Civic Education Centers Are Booming. The AAUP Wants Them Gone.

Faith in higher education continues to plummet, and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)—the nation’s leading organization representing faculty interests and a longstanding voice on academic freedom and university governance—has decided to train its guns on the growing movement to establish civic education centers at public universities. The AAUP’s objections amount to a single, unlovely demand: we get to decide what students learn, and nobody else gets a vote.

Six days after the report went online, the AAA fired back with a full-throated defense. “Anthropologists welcome rigorous critique of the discipline,” wrote its president, Carolyn M. Rouse. “What we cannot accept is a sweeping verdict about anthropology’s intellectual culture, scholarly practices, and professional norms built on selective evidence and issued without consultation. 

Sociology has long taken on society's biggest questions — inequality, social movements, declining birth rates — questions Pamela Paul notes shape political and cultural fault lines. But according to one sociologist quoted in the piece, the field has drifted from producing "intellectuals who think deeply and insightfully about the world" toward producing technicians and activists instead — prompting him to wonder aloud whether the discipline should simply be liquidated. The essay ties this to a critical spring report from Vanderbilt and Washington University describing a pattern of politicization across the social sciences.

Johns Hopkins University is undertaking an ambitious push toward ideological pluralism, most visibly through its new School of Government and Policy, opening in Washington, D.C. around 2027-28 under dean William Howell, who has recruited heterodox scholars like economist Peter Arcidiacono, whose empirical findings on affirmative action provided evidence in the 2023 Supreme Court ruling against Harvard. 

One year after Columbia signed its resolution agreement, the university remains something of an example, for others in the sector and for the Trump administration. But what many have called Columbia’s capitulation hasn’t been a full win for either side.