Free the Civics Schools

Across 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.