Parents of students attending UNC system universities this fall should be pleased to learn about the UNC Board of Governors’ (BOG) “Foundations of American Democracy” (FoAD) initiative. FoAD immerses college students in the careful study of foundational democratic texts created by Americans from diverse backgrounds and beliefs. It responds to recent research showing how students lack basic literacy concerning the roots of American democracy.
As a BOG planning memo puts it, FoAD ensures that “undergraduate students acquire a shared foundation in American democracy in a manner that emphasizes academic rigor and freedom of inquiry and that is implementable across all UNC System universities.”
Faculty from various academic disciplines with scholarly expertise in foundational democratic texts supervise students. The texts include such venerable works as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and speeches like Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address.” Because the UNC BOG also recognizes the crucial role of the Civil Rights movement in shaping American democracy, it requires that instructors familiarize students with documents like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
The NC State Department of Communication’s “Great Speakers, Great Speeches” course is part of the university’s FoAD program. The department works with other programs, such as history and political science, to build FoAD into a multi-course rollout. The class provides in-depth analyses of exemplary American speeches. Students learn about how these messages contributed to competing conservative, liberal, and other perspectives, as well as the narratives that leaders used to create and sustain American democracy.
“Great Speakers, Great Speeches” organizes important American speeches into units related to historical contexts and speech genres. For example, students examine orations about the American founding, the problems of union/disunion, and war and peace. They investigate presidential inaugurals and eulogies. These speeches responded to historical exigencies while reaffirming democratic institutional processes.
Students also explore speakers, such as Dr. King, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Susan B. Anthony, who sought, through their advocacy for racial and gender equality, a more encompassing democracy. Lincoln’s famous debates with Stephen Douglas, as well as Alexander Stephens’ “Cornerstone Speech,” are included because they reveal how speakers understood the conflicts, including slavery, that motivated the Civil War.
Students engage in exercises simulating the complex historical circumstances in which speeches were delivered, such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks and George W. Bush’s graceful “Remarks at the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance.” Ronald Reagan’s consoling “Challenger Disaster” address teaches students the value of eulogistic rhetoric to democracy. They debate the efficacy and ethics of speeches and write critical essays explaining speakers’ rhetorical appeals. The assignments help students become even more familiar with the history of foundational public addresses in American history and the profound tensions these speeches sought to resolve.
Studying these seminal orations goes to the heart of the FoAD program — it clarifies how foundational texts invoked the nation’s past to reconfigure its identity during challenging, often crisis-ridden situations. These speeches are edifying: They demonstrate how students, especially those who venture into state politics or other public service, can compellingly redefine liberty and equality as foundational ideals in the present.
North Carolinians should know that UNC System faculty are instructing students to value what Lincoln said so eloquently 162 years ago in his “Gettysburg Address” about foundational democratic ideals: The “great task” before every American, certainly North Carolinians, is to guarantee that the nation “shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”