Restoring a Higher Civics in America’s Universities

I am deeply grateful to the Law & Liberty editors for organizing this Forum on my essay urging the restoration of genuinely higher learning in America’s universities, especially liberal education as a civic education. I am indebted to each respondent for seriously engaging with my analysis of the multi-faceted crisis facing higher education, and my remedies for private as well as public institutions. Their contributions made me wiser about the deeper principles at issue. I also am better prepared for the ongoing efforts to implement practical reforms at particular campuses and to join others in building a broad national movement to renew American civic education in our colleges and universities.

I am heartened that James Hankins, Michael Poliakoff, and J. Michael Hoffpauir generally endorse my diagnosis and reform approach, while each emphasizes different deficits in our universities—thus different remedies needed in a national reform effort. I believe our four views offer a compatible vision. But the essays also provide a deeper lesson about what a renewed nexus of Socratic liberal education and American civic education should provide to our university students. Our Forum has generated more light than heat, the civil disagreement appropriate to free, self-governing people. Further, this rich discussion among scholars sharing broad first principles, thus some parameters for discussion, indicates that Civic Thought and Leadership truly is emerging as a new academic field. It is not just a narrow topic of policy or curricular reform. Academic fields generate energetic discussion, and disagreement, about larger intellectual, educational, and political-social aims and needs (the latter is a practical science, in Aristotle’s terms). Fields also address how to coherently connect these theoretical, institutional-pedagogical, and communal aims or realities.

James Hankins and I agree that Civic Thought and Leadership (CTL) is a new field, such that private and public universities should establish new academic units to restore the modes of inquiry, and the theoretical and civic knowledge, that the relevant humanities and social sciences disciplines have demoted on most campuses. All four of us agree that the illiberal turn in higher education has deeply damaged higher learning and American civic culture. The vast majority of higher education’s graduates are steeped in a cocktail of civic ignorance or civic apathy, but even the subsets of the engaged minority are defined mostly by angry polarization. Among this last set, an anti-American spirit predominates among most student activists—and among far too many faculty and administrators, as well.

Hankins urges that this new field of Civic Thought and Leadership, in its independent departments, colleges, or centers, must emphasize academic rigor while redressing the deficits created by the left-progressive academic turn. He has been a leader at Harvard and beyond in recent years, including the recently formed Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, in balancing advocacy of renewed academic rigor with criticism of any narrow ideology in the academy, left or right. He recommends Petrarch’s example, to undertake a renaissance of great traditions of learning; not a revolution that further polemicizes higher inquiry and discourse. 

It accords with the civic spirit of his essay that an American education reform would call upon not just one great founder but a collective effort, with several leaders building CTL to address both old and new questions facing humanity in our era. Hankins also wisely counsels the necessity to recruit excellent teacher-scholars as faculty, and to build curricula that obviously fill the gaps on a given campus and in higher education generally. Given his praise of a civic education “in virtue and eloquence” for serious citizens and leaders, in contrast to what has gone so “dreadfully wrong” in many elite institutions, I recalled my recent review of the course options that meet Harvard’s graduation requirement in Ethics and Civics. Viewed from the massive crisis and deficits facing American civic culture, it is fair to note that only a handful of the courses in the menu provide a fundamental civic education and ethics education—versus narrow, specialized topics of interest to particular fields and faculty. This is but one example of the deep need that CTL colleges, departments, and centers can meet in our prestigious universities.

Hankins’s emphasis on CTL units filling the need for academically serious leadership education also is welcome. A blend of citizenship education with leadership education is, he thinks, “the most obvious justification” for such new units, to include “military leadership,” diplomatic history, and American constitutional studies from our founding forward. Two of the earliest public university departments founded in the CTL reform—my department at Arizona State University, the School of Civic & Economic Thought and Leadership, and the Hamilton Center for Classical & Civic Education at University of Florida—have built curricular tracks and majors emphasizing grand strategy and statecraft as leadership studies; and all the CTL units have a core emphasis on America’s constitutional principles and historical development.

