Eric Liu is co-founder and CEO of Citizen University, which works to build a culture of powerful and responsible citizenship in the United States. He also directs the Aspen Institute’s Citizenship and American Identity Program. Liu previously served as a White House speechwriter for President Clinton and later as his deputy domestic policy advisor. President Obama appointed him to the board of the Corporation for National and Community Service. An Ashoka fellow and frequent contributor to TheAtlantic.com, Liu is the author of The Accidental Asian; The Gardens of Democracy (co-authored with Nick Hanauer); You’re More Powerful Than You Think; and, most recently, Become America: Civic Sermons on Love, Responsibility, and Democracy. He is featured on the PBS documentary, “American Creed.”
Previously
In a time of historically low trust in leaders and institutions, how can leaders build trust across lines of difference, depolarize solutions, and not live in fear of cancel c...
Hate takes many insidious forms: as a mass shooting targeting a Black community, as an antisemitic remark, as a wave of anti-Asian violence. Intolerance and hate crimes have s...
What should every American know? This question has long been debated, discussed, and deliberated. Amidst giant demographic and social shifts, it is more important than ever to...
It’s no secret that Americans are deeply divided along partisan lines, giving us divided institutions, divided communities, even divided families and friends. At the heart of...
In this creative session, global citizen-artist Yo-Yo Ma shares ideas with Eric Liu of Citizen University and the Aspen Institute for how to reimagine our lives and responsibi...
What possibilities unfurl when a symphony reaches Skid Row? How does music create healing on a street corner? Los Angeles Philharmonic violinist Vijay Gupta and internationall...
As the US ceases to be a white majority country (a demographic milestone we’re expected to reach by 2020), how will we as a society define what it means to be American — and w...
Join Damian Woetzel, incoming president of the Juilliard School, for an interactive breakfast interview led by Eric Liu, founder and CEO of Citizen University. Drawing on his...
We don’t need fewer arguments in American civic life today, we need less stupid ones. That means we need arguments that are more emotionally intelligent and more deeply rooted...
What factors motivate people to make it to the polls in any given year, and what keeps them away? One thing we learned from 2016 is that predicting not only how people will vo...
In this season of campus activism around race, inclusion, speech, and privilege, how can US colleges best cultivate—and reimagine—civic leadership? And in an age that rewards...
Deep inequality and stagnant wages. An emerging electorate of color. White anxiety. Anti-establishment anger. Millennial distaste for the duopoly of party politics. What do yo...
Our nation’s founders envisioned a republic in which the people would be the ultimate source of power. However, a pervasive cultural narrative—across the right and the left—te...
Debating immigration is a perennial favorite in presidential elections, perhaps never more so than in 2016, when border walls and banning Muslims push the boundaries of what p...
In 1987, E.D. Hirsch sparked a national debate with his book Cultural Literacy, claiming that there is a foundation of common knowledge every American should know — and codify...
Is the spirit of citizenship still alive in America? Past generations had the draft and epic fights for civil rights. Before that, Tocqueville described how barn raisings and...