The anti-bystanders

Election season is upon us, and with it the time-honored tradition of pulling the blankets over one's head till December.

This month, we caught up with three Stanford students doing the opposite. One is registering classmates to vote by the thousands, helping make Stanford a two-time national leader in student turnout. One chairs Democracy Day, the campus holiday built on the premise that voting alone isn't enough. One is teaching her peers to disagree productively in an age of algorithm-fed echo chambers.

The stakes are hard to overstate. National trust in nearly every core institution has plummeted, Americans increasingly seem to talk past each other, and young voters whose futures are so affected by elections historically show up the least. It's the kind of moment that could produce a generation of bystanders.

Stanford's push against this is no accident. It reflects a long-standing conviction, dating back to the university’s founding, that education should prepare students not just to succeed, but to participate in a democracy. That mission is reinforced by a community of donors willing to invest in it.

Meet the students carrying it forward.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, then-high school student Jack Norman reconnected with his elementary school music teacher. They were chatting via Zoom one day when suddenly she burst into tears.

“We are not going to have musicians in the future,” she lamented, explaining that many students had quit playing instruments amid the challenges of remote learning. 

Soon after, Norman started a local program called Music Buddies, which got high schoolers to tutor younger students. Before long, a record 97 percent of students at one elementary school were learning music. 

Norman kept helping his community. He also founded a nonprofit that distributed socks to unhoused people and served as a student representative to the local mayor's office, city council, and board of education.

“The world has many extremely complex problems,” he says, “but being able to focus on a problem in my community and work to address that can have a massive impact.”

When he got to Stanford, Norman joined Stanford in Government (SIG), a student-led organization that promotes civic engagement on campus. Founded in 1963, the group has funded thousands of summer internships that help students gain experience at all levels of government service and beyond.  

“We’ve been able to make public service more accessible for Stanford students,” says Norman, who was elected chair last spring.

For the past two summers, he received Cardinal Quarter Fellowships through the Haas Center for Public Service, which connects more than 3,500 undergraduates to service opportunities each year—a reflection of how embedded public service is in the Stanford experience. The fellowships brought Norman back to Monterey County for local government internships and a collaboration with a community arts and culture organization.

SIG also gets Stanford students to the polls, setting up voter-registration tables across campus and working with the registrar to build in a brief pause at enrollment each fall—a prompt that asks students to either register to vote or check a box confirming they've considered it, before they move on to sign up for classes. In 2014, fewer than 17 percent of eligible students voted in the midterms. Thanks in part to SIG, that number shot to more than 42 percent in 2018, and continues to grow. In 2025, Stanford won the Ballot Bowl for the second time, after registering the most students to vote among California colleges and universities in the 2024 general election.

“Stanford has moved from a campus with low voting engagement to a national leader,” Norman says.

SIG also gets students excited about civic engagement by hosting speakers. Al Gore and former Speaker of the House John Boehner have visited, and this fall astronaut Steve Smith and California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer will come, as well. The organization is also planning to host a policy hackathon this year to support innovation in state and local government. 

Norman, who will graduate with a BA and MA in Public Policy in 2027, is already considering what a career in public service might look like.

The summer he was 17, working a congressional phone bank in Michigan, Jadon Urogdy took a call that was supposed to last a minute. The voter disagreed with nearly everything the candidate stood for. Ten minutes in, Urogdy was still on the line, filling a notebook with notes. Thirty minutes in, he gave the man his personal cell number. Neither had persuaded the other of anything. It wasn’t the outcome any campaign script called for. But something, Urogdy felt, had opened up.

That instinct followed him to Stanford, where he's now chair of Democracy Day. The student-run holiday, founded in 2021, has since been entered into the registrar's official academic calendar. Over time it's grown to encompass more than 40 events and thousands of student participants. At its heart is a conviction that democracy requires more than just showing up to vote.

That philosophy runs through all of Urogdy’s efforts. He believes that the health of our democracy isn't something politicians or political scientists maintain on everyone else's behalf. Rather, it’s a set of habits—staying curious about people who disagree with you, showing up even when it's uncomfortable—that anyone can practice. 

Urogdy’s thinking about civic engagement took hold young, in the one-stoplight Michigan town where he grew up. Detasseling corn each summer, he noticed the political arguments between his coworkers were plentiful and went nowhere. Watching nearby Flint hollow out as automotive jobs moved overseas, he came to believe that some of our political malaise has less to do with apathy than with people no longer feeling seen. 

At Stanford, he’s completing a coterminal degree in political science and sociology, and used his capstone project to help design a national survey of Gen Z's views on polarization. He co-founded the Stanford Political Review, the campus's first multipartisan student journal in years, and serves as a TA for a course pairing public debates with small-group debriefs on where dialogue breaks down.

Fixing democratic backsliding, Urogdy believes, is an all-hands-on-deck project. "It's going to be the people that do art. It's going to be the students in engineering. It's going to be the technicians,” he says. 

It’s also going to be sheer patience. Interning last summer for his home district’s representative, Urogdy found himself on another phone call with another opinionated constituent. “Frank” was a serial caller, so persistent his number had been scrawled on a sticky note affixed to the phone. It was the last week of Urogdy’s internship, and rather than redirect the call like everyone else did, he just listened. Frank spoke his mind. At length. When he was done, Frank did something atypical. He thanked Urogdy for listening.