Guest: Dr. Amy Sayward
Estimated reading time: 23 minutes
Robin Lee: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the 2nd-ever episode of Honors Spotlight. The podcast that shines a light on the people, stories, and ideas shaping the MTSU Honors experience and beyond. I’m your host Robin Lee, and today’s episode is one I’ve really been looking forward to. Constitution Day is next week, so in this episode, we’re talking democracy. What it means, how we live it, why it matters, especially for students like you. There’s no better person to guide us through that conversation than Dr. Amy Sayward, Professor of History and the brand-new Director of the American Democracy Project here at MTSU. Now, if you’re not familiar with the American Democracy Project, don’t worry. We’re going to get into all of that. But what makes this episode really special is that we also explore Amy’s personal journey from growing up in a military family to her early experiences with civic action as a teenager to the moment she realized just how powerful democratic engagement can be. We’ll also dive into Constitution Day, why we celebrate it, what it means for our campus, and what you can expect from this year’s keynote with none other than a journalist and cultural commentator, David Brooks. Grab your earbuds, settle in, and get ready for a deep and thoughtful conversation about civic life, personal responsibility, and the power of student voices as we get to know more about
Amy. Let’s jump in. Dr. Sayward, welcome to Honors Spotlight. We’re excited to have you here.
Amy Sayward: I’m very excited to be here, Robin. Thank you.
Before we start discussing ADP and the upcoming Constitution week events, I want to explore, the history of the history professor now at the helm of it all. Can you tell me a little bit about your background in your journey to MTSU?
Amy Sayward: I grew up north of Buffalo, New York. There’s a whole county before you get to Canada. I don’t believe in snow days. Now that I’ve moved to Tennessee, we have a lot of snow days. We didn’t have a lot of snow days north of Buffalo, New York.
Robin Lee: We have potential ice days here.
Amy Sayward: That is true. I’m the proud product of public schools. I went to the very same school as a central school, from kindergarten all the way through 12th grade, in a pretty rural area. That’s actually where I first got involved with civic action.
What first sparked your interest in democracy and civic life?
Amy Sayward: I remember as an elementary student, our school was a polling place and before you had electronic polling places, it was the old machines where you pulled the levers, and we would vote for our student council in elementary school. We’d all go out and we’d line up to use those voting machines to vote for who we wanted for the student council. I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
Robin Lee: Could you see who other people were voting for?
Amy Sayward: No. When you pulled the lever, it closed the curtain behind you. Then when you finish voting, pulling each of the levers, it would record it when you open the curtain again.
You had told me earlier about this personal story from high school and your first experience really with democracy in action beyond your elementary school days. Share that with everybody.
Amy Sayward: When I was a senior in high school, in New York State, I voted for our school budget, and a lot of times people don’t like more taxes, and so routinely the school budget got voted down. But it was odd because you weren’t really voting on the entire school budget. You were really only voting on the discretionary portion. After the school budget failed, then they would break out the different sections. That was school buses, and that was and shop supplies, library books, and athletics. Usually, folks would vote in support of school buses and athletics, and we’d move forward, and for years, we didn’t get new supplies for shops or home ec. But that was just how we move forward.
In my senior year, the head of the school board took out a full-page ad in the local newspaper and said that people shouldn’t vote for the school budget, even though he had helped put it together. Athletics didn’t pass that year. Nothing that wasn’t state-mandated came into play. Our principal had to set up how every family, every individual would pay for the sports that they played. I made things a little rough, a little chaotic for our senior year. Then, moving into graduation, one of my friends who was head of the student government said, “Hey, do you know that at graduation, the person who hands us our diplomas is the head of the school board?” I won’t mention his name. The person who had actively lobbied against the school budget. What? It stinks. He said, “Well, let’s go to the school board meeting and ask that the retiring elementary school principal give us our diplomas instead”. Three of us, the head of the honor society, the head of the student government, and the head of the student council, we went and we sat through the whole 2-hour-and-45-minute school board meeting until they got to new business and then they said, are there any new business? We stood up and said, we respectfully request that Dr. Bianchi give us our diplomas and we sat down.
