When news broke this past spring that a survey of student achievement showed that only about one in five high schoolers were “proficient” in basic civics knowledge, pundits, educational specialists, and think tanks predictably warned that democracy was imperiled, and called for more-robust civics education. Such seasonal panic arrives with the regularity of El Niño — and has since civics education was first promoted in the 19th century.
This year’s outbreak of alarmist editorials and legislative proposals followed the pattern of earlier bouts, but for one truly novel response. For the first time, a tightly organized network of foundations, politicians, and experts prescribed that the remedy for America’s civics malaise was for historians to teach less about history.
The conservative charge that academic historians are out-of-touch radicals bent on indoctrinating America’s youth is old, with roots in the Red Scares of the 20th century. Originally the solution was simply to root out “disloyal” professors — membership in the Communist party was a particular concern. But in recent decades, conservatives have turned their attacks primarily to what professors teach, rather than what organizations they belong to.
The recent conservative attack on teaching came in response to proposals to reorient civics education from general lessons about governmental institutions toward real-world problems that research had shown to more successfully engage students and increase learning. Described as the “New Civics” by its proponents and denounced as “Action Civics” by its detractors, opposition to it crystallized in former President Donald Trump’s “1776 Commission,” an effort aimed at countering the spread of The New York Times’s “1619 Project.” The “1776 Commission” criticized Action Civics as a “progressive approach to education” that “compounds the mistakes of today’s conventional education” by neglecting “ideas that transcend and inform history.” Other conservative commentators chimed in. Stanley Kurtz, an education columnist for the National Review, wrote that Action Civics was a “pernicious practice” that “amounts to school-sponsored indoctrination and political action in support of progressive policy positions.”
New Civics originated in President Barack Obama’s first term, when the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement and Arne Duncan, then the secretary of education, released a report entitled “A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future,” which pushed for “civic engagement,” “service learning,” and other efforts in which students would participate in community activities beyond the classroom. That report quickly became a focal point of conservative criticism.
“A Crucible Moment” was countered by “Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics,” a report commissioned by the conservative National Association of Scholars (NAS) in 2017, which, at a hefty 525 pages, is four times as long as its nemesis. That report branded New Civics as a “radical program of the 1960s’ New Left … camouflaged with soft rhetoric,” and charged that efforts like service- and experiential-learning and civic engagement were “disguises” used by the left to smuggle ideas of “systemic change” into the civics curriculum. Rather than teaching students a love of their country and their duty as citizens as “traditional American civics” courses had done, the New Civics taught them “how to organize protests, occupy buildings, and stage demonstrations.”
Even worse, according to “Making Citizens,” the New Civics “disguises the collapse of solid education in colleges” with a plethora of courses that are either leftist indoctrination or frivolous wastes of time; these crowd traditional subjects out of the course catalog. The solution to this galloping radicalization and debasement of standards, according to the NAS, is legislation forcing public colleges to centralize the formulation and delivery of general-education curricula. A model, the General Education Act (GEA), written by Stanley Kurtz, David Randall (author of “Making Citizens”), and Jenna Robinson, a former Charles Koch Foundation associate, argues that faculty should not have control of the general-ed curriculum because Americans “no longer wish to defer to faculty and education administrators who advance their personal politics under the guise of academic expertise.”
Where some might see a glaring contradiction between the claim that the GEA is intended to “nurture a robust marketplace of ideas” and its restriction of the curriculum to “the classic Western liberal-arts tradition,” NAS activists see the restoration of topics they believe have been exiled by wokeness. Topics that would be legally mandated under the GEA include “the intellectual foundations of free countries, especially that of the United States;” the “principles, ideals, and institutions of law, liberty, and civic virtue that underpin the American constitutional order;” the “West’s enduring culture of liberty;” and the “Western tradition of liberal education.” “Western” is the GEA’s favorite word, comprising half the mandated eight courses (“Western History I,” “Western History II,” “Western Humanities I,” and “Western Humanities II”). Graduation requirements for all degree programs would include this gen-ed core “organized around the history, great works, and civic culture of the West as a whole, and the United States in particular.”
