Fall 2025
Student Voting: Power, Politics and Race in the Fight for American Democracy
Dates: September 01, 2025 - December 19, 2025Day/Time: Tuesday; Thursday 11:50 AM - 1:20 PM EDT
Level: 100-Level
Certificate: Civic Engagement, Human Rights
Instructor: Jonathan Becker, Simon Gilhooley, Bard College
The course will be a historical and interdisciplinary examination of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 and outlaws age discrimination, using it as a prism through which to examine both the history of disenfranchisement and the fight for voting rights in the United States. The role of college communities, particularly at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, will be the central focus. The course will connect four institutions in the US that have been the sites of voting rights struggles and major litigation via a network collaborative course (with a section held at each institution – Bard, Tuskegee, North Carolina A&T, and Prairie View A&M University). The history of the struggle at each institution will be examined, including organizing, protest, advocacy, and litigation, in order to elucidate methods and strategies of supporting and defending basic constitutional rights and elucidating, more broadly, strategies for organizing against anti-democratic and authoritarian actions. The course is co-designed by faculty from the respective institutions and will be taught simultaneously, with key assignments shared by the campus sites with the aim of facilitating synchronous classroom discussions and collaborations between the different sites. By the end of the course students will have developed an understanding of the history of the struggle for student voting rights and the challenges to those rights that are being faced today.
Credits: 4 US / 8 ECTS