You would think that that would be the end of it except it’s a small town. On the front page of the next day’s newspaper, it said Seniors Balk at Getting Diplomas. Then there followed a whole series of letters to the editor in which lots of people said that we had no right to an opinion, that we didn’t vote for the school budget, we didn’t pay school taxes, and so we weren’t entitled to an opinion. This struck me as really odd and contrary to everything I’d learned in school, that we are training you to be citizens and leaders in the future, and to think critically and all of those things. One piece of feedback that we really took to heart. Someone said, “Well, these are not representatives of the senior class. They’re only the head of the Honor Society, the student council, and the class president”. They said we weren’t representatives. We wrote a petition, and all but seven of the 177 members of the senior class said, Yes, we would like Dr. Bianchi to give us our diplomas.
Robin Lee: Just to be clear, Dr. Bianchi is not the superintendent who shall not be named.
Amy Sayward: That is correct. We will leave him out of the story. Then we went to the next school board meeting, which the school board was going to make the decision about who is going to give us diplomas. Before we got to that item on the agenda, the head of the school board stood up and he said, I refuse to give diplomas to this class. A bunch of troublemakers will probably ruin the ceremony for everyone. Which I thought was odd since we were the leaders of our senior class, never been in trouble in our whole life, sort of thing. He declined to give us diplomas. That was a little bit of a victory, but what I’m most proud of and what really resonated with me was our senior class. About half of whom were 18 before we graduated. We decided to do a voter registration drive. As soon as we’re 18, we can vote, we can vote on the school budget. That next fall, for the first time in 25 years, the school budget passed on the first vote. Because we were active, because we cared about the issue, because we cared to vote, we changed things in that community, at least for that year.
You come from a military family. How did that shape your views on service and civic engagement?
Amy Sayward: Both of my grandfathers served in World War II. Specifically, they both had two children before they joined the military. Both of my parents were born towards the end of the war. But, in World War I, now I teach a course on World War II. It really was a time when everyone was mobilized. Everyone recognized that they were part of this sort of shared conflict, not only in the United States, but across the world. They made a huge sacrifice. I kid my dad that he was a deployment baby. He was born while my grandfather was deployed fighting in Germany with the United States Army. When my grandfather got back to the United States, my father was two.
For two years, he was away from his family. I have all the letters that my grandma and grandpa say were exchanged while they were apart. I remember it was odd during the Persian Gulf War. I was watching the news with my grandma. I was visiting her, and it was an episode about military spouses and they were talking about how stressful it was, not being able to communicate every day with their spouses. My grandmother threw up her hands and she’s like, every day. I was lucky if I got a letter a month from Europe. Certainly, times have changed, and communication technologies have changed. But it was a super stressful time for everyone in the nation. My grandma went and worked Grandpa’s job at IBM while he was deployed.
Lots of moving around, lots of just doing the best that you can. My grandma Sayward taught school and had two toddlers. Trying to, keep the family working, keep everything moving forward during the war. Certainly, I grew up hearing those stories. My father also served in the Vietnam War and my brother served in between wars, with the United States Navy. But knowing the difficulties that come with being apart from family, talking about saying words, and complaining about communication technology. My father, one day, was complaining to my grandmother that he had not heard from my brother for a week. She said, it’s really difficult when your son is deployed to a war zone and you don’t hear from him regularly. Wink, wink. She was really talking about him, who didn’t think it was important to send her letters all the time. He’s like, nothing’s really happening.
Robin Lee: It’s easy to see that you are very passionate about history just from your experiences growing up. Another one of those interesting personal tidbits we’ve talked about previously.
You graduated from the same high school as Timothy McVeigh. I think you said he graduated either the year before or the year after you. How did learning about that connection affect you and how you engage with history?
Amy Sayward: Timothy McVeigh graduated the year ahead of me in 1986, and it always surprises people that he was voted best smile for his class. He was a guy who always has smile for everyone, which obviously doesn’t fit with the life that he pursued afterwards. It always struck me as very odd that someone who had grown up in the same community. Literally, Mr. McVeigh lived. If he went to the end of my parents road and hung a left, Mr. McVeigh lived right there and he continued to live there. That someone who went to the same school, lived in the same community, went to the church down the street, capable of carrying out that type of activity, blowing up the Murrah building, killing 177 people,
I think it was, including a number of children who were in the daycare on the bottom floor of the Murrah building. It got me thinking very much about motivations. I was already a historian working on my PhD at Ohio State, but it also got me thinking later about the death penalty because, of course, he was sentenced to death for his crime and it was the first time that I actually got to thinking about the death penalty and got me involved with some anti-death penalty organizations first in Ohio and then in Tennessee subsequently. I’ve also been working with non-profits, the Tennessee Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, which is now Tennessee for the Death Penalty, so the death penalty, I’ve been active with them since I moved to Tennessee in 1998.
