Making American Citizens

Civics centers have made significant inroads in public universities over the past decade, a significant source of hope for American conservatives. In their conversation with James Patterson, Professors Lee Strang and Paul Carrese explain why civics education is so sorely needed and discuss the practicalities of building centers for civic education, their reception within public universities, and the impact of AI on the mission.

Related Links

Teaching America Reflective Patriotism in Schools, College, and Culture by Paul Carrese
What Universities Owe Democracy by Ronald J. Daniels, Grant Shreve, and Phillip Spector
Justice by Means of Democracy by Danielle Allen

Transcript

James Patterson (00:05):

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture informed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. My name is James Patterson, Contributing Editor to Law & Liberty, and Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee. With me today are two guests. The first is Professor Lee Strang. He’s the inaugural Executive Director of the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at the Ohio State University. Before joining Ohio State, he was the inaugural director at the University of Toledo’s Institute of American Constitutional Thought and Leadership. And in 2016, he was appointed to the Ohio Advisory Committee of the US Commission on Civil Rights and reappointed as chair in 2023.

(01:23):

My other guest is Professor Paul Carrese. He is the Director of the Center for American Civics and a professor in the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University serving as its founding director from 2016 to 2023. Formerly, he was a professor at the US Air Force Academy, co-founding its honors program, blending Liberal Arts and leadership education. He has recently published a book in Cambridge University Press, and it’ll sort of be in the background of our discussion today. The book title is Teaching America: Reflective Patriotism in Schools, College, and Culture. Professors Strang and Carrese, welcome to the podcast.

Lee Strang (02:06):

Thank you. It’s a real treat, as I had mentioned earlier, it’s a real treat to be with Paul. He’s really, in some ways, the father of the paths that James, you and I, are trotting today …

James Patterson:

That’s right.

Lee Strang:

… in the large furrow that he had trod about starting 10 years ago maybe, right, Paul?

Paul Carrese (02:20):

Yes. Well, thanks very much. That’s very gracious. It’s great to be here. I look forward to the conversation.

James Patterson (02:25):

Knowing that about Paul’s influence, I have to make sure to do a good job lest he bring the hammer of judgment.

Lee Strang (02:32):

That’s right. He’ll expel you from being an heir, an intellectual heir.

James Patterson (02:36):

No. No.

Paul Carrese (02:38):

Well, actually, in the spirit of George Washington, I’m a George Washington fan, and I decided about six years into being the Founding Director at SCETL, which really, as Lee would know, you have to be a somewhat strong executive leader to build a department from scratch. And I was tired after six years. I know there were several faculty who were tired of me. I thought I should follow Washington’s example and step down rather than die in office. So now I’m just a professor. I’m just one of the members of the crew. I’m no longer the bigwig director. Lee’s the bigwig director now.

Lee Strang (03:12):

That’s right. That’s right. But you’re like Socrates. You’re giving wisdom.

Paul Carrese (03:19):

Until the hemlock comes.

James Patterson (03:20):

No, I was going to say, just don’t drink anything someone hands to you. For those listening and are not aware of the civics lingo that we’re using, SCETL is how we pronounce the acronym for School of Civic and Economic Thought Leadership at ASU. So we might do this a few times. Hopefully I’ll remember to jump in and explain things. I’m a big fan of the Commentary podcast, and Jonathan Horowitz is always jumping in and explaining things. And I don’t want to do that to you guys, but I might have to. So what is the state of civics education in the United States? And maybe to kind of narrow that, what is the report on the Educating for American Democracy, and maybe what did it find? We’ll start with you, Paul.

Paul Carrese (04:00):

Thank you very much. I would say that the state of civic education in a very serious way, and here I’ll be pointed, not democracy education, not engagement education, not just participation education. The condition of it in K-12 schools and in higher education is better than it was 10 years ago for a range of reasons. You mentioned this national report, Educating for American Democracy that I was invited to be involved with as openly, transparently, the only intellectual academic conservative in a lead author group of seven people. And that’s the credit of Daniel Allen at Harvard, Peter Levine Tufts, Jane Kaminski then at Harvard. James now the president of the Jefferson Foundation at Monticello. They wanted a national consensus report on the state of K-12 civics and history education focused on public schools. So we released that report in 2021. It has gotten some traction. Part of that report was a recommendation that higher education must renew its attention to priority for citizenship education for undergraduate students if there is going to be any hope for renewal and improvement of civic education in K-12 schools, not only because all the teachers have university college degrees, but because the whole culture of any given school is shaped by teachers in chemistry or reading, or whatever the subject is who are graduates of universities and colleges.

