Civic Thought: A Proposal for University-Level Civic Education – American Enterprise Institute

By Benjamin Storey | Jenna Silber Storey
American Enterprise Institute
December 11, 2023
Key Points
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Introduction
Leading voices at America’s most prominent universities have recently pointed out that institutions of higher education are failing to offer students the civic education they need to play a constructive role in political life. Johns Hopkins President Ronald J. Daniels wrote a book to encourage fellow leaders in higher education to reconsider “what universities owe democracy.” A pair of Stanford faculty, writing in the New York Times, claimed that “by abandoning civics, colleges helped create the culture wars.” What can colleges and universities do to meet the next generation’s need for a richer civic education?¹
While Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and others have done good work developing extracurricular programs and course sequences in response to this perceived need, the most ambitious projects in civic education have been undertaken by several state governments that have made substantial investments to create new academic units at their public universities. The model for this mode of reform is Arizona State’s School of Civic Thought and Leadership, founded in 2017 through the efforts of Gov. Doug Ducey and the Arizona state legislature; in the past two years, similar schools have been founded in Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah. These schools will have the same powers that other academic units have to hire their own faculty, design their own curricula, and offer their own majors and minors. This structural feature enables these schools to have a more profound effect on students and a more sustained effect on campus than do programs of study housed within or between existing departments whose primary purpose is something other than civic education.²
What will it take for these ambitious projects to offer a civic education that has a profound, enduring, and positive effect on the university’s work and culture—and on the country beyond the university’s gates? Among the factors that will determine these projects’ success, one of the most crucial is the articulation of a distinctive intellectual mission. For while the needs these schools have been created to meet are political, the standards by which they will prove themselves worthy of their place on campus are academic.
The articulation of an intellectual mission in its fullest sense requires defining a program of teaching and research with a particular scope of study and a characteristic approach, one that will train scholars in a demanding and recognizable discipline. Projects that define and implement a mission that can win the allegiance of both those who criticize the university’s civic failures and those who worry about the university holding true to its academic purpose have the most promise for surviving and thriving on campus—and making a durable contribution to our political and intellectual life.
In this report, we sketch the broad outlines of a new program of teaching and research that we call “Civic Thought.” Our argument draws on many informative conversations with administrators and faculty, especially with the group of impressive scholars who serve as the deans and directors of the new initiatives in public universities—but we do not claim to represent any group’s conclusions. We present this sketch of Civic Thought in the hopes that it may prove useful to the new schools in public universities and to other academics concerned about civic education as they work to launch new programs of study that will deserve to command both sustained public support and widespread academic respect.
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Notes
1. See Ronald J. Daniels, Grant Shreve, and Phillip Spector, What Universities Owe Democracy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021); and Debra Satz and Dan Edelstein, “By Abandoning Civics, Colleges Helped Create the Culture Wars,” New York Times, September 3, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/03/opinion/colleges-civics-core-curriculum-culture-wars.html. See also the Educating for American Democracy project, focused on improving K–12 civic education and spearheaded by Harvard’s Danielle Allen, which notes that “in recent decades, we as a nation have failed to prepare young Americans for self-government, leaving the world’s oldest constitutional democracy in grave danger, afflicted by both cynicism and nostalgia, as it approaches its 250th anniversary.” Educating for American Democracy, website, https://www.educatingforamericandemocracy.org.
2. See Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins, “The Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Committed $150 Million to a Joint Effort with Johns Hopkins University to Create the SNF Agora Institute,” https://www.snf.org/en/work/grants/grants-database/the-johns-hopkins-university-endowment-2017; and Stanford Civics Initiative, website, https://civics.stanford.edu. Arizona State University created the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership in 2017; the University of Mississippi created the Declaration of Independence Center in 2021; Utah Valley University created the Civic Thought and Leadership Initiative in 2021; the University of Florida created the Hamilton Center for Civic and Classical Education in 2022; the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, created the Institute for American Civics in 2022; the University of Texas at Austin cre­ated the School of Civic Leadership in 2023; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill created the School of Civic Life and Leadership in 2023; the University of Toledo created the Institute for American Constitutional Thought and Leadership in 2023; Ohio State University is founding the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at present; and three further such initiatives have been mandated for other Ohio campuses. For more on the history of these initiatives, see Paul Carrese, “A New Birth of Freedom in Higher Education: Civic Institutes at Public Universities,” American Enterprise Institute, January 24, 2023, https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/a-new-birth-of-freedom-in-higher-education-civic-institutes-at-public-universities.

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