That personal journey really lays the foundation for the work you do now. I’m going to shift gears a little bit and we’re going to talk about your role as an educator. You’ve taught history at MTSU for a year. How do you encourage civic participation in your classroom?
Amy Sayward: Ever since I started, I always have given extra credit for being a registered voter. I say the history, especially the history of the United States, is the history of Americans seeking to exercise government and to vote. When we look at American history from its foundation to the present, that continues to be a common motif. I always see history as very much a present endeavor, not something that just happened in the past, but things that were molding today. I’ve always given extra credit for registering to vote. Then when MTSU moved to EXL or Experiential Learning, I began to include as well, students working with groups that were promoting sociopolitical change. I’ve had students during that phase, who volunteered with the Tennessee Right to Life organization, who have lobbied their legislators, who have done door-to-door canvassing around health insurance issues. Involving themselves with groups that have promoted sociopolitical change in the present day as they were studying groups that had promoted sociopolitical change in American history, so that they saw the continuities between and discontinuities between the past and what was happening today. That history wasn’t just something that happened in the past, but something very much happening in the future, that they had the ability to shape and change.
Robin Lee: I think every generation has their historical moment or moments to, define their lives and shape who they become it’s that moment that they’ll always remember for I mean, honestly, the average age of college students now were born after 9-1-1 happened, so you’re still wondering what their turning point historical moment is going to be.
Why do you think it’s important for students to engage with democracy both in and out of the classroom?
Amy Sayward: Well, especially college students here at MTSU, obviously training to be the leaders of our industry, of government, of communities, of families, of our societies. Part of that training, especially as we become educated leaders, is critical thinking. That’s exactly what we need to sustain our democracy. Our founding fathers knew it, and every generation since, the people that we most need to be involved in and interested in government for it to continue to be a vibrant democracy are the folks who think about it, who care about it, who are willing to put themselves on the line. Every single person should vote because we need the input of every single person to get the best possible outcome.
Especially here at MTSU, our students, most of whom are going to stay in the region, will be leaders in their communities and so on. I want them to practice registering to vote, because you have to reregister every time you vote, and to be educated voters who research what’s going to happen before you go into the polling place. A couple of years ago, we had several constitutional amendments on the ballot in class, we went through each of them and why they were needed, what they meant, and one of my students reported back and she’s like, Dr. Sayward, I went into the voting booth and I was in and out in 2 minutes and all these other people were like, “What is this? I can’t believe they didn’t do their homework before they went”. Having those good practices of knowing where to get the information, looking it up, making up their mind, and talking to other people before they move forward.
Robin Lee: Being educated citizens.
Amy Sayward: Being educated citizens. Sometimes it can be a little harder to find that information. In Tennessee, when we were voting in the presidential primary, you don’t actually vote directly for who you want, but for who the delegates to the convention will be and who they represent, and there were more people than the minimum number you had to choose. We talked through that process. Again, if you just walk in and say, I want to vote for candidate X, and you don’t get to vote for candidate X, but you vote for X number of delegates, how do you make that decision if you haven’t thought about it ahead of time, if you haven’t done a little bit of research on it?
Robin Lee: Absolutely. It’s inspiring to hear how much thought you’ve put into helping students become engaged citizens.
That’s a perfect lead into one of the major ways students can get involved in campus civic life: the American Democracy Project. For listeners who aren’t familiar, what is ADP?
Amy Sayward: The American Democracy Project was an initiative of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities a quarter century ago. They said one of the key parts of our mission as regional state colleges and universities is to train future leaders. A key part of that is civic engagement. We need to be doing a better job more consciously helping our students think about how to be civically engaged. Not just registering to vote and voting, but also how you involve yourself in your community, and also realizing that those students who are more involved in their community, doing more community-based learning, are more civically engaged, and have a more positive experience in their education. Getting outside the classroom has been very valuable to students.