(05:35):

And if they never thought of citizenship education, civic education as a priority at the level that English Language Arts is or math is at most universities and colleges, then they’ll just never take seriously something like the civic social studies history teacher in the building. So that report has received some attention in dozens of states. Lee and I are here representing the public university reform movement that did begin at Arizona State University in 2016. There’s an analog effort in elite private universities. Of course, we have to give credit to the James Madison Program and Robby George at Princeton University and the Ashbrook Center at Ashland and some other centers that preceded anything happening in the public university reform over the past 10 years. But there has been a serious effort at Stanford University establishing the Stanford Civics Initiative about five years ago. And there’s now a required course for every Stanford undergraduate called “Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century” taught from a common syllabus.

(06:39):

That development was in parallel to, aware of what was happening in the public university space to establish these new departments, schools, colleges, centers of civic thought and leadership. So I’ll stop here and let Lee pick it up, but in the public university reform space, we can say that there are 12 states and 17 public university campuses that have basically adopted the model started by the state legislature and governor in Arizona, that there will be a new unit. The full size is a college. Three of them are in our colleges in Texas, in Florida, now in North Carolina. Either a college, a department, or a center, and that’s a pretty robust center, for civic thought and leadership under different names. And then in the private university space from Stanford to Johns Hopkins to Yale, maybe at Harvard, some renewed discussion about attention to civic education, citizenship education as a primary role for higher education.

Lee Strang (07:45):

And Joseph, I’ll just add maybe just a couple of comments on Paul’s remarks, which I think are probably representative of Paul’s experience, I’m sure your experience at Tennessee, in thinking about the state of civics education. So young people come to us at age 18 and I’ll just share two anecdotes, one anecdote relating to civic knowledge and one anecdote relating to the virtues which Paul has reflected on very well in his book, his recent book, Teaching America. So on the civic knowledge part, one of the things that is a corollary to what Paul was talking about in many public universities, including many states, has been required civics courses that oftentimes the schools of civic thought are either the leaders or at least one of the mechanisms of providing what used to be relatively common, but has now become rare, access to the common aspects of the American civic tradition.

(08:33):

So Paul, in his prologue or preface, talks about the Declaration of Independence repeatedly. And a lot of our students, they’ve reported to us, they’d never read it before. And that’s not just one document, but entire texts students have rarely read. And then in thinking about terms that Paul also talks about, I think really well, in his book: the virtues that are appropriate to our regime. One of the things that we recently experienced was we had our first study abroad for a cohort of our student society members, and we had a dinner organized in such a way that it was intentionally designed to bring students who have different perspectives together to debate in a civil way. And the students universally reported that was their favorite experience of the entire trip over to the UK. And in particular, what they said was that they had not had a conversation on a controversial issue in a civil way with the person with whom they had disagreed.

(09:22):

Many of them reported that it had never happened before in their lives. So thinking of the virtue of civic friendship and civil dialogue, that the schools of civic thought are able to both give the knowledge and skills that our young people need to be citizens with each other.

James Patterson (09:36):

How did civics education originally decline to the point where we had to engage in this kind of recovery mission? What were some of the policies that we should not repeat that led to this problem?

Paul Carrese (09:50):

One great resource here is crucial to mention because it proves that this is not a narrowly partisan project. You could say as a kind of restoration renewal project, it’s conservative. It is fair to say that at least the public university civic thought and leadership units are intellectually and academically conservative. As he was just recounting, the idea that you would take seriously the Declaration of Independence. And therefore, where did it come from? What are the civilizational sources of it? How could the Second Continental Congress have produced such a document? So you’re talking about a restoration of liberal arts education and American civic education. That’s intellectually and academically conservative. So what’s the need for this? A great resource, to continue my thought, is a totally non-conservative source. President Ronald Daniels of Johns Hopkins University and two co-authors publishing a book now five years ago entitled What Universities Owe Democracy.

(10:56):

And you can notice from the title that featuring the term democracy, not wanting to say “what American universities owe” or “what universities owe to the American Republic.” That would be the more conservative title. What Universities Owe Democracy. So who is Ronald Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins University, the first research university in the United States of America established in 1876, who has the courage as the president now in the twenty-first century to say, you know, research universities, this model is a great thing. But one unintended… he’s very diplomatic, he’s a Canadian, he’s a lawyer, he’s very diplomatic, he’s very nice. So I’ll be brutally frank in a way he wouldn’t be. One, I think, unintended consequence of the research university model was to kill off the liberal arts spirit, to replace it. And what Daniel says more diplomatically is that a consequence of that was to undermine the civics education that had been provided by American colleges and then universities for hundreds of years, starting with Harvard in 1636.

(12:00):

So there’s a nonpartisan, very serious academic resource saying: we have a big problem in that all of the relevant disciplines that might have provided a citizenship civic education have entirely turned away from that role. It’s beneath them. So my PhD discipline, political science, we can name history, philosophy, other social sciences, but humanities disciplines, which would’ve thought in a literature course that they’re educating citizens. And the choice of readings and how you teach a course, it’s all relevant to this larger mission of the college or the university. You’re educating citizens and really, to be honest, citizen civic leaders. All of those disciplines have turned away from the more traditional liberal arts model, and they’ve definitely turned away from any role they have in producing citizens per se or civic leaders per se, except for a few spaces. And those few spaces think in activist terms. They don’t think in liberal arts, Socratic, intellectually diverse terms.

