The Program for Public Thinking is not intended, now or in the future, to be a substitute for the depth and breadth of a university education. Rather, the program aims to help universities live up to their highest ideals at a time when so many incentives mitigate against the cultivation of thoughtfulness both on and off campus.

In addition, the program will bring students in contact with speakers and instructors with years of experience engaging nonacademic audiences about ideas, something they are less likely to find on their college campus. This will allow discussion of topics that rarely come up in university coursework, around how to communicate with diversely educated audiences and contend with the multiplying economic, technological and political challenges of operating in today’s public sphere.

It is foundational to our project to assemble cohorts with a broad diversity of backgrounds and convictions and therefore the Program for Public Thinking encourages students from all political, philosophical, and religious perspectives to apply. (It is also okay to be undecided politically.)

The Program for Public Thinking is not chiefly concerned with “cancel culture” or “freedom of speech.” We will make sure to create a welcoming space for the pursuit of truth wherever it leads, but we take it as part of the problem that such buzzwords have come to stand in for serious engagement with the difficulty and complexity of approaching controversial topics in a pluralistic society. The Program aims to provide students with the habits, skills, and knowledge that is necessary to steer clear of both thoughtless conformity, and thoughtless heterodoxy.

Although our workshop is currently only open to undergraduates, we intend to eventually expand our programming to include seminars for graduate students and professionals working in culture, politics, and the arts. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us if you are not an undergraduate but are interested in such programming or have ideas for how to expand the work we are proposing to do on your own campus or in your workplace.

All currently enrolled undergraduate students at U.S. and Canadian colleges and universities—including graduating seniors—are eligible to apply.

Our second workshop—to be held in the summer of 2024—will be led by Point founding editor Jon Baskin and Washington Post book critic Becca Rothfeld. The theme of the workshop is “The Personal and the Political.”

Our pilot workshop, on “The Future,” was taught in the summer of 2023 by Point editors Anastasia Berg and Jon Baskin.

To see candidates for future workshop leaders and speakers, check out our People section. Some topics under consideration for future workshops include: What is Tech for?, Race and Pluralism, Art and Democracy, and Conspiracy Theories.

If you are accepted into the summer workshop, all your travel and lodging costs will be paid for, along with free tuition for the credit-granting, two-week workshop. Workshop participants will receive grades. (Those grades will depend heavily on good-faith participation.) You do not have to take the workshop for credit, but if you intend to, we advise checking with your college or university to be sure they will accept it.

No! Though other UChicago Summer Session programs have a $50 application fee, the application process for this program is completely free. You will not be prompted to pay when you complete your application.

Workshops will be designed as inquiries into the nature and challenges of public thinking at the same time as we practice the skills necessary to engage productively in public dialogue. Mornings will be spent in structured discussions and writing exercises in response to assigned readings, while afternoons will involve more group-oriented activities. There will also be outings planned around the city and occasional evening activities including film screenings.

Readings will vary depending on the workshop with some “core texts” that will be read in each workshop. Readings on thinking and intellectual life may include texts by Aristotle, Hannah Arendt, Pierre Bourdieu, Ralph Ellison, Franz Kafka, C. Wright Mills, Susan Sontag, Adrienne Rich, and Alasdair MacIntyre.

For their final assignment, students will be asked to design a project to encourage public dialogue on their own campus or in their own community.

Good question! For that matter, what do we mean by “thinking”? A thread that will carry through all of our workshops and programming will be to clarify for ourselves what we mean by those two complicated words: public and thinking. Here are a few other questions we’ll be discussing: What are the responsibilities of thinkers in a democracy? What is the relationship between journalism and activism, or humanistic education and social change? How can public commentators address, rather than exacerbate, the fragmentation and polarization of our cultural discourse? More basically: What is a public intellectual, and what good are they? How and why do ideas matter outside the university?