The best starting point for American civic education is what Americans hold in common: our constitutional inheritance. To many inside academia, a renewed focus on the Constitution in undergraduate curriculum, faculty scholarship, and graduate education is controversial. To ordinary Americans, it is perfectly obvious—and frankly surprising that it is not already a priority in colleges and universities.
Americans outside the ivory tower are not divided over the value of the Constitution or its importance. They are divided over its meaning and how best to live in conformity with it. That makes the Constitution a vital focal point for civic education. An important part of educating for citizenship is learning how to navigate disagreement, and productive disagreement requires something held in common—something to which members of the same community can have recourse. The Constitution is this indispensable common ground. This is why the Center for Constitutional Studies at Utah Valley University, which numbers among the growing cadre of legislatively initiated centers and schools of civic thought, has put the study of the Constitution at the center of civic education.
An important part of educating for citizenship is learning how to navigate disagreement, and productive disagreement requires something held in common—something to which members of the same community can have recourse.
The creation and subsequent amendment of the Constitution have repeatedly provided occasions for working out perennial problems of republican self-government. It represents the consensus at which Americans have been able to arrive—and that consensus is not a trivial or merely symbolic thing. Americans who otherwise differ on much are agreed that the basic freedoms and institutions enshrined in the Constitution are salutary and worth keeping.
The serious study of the Constitution and the arguments over its meaning also lead to the civilizational inheritance that stands behind it. The elimination of the study of Western civilization from college curricula has been a disaster for civic education. Our deepest disagreements raise profound questions about the rights and duties of human beings as members of a community. The generation that built the American constitutional order was equipped to confront these questions by an acquaintance with the long debate in Western civilization over the nature of human beings and how they ought to live together in light of their differences.
Western civilization and the American constitutional order are interdependent in an important sense. The constitutional order rests on the enjoyment of political liberty, but not because Americans are skeptics. From the Founding, down to our present moment, confidence in the capacity of human reason to find the truth and in voluntary associations to secure the highest goods abound in American political culture. This confidence exists within a system of political, economic, and religious liberty—the essence of the pursuit of happiness.
For a half century, universities have hollowed out the core curriculum, but these critical issues have not disappeared. Americans have not become less invested in questions of meaning and purpose. Students are starving for them. Instead of spoon-feeding them a worldview devoid of deeper meaning, institutions need to equip them to work through these questions for themselves. The constitutional tradition and the great debates of Western civilization that stand behind it are the ideal material for doing so.
Instead of spoon-feeding them a worldview devoid of deeper meaning, institutions need to equip them to work through these questions for themselves.
Civic renewal in higher education therefore requires reacquainting students and faculty alike with the American constitutional inheritance as an episode in the saga of Western civilization. Likewise, we must build institutional structures that can sustain this work over time. This work begins with general education. Refashioning general education offerings—or better yet, recovering a core curriculum—is a matter of the greatest urgency. At UVU, that has meant cultivating and expanding a course on American Heritage, which fulfills Utah’s American Institutions general education requirement and introduces students to the Constitution, the American political tradition, and the broader civilizational sources that shaped them. Equally important, that has meant hiring faculty fully equipped and committed to teaching such courses.
Beyond general education, the Center has recently supplemented its long-standing minor in Constitutional Studies and student research fellowships with the Tocqueville Fellowship program and a week-long Summer Civic Institute for undergraduates from across the state. These will serve as foundations for a robust Civic Thought and Leadership curriculum attracting students from a wide array of disciplines and majors. Clemson University’s Lyceum Program offers an important model in this regard, demonstrating how students from diverse fields can be formed intellectually around serious engagement with primary sources and fundamental questions of political life.
Perhaps most distinctively, the Center has seized an opportunity to take direct responsibility for teacher education, offering degrees and courses directly to social studies teachers. The long-term goal is an educational system in which the leading credentials for advancement in social studies teaching and leadership are subject-area graduate degrees in Western civilization, humane letters, history, and American civics.
Programs like UVU’s MA in Constitutional Government, Civics, and Law are blazing a trail forward, while the Jack Miller Center’s new Civics Foundations Graduate Consortium is providing the means for others to join the effort. The Consortium provides tuition support for teachers to take graduate courses in the American political tradition and Western civilization at partner institutions and then facilitates the transfer of those credits to a handful of graduate programs like UVU’s.
The Center’s MA in Constitutional Government is part of a broader ecosystem of teacher professional development, which now reaches more than 500 civic educators in the state each year with in-person workshops focused on primary sources.
This investment of expertise and resources in K–12 civic education has allowed the Center to support the state’s exemplary efforts to implement effective civics education standards. This includes Utah’s new year-long course in Constitutional Government and Citizenship, which is now required for graduation throughout the state. This serves to address the civics crisis early in the educational process rather than patching it up at the end. Crucially, it also reaches those students who will not pursue university education. This essential civic element of a liberal education should not be withheld from those who pursue a path other than college.
Left to themselves, the legacy disciplines simply will not allow civic education to flourish in a way that constitutes genuine renewal.
Achieving these reforms in higher education requires working parallel to—rather than simply within—the cognate disciplines of history, political science, economics, and the humanities more broadly. Left to themselves, the legacy disciplines simply will not allow civic education to flourish in a way that constitutes genuine renewal. At best, the magnetic pull will be perpetually in the direction of a cosmopolitan attachment to democracy as a generic regime or, perhaps a methodological commitment to civil discourse. These approaches, while mostly uncontroversial, fail to cultivate any attachment to or sense of responsibility for the Constitution, laws, and customs of the American political tradition—the particular regime to which current and future citizens belong and for which they have immediate responsibility.
Those engaged in this work should look for promising partnerships with existing disciplines and academic units, but making those partnerships fruitful in the long run will require preserving a large degree of institutional autonomy for centers and schools of civic thought. Renewal requires strong institutions and new faculty within academia that will place the Constitution and its civilizational inheritance back at the center of American civic education.
Matthew Brogdon is the Senior Director and Larry H. & Gail Miller Family Chair in the Center for Constitutional Studies at Utah Valley University, the home of Utah’s Civic Thought and Leadership Initiative.