Over the last four years, Ohio has become a national leader in the revitalization of university-level civics education. I have seen this first-hand through my roles as the inaugural director of the University of Toledo’s Institution of American Constitutional Thought & Leadership and now at The Ohio State University’s Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society. Ohio created both of these schools of civic thought, along with three others across the State—at Cleveland State University, Miami University, and Wright State University—in 2023. This one-in-a-lifetime experiment combines the efforts of state officials, university board members, and leading scholars, to revitalize an essential portion of what connects United States citizens: our shared civic tradition.
Collectively, Ohio’s civics centers have created five new academic communities dedicated to teaching and researching the historical ideas, traditions, and texts that have shaped the American constitutional order. Together, these communities include more than 60 faculty who have come from leading universities around the world—Yale, Stanford, Oxford, and Cambridge among them.
Collectively, Ohio’s civics centers have created five new academic communities dedicated to teaching and researching the historical ideas, traditions, and texts that have shaped the American constitutional order.
The centers have also created more than 60 new courses—with dozens more in pipeline for next year—and are poised to teach more than 5,000 students this upcoming academic year. These courses range from foundational surveys of the American political tradition to advanced seminars on constitutionalism, statesmanship, and rhetoric. Many of these courses are approved for general education credits, thereby embedding civic learning in the core undergraduate experience. Through hosting over 50 events last year alone, these centers have enhanced their universities’ conversations by introducing arguments, perspectives, and thought-leaders previously absent from public debate.The schools modeled open inquiry across the political spectrum, pairing voices as varied as Robert George and Cornel West, Nadine Strossen and Steven Hayward, and Ross Douthat and Michael Shermer to demonstrate civil, reasoned disagreement on the hardest civic questions.
This good work is reflected in what the centers’ students are saying. “I am so excited that Cleveland State University has a Center for Civics, Culture, and Society! The course I took in American civics not only introduced us to the key ideas of America, but also allowed us to discuss and debate the texts freely and openly with our professors and classmates.” This life-changing experience by a mechanical engineering major at Cleveland State University is being duplicated thousands of times across Ohio.
Ohio’s five schools of civic thought represent a unique opportunity to invite all Ohioans—of whatever political, ideological, religious, or socioeconomic background—to once again invest and have faith in their public universities.
One last note before closing: the schools of civic thought have one additional major benefit: they are a key mechanism to rebuild trust between Ohioans and their public universities. Many Americans have lost faith in their institutions of higher education, and Ohioans are no exception.
The causes for this breach of trust are many and contested, but the higher education monoculture is one reason Americans are turning their backs on their public universities. Ohio’s five schools of civic thought represent a unique opportunity to invite all Ohioans—of whatever political, ideological, religious, or socioeconomic background—to once again invest and have faith in their public universities. They do so by focusing on what unites us Americans—our shared civic tradition—and they do so by forming the civic friendship we all need to live well together.
Lee J. Strang is professor of law at the Michael E. Moritz College of Law, and the inaugural executive director of the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society, both at The Ohio State University.