Series Convener

A message from the series convener, Dr. Victoria Tin-bor Hui, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame

Teaching this speaker series has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my academic career, and its impact has far exceeded my expectations. Through both speakers and students, the classroom has become not merely a site of learning, but a civic space where democracy is practiced through encounter, dialogue, and responsibility.

This pedagogical experiment began with Democracy Defenders in Exile and Global Struggles for Freedom in Fall 2025, and continues with the College Seminar Global Struggles for Democracy beginning in Spring 2026. It has now been extended into a multi-semester initiative supported by a Kellogg Institute grant, which will sustain the series for six additional semesters.

The defining feature of this series is that students—not the professor—lead the Q&A sessions. Student interviewers are trained to conduct professional, newsroom-style live interviews, requiring them to research speakers’ backgrounds, political causes, and life experiences in depth. This shift in authority fundamentally changes how students engage. Rather than performing for a grade, they assume responsibility for representing the voices and struggles of frontline democracy defenders with accuracy and care. When speakers join us in person, this responsibility becomes especially tangible: students are no longer discussing cases in the abstract, but speaking directly to those who have lived them. The result is a heightened sense of accountability that deepens both intellectual rigor and moral seriousness. All assignments and comments are shared with the entire class and with the speakers themselves, creating a learning community defined by transparency, accountability, and mutual respect.

At the same time, the course is structured to develop both analytical fluency—the ability to construct, defend, and revise arguments under real-world constraints—and autocracy literacy, the capacity to diagnose how authoritarian regimes operate, suppress coordination, and adapt to opposition. Students learn to move from theory to practice: to define goals, diagnose political systems, derive strategy from structural conditions, and respond to counterarguments in real time. This combination of structure, interaction, and iteration transforms engagement into disciplined analysis.

My longstanding mission in teaching is to help self-described shy students become confident speakers by semester’s end. This course has advanced that mission in ways I had not anticipated. Students learn not only critical thinking, but also how to ask difficult questions, speak publicly with confidence, and write with moral clarity—skills that are markers of success across disciplines and careers. Over time, I have seen students shift from distant observers of global repression to active learners who ask what role they themselves might play in defending democracy. I was particularly struck by how visibly students embraced the same spirit of advocacy and purpose expressed by our speakers. When Jewher Ilham remarked that she wished she had taken a course like this as a student, I was less struck by her praise than by how my students had already internalized that message: that they, too, can be change-makers.

Equally powerful has been the effect on democracy defenders themselves. As reflected in speaker testimonials, many describe these encounters as reciprocal and energizing. These exchanges affirm the program’s dual impact: empowering students as civic actors while revitalizing democracy defenders through meaningful academic dialogue.

To sustain this impact beyond the classroom, top student assignments are featured on the Democracy Defenders website, and outstanding essays will be compiled into a future edited volume. In this way, the conversations initiated here continue to travel—extending the life of these encounters and reinforcing the idea that education, when practiced as engagement, can contribute to the defense of democracy.