CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – As the autumn sun warms the historic campus outside, a professor specializing in ancient and modern political philosophy guides undergraduate students through the seemingly ruthless nuances of Machiavelli’s 16th-century philosophy of morals.
In another class, a professor specializing in political theory offers students a guided tour of the early American republic, as seen through the enlightened eyes of French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville.
And a professor of rhetoric, who moonlights as a conservative political consultant in national races, diagrams the components of a bulletproof argument on a blackboard as he preps students for an upcoming class debate on the pros and cons of universal basic income.
These vignettes may seem unexceptional, but they are at the center of an ambitious movement to reform what many see as the left-wing capture of America’s leading universities. The classes taught this fall in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s newly launched academic experiment, the School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL), revive approaches and values that were once accepted as essential to shaping informed and virtuous citizens in a liberal democracy, but are now regarded with deep suspicion by many academics: the classical liberal arts, the great books, Western Civilization, Socratic dialogue, civil discourse.
More than 100 civics programs have arisen in the past quarter-century in academia – emphasizing everything from the Great Books and the Western canon to free markets and entrepreneurship. But UNC’s program is part of a new wave that’s on a wholly different scale in scholarly ambition and political heft. In less than a decade, conservative reformers have created 13 relatively large civics centers at eight public universities – including five in Ohio alone – designed to operate autonomously, similar to law schools or business schools, with their own deans, their own majors, sometimes their own Ph.D. programs, and in a few cases, their own designated buildings.
Much of the mainstream media coverage of this movement has focused on criticism from the educational establishment – which commonly derides them as “freedom schools” and conservative “safe spaces” – because of the circumstances of their creation. Most have been launched by Republican legislatures, fast-tracked by conservative regents, and bankrolled by conservative donors. The civic schools often enjoy a great degree of independence as they are typically granted full control over faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure.
The education establishment, accustomed to having sole control over academic programming, casts these developments as a threat to academic freedom. Civics advocates say they must bypass the conventional procedural protocols because the left’s ideological capture of most campuses would make it difficult, if not impossible, to approve these programs.
The classical learning and civics revival has long been associated with Christian private schools at the K-12 level and independent colleges like Hillsdale College, the Michigan private institution that staunchly refuses any federal funding, and the recently launched University of Austin. But the new wave of civics centers, while enthusiastically backed by conservatives, is rejecting the appeal of a cloistered virtue, and instead adapting traditional educational philosophies to operate within existing university cultures.
After a series of faltering attempts to establish a viable liberal arts tradition over a century, the new civics centers are being built with longevity in mind. In some sense, they are the intellectual mirror of the successful effort by leftwing scholars and activists that began in the 1960s to seed departments – in African-American studies, ethnic studies, and women’s studies – that would exert a powerful influence on America’s universities and the broader culture. The 13 civics centers, which are expected to employ several hundred scholars, have been designed to supply the infrastructure – including financial support, academic posts, and professional conferences – to foster the next generation of civics intellectuals and further expand the movement.
Civics pioneer Paul Carrese, founding director of the civics department at Arizona State University who also served as a consultant for UNC’s civics initiative, said he’s in “serious discussions” with faculty and administrators about creating civics centers at public institutions in four more states. Carrese also said there has been renewed interest in civics at elite private universities ever since Stanford University three years ago restored its common core, called Civic, Liberal, and Global Education, including a course in which students read and discuss a mix of canonical texts and contemporary scholars.
Donald Trump’s election could aid the movement, as the president-elect and his supporters are vowing to reclaim universities from “Marxist maniacs,” in part by withholding accreditation, freezing federal funding, and taxing endowments, or by mothballing the U.S. Department of Education.
As an intellectual movement, civics represents more than a surgical strike against the dominant progressive mindset and hyper-partisanship that define elite campuses. The professors and leaders involved describe civics as nonpartisan, apolitical, and pluralist. They see themselves as leading a revival of the classical liberal tradition that not only rejects social justice advocacy as a university’s prime directive but also challenges academia’s hyper-focus on careerism and vocationalism and pushes back against the academic fetish for arcane sub-specialization within some disciplines.