AASCU, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, has placed this emphasis on civic engagement across all its member institutions. Once a year, we get together and we share ideas. Just go back from Annapolis with 3 faculty members and 6 undergraduate students who made their own presentation about how they engage with democracy every day. We have an American Democracy Project Student Organization. They run voter registration drives, they do presentations at national conferences, and they have organized for the fall a issues form in which we’re going to look at a number of issues that impact specifically MTSU students and understand where the different political parties agree, disagree on those different issues. That’s part of it. The ADP student organization has been great already to be able to work with them.
How did it feel stepping into this role after Dr. Mary Evins, who led the program for nearly two decades?
Amy Sayward: It’s a fun story that I was chair of the History Department when Dr. Evins became the American Democracy Project Director. I was approached by the previous director who said, “Hey, I think Dr. Evins would be a good director.” I said, she’d be a great director. Both the former director and I went and talked to the provost and said, “This is the person who should be the ADP director.” Dr. Evins did such a great job of making Constitution Day on our campus such a broad and anticipated event. Not only do we have national-level speakers for Constitution Day, like David Brooks, who’s coming, Vice President Pence, who was here last year, but also every one of the colleges participates in reading the Constitution out loud every year during Constitution Week. May sound a little odd like why would we do that? But it’s so fundamental to our democracy, to not only know the constitution generally, but to be more familiar with its specific parts, to be able to when someone says, that’s unconstitutional, to really know what’s in the constitution and how things fit or don’t fit, how our constitution is written and how it’s functioned over the last almost 250 years.
Robin Lee: Absolutely. I know that reading the Constitution outside in front of one of the college buildings is something that they’re always going to remember. For the Honors College, we also give them cupcakes after they read. I don’t know what the other buildings do, but happy fail.
Amy Sayward: Everyone should come to the Honors College.
What excites you the most about the future of ADP?
Amy Sayward: What has excited me for 27 years of being at MTSU? I am always so excited to meet our freshmen, to meet our students and to imagine what they’re going to do next. I’ve had the honor and privilege over these last 27 years to work with thousands of students and to see them go on to careers in the legislature and classrooms and their commune. Every once in a while when you’re here long enough, folks will circle back and say, “Hey, do you remember me? Are you still on campus? Can I come visit you?” I had a student just recently who came to visit; Jason, who I had had in class 20 years ago. He said,” Do you remember me?” I said, “I remember that you were tall in dark hair. I probably couldn’t have picked you out of a lineup.” But he said, “Do you remember, the positions that I took in class?” I’m like, “No, it was a little too long ago.” He’s like, “I have changed so much over the years, in part because I kept learning.” He said, “I always remember in class, we could never nail you down on what your position was. You would always ask us questions to clarify our own positions.” He said, “That always just stuck with me.” He said, “If I had a chance to go back and talk to my 22-yearold self, I’d be like, What are you thinking?” What always excites me is the future, which is probably ironic for someone who’s a historian and studies the past.
Robin Lee: I think it makes perfect sense. Clearly, ADP is doing powerful work to connect students with real world democratic engagement. A big part of that centers around something we all know, but don’t always think deeply about perhaps, and that’s the constitution.
Why is Constitution Day important, especially on a college campus?
Amy Sayward: It’s actually federally mandated that we mark and celebrate Constitution Day, which I think is wonderful, because I don’t think that we think about the Constitution enough on a daily basis. Again, it’s a term that we throw around a lot, especially things being constitutional or unconstitutional. Once you really start digging in thinking about the intellectual work that was done by that founding generation to decide, how do we create a document that is broad enough that it can govern this future that we can’t quite imagine, but not specific enough so that it’ll only apply to us.
I’m always struck by the genius of that founding generation and their ability to craft our Constitution and include in it that amendment process to realize that it would have to change over time. That they couldn’t quite imagine how or when, but they put a process into place. I think that’s the genius of the document. It’s also the reason why we continue to have our courts functioning to interpret because they left room for ambiguity or change over time. Well, I’m sure that they could not have imagined that 250 years later, we’d still be operating with the same constitution, with just one huge constitutional crisis, the civil war and a lot of amendments over the years.
I actually did some research on the 26th Amendment that lowered the voting age, the early 1970s, and came to realize that two young men who had just recently graduated college were the two Tennessee legislators, the youngest members of the legislature who were responsible for getting Tennessee to ratify the 26th Amendment on the very first day that it was open for signature. Victor Ashe and Richard Krieg, I had the honor this past fall of being on a panel with them and having them tell their stories at the East Tennessee Historical Society about 52 years after they had played that pioneering role in pushing for the youth vote. It was so inspiring to get to meet them and talk to them about that experience. As I said, we did our homework better than some of the more established legislatures.
