These centers can revive needed rigorous civics education — if hostile faculty don’t get in the way.
These centers can revive needed rigorous civics education — if hostile faculty don’t get in the way.
A cross the country, civics schools have emerged as a major force of reform in higher education. These schools, founded by state legislatures and in most cases housed at major public universities, aim to restore serious teaching and scholarship on American civics within an academic establishment that is often hostile to the country’s founding principles and Western heritage.
But as economics professor Richard Lowery recently wrote at National Review, civics schools often face bitter opposition from faculty and administrators at public universities, who will do anything in their power to neuter these new institutions or, even worse, capture them for their own ideological purposes. Lowery’s warning — along with resistance at the University of Florida and Ohio State University — points to the importance of strong protections for civics schools’ independence in state law. My new report for the Goldwater Institute provides a roadmap for ensuring this independence.
The Center for Intellectual Freedom at the University of Iowa, where Lowery served as chair of the center’s advisory committee, offers a stark warning to other states: Without real guarantees of independence and autonomy for civics schools, they can be doomed from the start. The Goldwater Institute’s report lays out specific provisions in state law that will ensure this independence and autonomy. I co-authored the report with Sean Beienburg, who served as the associate director of the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL) at Arizona State University (and is an occasional NR contributor). Founded in 2016, SCETL was the first civics school at a major public university, and Beienburg was one of the first faculty members to join the school.
Drawing on Beienburg’s tenure and the experience of other civics schools, our report stresses the need for legal guarantees that empower civics schools to govern their academic affairs themselves. Too often, elected officials still rely on institutions long regarded as neutral arbiters, overlooking how thoroughly ideological factions have captured them over the past several decades. For example, the authorizing legislation that founded the Center for Intellectual Freedom at the University of Iowa includes many admirable provisions, and our report endorses several of them. However, as Lowery explained, even the Board of Regents appointed by Republican Governor Kim Reynolds was unable to resist the administration of the University of Iowa, which undermined the center’s autonomy and independence from the start.
The higher education establishment cannot be trusted to fix the problems it created. Civics schools were founded as a solution to public universities that failed to provide basic civics education, cultivate intellectual diversity, or promote the civil exchange of ideas. Those who presided over the decline of these fields should not enjoy a veto over schools designed to revive them. The lesson of Iowa is to shield the internal governance of civics schools from existing boards and university administrations, especially mid-level administrators.
Our report offers model legislation to do exactly that. Under our policy suggestion, the civics schools would no longer need permission from entrenched university bureaucracies or other departments to pursue their important missions. For example, the model legislation stipulates that no other academic unit may block the civics school from placing a course in the academic catalog, offering a degree program, or hiring faculty.
We offer several other recommendations, but one is particularly worth highlighting. Future civics-school legislation should provide an enforcement mechanism to preserve guarantees of autonomy and independence. In our model policy, we give full-time faculty the right to bring legal action against a university for violations of the civics-school statute.
Such broad guarantees of independence from the rest of the university may strike some readers as excessive, but they are necessary. Faculty and administrators often see civics schools as illegitimate institutions because they do not affirm the progressivism of the rest of the university. Experience has shown that entrenched faculty have no intention of honoring the academic freedom of civics schools. In fact, the Manhattan Institute’s John Sailer recently revealed that the American Association of University Professors was developing a targeted public relations campaign to “knock out” civics schools.
Establishing civics schools without ample resources to resist attempted interference from hostile faculty and administrators will doom them to failure. But with sufficient resources — including adequate funding provided by state legislatures and patriotic donors — civics schools can revive rigorous civics education, instilling in students an appreciation for the genius of the American constitutional republic.