Student Fellow Opportunities

The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities is hiring fellows to work on the Campus Plurality Forum projects Tough Talks and Dorm Room Conversations for the 2019-2020 Academic Year. Fellows will be responsible for producing Tough Talk events and Dorm Room Conversations, including selecting potential speakers, corresponding with speakers, reserving campuses spaces, organizing travel and housing, crafting marketing materials, and hosting speakers while they are on campus. This is a paid position. 

Please submit your résumé and a brief essay (2-3 pages) explaining why you want to be a Tough Talk Fellow. What makes you particularly suited to this position. What Tough Talks have you attended? Offer some example of people you would you like to invite and why, and some topics for potential Dorm Room Conversations. 

Please submit application materials in one file as a Word docs or a PDF to [email protected]

Applications are due by the end of day on April 11th. Qualified applicants will be contacted for interviews.   

You can read more about the Tough Talks Program here.

A premise of Arendtian thinking is an embrace of plurality. Plurality is the condition of speech and action by which we appear to others as ourselves in the world. Plurality is the fact that people live in their own way, worship different gods, pursue different ideals, and associate with different people. Amidst such plurality, political life is where we come together in common, embracing what unites us amidst our differences. Plurality is thus a condition of politics, since politics is a discussion amongst a plurality of individuals with different opinions, not a search for a single truth. To do away with plurality would be to do away with the public realm of politics altogether. In line with her recognition of plurality, Hannah Arendt was a fierce defender of free and open political speech. In perhaps her most direct defense of free speech, Arendt writes: “Only in the freedom of our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides.”

The Hannah Arendt Center's Campus Plurality Forum begins with Arendt’s uncompromising defense of plurality and free speech as a foundation for democratic politics. Politics is never about truth. It is about opinion. Free speech matters because it exposes all of us to opinions different from our own. In doing so, free speech expands our understanding and experience of the world. In encountering unexpected, disagreeable, and uncomfortable opinions, our imagination of the world must change, and so too our thinking. We must either alter our own opinion, embrace a new opinion, or reaffirm our old opinion. In each of these cases, we embrace an opinion that is more fully consonant with the plurality of the world as a whole. The Arendt Center sponsors multiple student led programs dedicated to free expression. We welcome all students!  

If you have any questions, please email [email protected]