Sara Mehltretter is energetically and eagerly joining the Compact team for the 2026 calendar year, where she will bring her passion for dialogue, deliberation, and public discourse in higher education and communities.
Sara is a professor of Rhetoric at Wabash College, a small liberal arts college for men in Crawfordsville, Indiana. In 2014, she founded the Wabash Democracy and Public Discourse initiative, an interdisciplinary student program that focuses on teaching and promoting the kinds of communication that advance democracy. Her research, teaching, and practice center around using productive communication and collaboration to address campus and public challenges. Sara has published more than twenty articles and book chapters on deliberative democracy and public discourse, and has experience facilitating community conversations, deliberations, and dialogues across a variety of contexts.
Sara earned her BA in Communication and Political Science from Boston College, and her MA and PhD in Communication Arts and Sciences from The Pennsylvania State University. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for Indiana Humanities