(13:09):

They think in activist terms. So there are obviously some people in political science departments who still care about this, but it’s all democracy education. It’s civic engagement education. And then there are the analogs obviously in the studies, the new studies disciplines. So this is the difficulty that we’re facing in a whole K-16 ecosystem. Why are students showing up at Ohio State University, very selective university where Lee’s teaching, and they’ll honestly say to him, “Wow, it’s fascinating to read the Declaration. I’ve never actually studied it. I’ve never actually read the whole thing at a selective public university.” How is that happening? It’s because of this research university ecosystem, which has totally pervaded obviously K-12 as well as higher education. So this was the brilliance, I think. I have to give credit to the Arizona legislature and governor in 2016 to say, You know what?

(14:04):

It’s really not going to work well if we ask political science and history and economics and relevant disciplines to reform, or if we just impose a new course, something like that. It’s good to impose new graduation requirements, and the Board of Regents has done that in Arizona for all the public universities in Arizona. But the genius to say, what we really need is a new unit, which would hire PhD faculty from the relevant disciplines and beyond the social science and humanities to lease discipline law. But selecting those excellent faculty with their terminal doctoral degrees to contribute to a restoration mission, to reconnect liberal arts education and civic education.

Lee Strang (14:47):

If I may, James, I’ll just comment and highlight one aspect of Paul’s story and agree it’s a complicated story. How did civics end up being something neglected? And highlight one aspect, which is the rise to modern research university. So, lots of reasons why we have research universities, lots of goods come from them. So the medicine, the scientific breakthroughs, the lives that we lead. So this is not to gainsay any of those. But if you think about what was part of the reason for the transition from, let’s say, the medieval conception of the university to the modern research university, one among many causes was that there ceased to be one common set or one body of knowledge or one discipline that provided a coherence, what I call an intellectual architecture for the university. And so since the rise of the modern research university, first of course in Germany, and then later in the US, Johns Hopkins, Harvard University under Charles Eliot, the modern research university has become discipline-centric, which is one of the points that Paul was making, that publicly accessible knowledge is identified by the criteria of the people in particular disciplines.

(15:49):

So what’s biological knowledge? Ask the biologist. What’s legal knowledge? Ask the law professors. And so each discipline is creating, is curating, is conveying information by the standards of that discipline, but there’s no one discipline whose job is the formation of American citizens or formation of citizens because of the disciplinary focus of it. And one concrete example, because one of the things I’m working on is an article to try to detail and lay out this historical narrative that I’m sharing with you was I had a chance to look at the curriculum. I haven’t completed it yet, but look at the curriculum at Ohio State. And up until the late ’60s, early ’70s, what I’ve seen so far, this is tentative, have been kind of smaller and more residual versions of a coherent introduction to the American civic tradition that up until the early 1970s was still there.

(16:35):

I haven’t seen where it ended yet, so that’s not where my research has gone. But even the late 1960s, I was saying to myself, “Hey, I wouldn’t mind my kid having that education that was being presented at that time in addition to being a great engineer or being a great biologist or whatever it might be.” But then sometime between then and today, it has not quite evaporated, but has almost evaporated. And maybe part of our conversation will be about the general ed requirements that have purported to replace these more coherent civics educations that students used to receive.

Paul Carrese (17:04):

It’s a wonderful overview that Lee has given, but just to make it a little more pointed, Lee’s university, as he well knows, has a motto in Latin, which is the commitment to citizenship education by the state of Ohio. That’s why the state would charter, establish, fund, supervise a university. And this is the story in American higher education from 1789, University of North Carolina, when the state legislature establishes that public university. Why would a state do that? Some of us might know of George Washington as president from his first annual address, what we call the State of the Union, to his last, his eighth, calling upon the Congress to establish a national university because we’re a new federal republic and we need to train, educate in the science of government. He’s very committed to the liberal arts idea. It’s not hack, narrow political education. It’s a liberal arts education.

(18:04):

So Washington’s committed to that idea, but in part, he’s aware it’s already happening in the states. Georgia had done it in 1785, North Carolina in 1789, and it goes on this way. So as Lee well knows, Ohio State University has civic education in the motto, and University of Texas at Austin basically has civic education in the motto. So this is how far we have fallen away from the founding mission of public universities, just in 75 years or so, to have this disappear from the curriculum, let alone the founding mission of public schools. The predecessor elements of that in the colonial period and in the early American Republic, but then Horace Mann and the common schools, what we call public schools movement. Why? Why would a state government be taxing everybody and then helping to supervise, organize these schools? Why? Citizenship education. That’s why. And to have that subject fall not just to second, but to third tier status in K-12 public schools, it’s shocking how far we’ve fallen away.

