Constitution Day at The W
Happening from 11:30 am - 1:30 pm on Thursday, Sept. 17 on the front lawn of Fant Library!
September 17 is Constitution Day & Citizenship Day, marking the anniversary of the signing of the US Constitution in 1787. Every year, The W's celebration is planned by the Department of History, Political Science, and Geography (HPG). In recent years, the department has revamped the programming, moving events outside, adding interactive activities like trivia challenges and patriotic photo booths, and emphasizing voter registration and education. HPG students and others are welcome to volunteer to help run the event.
Whether volunteering or simply attending, W students are sure to have fun, learn more about their rights, and be prepared for the next election.
Patriotic Photo Contest
Stop by our Patriotic Photobooth, grab some of our fabulous props, and take a group or individual selfie that shows your civic pride! Then post it to Instagram using #WConstitutionDay to enter the contest. Following the event, we'll invite campus to vote here for the best photo of the day, and the people's choice will win a $20 Visa gift card!
Winners will be notified through Instagram on Monday, Sept. 21.
Constitutional Trivia Contest
Test your knowledge and compete for a $20 Visa gift card by taking our short quiz on the US Constitution and American Government. Whoever gets the day's highest score wins!
Voter Registration & Education
Ready to cast a ballot this November? Volunteers will be on hand to share resources, answer questions, help you check your registration and look up your voting location and ballot. We'll have voter registration forms, envelopes, and stamps on hand to make registering or updating your registration simple.
We encourage you to show your voter pride and encourage others to register by taking a selfie with your registration form or voter ID (making sure to cover sensitive information) and posting it with the hashtag #TheWVotes.
Why Constitution Day Matters
In a democratic country like ours, the constitution is the foundational contract binding all members of the society together. By virtue of living in the country, we’ve all given our consent to the “terms and conditions,” so we should all know what is (and isn’t) in the agreement; luckily for us, the US Constitution is one of the shortest in the world, and it’s probably more straightforward than most of the terms of service agreements Americans sign each year.
If you’re an existing or aspiring citizen of the US, it’s important to understand the basic rules of the game that we’ve agreed to follow in our political struggles. Every society experiences disagreements and conflict as its people work out how best to use its resources for common purposes, and world history is replete with examples of political confrontations that turned violent. In comparison with other countries, the US Constitution has done a fairly good job of keeping our national struggles from boiling over into physical confrontations, but only because enough of us have continued to follow the rules and to update them in an orderly way when we find them lacking. If we want the Constitution to keep us from flipping the board over when we’re losing a round in the game of politics, we all need to know what the rules are and understand how to change them if we think they’re no longer fair and useful.
Reading and re-reading our Constitution is also an important exercise in reflective citizenship. Beyond establishing the basic rules by which political disagreements will be resolved, the Constitution asserts our highest beliefs and values as a nation. In this sense, it is an aspirational statement of who we want to be as a people, and we should refresh our memories periodically to check our behavior against the common expectations we’ve set for ourselves. In fact, the French revolutionaries probably put it best in the Preamble to their Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which was also signed in 1789:
This declaration, being constantly before all members of the social body, shall remind them continually of their rights and duties . . . [and] the acts of the legislative power, as well as those of the executive power, may be compared at any moment with the objects and purposes of all political institutions . . . [as established in this declaration].
Reading the Constitution is an opportunity to reflect on who we are as a country. It remains the basic contract binding all who reside within the country. The contract establishes the shared values that are to guide our development into a ‘more perfect union,’ as well as the rules of the game by which we all agree to reach collective decisions in spite of our differences. Without agreement on those, there isn’t anything to hold us together; we can renegotiate the contract, but we can’t get along without one. The Constitution also provides an important opportunity to remind ourselves of the ideals upon which our polity is based and to take stock of the ways in which we are falling short of our aspirations.