“It is based on an ancient and powerful set of ideas,” said SCiLL dean Jed Atkins, a classics scholar in Greek and Roman political thought and moral philosophy. “I’m not making any of this up whole cloth. This comes from an established tradition.” Among the movement’s immediate challenges: attracting undergraduates to sign up for civics courses and to major in the discipline. In addition to stock courses on federalism, diplomacy, military history, constitutional rights, and the like, civics schools offer classes that are hip, cool, fun, and philosophical at the same time: explorations of happiness, friendship, immortality, faith, war, espionage, and other perennial themes that could easily be the subject of a Ted Talk.
Some civics professors wade into present-day moral minefields where tenured faculty fear to tread, exposing students to readings and discussions of the most sensitive subjects, like reparations, misgendering, trans athletes, abortion, and polyamory.
Carrese said civics education is maligned as affirmative action for conservatives but should be understood as the restoration of the original charter of the public and private university: to prepare educated, responsible, engaged citizens.
“Part of the challenge for this movement going forward is to show that although in every single case these programs have been initiated by Red States, they’re not ipso facto a Republican partisan ideological enterprise,” said Carrese, who now consults on strategy for the Jack Miller Center, a suburban Philadelphia nonprofit that provides training and support for civics professors and K-12 teachers.
The Jack Miller Center has provided workshops and programs for more than 1,200 professors, including Carrese and most of the leadership cadre of the 13 civic centers, serving as a kind of networking hub for the movement.
“You can look at who’s been hired, what the courses are, what the enrollment is, what the public speakers programs are,” said Carrese, who is also a professor of moral and political thought in the Arizona civics program.
For Nadège Sirot, a first-year UNC student who plans to major in classics and minor in civics, SCiLL has been a revelation. Her high school experience was marked by “tons of trigger warnings,” the occasional land acknowledgment, and open invitations for students to walk out of class if they felt uncomfortable or offended by the subject.
In civics, core knowledge, as understood in the American context, is not presented as just another perspective in a subjective buffet of equally valid options but as the intellectual foundation for all other learning. In the Carolina civics course, Sirot said, the approach is not “Do you agree with Machiavelli?” but rather, “Do you understand what Machiavelli is trying to say? What can this thinker teach us today?”
“It’s a teaching method that has worked for centuries,” Sirot said. “And SCiLL is now trying to return to it.”
The new civics centers are generously funded, unmistakably ambitious, and already reshaping campus culture. The University of Florida’s Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education, which aims to build the nation’s top program in the study of Western Civilization, has 35 tenured faculty, runs about two dozen classes a semester with more than 500 students, and is slated to expand to 60 full-time professors.
The Hamilton Center has recruited professors with pedigrees from the Ivy League, Oxford University, and other marquee institutions to teach such courses as “The Crisis of Liberalism,” “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” “God and Science,” “Utopias and Dystopias,” “Political Violence and Power,” and “Why Spy?”
UNC’s SCiLL department is set to expand from three courses this semester to 14 courses next year. Planned offerings include “The Politics of the Bible,” “Science and Society,” and “Lab Coats and Legislatures: Science and Policy.” The school is in the process of developing a residential program on the Chapel Hill campus, modeled on the civil discourse dorm offered at nearby Duke University. In the long term, SCiLL leaders hope to create a semester study program in Washington, D.C.
Notably, the UNC school has already been green-lighted to lead a mandatory free speech session during orientation week next fall for all 4,700 first-year undergraduates – a requirement noteworthy for a university that has recently disbanded diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
Sirot’s professor, Dustin Sebell, whose Foundations of Civic Life course covers modern political thinkers and moral philosophers – including Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, and Nietzsche – said that recognizing the immense contributions of the great thinkers stands in stark contrast to the prevailing trend in academe, where it’s often assumed that classic books and ideas are past their expiration date.
