Michael Briand

New Director of Civic Engagement Promotes Collaboration

Michael Briand, the campus’s new director of civic engagement, is emphatic: “Higher education has a special role to play in transforming our public life in the United States today,” he said. Civic engagement means “the University actively collaborates with the communities it serves to meet the challenges facing them,” he adds. And to accomplish this task, “faculty and students must model the skills and attitudes citizens need to govern themselves confidently and effectively.”

His special interest is “changing public discourse, changing the way we talk to each other, and moving from recrimination to deliberation.” What we need to do, he said, is “replace competitive browbeating with collaborative problem-solving.”

Briand has a PhD in political philosophy from Johns Hopkins University, a master’s in philosophy from Oxford University, and a BA in government and psychology from the University of Michigan. He previously worked with the Charles F. Kettering Foundation and the Colorado community college system, where he served four years as director of a community civic development service he created for the state’s two-year colleges.

When asked what attracted him to this part-time position at CSU, Chico, he pointed to higher education’s potential to serve as a model of democratic life by “going public” with the practice of collective inquiry. He likes CSU, Chico in particular because “compared to other universities, it seems to have a more democratic ethos, starting at the very top,” he said.

Briand’s hope for the office of civic engagement is to make it the focal point of Chico State’s “conversation with itself.” He also sees the opportunity to better connect the academic component of civic engagement (his office reports to the dean of Undergraduate Education) with the service learning programs that already exist on campus. “The place to begin is with what already exists—CAVE, EOP, CCLC, the Institute for Sustainable Development, etc.—and then introduce the campus to other types of civic engagement.”

Briand is also working with the Sustained Dialogue Campus Network to bring their program to CSU, Chico. The network is a consortium of 13 campuses that promote dialogue about volatile and charged issues in an honest and safe way.

For more information about the Office of Civic Engagement and what it can bring to your college or department, contact Briand or keep an eye out for the office’s new Web site, due to be launched next
semester.

—Anna Harris, Public Affairs and Publications