Here Hankins and Poliakoff emphatically agree that this kind of historical education—which teaches practical wisdom, civic judgment, and moderation—is indispensable for the blend of classical liberal education and civic education revived by these CTL units, preparing capable citizens and leaders. Both lament the progressive and critical-theory conceptions now dominant among history PhD-granting departments, which have undermined the discipline’s standing within the academy and the broader public by repudiating political, military, diplomatic, legal, and intellectual history. They agree a restoration particularly of American history, from our founding forward, would serve the higher aims of higher education while drawing enrollments to the new CTL units. Their arguments prompted a vision of the medium-term prospects of the CTL reform: while these departments and colleges now draw STEM, business, and other pre-professional majors to take a general-education course, or a minor or a second major; we could eventually see such students choosing, first and foundationally, a major in civic and liberal education then adding a minor or second major in more narrowly-practical studies.

Poliakoff is wary of establishing a new academic discipline “with journals and conferences,” since this would distract from the urgent need to establish more CTL departments, colleges, and centers on a great many campuses. The top priority must be redressing America’s glaring deficit of literate and responsibly-prepared citizens, by providing knowledge of American government and history—the “study of our government’s foundations.” I have learned during my part-time work as a Senior Fellow of the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History how deeply worried this non-partisan and bipartisan national network of scholars, educational professionals, and civic leaders is about the near-collapse of constitutional studies within political science, and American history within History—thus their declining status in higher education curricula and K-12 schools. 

Readers should know, if they don’t already, that the institution Poliakoff leads, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), has been a national leader in documenting the state of civic illiteracy in higher education. ACTA unwaveringly focuses on the basic educational and civic duty that academia mostly has neglected over the past half-century. They have called out various reports in the past two decades which claim to redress this deficit but effectively divert attention from serious American civic literacy, by advocating progressive, comparative, or global approaches to “democracy education” and “civic engagement.” With their new National Commission on American History and Civic Education, bringing together bipartisan and non-partisan experts ranging from eminent scholars of American history and constitutionalism to civic leaders who also have served as educational leaders, ACTA is performing an even greater civic and educational service.

Reasonable educators and reflective patriots from left to right, on particular campuses and in a national effort, need to forge consensus plans for necessary reforms in civic education.

Poliakoff urges us to consider why from President Jefferson to President John F. Kennedy, and up through the famous Harvard “Redbook” report of 1945 on “General Education in a Free Society,” there was a broad consensus among both civic leaders and leading educators that an American civic education was both an urgent civic and educational priority. In the 2021 national-consensus study of K-12 American history and civics education, Educating for American Democracy, my co-author colleagues and I suggested that ever since the Sputnik crisis in 1957 we have been too focused on the educational priorities for responding to urgent national security and economic competitors abroad. We must meet these challenges without neglecting the lesson once widely shared by Benjamin Franklin at the close of the 1787 Constitutional Convention up through Ronald Reagan: republics are hard to found, and even harder to keep. Citizenship preparation in a serious civics therefore must be a top educational priority, second to none. (Hankins reminds us in a new essay for Law & Liberty that a first step is to ponder the distinction between a republic and a democracy.) When critical theory, postmodernist, and anti-American studies entered academia in the 1960s just as governmental and civic leaders urged a focus on practical subjects outside liberal education, the great tradition of learning that long combined liberal and civic education was whipsawed, setting it onto steady decline.

Like Harvard’s Derek Bok and Ronald Daniels of Johns Hopkins, Poliakoff is exactly right that we also need academic leaders who will challenge the narrow, religious devotion to prioritizing the research aims of the separate disciplines, and also a solipsistic conception of academic freedom for faculty. Together these dogmas have led higher education to dismiss any civic obligation to America, to provide all graduates with a rigorous civic education. Here Poliakoff and Hoffpauir strongly agree that legislators, regents, trustees, and donors have quite legitimate grounds for demanding new graduation requirements in civic education and liberal education, among other curricular reforms. They should be heartened to know that not only Stanford, but as of this fall also Johns Hopkins, have established a new requirement in civics for all students; but this must be a spur for other prestigious universities. I’ll add that the older generation in the forum can take hope from the public stance of a younger scholar like Hoffpauir, so candidly delineating the illiberal spirit, and active undermining of our liberal democracy, in the identitarian ideology of too many faculty leaders and administrators.