Lee Strang (19:12):

Paul had mentioned what we’ll call the first founding of George Washington and the original Constitution. But Ohio State’s really part of the second founding period. So Ohio State was found in 1870 after the brutal Civil War. There were continuing political divisions of that. There was massive immigration in Ohio and elsewhere. Lots of parts of America, Cincinnati, for example, parts of Ohio. English was not the most common language. You had these new people who had these weird religions from Protestant Christianity. You had people of different ethnicities. And so what binds them together? This goes with Paul’s common school point. So there’s the K-12 version. Let’s create a higher education version. And in fact, this is part of the research I’ve been doing. During the first year of the Board of Trustees of Ohio State’s existence, they debated: What is the mission of Ohio State?

(19:57):

And they ended precisely on the mission they had before them, two different conceptions. A pure research university, which they described as kind of a mechanics with an archaic spelling, or a liberal arts education. And they wanted a both/and. They wanted a research university that generally produced valuable knowledge while simultaneously creating citizens for the state because of the multifarious backgrounds that we had.

James Patterson (20:21):

Yeah, the curriculum changes that you’re describing, Lee, occur at precisely the time we’re beginning to experience a kind of civic unraveling in the 1970s. And what’s replaced a kind of common vision of the country. And then we have the canon wars of the 1990s. Older listeners might remember this when they were getting rid of Western tradition courses. The replacement was ultimately the idea of STEM education where people were going to become trainees. And that’s not really the model that the universities were talking about originally had. And maybe it was done as a way of avoiding some of these controversies. Instead of saying, “We’re going to make you citizens,” when what that is under dispute, we’re going to say, “We’re going to help you make money.”

Paul Carrese (21:10):

Yes. Again, to underline one theme here, this reform movement in higher education is not a narrowly partisan Republican ideological project. So I’ll invoke another non-conservative in a conventional sense, Danielle Allen at Harvard, who’s written eloquently on this point that the shift since the 1950s, late 1950s, really Sputnik, 1957. The shift in the federal view of its role to support K-12 public schools and higher education. And then the shift within universities and in K-12 to think, oh, a clear priority is STEM education because that advances economic development and technological development for national security purposes. Oh, and it doesn’t have any of those political, cultural, civilizational baggage and conflict that some of these liberal arts turn modern research disciplines have. And the same story in K-12 schools. So I know from personal history, my father was, this is the 1950s, so the term used was a history teacher in the junior high schools, now called middle schools.

(22:24):

He was a history teacher. It later was called a social studies teacher. And he would tell me the story after Sputnik, the 1958 National Defense Education Act. Yes, it had money that the federal government was giving to universities and to K-12 public schools in what we call STEM, science, technology, mathematics, et cetera. But it also had some money for national security-related language study and cultural history study and geography and things like that. Eventually that all faded away and then the money was just STEM. And so that has been the pattern in the federal government. And it just replicated through reasons we’ve just discussed in the intellectual academic culture that was acceptable in a way in the university space and in the K-12 schools. So Danielle Allen, to bring her back into it, she has argued that that was a certain kind of social contract that the universities and colleges made with the federal government in particular, and that K-12 made with the federal government.

(23:25):

This is what we’ll do. We’ll educate for STEM and we’ll educate for employment and these other serious (national security was serious during Cold War!) things, but not anything liberal arts and citizenship related. And that social contract has run its course and we need a new social contract. Partly one dimension of this is that higher education marched farther and farther and farther to the left in these humanities and social sciences fields. So Danielle’s argument is we need a re-centering and a balance in those fields. But one way to show that is to show we are interested again in citizenship education in a more balanced, broad way. Education for all American citizens of all political viewpoints, not just for a left-leaning and more activist viewpoint. That would be the new social contract. And that would deserve support again from a broad American public and even from the federal government and the state governments.

(24:28):

But it’s a prominent center left academic voice saying: that path may have had good reasons at its origin, but after 75 years of it, we need to go on a different path. Higher education needs to go on a different path, and America needs to go on a different path, a different new social contract.

Lee Strang (24:47):

One point that I would add to Paul’s comments, which I think in some ways is unremarkable, and it follows on what James had said, which is that in the 1950s and even up into the 1960s, you had a significant cultural consensus on lots of points. And so in that context, one might imagine that one could afford to focus less on citizenship education because that’s well in hand, and things like Sputnik, the Cold War, and the space race are the priorities. And so it could be deprioritized over time. It’s not to say that there aren’t other causes or other bases. I’m sure there are many of them, but today’s context is not that, as Paul was saying in his introductory remarks, which is this is a time of deep polarization, a time of deep lack of knowledge about the things that we Americans hold in common.

(25:30):

And so following Danielle Allen’s new social compact, this is a new way in which, and Ron Daniel’s argument as well, a new way in which higher education can be partners with the political communities that they themselves are a part of.

