Making University Civic Centers Last

Three years ago, Governor Ron DeSantis established the Hamilton School at the University of Florida. According to The Washington Post, the school now boasts “50 professors, four majors, 69 classes this spring.”

Similar efforts are afoot with the University of North Carolina’s School of Civic Life and Leadership and The Ohio State University’s Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society. Depending on your political perspective, these are either a promising effort to reform universities or, as The Post deems them, mere “conservative backlash” to combat “‘woke’ liberal indoctrination.”

Media coverage on these centers tends to focus on their novelty; however, the broader civic center movement is beginning to reach maturity. It arguably began with Robert George founding the James Madison Program at Princeton University in 2000, which acts as a model for civic-minded institutes that function within the university architecture. The first of the newer programs was Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL), established in 2016.

At present, there are no fewer than 45 centers at 41 institutions in 25 states. The question facing the movement now isn’t how reformers should establish such institutes or why—but rather, how can they sustain the movement.

In a recent report for the Conservative Education Reform Network at the American Enterprise Institute, Paul Carrese, the founding director of ASU’s SCETL, lays out three essential considerations to answer that question.

The first, and arguably most important recommendation, is simple: Prove excellence. The media will gnash their teeth, faculty will wail, and university administrators will work to stymie the effort, but, in Carrese’s words, “criticisms will prove hollow if these institutes train students well, produce exceptional scholarship, and offer robust civic discourse and civics resources on their campuses and for broader communities.”

The best argument for these institutes resembles the old high school chant: “Scoreboard!” What insult can a competing team hurl when you’re winning the game? What can critics say if these institutions produce exceptional scholarship, education, and civic engagement?

Of course, how each center achieves such excellence is the real question. Carrese offers practical guidance beginning with the simple adage that personnel is policy. Recruiting excellent faculty is essential. He recommends a blend of teaching faculty that draw in students, making the institute economically viable, alongside researchers who provide prestige and receive grants.

He also notes the importance of designing degree programs with real utility:

“Campuses with Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) detachments will find CTL [Civic Thought and Leadership] units a great resource for cadets to find majors, minors, and the right courses to complete general studies requirements… The education schools should look to CTL units to provide coursework for preservice teachers specializing in civics, social studies, history, and education. Prelaw students, and those interested in public policy or leadership in civil society, will find a much stronger and broader foundation for developing relevant knowledge and judgment in CTL units than in humanities and soft social science departments that have shifted hard to the left or quantitative social sciences that have narrowed their range of thinking and learning.”

Carrese’s second recommendation is to persist through criticism. For example, the School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) has faced harsh criticism since its founding, but UNC’s campus leadership has recently elevated SCiLL to a fully independent school within the university. The unique degree offerings and top-tier faculty proved their worth and gained recognition despite the haters. Scoreboard!

Of course, there are ways to dampen the criticism and play nice in the university sandbox. For example, several civic centers offer Philosophy, Politics, Economics (PPE) degrees of some kind. At Arizona State University, SCETL offers such a degree in partnership with existing philosophy, political science, and economics departments, thus ingraining the school within the network of the broader university and fostering friendships, partnerships, and, ideally, goodwill between the programs.

Finally, Carrese recommends establishing Civic Thought and Leadership as its own academic field. Such an effort isn’t entirely novel. The interdisciplinary field of Science, Technology, and Society, Carrese notes, is another comparatively young academic discipline that has developed both PhD programs and several academic journals.

If the civic center movement is to persist, such efforts are vital. Faculty pipelines are necessary to fill the personnel roles that these civic centers require. Tenure-line professors will need avenues to publish their work to garner prestige, grants, and a publication record.

The Hamilton School in Florida admitted their first class of a dozen PhD candidates to begin studies in fall of 2026, pursuing degrees with tracks in the History of Ideas and War, Statecraft, and Strategy. Carrese argues that “Other CTL units should take note, creating a pipeline for faculty to staff not only CTL units but other higher education spaces in need of such faculty.”

As someone who is not a higher education reformer by trade but who has experience in founding and supporting fledgling charter schools at the K–12 level, I see much overlap between the recommendations for sustaining new institutions across primary, secondary, and higher education.

Regarding new K–12, classical schools, no matter how nice they play or how non-partisan their materials read, local media will inevitably label them with a predictable list of epithets: Trump-aligned, white-supremacist, or whatever the accusation of the day is. If founding leaders wilt in the face of such criticism, the institution eventually dies by a thousand compromises and retreats. However, if the principals hire quality teachers and execute on the educational mission, enrollment grows while critics shout into the wind. The qualifications for a quality university professor or kindergarten teacher differ, but the general principles are the same.

Carrese also notes how the need for such civic units was recently recognized from a small handful of Ivies themselves. A recent report from Yale University identified that progressive ideological orthodoxy and an absence of civic education caused declining trust in higher education. Likewise, a white paper from Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute chided academia for a culture of progressive ideological conformity and lamented the absence of a balanced, serious civic education.

There is, then, a certain enlightened self-interest that even left-leaning professors should have towards these institutes. In the highest sense, professors should value a diversity of viewpoints and view conservative scholarship ranging from Edmund Burke to Friedrich Hayek as worthy of study. Less enlightened but no less motivating, universities should reform themselves lest they be reformed by outside actors,

While federal action in recent years cut grants, embarrassed university presidents in the halls of Congress, and otherwise bludgeoned higher education is exciting and attracts media attention, the quieter work of building new institutions on college campuses may prove far more consequential in the long run. As they churn out undergraduate and graduate students and challenge campus orthodoxy from within, they fundamentally revamp academic personnel, reshape social sciences, and reform higher education in a way that a single executive order never could.

Daniel Buck is a research fellow and the director of the Conservative Education Reform Network at the American Enterprise Institute.