For the first time in decades, certain parts of the long-suffering humanities are a growth sector in higher ed. Even more surprisingly, this expansion is being driven by state legislatures and governing boards dominated by Republicans.
At public colleges in red and purple states like Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah, about 200 tenure- and career-track faculty lines are being created in new academic units devoted to civic education, according to Paul Carrese, founding director of the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL) at Arizona State University. These positions are being filled by faculty members trained in areas including political theory, history, philosophy, classics, and English. Since there are only about 2,000 jobs advertised in all those disciplines combined in a typical year, the creation of 200 new lines is a significant event.
Because a political party intensely critical of higher education has backed the founding of those programs, some worry that they will debase academic standards, subject intellectual life to political imperatives, and constrain teaching within certain ideological limits. Others hope that this burst of hiring might help colleges better prepare students for civic life and rebuild interest in the humanities.
Criticism of these new programs is both understandable and premature. Most of them have just been founded and have yet to demonstrate exactly how they intend to fulfill the mandates that have set them in motion. They have not had time to create a track record by which they might be judged, and they will each develop in different ways. For now, understanding the motivations of the faculty members who join them may be the best way to discern where those programs are headed. Who are the academics working in these programs? Why have they moved from other colleges? How do they think about their responsibility to the legislative mandates that created these projects? And how do they plan to build academic programs with integrity under intense and conflicting political pressures, from both on and off campus?
Over the past year, we have spent significant time with many of these academics, visiting some of their campuses, discussing the programs they’re building, and interviewing them about their reasons for taking these jobs and the possibilities and pitfalls of the work they are doing. As humanistically trained scholars who have long been concerned about the state of both the humanities and civic education, we are sympathetic toward these projects. (Full disclosure: We have an unpaid affiliation with a research institute housed in one of these new schools, the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin School of Civic Leadership; opinions expressed in this piece are, however, our own.)
We found that faculty working in these new schools are motivated by desires common to many professors. They want to pursue their scholarship in an environment that both supports and challenges them. They want to develop models of teaching that address what they see as the needs of today’s students. And they want to build academic communities that are energetic, where “students can come together to unapologetically experience the joy of learning,” in the words of Jill P. Ingram, who moved from the English department at Ohio University to the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida in 2022.
Because a political party intensely critical of higher education has backed the founding of those programs, some worry that they will debase academic standards.
But they face some unusual challenges. They must develop substantial, distinctive academic programs to justify their significant, controversial administrative footprint. They must hire and perform according to high scholarly standards, while showing legislators, regents, and trustees that they are fulfilling their mandates. And they must win the respect of colleagues in other departments who are skeptical about their programs’ legitimacy.
The key motivation for joining these programs and accepting those challenges, as some see it, is regular engagement with scholars who represent wide-ranging intellectual and political perspectives. As Lee J. Strang, a professor at the University of Toledo School of Law, put it, “Over the past 10 years, I saw the pressure on civil discussion and debate in the broader culture spill over into higher education.” Strang accepted the position as inaugural director of the Institute of American Constitutional Thought and Leadership at his university because he sees his new program as a way to create “intentional space for scholarly excellence via research and civil dialogue.”
Others speak of a desire to rebuild the core knowledge they see as the backbone of civic education: the history of Western efforts at self-government, the political thought of the American founding, and the study of federal and state constitutions. Jeffrey Collins, a historian who moved from Queens University, in Ontario, to UF’s Hamilton Center last year, remarked that students don’t typically learn about “very basic events like the French Revolution” because scholars consider them “passé from a research perspective. But they’re not passé to students.”
A third, related motivation mentioned by scholars participating in these programs is the opportunity to revive overlooked fields of study. As William Anthony Hay, a historian and associate director of public programs at Arizona State’s SCETL, said, “The cultural and linguistic turn” in history left scholars who study “international relations and war, as well as constitutional and legal history,” suffering from “professional isolation and neglect.” By hiring scholarly experts in subfields central to civic education, these programs hope to rebuild important areas of scholarship and draw on the natural love faculty members have for their own subject matter to make teaching core civic knowledge exciting.
Reviving essential aspects of humanistic education against the grain was a fourth motive faculty members frequently cited. Alexander S. Duff, a philosophy scholar who will be starting a position in the School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas at Austin this fall, said that in other teaching positions, he experienced “regular confrontation with the impossibility of improving education for students.” At UT-Austin, he said, he wants to help design a program that offers students a “four-year odyssey into the strange and profound,” moving them beyond the assumption that “there are a suite of ready-made answers to difficult human questions.”
Similarly, Jill Ingram, of the Hamilton Center, was eager to work in an environment that would support her in assigning “big, strange books,” such as Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, at a time when many academics have resigned themselves to the proposition that “students don’t read anymore.” Ingram also takes it as her charge to help students develop “the ability to articulate their instinctive responses to what is beautiful,” which is difficult when dominant reading strategies prioritize critique.
Finally, many faculty members were motivated by the desire to participate in something vital and growing. Ingram and Collins contrasted the youth, energy, and “esprit de corps” of the Hamilton Center faculty with the “culture of discontent” and “burnout” common elsewhere. Karen Taliaferro, a scholar of Islamic political thought who taught at Arizona State’s SCETL for seven years, said that people working in that program tended to be “curious and thoughtful” both about “regular, granular, scholarly questions” and “the big questions” that transcend particular subfields.
Collins thinks that the enthusiasm of the faculty will attract students, and argues that projects like the Hamilton Center can help revive the case for the humanities. “Many STEM fields are glutted with job candidates,” he noted. “You can do a lot with a humanities degree.” After seven years, the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership has shown the viability of these projects from an enrollment standpoint: In the 2022-23 academic year, more than 1,300 students registered for its courses.