James Patterson (25:42):

Beck in April, Elizabeth Corey defended the effort to reach consensus on campus over civics education, and this earned the consternation of Christopher Rufo. And among the things he said is that the conservative movement has been ineffective for decades and DEI took over and crushed the university. And while I disagree with him, I think what he’s getting at is a pretty well-earned skepticism from a lot of people on the right of universities just as an institution entirely. That they have a kind of ideological bias, that there’s no collaboration or consensus achievable with partners on campus outside of the right. I don’t think that’s true. You guys probably don’t either. So maybe explain to someone like Rufo or people who are really sympathetic to the criticism he leveled, what it is that we’re doing and how it often is so constructive and works out well for students.

Lee Strang (26:41):

Yeah, I think that’s a great question. And I actually enjoyed the conversation that you had with Elizabeth and that all the follow-up conversation’s been going on as well. And it wouldn’t be surprising just the fact that Paul and I are in higher education, that’s part of a reform effort of higher education to think that we see some porosity of the existing structures and think they’re flexible in some ways. And I’ll just share my view, which is actually just my view of human beings, which is that human beings come in all different shapes and sizes. And that in my experience, when we present the mission of the Chase Center, which I lead the School of Civic Thought here at Ohio State, is that I’ve never had anybody, at least publicly, say that they disagree with the mission of citizenship education. Where people come apart is skepticism, and Paul has alluded to some of the bases of the skepticism that even though the mission sounds good in its implementation, it would in fact be deeply big-P or deep big-R partisan.

(27:35):

And so what we’ve tried to do in a genuine way, I’m sure with some mistakes along the way, has been to try and faithfully met the mission in which people of all different backgrounds in the United States would see as faithful to the civic tradition. Not to mean that they might do it differently here or there. And then I would say internally in the university, some folks I think we’re just never going to persuade, but I think there’s a large number of people who are open to persuasion, especially as they become more cognizant of some of the criticisms that Paul and I have identified regarding the posture of Ohioans, of Americans regarding higher education. I’ll just give one anecdote that captures it. We’ve had a number of speakers. Danielle Allen came out and it was actually after Dr. Allen had given her remarks, which was on her Atlantic piece about the new social compact that we had a faculty member come up and the faculty member said something to the effect of, “When you guys started, I was pretty skeptical. I’ve been coming to a number of your events.” And she said after the Danielle Allen event that “you persuaded me that this is a valuable enterprise that Ohio State needs.” And now that’s one anecdote that I think captures what I see as the kind of large middle of people inside my colleagues in Ohio State who are open to persuasion if by their lights we’re able to implement the mission in a faith way.

(28:46):

Again, maybe not the exact way that they might do it, but in a way that they recognize is responding to the challenges that Paul and I are identifying.

Paul Carrese (28:53):

In response to Rufo’s concern or criticism, I’ll invoke what is now a conservative virtue: prudence or practical wisdom. American higher education is a big space. There are many different kinds of institutions and many different campuses. And so it makes perfect sense that more than one approach might work. Partly I’m showing my Montesquieu influence. There are different climates and customs and historical realities, and there isn’t one universal blueprint in the sky that’s going to be perfect to achieve justice. So practical wisdom has to be brought in here. This can work in different ways on different campuses. And I think Lee is right that those of us who are in and believe in the role for one of these approaches to have separate units at the college size, at the department size, at the center size or scale, but in a robust way as a center, we should try to be Socratic with our colleagues and persuade our colleagues and say, “This is a serious academic mission which needs to be restored.”

(30:00):

It’s liberal arts learning on a crucial subject. Obviously, I think in private universities as well, but undeniably in public universities, this has to be restored. And we’ll try to persuade you that we’re good faith, serious academics, academic professionals. We’re not partisan actors, but we will also be firm in arguing that there ought to be some self-reflection on the part of on a given campus, the department of political science, the department of history, the department of philosophy, and the list goes on. So I’ll just give one example. At Ohio State University, sorry, at Arizona State University, when I was recruited in 2016, there’s huge criticism coming from political science, philosophy, history related departments. I asked the dean who had just hired me, “Could I do some immersion sessions with these departments and just say, I’m not going to give a presentation.

(30:59):

I’m just going to answer questions that you have and show basically I’m a totally boring academic just like you. I have a PhD and promoted to full professor at the academy. I’m not some political agent.” He says, “Great idea. Let’s go to my tenure home.” His tenure home was political science. So the very first question that comes is, and I’d read it in the press and I’d heard it before, “There’s no need for these new civic though leadership units, this one here, because we already do this.” And the dean, again, this was his tenure home, political science. He said, “Paul, I’ll let you answer, but could I please just take that briefly?” He looked him in the eye and said, “You know we used to do this. What happened when Bob retired and Sally retired? What did we do with those lines?” And these were lines in political philosophy, in American politics, but political though and constitutional though.

