Benjamin Sotrey and Jenna Silber Storey at AEI:
Schools of Civic Thought are entirely new academic units, with the same powers as other departments, dedicated to offering university-level civic education. Since citizenship is always exercised in a particular time and place, their curricula focus on the American political tradition. The University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, for example, offers a course called “What Is America For?” The University of Tennessee’s Institute for American Civics offers “Construction and Reconstruction of the American Republic.” While similar courses were once taught in history or political science departments, they have fallen largely out of favor.
Most of these schools contextualize the development of American ideals and institutions within a broader framework about the challenge of governing ourselves. The School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas at Austin, for example, requires majors to take a course in “Perennial Problems in Civic Thought.” Such a broad vantage makes sense; after all, human self-government stretches back through British constitutionalism to classical republicanism, which itself has roots in a story that spans East and West.
Some Schools of Civic Thought are integrating the social sciences into their offerings. This work is underway at Ohio’s State’s Chase Center, which incorporates sociology and anthropology into its curricula, and the University of Texas’s aforementioned School of Civic Leadership, which combines offerings in economics with constitutional theory and moral philosophy. Such efforts at unifying disciplines are rare in the fragmented modern university.
Finally, Schools of Civic Thought often host civil discourse programs, which help students learn to talk about our most divisive political problems. These are essential, since a well-formed citizen must learn to navigate pluralism. For example, Arizona State’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL), founded in 2017, offers a class in “Left and Right Around the World.” Indeed, the schools themselves often bring intellectual pluralism to their campuses by building curricula and hiring faculty in fields of interest to conservatives.