certificate program (requiring fewer hours than a major but slightly more than a minor) that would take students through many of the general education requirements for earning a degree. “This was designed as a pathway through the core curriculum for students in any major,” Lorraine says, albeit a path with more rigor and cohesion than a student might find selecting classes at random.  

Rasikapriya Krishna, a first-year from Frisco majoring in psychology, anthropology, and Liberal Arts Honors (LAH), applied to the Jefferson Scholars Program (JSP) at the encouragement of her high school AP European History teacher, with little prior knowledge.  

“My roommate is also in JSP, and she knows so much stuff,” Krishna says. “She had already done ancient Rome, ancient Greece [in high school] ... I took Intro to Ancient Greece last semester, and I had no idea about anything. The furthest I knew was that The Odyssey existed.”  

A key component of JSP, too, is this social connection the program facilitates, through extracurricular activities such as weekly Lunchtime Lectures, a peer mentorship program, and an Activity Fund that allows students to meet over ice cream or performances at the Austin Symphony Orchestra.   

“What we’re trying to do here is the experience of a small liberal arts college, in a big research university,” Lorraine says. “The kind of thing that happens most easily in a small liberal arts college that all college students should have, is the chance to study really important books in class and then go have lunch and keep talking about them. And then to go back to the dorm at night and get your assignments done for the next day and start chatting about the meaning of life.”  

Krishna was matched with second-year Aurelia Savener as her peer mentor, who is also studying psychology and LAH in addition to the JSP certificate. “[Aurelia] will go get boba [tea] with me, and it’s all on Jefferson’s dime,” Krishna says. “It’s a chance to meet someone who’s already had experience doing what I want to do, who is two steps ahead.”  

Savener has also served as the leader of a JSP book club that focused on reading contemporary literature as a supplement to the academic courseload, which tends to be low on modern voices. Their picks included Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, a 1992 murder mystery set within a fictional classics seminar, and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin—evidently a polarizing read, inspiring good-natured teasing between the students at a semester kickoff event months after the meeting.  

“I have actually made friends from some of my JSP classes,” Savener says. “I feel like I never make lasting friends in lecture-style courses, where we just sit next to each other and swap notes. But in JSP, you learn something about how somebody thinks and what their values are during the class discussions.”  

Dr. David Garza, BS ’70, JD ’96, Life Member, is a donor to the Center and a member of its advisory committee. Though he’s involved across the Forty Acres, he says JSP is unique among UT programs.   

“Nowadays, anger, invective, insult, volume, all of that is taking the place of reasoned discussion,” Garza says. “[Reason has] got to start somewhere. And to me, of all that I’ve seen, to be exposed to this type of rational atmosphere is in itself worthwhile.”  

Last semester, for example, JSP invited students to consider the issue of peace between Israel and Palestine, a topic that has divided institutions of higher education all over the world, including protests on UT’s campus last spring. On their own time, four students prepared speeches on the subject, after which Lorraine moderated questions from the roughly 20 other students as well as a period of collective reflection.   

“In the reflection part of that, one of the speakers said, ‘This was so great, because every time I’ve tried to talk to any of my friends about Israel and Palestine, we end up yelling at each other. This is the first time I was involved in a discussion about it where nobody got angry,’” Lorraine says.  

The Jefferson Scholars Program is not classified by the University as an honors program, and while it welcomes students from a panoply of majors, there is not an explicitly pre-professional bent to the curriculum.  

Besides these idiosyncrasies, Lorraine is partial to a certain explanation of the Center’s special sauce: “Since I’m an Aristotle scholar, I’m interested in Aristotle’s idea that we’re by nature political animals,” she says. “We need communities that take seriously the idea of virtue and cultivate certain virtues—intellectual courage, intellectual honesty, and civility, meaning not just politeness, but seriously listening to other people, looking for what’s most reasonable in what you’re hearing, and trying to hear the ways that other people are offering us challenges that we need to think about.”  

And at a place like UT, in an age such as this, there are enough challenges to go around. Beyond broader goals for growth—expanding scholarships for JSP-affiliated study abroad opportunities and finding a way to bring the small classroom model to as many students who would benefit from it, without diluting the experience—the scholars continue to benefit from the program’s philosophy.  

“UT feels really big. It’s easy to get lost in the shuffle,” Savener says. “JSP is this little corner that wants to invest in its students and in our having these cultural experiences outside of the classroom that are relevant to understanding the world.”  

CREDIT: Illustration by Chris Gash