(31:51):

What happened when these people retired? He looked them right in the eye and said, “We gave those lines away to other subfields.” And of course the temperature in the room went down about 30 degrees. We need to be firm in saying, “Really? There’s no need to have a separate unit on a given campus? Fine. On a given campus, it could be a center that’s going to collaborate and try and generate, be a catalyst for reform. Fine. But on some campuses, there might need to be a separate department, a separate college, because the legacy departments have gone just so far away from this. I mean, there are departments of history that no longer have faculty teaching the two semester sequence in American history that was standard when all of us were undergraduates: American history from the beginning to the Civil War, second semester, American history from the Civil War to present. Because that would be to give too much attention to America as a theme.

(32:48):

Instead, you have to teach American race, America and gender, America and civil rights, America and labor, something like that. So not to mention other subfields that history is doing away with, military history, diplomatic history, et cetera. And there are analogs in political science, and we can go down the list of other departments. So it’s this balance that we have to strike between being Socratic, persuasive, compromising, try to be collaborative. But on the other hand, to be somewhat firm, to say we are not doing our educational duty. This is not a healthy academic climate if we can’t have space on campus for these areas of teaching and research and inquiry. And we, for public reasons as well, need to restore space on campus for these activities.

Lee Strang (33:35):

Sorry, James, I just highlight and affirm one aspect of what Paul was saying, which is not going in with naivete. Paul has been an academic for a number of years. I was a 20-year academic before I took on this leadership role. I know what higher ed is like. I know its high points, its genuine virtues. I know some of the challenges it faces. And so many of the institutions that have been created, modeling off of Paul and SCETL back in 2016, have had structural provisions that do what I characterize as a both/and posture. Both engagement, both wanting to be a genuine and robust part of the university, and also having the capacity if, and hopefully never is necessary, but also having the capacity to be able to protect that unit’s mission because of the structural mechanisms of that particular unit, including in particular hiring and curriculum.

(34:23):

And one of the things that has struck me just from having been a leader now for three years has been the variety of experiences of different schools of civic thought in their respective universities. Some have been just wonderful and mutually enriching and beneficial. Some have been pretty bad and very challenging. And so having the structural protections with the realistic eye towards human nature in general, and then the particular areas of American higher education now allows one to engage as robustly as one can from a position of also having the independence be able to maintain the mission of citizenship education.

James Patterson (34:59):

Yeah. I find that so many people are unaware of how universities operate internally, that they try to read a kind of ideological shortcut into understanding what we’re doing. So it makes sense to me that there would be a kind of extension of existing polarization into what we’re doing. So you get on the one hand a lot of gloom and doom coverage from more left-wing outfits about the creation of these programs and then skepticism on the right about the effectiveness or the collusion of so-called right-wing professors with the university. But really, when I was thinking about this when Paul was talking, it’s just a lot of committee meetings. It’s not that intense. And when you were talking about surrendering tenure lines, for those who aren’t academics at home, this just means that professors that once taught the civics education, they retired, and then they gave those jobs to someone whose version of teaching civics education is importing equations from R and then using them to develop an R squared for an independent variable. Which is perfectly fine as a discipline, but not civic education.

Paul Carrese (36:12):

So just to follow this thread on whether any of this activity in the public university space or even the efforts at Stanford, Hopkins, elsewhere, we’re just spinning our wheels or to a different metaphor, we’re duped into thinking we’re really doing something effective. We’re sort of just token efforts. Again, 12 states, 17 public university campuses with three of them as colleges, civic thought leadership. And the University of Florida, the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education has just launched a PhD degree. They’ve just admitted their first class of about a dozen PhD candidates to study in two different tracks. One track is intellectual history, great works, intellectual history. The other is war strategy and statecraft. I think I’m getting that title correct. So that’s a big move. This could be recognized now as a field of civic thought and leadership that has PhD discipline departments offering a PhD degree.

(37:24):

I know other civic thought leadership units have discussed, made initial steps and plans to have a PhD degree. So we could be at the beginning edge now of what occurred in the past 50 years with this new interdisciplinary field called Science, Technology and Society.

James Patterson (37:41):

Oh yeah.

Paul Carrese (37:43):

A group of faculty in different disciplines from the engineers and the natural scientists themselves to sociology, political science, philosophy, other fields saying there’s a reality that’s worth studying. There’s also a reality that’s very troubling. The power of science and technology, its effects and consequences on politics and society, and no one’s really studying it. The engineers are doing it, but they are not liberal arts people or even social science and humanities people. So this is a field now, science, technology and society, STS, with its own PhD degrees in several major universities around the country, with its own journals. It’s not a huge field, but it’s recognized as a field meeting an important academic need to study reality and have space to discuss and debate and focus on that and an important political need. So I think that’s where civic thought and leadership is at the beginning. And that’s a real effect on higher education and on civic life.

Lee Strang (38:52):

If it’s all right, I’ll just add one kind of concrete aspect. So in Ohio, we have five schools of civic thought and we’re in, depending on which one, our second or third year. And really next academic year will be the year in all five of these schools will be operating in a more robust academic mode. And we just were collecting some of the data. And compared to two years ago, there’ll be approximately 40 faculty have been brought into Ohio from all over the country and all over the world. We’ll have majors, minors in civics or other versions of civic though. We anticipate collectively teaching somewhere between three and five thousand students this next year. So it’s broad, thousands of students across the state, the intellectual enhancement of the university cultures. The students will be deeply engaged through their majors. And then lastly, the university conversation.