“The presumption is that the present is the peak – we can look down on the past with contempt and pity,” Sebell said. “It’s a kind of chauvinism, almost a kind of xenophobia.”
Civics advocates have hashed out a variety of strategic approaches in a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal, Law & Liberty, and other publications.
Some warn against the natural temptation to hire faculty based on political beliefs and wage warfare against the woke machine, and thereby risk becoming rightwing echo chambers and alienating professors and students. “The solution to politicization from the left is not politicization from the right,” wrote Harvard historian James Hankins last year.
Others say that to disrupt the status quo, civics should borrow from the playbook of politicized programs like women’s studies, ethnic studies, African-American studies, and gender studies. These sectarian, advocacy-oriented departments were once upstarts that muscled their way onto campus with boycotts, protests, and sit-ins, and were often treated with indifference or scorn by the Greatest Generation professoriate, but over time, the activist-scholars ended up producing a critical mass of scholarship – on implicit bias, microaggressions, systemic racism, structural oppression, power and privilege – that has proven highly influential in law, medicine, education, government, and corporate management.
“This is a legitimate tactic. It’s how universities work,” wrote two American Enterprise Institute scholars in the WSJ this year in a piece titled “Follow the Left’s Example to Reform Higher Ed.” “They develop ways of thinking that cohere as a discipline, in which students can be trained. They create associations; journals spring up; grants get funded; students get degrees. One generation of faculty acts as mentors to the next.”
The objections to civics range from rightwing political meddling to duplication of subjects already taught. Some skeptics go further and say that civics is a nostalgic throwback to a triumphalist, Cold War era scholarship limited by Eurocentrism and cultural myopia that now seem quaint and misguided.
UNC historian Jay Smith, who is president of the North Carolina conference of the American Association of University Professors, said SCiLL is an “invasion” and an “intrusion” on the campus. He acknowledged that the professor bios and course descriptions look solid – in fact, some SCiLL faculty are full-time professors in other UNC departments – but he said he would advise students to pass over SCiLL and instead take a class in the history department or political science department, where they can be sure the curriculum was not created under political pressure.
“To me civics is a code word the Right uses,” Smith said. “This is all intended to get students to get focused more on American greatness. Everything that’s special about America. And capitalism, too, in its way. They don’t have ‘capitalism studies’ in their title … but making the world safe for the capitalists is one of the unspoken objectives.”
The critics typically downplay or deny the amply documented grievance that a progressive overrepresentation on campus is stifling viewpoint diversity on campus and creating a climate of censorship and conformity.
Danaya Wright, a law professor at the University of Florida, is deeply suspicious of the legislature dictating a civics program by “a top-down, heavy-handed approach” but acknowledged that the Hamilton Center has hired “outstanding scholars” and is offering legitimate courses in a subject that is worth studying. Her concern is that the civics posture of intellectual humility toward the Western tradition betrays a tendency for sanitizing and mythologizing the past.
She said there are compelling reasons for exposing the moral blindness of the past from the contemporary perspective of social justice advocacy, and even acknowledging today’s perspective as morally superior.
“Don’t we think that people who are woke are actually more evolved?” she posed. “If there is a one-way direction of knowledge in engineering, isn’t becoming more moral and more empathetic – and more aware of the world around you – isn’t that a one-way ratchet, too ?”
And one other sore point bears mentioning.
“There’s a little bit of bad feeling because they’re getting a lot of funding,” Wright said, “and these other colleges and departments are not – they’re being starved.”
However, some civics courses do expose students to contemporary critiques of the West and of the American project – specifically, theories of power, privilege, and oppression as applied to intersectional identities of race, sex, and gender.
The Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville is teaching eight sections of classes this semester, with about 200 students enrolled, said Josh Dunn, the executive director. Dunn said that two of the courses include readings from The New York Times’ 1619 Project, a book-length collection of revisionist essays that characterize the United States as a “slavocracy” and center racism and discrimination as the nation’s core values. The 1619 Project is always paired with readings from critics who assess the project’s omissions and misrepresentations.
“To give a true version of American history, you have to expose students to these different perspectives of the debate over these conflicts and over our purpose as a nation,” Dunn said. “You’re doing a disservice to students if you don’t expose them to all these different sides.”
Civics also exposes students to both sides of current, ongoing controversies, a perspective students say they don’t get today. The topics are so radioactive that many professors won’t touch them for fear of offending students or administrators. The issues covered are the alpha-omega of contemporary tripwires and taboos: nonbinary pronouns and misgendering; transgenderism and female athletics; puberty blockers and teenage transitions; biological sex as a social construct; legalizing polyamory; white privilege, reparations, abortion, Israel/Palestine, among others.
These controversies are currently taught in Duke University’s civil discourse program by John Rose, a specialist in Christian ethics who has joined SCiLL and will be teaching the same subjects at UNC this spring. At Duke, Rose’s classes have included visits from prominent scholars directly involved in the controversies – including Harvard economist Roland Fryer (whose research shows that police don’t disproportionately kill black people), Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono (the expert witness for Asian plaintiffs opposing affirmative action in the recent Supreme Court case involving Harvard and UNC), and detransitioner Chloe Cole (who opposes medicalized “gender-affirming care” for minors).
SCiLL’s planned class on Israel and Palestine will take students on a university-funded trip over spring break to visit Israel and the Palestinian territories.
That approach is catching on. In May and June, Rose led seminars for university faculty on teaching these polarizing topics in college. To date, 84 professors from 70 colleges have attended these workshops, and some are teaching a version of this class, Rose said.
Addie Geitner, a Duke senior double majoring in economics and public policy, took Rose’s polarization class last spring. She described the class as “a total overhaul of what I was used to – there’s a 50-50 balance of perspectives.”
She said a typical policy class is very one-sided, exposing students to a narrow range of perspectives one might experience listening to NPR: “We focus on issues generally related to equity, and how it’s achieved. And we almost solely focus on what the federal government needs to provide to address those problems, as opposed to exploring any other route.”
Civics is only one example of recent efforts to course-correct academia.
Around the country, faculty have formed faculty free speech alliances, led by the example of Harvard’s Council on Academic Freedom, which opposes enforcing ideological compliance through mandatory “diversity statements” in faculty hiring, counsels faculty on free speech threats, and sponsors public events. The Harvard organization was launched in 2023 by Flynn Cratty, a historian who served as the Council’s founding executive director and has been described by The New York Times as a “prominent Harvard academic”; Cratty has since joined UNC’s School of Civil Life and Leadership.
A chief rationale for civics is the ideological monoculture on U.S. campuses. The conservative National Association of Scholars said in a 2017 report that civics has been replaced by the progressive ideal that “a good citizen is a radical activist.”
That claim may be hyperbolic, but studies consistently find that faculty political affiliations skew leftward, usually leaning liberal or leftist 10 to 1, and in some colleges leaning left more than 100 to 1. In a climate of cancel culture, shutdowns, and callouts, the majority of students are hesitant to discuss or ask questions about controversial subjects.
Dunn, who directs Tennessee’s civics initiative, is co-author of “Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University” (2016), a well-received book that describes conservative professors as a “stigmatized minority” on campus who sometimes resort to the coping strategies used by LGBTQ people. According to the Atlantic magazine review: “Many conservative professors are – as they put it – closeted. Some of the people they interviewed explicitly said they identify with the experience of gays and lesbians in having to hide who they are. One tenure-track sociology professor even asked to meet Shields and Dunn in a park a mile away from his university.”
Murmurs about civics deficiencies in education aren’t new, as universities continually face pressures to produce marketable graduates, publish cutting-edge research, and compete for federal research funding. According to a recent study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, 100% of the top colleges allow students to graduate without taking a single course in American history, and three-fourths of the colleges don’t require students to take any history course at all.