This year’s theme focuses on how constitutional values intersect with student voices and identities. What does that mean for you?
Amy Sayward: What it means to me is that every student needs to be thinking about the constitution, thinking about how it shapes the world around them, and how they may well shape the next generation and how that constitution is interpreted. There’s lots of language in it. I love the preamble to the constitution that lays out those broad ideas. I’m a big fan of the very first word of the Constitution I think a lot of times people talk today about how polarized we are. I would like us as Americans to spend more time thinking about what we share rather than what divides us. I think we’d be a lot happier and we’d probably be moving forward in a little more concerted of an effort these days.
Robin Lee: Absolutely. What ways do you think students can live out constitutional values in their daily lives?
Amy Sayward: Again, if I go back to we thinking about when we hear disagreements between different political parties or even different people or groups on campus. Again, to start by thinking about, well, what do we share? What’s the common ground that we have? What are our shared values that can help guide us and move us forward? We do that every day in the classroom as we work with other people who may not share the same ideas that we do. We can learn from one another and learn how to work together regardless of some differences and realize the things that we share in common every day.
Robin Lee: You’ve given us a lot to think about when it comes to living out constitutional values. Let’s talk about how all of that comes to life at MTSU, starting with this year’s Constitution week events.
Can you give us a quick overview of Constitution Day at MTSU this year?
Amy Sayward: Constitution Day is September 17th. It’s a Wednesday this year, and that’s when our big speaker and event will be on campus. David Brooks will be talking to student members of ADP’s Organization, talking about the role of the constitution in their everyday lives. That will be at 3 o’clock in the Tucker Theater. That event is free and open to the public. Everyone is invited, and after the initial questions and answers, we will throw the floor open for questions. The public is also welcome to the reception that we’ll follow immediately. They’ll also have an opportunity if they so wish to intersect and interact with Mr. Brooks as well as the students who will have been on stage. That’s at three o’clock on Wednesday, September 17th. Mr. Brooks will also be reading the Constitution, along with the College of Liberal Arts and the College of Basic and Applied Sciences, at one o’clock in the Peck Hall courtyard. We would love for members of the community, as well as everyone on campus, to participate in reading the Constitution at some point during Constitution Week. The College of Media and Entertainment and the Walker Library will be hosting a Constitution Day reading Monday, September 15th at 11:00, 3:00 is when the Honors College will be reading at 3:00 with cupcakes. Tuesday, the College of Education and University College will be reading the constitution at 9:00 in the morning at the College of Education Portico. We have constitution readings taking place throughout the first part of the week as well.
Robin Lee: What can students expect from David Brooks’ keynote address?
Amy Sayward: He’s not giving a set address. He will be having a conversation with students from the ADP student organization about some of the key ideas that he has laid out, both about the constitution in general, current politics, and in his writings. He has written a lot about the development of character and being a good, solid American in terms of values. When I took the ADP student organization up to Indianapolis last month, I said, “This is what I’d like to have happen that all of you are interacting with him.” One student said, “His book on the Second Mountain changed my life.” I said, “Then you absolutely have to draft a question around how that idea of not just our original career goals, but as we climb that career ladder and we see as he says in his analogy, the mountain behind the things that we want to accomplish for communities to make the world that we leave behind a better place than the one we inherited.” Those are what I see as good constitutional values. He’ll also be talking about those as well.
How can students get involved in the American Democracy Project or even the Constitution Day activities?
Amy Sayward: Our student organization website is awesome. You can go on to student organizations and scroll through. I think last, there are 180 different student organizations that students can belong to. Everything from a knitting club to the American Democracy Project, to the Swim Club, all types of student organizations. I think it’s really one of the best ways to connect with peers across campus, to be connected to others who share similar interests, and to find your people as you settle into the college campus.
Robin Lee: Perfect. Well, thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Honors Spotlight, and a huge thank you to Amy Sayward for sharing her insights, stories, and passion for civic engagement and the Constitution. If you’re curious about how to get involved in the American Democracy Project or Constitution Day events, visit amerdem.mtsu.edu or stop by the Honors College for more information.