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

By Tal Fortgang ‘17

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.

It is worth understanding what these centers are, and the movement they stand for, before understanding why the AAUP is so desperate to kill them. Over the past several years, legislatures in at least nine states — including Florida, Texas, Ohio, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arizona — have established or funded civic education programs at their flagship public universities. To name just a few: Ohio State’s Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society, UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Civic Life and Leadership, and perhaps most ascendant of all, the University of Florida’s Hamilton Center share a premise: American undergraduates are scandalously ignorant of the intellectual and institutional foundations of their own civilization. Existing faculty have demonstrated no interest in fixing the problem, and perpetuate their preferences by reproducing, hiring, and credentialing people altogether similar to them.

The numbers back this up. Surveys regularly find that fewer than half of college graduates can name the three branches of government. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has documented the near-total disappearance of meaningful civics requirements at top universities. Students can earn degrees in political science without ever reading the Federalist Papers. The centers stand for the proposition that universities exist at least in part to cultivate capable citizens, which in turn requires some familiarity with the ideas that have shaped our nation. The new institutions therefore emphasize courses on the Western canon — Aristotle, Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Tocqueville — alongside study of America’s founding documents and constitutional tradition, and other sources that speak directly to matters of enduring importance in a free, democratic society bound by the rule of law. 

Some, like the one at Tennessee, also assign Marx and other critics of liberalism, because in their judgment that is a crucial part of understanding the sweep of Western Civilization. Good—there should be variance rooted in good-faith argument, and an acknowledgment that there is no single “agenda” at play, aside from getting students to think hard about the core questions that shape our world.

This, to hear the AAUP tell it, is an existential threat to the university.

Their criticisms, as my colleague John Sailer has meticulously documented, follow a predictable script. First comes the objection to eroding the faculty-centric principle of shared governance. These centers were created by legislatures rather than faculty senates, and therefore their hiring processes violate established norms of faculty self-rule. At Ohio State, critics have complained that the Chase Center’s director wields “sole and exclusive authority” over faculty recruitment, bypassing departmental search committees. Associate Professor Ashley Hope Perez called this “essentially legislatively directed hiring at a university” and warned that it amounted to “setting up political loyalty for tenure.” At UNC, the local AAUP chapter leader, history professor Erik Gellman, went further, characterizing the scholarship funding offered to students who enroll in the civics school’s courses outright bribery. Following Gellman’s rhetorical lead, a new progressive group at UNC has called for a boycott of the new civics center because it represents an alleged Republican takeover of the faculty’s rightful remit. 

The most frequently occurring and most revealing objection is the claim that these centers are simply Trojan horses for conservative indoctrination. Behind the scenes, as Sailer has exposed, the AAUP has undertaken a war to defend campuses’ ideological purity. “I would really love to see kind of a robust research project on these right-wing centers and individuals—like, naming and shaming and discrediting and undermining the legitimacy,” said the director of an AAUP subdivision nominally committed to academic freedom. “I would love to strategically map who these f---ers are, and figure out what the weaknesses are, and design a research agenda that just goes through them and tries to knock them out.”

These interrelated arguments are exactly what you would expect from a faculty that senses it is losing its monopoly over educational discretion—not just how each professor handles her classroom, but who gets to teach, what they teach, to whom, and why. 

Shared governance sounds noble in the abstract but in practice has become the mechanism by which an ideologically uniform professoriate reproduces itself. Ideological imbalances among faculty are the stuff of legend; entire academic fields have zero self-identified political conservatives. In such a context, “faculty-led hiring” is a synonym for political monoculture. The AAUP is defending the cartelization of higher education, even as professors have no greater claim to expertise in the management of an educational system than boards of regents or other elected officials. 

Citizens fund public schools, and they control them. They do not exist to perpetuate an ideological academic machine. When legislatures intervene to wrest some control over what is taught and by whom, they are not attacking academic freedom; but acting as the stakeholders they are. Moreover, they have ample grounds to believe they are correcting a market failure the faculty created.

The ideological objection collapses the moment you examine the actual syllabi. Courses assigning Aristotle, Locke, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx are not conservative indoctrination. They are the liberal arts tradition that the university was built to transmit and that the existing faculty largely abandoned in favor of the trendy and ideological. The charge of right-wing bias is projection from people who are accustomed to the privilege of being able to maintain an ideological monoculture for years, and now sense their entitlements slipping away.

If anything, the AAUP’s opposition to civic education centers should encourage education reformers. Arguments grounded in territoriality over the nuts and bolts of university-classroom programming, with a dash of ideological orthodoxy, reveal the importance to faculty of maintaining their intransigence. For decades, professors have expanded their remit to control more university operations, making more decisions about pedagogy, curriculum, hiring, and altogether what ideas are worth teaching and emphasizing. Even at public schools, professors continue to treat external accountability as an invasion. The same instinct that resists civics centers resists post-tenure review, curricular reform, transparency in hiring, and any effort by trustees, legislators, alumni, students, or other stakeholders to exercise the authority that is, at least in part, theirs.

The good news is that the faculty cartel’s grip is weakening. Nine state legislatures have already acted. Trustees are waking up to their fiduciary responsibilities. Organizations like the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the American Enterprise Institute, the National Association of Scholars, the Manhattan Institute (where I work), and Heterodox Academy are providing the intellectual and policy infrastructure for reform. Most of all, students themselves, offered the chance to spend classroom time grappling with the great texts and questions of the Western tradition, are showing up. The University of Florida’s Hamilton School illustrates the trend: after its civic education courses were added to Florida’s core curriculum, enrollment in qualifying classes increased from 671 to 1,205 students. Administrators at other new civic education centers have reported similar year-over-year growth.

The AAUP can denounce all of this as an assault on academic freedom. But academic freedom is not, and never has been, synonymous with professors’ sovereignty over the university. Professors have the right to pursue truth without political interference in their research and teaching. They do not have the right to a permanent monopoly on what gets taught, who gets hired, and how public money gets spent. If the public determines that professors have abdicated their duty by allowing generations to graduate without understanding the Constitution, the Enlightenment, or the intellectual foundations of the free society that sustains their own privileges, they should not hesitate to return the academy to its core functions.

The civic education centers are not perfect. Some will need better curricula, better hiring, better integration with the broader university. But their existence represents something the AAUP cannot tolerate and the rest of us should celebrate: proof that the professoriate does not get the last word. The university belongs to all of us. We can act like it.

Tal Fortgang ’17 is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS and a contributing writer at The Dispatch.