(39:41):

So each of the different schools of civic thought has enhanced their university’s conversations and the topics presented. Bringing Danielle Allen, even though broadly there’s debates about higher education, there had not been any debates within our university about the future of higher education, or at least no public debates about it. And we contributed to the conversation because of that. So that’s one concrete in one state with just five institutions have been able to really move the needle significantly for students, faculty, and the state.

James Patterson (40:09):

I mean, here at Tennessee, at the IAC, I think we’re going into our fourth year. We’ve already developed the major and the classes are full. And we’re having to hire. It’s just like at Florida and UNC, we have to hire in order to just offer the courses that we need. And a funny thing about this kind of education, at one point I had a student in a class, and he was distracted on his computer, which he shouldn’t even have had out. And so I sort of called him out on it, and he said, “I’m sorry, I’m following the state legislature to see if they approved a landfill in my county.” And I’m like, “This is it, man. This kid is civically educated. He cares about his county landfill.” Well, it wouldn’t be the year 2026 if I didn’t ask you a final question about artificial intelligence.

(41:08):

The University of Chicago just announced a deal with Anthropic to incorporate AI while it’s also announced a kind of de-emphasis on its liberal arts education. How much do civic educators need to adapt to a world where maybe universities are actually doubling down on a kind of STEM approach as well as the way that AI seems to impact the traditional ways that we used to assess our students such as through paper writing and the like?

Lee Strang (41:38):

Yeah, I’m happy to let Paul talk about some of the internal ways. One of the ways we’ve been thinking about it, James, and it definitely is important and something that we need to address, and I think we do have a special value add. So the value that we see ourselves as bringing to our university community is: How will artificial intelligence affect the civitas, the ability of American citizens to live well together, to bear the responsibility of self-government? And we have a multidisciplinary academic community. And so a person in literature, we have a class on, it’s not the title, but a class on dystopias, a part of which are future dystopias where scientific computer intelligence is pervasive. Part of it will be in our political theory-oriented courses. So how do people live well together in those contexts? Part of it will be, we’re working on forming teachers for schools.

(42:27):

And so what are the ways in which humans learn well? And then how might they be distorted or enhanced potentially by things like artificial intelligence? And so we’re working, and this goes back to one of the points that we were talking about earlier, on finding scholars who have the facility, and the interest of course, but the facility in being able to address this new concern from the perspective of: How will it impact people out in the civic life? And Paul can comment on the internal things that James was talking about. I have some things to say as well on that.

Paul Carrese (42:56):

Yeah, great question. I think it would be wise for all of the remaining liberal arts-oriented faculty in universities and as many allies as you could find in the humanities and social sciences, obviously in other STEM fields and business, et cetera, to use the, I’ll be honest, the threat of AI to rally and focus attention on precisely what AI can never do, and never be, which is human judgment. And educating for human judgment, and educating for, in this case, civic judgment, and the blend of civic knowledge and civic virtues, reflective patriotism, civil disagreement, civic friendship, the character leadership, statesmanship development. AI can never do that unless we’re going to entirely surrender our humanity. So it may be a focus moment. I will say I did try from 2016 onward to, as we were talking about earlier, try to say to colleagues in humanities and social science disciplines who were so skeptical about a new civic thought leadership department, and say, “Don’t look at me as your enemy.

(44:17):

We should be collaborating.” And I would tell this story I remember learning at the Air Force Academy. An Air Force General during the Cold War is talking with a younger officer and the younger officer refers to the Soviet Union as the enemy. And the old Air Force General says, “Young man, Soviets are our adversary. The Navy is our enemy.” So to get the remaining liberal arts faculty to say, “Hey, wait a minute. The engineering school is our enemy, and the business school is our enemy. And the more utilitarian ways of study, we should be collaborating over here.” So I put forward, for example, a PPE degree, philosophy, politics, economics. Our civic thought leadership unit was leading it, but three other departments, philosophy, politics and economics, their courses are listed in it. We’re collaborating on it. So four departments that we’re pulling together and trying to use the sexiness of the title and the idea that, oh, this is kind of a leadership honors degree to get some of the business school students to say, oh, I’ll take a minor in that or maybe I’ll do a double major, do a second major in that.

(45:19):

I think we should use AI in this way as well and be brutally honest about it.

(45:26):

I think this is a neutron bomb going off in higher education. Buildings will be standing, faculty will still be there, and there’s destruction. So we ought to use this to rally and try to find allies, and we are perfectly placed to do this. This is precisely the kind of learning and educational development and research that AI can never do, and it’s indispensable, including the study of it. I’m not saying we should ignore it. We’ve got to know about it and the reality of it, but in a highly skeptical way, and rally the liberal arts capacities.