The most recent salvo in this campaign came from Arizona State University’s Center for American Institutions (CAI), a think tank established in 2022 whose first public fundraiser, promoted as the “Buckle Up and Ride the Red Wave” dinner, featured Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA. The CAI’s first National Commission Report has the tellingly possessive title of “The Study of American History in Our Universities” (SAHOU). The self-appointed “commission” lending their imprimatur to this report is chaired by former Wisconsin governor and failed presidential candidate Scott Walker and includes Mary Fallin, a former Republican governor of Oklahoma, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Donald T. Critchlow, director of the CAI and a historian best known for his fawning biography of Phyllis Schlafly, opens his introduction to the report with the usual distress about the “crisis in civic education in our nation today,” for which he blames the professoriate. The root of the problem, according to Critchlow, is that history professors “simply are not conveying foundational knowledge to their students” because they place such “heavy emphasis” on “racial, ethnic, and gender identity” instead. Historians, Critchlow charges, choose to “stoke the flames of personal grievance and identity politics” that is “speeding up the erosion of our civic culture.”
The conservative charge that academic historians are out-of-touch radicals bent on indoctrinating America’s youth is old, with roots in the Red Scares of the 20th century.
Evidence for this sweeping indictment is compiled from two sources: the program of the most recent annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians and 75 syllabi from introductory courses in American history culled from the web. To show that “a presentist mindset” that presumes that “the primary mission of the study of history is the correction of today’s social problems” pervades the field, the CAI sifted through the OAH convention program and calculated the percentage of sessions that were “identity-focused.” Of the “total of 178 panels,” they concluded that 52 percent “were devoted to identity themes.”
As their coding scheme or rules were not included, the accuracy of these calculations can only be inferred by reconstructing the data set from the conference program itself. By my count, there were actually 165 panel sessions. To reach their total of 178, 13 of the conference’s workshops, breakfast and luncheon meetings, plenaries, and at least one reception must be thrown into the mix.
As the data presented is broken down by date, for convenience let’s examine Thursday’s sessions, as they are the least numerous. According to the report, there were two sessions involving “gender.” Here I believe they undercounted, as I found three: “State Management of Race and Gender,” “Women at the Center: Rethinking the Place of Women, Gender, and Sexuality in the Early Republic,” and “Digital Feminist Humanities.” There were supposedly a dozen panels on the topic of “race”, but I found only six:
1. Crises as Moments of Opportunity: Race, Power, and Two Centuries of Bad Development
2. State Management of Race and Gender
3. Mapping Identity and Placemaking Across U.S. Empire in the Pacific — Moving Peoples and Racial Ideologies From World War II into the 21st Century
4. Encampments, Mobility, and Racialized Space in the 20th-Century Latinx West
5. Cross-Racial Alliances and Social Movements in the Late 20th Century
6. Crosscurrents of the Radical Caribbean: Navigating Transnational Black Solidarities
Where did the other six come from? They must be on the same page as I’m looking at, as this is the only day listed where my count of sessions and the SAHOU’s agree. Could it be that they counted “Los Doyers: Latinos and Los Angeles’s Favorite Team” as a panel focused on “race”? They must have, for the only possible way of arriving at a total of 12 sessions dealing with race was by defining every mention of a group other than whites as being one dealing with “race.” When white people are considered unraced and any mention of African Americans or Latinos is automatically a matter of race, then the missing six sessions appear. They include such civics-oriented topics as “Fighting for the Soul of a Nation: Black Americans’ Struggle to Keep American Democracy Alive” and “The Church as a Site of Struggle: Faith and Social Mobilization in Latinx History.”
Drilling down into their data, more than a sloppy methodology is revealed. The heart of their report is an “objective analysis” of 75 introduction to American history syllabi. They coded each course element as either “institutions” (good) or “identities” (bad), and then used these categories to calculate correlation coefficients, regression models, and factor analyses. Their division of these topics is extremely odd. “Civil War events” and “Reconstruction” are considered institutional issues, while “slavery” or “abolition” are considered matters of identity. In other words, teaching about the Civil War absent slavery is considered a laudable practice, while teaching this conflict in the context of slavery is “presentism.” “Western tradition” is not considered a matter of identity, but “pre-Columbian societies” is. Likewise, “conservatism,” “capitalism,” “Falwell,” and “Schlafly” are all included in their list of 11 essential “historical terms,” but “progressivism,” “Jim Crow,” or “New Deal” are not. From data assembled on this basis, the authors of the report make some extravagant claims. For example, the topic in the first semester of American history that supposedly receives on average the largest proportion of class time is “pre-Columbian societies,” at 4.5 hours, double the time devoted to colonial institutions. The only syllabus I was able to positively identify in their sample actually had less than one class period devoted to “global history” before the “Spanish conquest” — and this on the first day of the course when going over class mechanics usually consumes much of the hour.
