How often do you find a former campus provost exhorting campuses to require their students to seriously study the character and foundations of American democracy? In an eloquent essay Thomas Lindsay makes this case to higher educators and frames six questions essential, for both newly arrived immigrants and native-born citiizens, to “becoming American.”
“American higher education,” he concludes, “has both the obligation and the privilege” to provide core civic education, thus protecting our liberty from being “swallowed whole by democratic conformism.”