In an era where higher education is under scrutiny and global democracy appears increasingly fragile, American University is proving that academic research belongs in the field—not just on the shelf. 

On Tuesday, April 14, President Jonathan Alger joined a trio of School of Public Affairs faculty members in Kerwin Hall to showcase engaged scholarship—a rigorous approach to research that treats global conflict zones and local civic debates as primary classrooms.

The event, the final installment of the semester’s Lunch and Learn series—part of the university’s 250+ at American initiative—moved beyond abstract theory to demonstrate how faculty are directly involving students in solving real-world security and political crises. The faculty panel included Tricia Bacon and Daniel Dreisbach of the Department of Justice, Law and Criminology and Laura Paler of the Department of Government.

Bacon, a former counterterrorism analyst at the State Department, detailed the launch of AURORA, AU’s open-sourceintelligence and analysis hub. She developed the initiative to provide students with “experiences, training, and publications” that ensure they remain competitive, even in an environment where traditional federal government internships and jobs may be less available. 

By training students to interrogate sources and sit with the uncertainty of intelligence tradecraft, Bacon noted that AU is producing “rigorous analytic products” that serve professional practitioners while simultaneously insulating students against the “lean, ideologically motivated arguments” common in polarized political environments.

The theme of civic survival continued with Paler, codirector of the Democratic Erosion Consortium. Paler highlighted how her research on democratic backsliding travels beyond the university through a course taught on more than 100 campuses worldwide. Students in this program act as frontline researchers, interpreting events and building datasets that help policymakers and journalists understand shifts in global democratic health. 

“We have this wealth of knowledge and political science on topics that are in the headlines every day, and we often do a very bad job of communicating that to the outside world,” Paler said. “So I think [the] onus is on us to . . . think about how to bring that knowledge and that information and make it usable to a broader audience." 

Meanwhile, Dreisbach—an expert on the intersection of politics, law, and religion—connected these modern efforts to the American founding. He argued that scholarship is most “engaged” when it functions as a “nursery” for citizenship, teaching the foundational principles of the rule of law and due process that must apply regardless of partisan loyalty.

“Every time I step into a classroom, I think about my . . . job preparing students for citizenship,” Dreisbach said. “One of the things that [has been] important since the day I stepped on this campus . . . is to incorporate discussions of what we mean by constitutionalism, rule of law, and due process. It’s not only relevant to the courses I teach, but it’s a part of the training of our students for life as citizens.”

Alger emphasized that this hands-on model of education effectively dismantles the “either/or” choice between workforce development and civic engagement. He argued that the engaged scholarship model provides students with the toolkit—including critical thinking, communications ethical reasoning, teamwork, leadership, resilience, and AI literacy—“that employers want to see.” 

The Lunch and Learn series will continue in the fall with events featuring Kogod, the School of Education, the School of International Service, and the Washington College of Law.