I also appreciate Hoffpauir’s amplification of my arguments that the Socratic foundations of a genuine liberal education prepare citizens and potential leaders for the realities of America’s democratic republic: our perpetual debates, resting on shared premises of natural rights and self-government, aiming for reasonable consensus. A reasonable pluralism, and liberal-democratic parameters for orderly debate, must outweigh the third “p” now so dominant on campuses—the discourse of power. Thus we entirely agree that the intellectual virtues needed in a liberal education strongly overlap those provided in an American civic education—from intellectual humility and courage, to justice and responsibility (especially needed to pull faculty up from research myopia and anti-academic ideology), to moderation. As Law & Liberty has helped Americans to see, through attention to Yuval Levin’s splendid revival of serious study of the philosophy of human affairs informing our Constitution, these same virtues are implicitly called for by our complex constitutional order.

Hoffpauir is leading even as a young scholar and teacher as a founding faculty member of The University of Austin. Things are so bad in American higher education, and American civic culture, that such bold acts as establishing a new university, and a new academic field, are necessary acts of renewal and renaissance. Yet they are, in their own way, a restoration of common sense for our constitutional democratic republic. Lest anyone take a note of complacency rather than urgency from invoking common sense in these efforts to renew higher education and restore serious civic education in our schools and colleges, we should recall Poliakoff’s chilling warning about one particular finding in ACTA’s recent survey of college students. This replicated a spring 2022 poll by Quinnipiac, shortly after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine—when it was clear the Ukrainians were fighting to save their republic, not surrendering or fleeing. A majority of 18 to 35-year-old Americans in the 2022 poll, and a majority of college students in ACTA’s 2024 poll, replied they would not fight if America was invaded. America itself is underwater with our youngest generations. 

Yes, the restoration of a liberal and civic education is a serious academic issue, and its absence is one cause of the recent crescendo of violent protest culture and anti-academic ideology on our campuses. It also is an existential necessity for our democratic republic. If we don’t address this deficit, then Lincoln’s prescient warning of 1838, about the desperate need for a renewed civic education to overcome growing polarization, lawlessness, and violence, will come true for us as for his era: we will have set ourselves on the path to national “suicide.”

I hope that center-left colleagues reading this forum will not recoil at such candor, and I should close by noting center-left civic leaders and educators who have produced glimmers of hope upon which we should build, beyond those I noted in my lead essay. Steven Smith of Yale argues in Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes (2022) that we should follow Tocqueville and Lincoln, and the American founders, to recover an “enlightened patriotism” of head and heart. Brook Manville and Josiah Ober in The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives (2023) urge a renewed priority for civic education; as one of the seven “essential conditions” of a democratic republic, “necessary for citizen self-governance.” We should be grateful for Richard Haass’s The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens (2023) emphasizing civic education as one of those crucial habits; and Jeffrey Rosen’s The Pursuit of Happiness (2024) on the classical moral and civic virtues that leading American founders wrote about and practiced. Josh Ober also is not resting on his laurels after launching the Stanford Civics Initiative (crucial for establishing the new civics requirement at Stanford); he is forming the Alliance for Civics in the Academy to pull together educators across a range of views and pedagogical approaches who share a basic commitment to restoring fundamental civic knowledge, and related civic virtues and dispositions, to as many colleges and universities as possible. It is particularly helpful that he is pulling together the leaders of the Civic Thought and Leadership movement in public universities with reformers in private universities. And all is not lost when even the Boston Globe chides Harvard for its deficit of intellectual diversity and robust truth-seeking, asking upon the retirement at 91 of the great conservative professor and educator on America’s constitutional principles: Will Harvard ever hire another Harvey Mansfield?

Reasonable educators and reflective patriots from left to right, on particular campuses and in a national effort, need to forge consensus plans for necessary reforms. We can draw upon exemplars who show it can be done, but their work should spread to all universities and colleges, private and public, which claim to care about America and to educate leaders for civic life. With the approach of America 250, marking in 2026 the semi-quincentennial of our political founding in 1776, we have much to study, celebrate, and discuss—but the commemorations would be less grim if there was greater evidence that higher education is undertaking (to paraphrase Daniels of Johns Hopkins) what we owe to our democratic republic.

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This essay was published by Law & Liberty on September 30, 2024.