Professor Ioannis “Yannis” Evrigenis has been named Claremont McKenna College’s next Director of The Open Academy.
Evrigenis, who will take the helm on July 1, 2025, is committed to making powerful contributions to The Open Academy and expanding its impact on the CMC campus and nationally. In response to political, societal, and educational challenges, the campus-wide initiative is centered on three core commitments: Freedom of Expression, Viewpoint Diversity, and Constructive Dialogue.
“The Open Academy’s mission is rooted in commitments that are foundational to our academic experience and programs,” said Evrigenis, the Alice Tweed Tuohy Professor of Government and Ethics. “I am honored to lead the next chapter of this important initiative.”
Evrigenis succeeds Professors Jon Shields and Heather Ferguson, the founding faculty co-directors of The Open Academy, who have served in their roles since 2022. In that time, Ferguson and Shields created The Open Academy’s signature Saturday Salons series and introduced new student cohorts to the initiative’s CMC commitments through innovative orientation programming. Their “flipped Ath” experiment also put the Athenaeum’s lecture before the dinner in order to facilitate deeper and more sustained roundtable discussions.
“Professors Shields and Ferguson have been real champions of The Open Academy’s core values,” said Heather Antecol, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty, as well as the James G. Boswell Professor of Economics. “Under their guidance, The Open Academy has continued to thrive as a core strategic priority and commitment. We greatly appreciate their invaluable contributions and the strong foundation they have built for the future.”
“As we look forward, we are excited that Professor Evrigenis is stepping into his new role as CMC’s Open Academy Director,” Antecol added.
President Hiram Chodosh also congratulated Shields and Ferguson for their “tireless commitment to building a learning community of faculty, staff, and students who have the courage to speak up with respect, the curiosity to ask incisive questions that embrace the importance of diverse views, experiences, and perspectives, and the creativity to find common ground through constructive dialogue and problem-solving.” He is also “thrilled by the inspired appointment” of Evrigenis.
“I can think of no one in the country—no scholar of his stature, no teacher of his level of pedagogic commitment—who is better prepared to take The Open Academy to the next level,” President Chodosh said.
In his Open Academy leadership role, Evrigenis will direct a range of activities in collaboration with a coordinating committee of program leaders, selected in consultation with the Dean of the Faculty. These include:
- Recruiting faculty to co-teach in the program or to develop and integrate curricular modules reflecting The Open Academy commitments into their courses;
- Collaborating with departments, institutes, centers, labs, and other offices to develop co-curricular and extra-curricular programming reflecting The Open Academy commitments;
- Coordinating all faculty, staff, and student programs that leverage learning experiences and advance The Open Academy commitments and activities, including Athenaeum speaker programs, salons, co-teaching modules, applied seminars, collaboration with student groups, and an immersive approach to mastering constructive dialogue; and
- Working closely with CMC leadership on national initiatives for constructive dialogue and civic preparation.
Evrigenis, who joined CMC in 2023, holds a B.A. from Grinnell College, an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and A.M. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. He teaches courses on ethics and international relations and the social contract. Evrigenis is also the author of books and articles on a wide range of topics in political thought, including Fear of Enemies and Collective Action, for which he received the Delba Winthrop Award for Excellence in Political Science.
“One of the many things that makes CMC special is our deep commitment to free expression, viewpoint diversity, and constructive dialogue,” Evrigenis said. “Small classes, a wealth of opportunities to discuss issues in depth, access to the resources necessary for informed dialogue, and active encouragement to respectfully engage with—rather than avoid—other people are desperately needed as the world turns inward.
“It is my hope that The Open Academy will help foster the curiosity, critical thinking, epistemic humility, and goodwill that make for good citizenship, responsible leadership, and a meaningful life.”
–Gilien Silsby
Civic Leadership:
The Next Generation
How can higher education play a critical role in developing students into civic and responsible leaders?
To highlight the importance of civic education and emphasize the need for informed engagement to develop effective citizenry, CMC continues to advance its leadership role nationally and on campus through The Open Academy’s commitments to freedom of expression, viewpoint diversity, and constructive dialogue.
Among the significant partnerships: Working closely with the Institute for Citizens & Scholars (C&S) on a large national collaboration, College Presidents for Civic Preparedness. CMC was one of the first higher education institutions to join the C&S college civic engagement initiative, a coalition that currently numbers 112 college presidents from a diverse range of institutions.
Photo by Sidney Smith IV ’25
“I love this institution, and the work you are doing,” said C&S President Rajiv Vinnakota, who discussed cultivating talent and ideas for civic leadership with CMC President Hiram Chodosh and Vernon Grigg, Executive Director of the Kravis Lab for Civic Leadership, during a purposeful Athenaeum panel—“Civic Leadership: How Are We Doing?”
As demonstrated by the breadth of activities hosted by CMC year-round to encourage engagement around community building—such as proactive constructive dialogue and self-authorship sessions organized by the Dean of Students, the CARE Center, and The Open Academy’s Saturday Salon series—President Chodosh emphasized that developing creative solutions to complex challenges requires applying all three Open Academy commitments interdependently and consistently across the entire CMC experience.
Grigg further noted how in spring 2024, CMC launched the Kravis Lab to address, in alignment with The Open Academy principles and C&S, the “same urgencies and needs, and the desire to provide to our students robust opportunities to learn at a deeper level, a notion of applied civics.”
“The commitment to building these resources at CMC is everywhere you look,” Grigg added.
“I think what’s powerful about what Vernon is doing at the Kravis Lab, and what our other institutes and centers at CMC do, is giving each of you opportunities to engage outside of the College, to engage in smaller chunks of challenges that give you a positive feedback response of having an impact … which help you practice those skills of getting things done,” President Chodosh said. “You learn, sometimes through failure, sometimes through modest success, but it gives you that positive cycle of doing and learning that then becomes very powerful.”
– Anne Bergman