James Patterson (46:04):

Lee, you said you had more about the internal.

Lee Strang (46:06):

Oh, yeah. It’s one of the things that we’re trying to work through is how do we accurately assess students? How do we accurately encourage them to develop the faculties that Paul talked about that can’t be done by artificial intelligence? And it’s been a learning process. It’s actually one of the things that’s brought the academic community together because together we’re facing these challenges. And I would say our faculty have the same goals on this point, which is that all of us want students to have an education that stretches the individuals, that helps them have the opportunities to hone their intellect and their skills. And then how do we test that? How do we achieve that? So one of the things that’s been, I think, healthy has been, we do a lot of in-class writing again. We have a lot of in-class discussion. So it’s actually given us additional reasons to move towards a more Socratic style of education.

(46:59):

I would say one challenge has been, not all of our colleagues have moved in that direction. And so there are some very large online asynchronous sections that get a lot of students, and therefore, given the budget model that we have, have large amounts of revenue. And so there are structural challenges that that presents. And we don’t have an answer to that yet. We’re working on that.

James Patterson (47:20):

No. I think neutron bomb is right. Even though some people might hear that they might think surely not. But no, it’s pretty crazy how much this has changed in the course of just two years, how I teach. And I think Lee’s description of reforms made reflect my own in terms of in-class writing and discussion. There’s more to develop in that direction that might even be more civically minded. I was thinking about running one of my classes more like a Congress with points of order and stuff like that. Students try to pass legislation and so they can experience that way of life that used to be so common in America and now is fading, at least for now, until we have our way.

Paul Carrese (48:05):

Yeah, obviously there have been for a long time efforts to bring experiential learning into political science courses or history courses, reenactment exercise courses or mock trials or mock cabinet debates, debating the Emancipation Proclamation, et cetera. But just to reinforce the larger theme here, and James, you’ve got a topic for an entire other podcast episode here, related to the civic thought renewal in higher education and also this AI challenge. Both Yale University and Harvard University have released reports or white papers in the past couple of months in spring 2026 that directly addressed the topic of our conversation this hour, but also the resource that a renewed civic education focus can have for reminding these elite universities of what their core mission is and for revivifying or rehabilitating a decayed, deteriorating intellectual academic culture on campus. So the Yale study is the president’s handpicked committee of 10 faculty to write a study about the loss of public trust in higher education.

(49:20):

So that report came out. And the one specific academic topic that they mentioned for further studying reform is perhaps to restore some kind of common intellectual experience for the first year students at Yale. There should be co-curricular learning experiences about citizenship education and civic education. And it’s pretty obvious from the footnotes and the resources report that a player there on that topic was Bryan Garsten, the founding director of the new Yale Center for Civic Thought, helping to host some lectures and have conversations publicly and behind the scenes with the committee members. So they didn’t go all the way that any of the three of us might’ve liked to say: Maybe we should have a required curriculum in civic education as Yale had at one time. But at least the one topic they could pick out, what topic might bring a common intellectual experience to all Yale College first-year students that were all citizens or aspiring citizens, or even the international students are interested in being in America and understanding American politics and American self-government.

(50:24):

That’s the one topic that they picked. Then the Harvard Radcliffe Institute went a step further. This was not a full university report to the president, but it was a Harvard Radcliffe Institute white paper on intellectual diversity and really on the health of the intellectual academic climate of Harvard and other elite universities and more broadly in higher education. They went further and specified this reform of establishing new centers for civic thought and leadership as something that should be seriously studied. It was positive and it was a unanimous recommendation from a white paper committee that had clearly had center left people in there and they were willing to say, “This has proven itself in 10 years.” And it was both for the particular topic, civic education, but also for the kind of renewal of Socratic, they didn’t put it quite this way, but the renewal of Socratic learning and debate.

(51:22):

This is a common topic, being a free person, a citizen and self-government, even if you’re an international student or you’re not fully a citizen yet. It’s a common topic and it’s intellectually rich and it’s Socratic and so full of lively debate discussion, and you have to therefore build the intellectual and civic virtues related to it. So I think it’s quite striking. And again, to make the point that what we’re doing is not a narrowly partisan ideological project. If both a Yale committee and more emphatically, a Harvard Radcliffe white paper can be identifying what we’re doing and talking about as an important reform for all of higher education, then I think we’re at the beginning of bigger and better things.

James Patterson (52:08):

Paul Carrese, the book is Teaching America: Reflective Patriotism in Schools, College, and Culture. And if you liked what he just said there at the end, he really goes into great detail about these and other studies that have really been pushing for the civic education we’ve described. And of course also Professor Lee Strang, thank you to both of you for coming on the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Lee Strang (52:31):

Thanks, James. All great to be with you.

Paul Carrese (52:32):

Thank you, James. Thank you, Lee. Terrific conversation.

James Patterson (52:35):

Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.