The School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas in Austin is led by Justin Dyer, who once described himself as “a conservative, straight out of central casting, a pro-life evangelical who is an unapologetic admirer of the American Founding Fathers and the U.S. Constitution.”
Dyer said the center is nonpartisan but does approach the American founding “from a posture of gratitude” and an appreciation of the Western inheritance that produced the U.S. Constitution and the American experiment.
“It’s not simply an uncritical exercise,” Dyer said. “We’re not value-neutral or value-free.”
The school has eight faculty with tenure or on tenure track and another 13 lecturers and adjuncts, and is legislatively mandated to have at least 20 tenured faculty. It has a budget of $6 million this year from state sources, and private donations and pledges have soared, exceeding $20 million. Top donors include Republican political funder Robert Rowling, a hotel magnate who is ranked 126 on Forbes 400 richest Americans, and Republican contributor Harlan Crow, a real estate magnate whose generous gifts to his friend, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, have been subjects of media coverage.
Rowling’s expectation is that the School of Civic Leadership will become a highly selective and competitive program, attracting world-class faculty and top-performing students.
But right now, the school is regarded with wariness by the university faculty.
“Look, I’m not foolish,” Rowling said. “If you voted among the faculty up or down on the School of Civic Life, they would absolutely say No.”
The director of the University of Florida’s Hamilton Center, William Inboden, said the Hamilton Center is animated by an “appreciation for the American founding” and the “uniqueness of the Western tradition. “We see history as more than a simplistic morality tale of the oppressor versus the oppressed,” he said.
“You will find more conservative viewpoints on our faculty,” Inboden acknowledged. “That’s not because of a political litmus test, but because we have removed the political litmus test.”
The Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran a lengthy, detailed account of how the University of Florida humanities faculty discriminated against students who became involved with the Hamilton Center. One student met with a Hamilton Center official at an off-campus coffee shop, where they wouldn’t be seen. Within the university, some professors regarded university officials who were involved in the Hamilton Center’s creation as “agents of the state.”
The university subsequently retaliated by subjecting six professors to an investigation. Ultimately, the probe was dropped after Ken McGurn, a former UF Foundation board chair, got involved. McGurn, a Kamala Harris supporter who has donated or pledged more than $10 million to the university, met several times with Inboden this spring to try to get to the bottom of the Hamilton Center’s purpose and agenda.
In an interview with RealClearInvestigations, McGurn said he has been impressed with the credentials of the Hamilton Center faculty and has received assurances that it’s not a political boondoggle, but he is concerned about an academic unit for which Republicans are “writing the checks.”
“This group that started the Hamilton Center,” McGurn said of state GOP lawmakers, “they went out there banning books. They went out there taking away civil liberties. It’s very suspect, very suspect.”
UNC’s School of Civic Life and Leadership has been subject to similar scrutiny. A nonprofit news site, The Assembly, recently ran an exposé about SCiLL, intimating that Jed Atkins’ “vision for the program is becoming clearer.”
The suspicion borders on the irrational when insinuating that Atkins’ scholarly interest in Cicero betrays a fascination with Roman statesmen that is a proclivity of the political right. The article further notes in conspiratorial tones that “Atkins is a Christian whose kids were homeschooled.”
Inger Brodey, SCiLL’s associate dean of faculty development and curriculum, is a UNC professor of English and Comparative Literature.
Brodey shared a draft syllabus for a civics course she plans to teach this spring entitled “Seeking the Good Life.” Reading selections for the class include the Bible, Bhagavad Gita, Aristotle, Nietzsche, the Quran, Confucius, Simone de Beauvoir, C.S. Lewis, and James Baldwin, among others.
Asked if SCiLL is a source of controversy among the professoriate, Brodey replied: “I have people hugging me and thanking me for taking this on, and people who won’t speak to me in the elevator.”