In their qualitative analysis of select syllabi, the researchers conclude that for today’s professors, the “oppression of women and masculine toxicity are presumed to be persistent and never-changing tools for understanding American history.” Worse, instructors who focus on gender issues “exclude historical comparisons at the time with other societies,” and the “attitudes of white males are presumed not to have changed substantially over time.”
Only one syllabus is specifically referenced as an example of these faults, this from a “large urban public university in the Midwest” where, shockingly, a class period is devoted to “Jolly Men and American Masculinity.” The authors characterize the course this way: “The instructor presumes that American history is one of vicious cycles in which ‘gendered’ roles in every aspect of American life are recreated in various forms without any social, political, legal, or economic advancements for women.”
I was able to locate this syllabus. Reading over the actual description of the course, it not only bears little resemblance to the report’s characterization, it seems to be an example of just the sort of history that conservatives complain is being crowded out by wokeness.
Judging by the actual syllabus, it is clear that “identity” themes do not predominate over traditional political ones. Only one half of one period is devoted to the topic of “sex, family, and marriage in colonial America.” Another is devoted to “gender, race, and nation in Puritan New England,” in which students read writings by Anne Hutchinson and Mary Rowlandson.
Gender reappears later in a course titled “The Cult of Domesticity,” in which students read the account of westward migration, from New York to Michigan, in 1824 by Harriet Noble. Three weeks later, students spend one period hearing about the Seneca Falls women’s-rights convention of 1848 (with readings from Angelina Grimké and Catharine Beecher), and another period considering those “Jolly Men.”
I confirmed with the instructor of this course that the title of the lesson on “Jolly Men” was inspired by Richard Stott’s 2009 book Jolly Fellows: Male Milieus in Nineteenth Century America (Johns Hopkins University Press), a book whose point was not to grind home the woke message that women have long been oppressed, but to study the subculture of rowdy male “jolly fellowship” that was undone by the rise of moral reform movements. The instructor observed that he chose this topic not to drive home the lesson that masculinity was “toxic,” a concept he rejects as ahistorical, but because it served as a good transition to considering the personal motivations that moved some men to fight in the Civil War.
There are no further topics centered on gender or women’s social standing, though students do read some of Abigail Adams’s letters. Rather, the course is chock-full of traditional political topics. The American Revolution is discussed across six class sessions over three weeks, about double what the researchers of the report claim is the lamentable average now.
The Study of American History in Our Universities is just one manifestation of a growing movement to regulate and restrict what historians teach in America’s colleges. That movement is premised on a zero-sum conception of civics learning, where too much attention to irrelevant topics prevents one from learning the truly important matters of government and law. But this logic leads to a harsher diagnosis, namely that some woke subjects are actually too toxic to teach. Having learned the lesson from last year’s federal court ruling that Florida’s attempt to restrict the teaching of critical race theory violated academic freedom — a ruling that drew a distinction between permissible state control of programs, and administrative arrangements and unconstitutional censorship of curriculum — conservative educational reformers are now focused on restructuring colleges themselves. The NAS now proclaims that “policymakers must change the administrative structure of higher education to change the substance of what professors teach in college classrooms.” Naturally, such a shift, they expect, would “necessitate the discontinuance of some existing academic programs, including some currently existing tenure lines.”
As of this writing, half a dozen red state legislatures and most recently the purple state of Ohio have adopted model legislation drafted by the Civics Alliance, a coalition organized by the NAS that brings together a who’s who of conservative think tanks, academics, and publications. These laws are aimed at creating “autonomous” institutes within public colleges where administrators can control hiring (staffing it with “courageous dissenters from the activist establishment”) and crafting a curriculum offering “proper courses on the nature of intellectual freedom, the Western heritage, and the American heritage.”
This movement was piloted at ASU by the establishment of the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, which combined two existing centers previously funded by the Charles Koch Foundation and granted an initial state allocation of $3 million in 2016. (Some controversy was stirred up when the school used $200,000 to purchase a first edition of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and $137,500 for a first printing of the Federalist Papers.) Since then, Ohio’s GOP supermajority allocated $24 million to establish five “intellectual diversity centers” at Ohio State University, the University of Toledo, Miami University, Cleveland State University, and the University of Cincinnati. The bill’s sponsor said these institutes were needed because “ideology is replacing the lessons of history,” and “leftist ideology has a monopoly on most college campuses that is squashing intellectual diversity and punishing wrong-think and anti-woke dogma.” What happens next will largely be determined by the direction the political winds blow in what is shaping up to be a historic year.