None of the goals stated above are explicitly ideological, and they would likely be echoed by many humanities professors today, regardless of their political affiliations. Whether or not these programs can actually meet those goals, though, remains to be seen. In our view, it will depend on how they respond in practice to some of the particular challenges they face.
The most significant of those challenges is whether the programs’ development will be driven primarily by an intellectual mission or by political concerns. The development of new disciplines in academe should be structured around the effort to understand certain phenomena more clearly. New, humanistically focused programs in civic education have the potential to make a powerful claim in this respect. No discipline now operating in our colleges systematically seeks to understand and develop the capacity for acting and thinking like a citizen. While political science seeks to understand political life, it does so not from the engaged standpoint of the citizen, but from the detached standpoint of the scientific observer of human behavior. There is space for the development of a humanistic discipline of political life.
If, however, political pressure drives new programs in civic education to devolve into a “catechism,” as Collins warned, they will be vulnerable to the critique that they are little more than a “blunt-force counteragenda,” in The New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall’s words, to the perceived partisanship of the 21st-century university. They might avoid such criticism by distancing their work from the legislative proposals that have attempted to ban opinions politicians deem “harmful” or “controversial” from the classroom — even when such proposals are packaged in the same bills that have brought these programs into being.
The leaders of these programs also need to make clear that they understand that an academic program is not the public square. As professors Richard Amesbury and Catherine O’Donnell write, there is a difference between the freedom of speech that characterizes a public marketplace of ideas and the academic freedom that allows for the unfettered development of scholarship. The broadening of views these programs aim to introduce to campus should be in the service of improving scholarship, not replicating the polarized echo chambers of the contemporary public arena.
None of this is to say that these programs need to be politically agnostic. Major intellectual revolutions — the founding of ancient schools of philosophy, the rise of renaissance humanism, the dawn of social science, the creation of 20th-century schools of thought such as feminism — were driven by scholars whose passion for discovery was intertwined with intense political concerns. But they all succeeded, in the long run, by producing scholarly discoveries and syntheses of undeniable value. Programs devoted to humanistic civic education must prove their worth on the same grounds.
The leaders of these programs need to make clear that they understand that an academic program is not the public square.
The second, related challenge concerns the need to speak to markedly different constituencies simultaneously. Political actors have supported these programs in response to widespread public dissatisfaction with contemporary higher education. Their academic leaders must show that they recognize the just aspects of public complaints, and the legally binding character of legislative mandates, while building curricula and research agendas that earn the respect of fair-minded academics.
Some worry that political authorities will constrain the teaching and research of professors in these programs. Those with experience in Arizona State’s SCETL told us that this had not been a problem. As Taliaferro put it, she never felt as if anyone was looking over her shoulder as she wrote her syllabi. In her view, state legislators were principally concerned about whether American and Arizona history and political thought were being taught at all. It remains to be seen whether the respectful distance between the legislature and the professoriate necessary for academic integrity will be honored in other states.
The third challenge these schools face is to introduce more viewpoint diversity without becoming conservative silos. One approach to this problem that we advocate is to hire in fields which tend to attract right-leaning scholars, such as constitutional law, diplomatic and military history, and moral philosophy — thereby raising questions that might otherwise go unasked on campus, but then encourage students and faculty to follow those questions wherever they might lead. Moreover, as Collins noted, a fairer hiring process, one that “removes the screens and the gatekeeping” that often shape faculty searches, may result in “more conservatives and religious people” being let through the door. However they decide to approach this challenge, these programs will need to strike a difficult balance between fulfilling missions designed to correct perceived ideological distortions in the academy without becoming exclusively conservative redoubts.
One way to avoid self-imposed isolation on campus is to reject the “zero-sum conception of civics learning,” which the historian Timothy Messer-Kruse worries is underlying these efforts, and find ways to build bridges with other faculty members who share common interests or concerns. As Josh Dunn, executive director of the Institute for American Civics at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, found, campus colleagues were open to surprising forms of collaboration. Last year, IAC teamed up with faculty members in UT-Knoxville’s English and theater departments to put on a production of Joseph Addison’s Cato — a drama about “citizenship, freedom, race, and honor” that was also George Washington’s favorite play. Such cooperative endeavors suggest ways that these new programs can work with existing departments to increase overall interest in the humanities, rather than allowing themselves to be consumed by competition for students and resources.
A fourth challenge concerns whether these rapidly expanding projects will be able to build coherent programs while recruiting and retaining top academic talent. The Hamilton Center recently announced 21 new faculty hires in a single year, including four Harvard Ph.D.s and four Cambridge Ph.D.s. Given their sizable hiring mandates, these schools will need to work hard to recruit highly qualified and productive faculty, while making sure diverse personalities, teaching styles, and research interests do not destroy the programmatic coherence and esprit de corps many find to be valuable traits of these projects.
The final challenge these schools face, in our view, is to articulate their programs as a renaissance rather than a reaction. Many of the faculty members moving to these schools bring with them powerful memories of elements of their own academic training that are underappreciated: great books programs at the University of Chicago and Columbia University, courses in grand strategy at Yale University, curricula that focus on the American founding or British constitutionalism. To be part of a renaissance that endures, efforts to revive neglected subfields and forgotten courses must resist the temptation of nostalgia for a lost golden age. The Renaissance we remember did not simply revel in old texts of Cicero, it gave birth to novel forms of art and thought that focused on the distinct challenges of its moment.
The demands that weigh on these programs are daunting and sometimes conflicting; it seems unlikely that all of them will navigate these choppy waters successfully. But those that do could offer the rarest of prospects in the humanities: reasons for hope. The right’s newfound interest in these disciplines can make support for them solidly bipartisan for the first time in decades. Scholars everywhere, regardless of how they vote, should be thinking creatively about how to use that support to build a vital future for the humanities.
