A class on political economics where Adam Smith is read alongside Marx and Engels. A class on virtue that places Plato in conversation with Nietzsche. A class on presidential leadership drawn from the biographies of FDR and Reagan. A class examining individual rights through Aristotle and Frederick Douglass. Courses encompassing some of history’s most consequential thinkers and leaders. These are not the aspirational fantasy of some ambitious educator; they’re selections from the syllabi of the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Civic Leadership.
Bowling Green Professor Timothy Messer-Kruse sees something sinister at work in curricula like these. In his recent polemic in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Civics Is a Right-Wing Plot—and They’re Not Even Hiding It,” he argues that the movement behind the establishment of civic schools at institutions like UT Austin, the University of Florida, and others is more focused on “squelching viewpoints the state opposes than it is about widening the marketplace of ideas.” Messer-Kruse has joined a rapidly growing chorus of opposition to civic schools as right-wing indoctrination centers.
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A look at the course list and syllabi at these schools is enough to dismiss the charges that they are ideological indoctrination centers. If anything, the design of these new schools makes clear that the real indoctrination centers can be found in many of the conventional academic programs with which they share a campus.
The programs’ unifying principle is a commitment to classical education through direct engagement with the works of great thinkers. In just two required classes, students at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education cover more than two millennia of topics ranging from classical philosophy to democratic socialism, with readings from Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Rousseau, Kant, Nietzsche, Lenin, Hayek, and Orwell. In just one class at UT Austin’s civic school, students are assigned the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and Aristotle, Polybius, Machiavelli, and Locke. The syllabi of these institutions are not solely devoted to conservative thought; they’re marked by remarkable ideological breadth.
The same cannot be said of conventional government or political science programs. For example, government majors at UT Austin can earn an undergraduate degree without ever encountering many of the seminal texts of Western political thought. As shown by the department’s listed requirements, a student can complete the major without having read the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, or any work of Enlightenment political philosophy. A student can fulfill the American Government requirement with classes like Blacks and the Media, Racial and Ethnic Politics, and Latina/o/x Citizenship. For political theory, students may select Marxism & Modern Political Thought, Mexican American Political Thought, or Visions of Emancipation.
A hypothetical UT Austin government major who actively seeks out traditional course offerings like American Government, meantime, receives very little exposure to primary sources. In this course, students spend just one class session on constitutional foundations, in which only two chapters from a textbook are assigned. This minimal study of the country’s foundational documents ensures that there’s enough class time for six lectures devoted to gender in U.S. politics. But even in gender politics, not a single primary source is assigned—neither Abigail Adams’s 1776 letter to John Adams nor Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Students in the UT Austin School of Civic Leadership’s Foundations of American Civics course read both.
The lack of primary sources undermines the American Government course’s objective of instilling a sophisticated understanding of U.S. politics. Students are left to formulate their understanding from secondary sources, including many overtly political ones like Michelle Alexander’s New Jim Crow. Ironically, the course includes an article warning that “Many Americans know nothing about their government.” Its author determines that the Common Core’s three required foundational documents—The Declaration, the U.S. Constitution, and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address—are “hardly sufficient.” Yet the class fails to heed that warning by offering students sustained engagement with the fundamentals of constitutional government.
Consider the Government department’s Citizenship in Democratic Politics. The class begins by asking a sensible and important question: What is democracy? But then it assigns no texts published before 2015. The course ends dramatically with a lecture entitled “Democracy in Peril,” where students read David Frum’s Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic and How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them.
By contrast, the University of Florida’s Hamilton School has a course that asks the same question and then assigns students readings of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Marx, and Arendt.
The civics schools’ emphasis on primary sources is not merely a pedagogical preference but an essential ingredient in forming independent thinkers. Without direct engagement with core texts, a student’s knowledge becomes derivative—merely a distillation of another’s interpretation. Centers for civic thought and leadership offer their students the opportunity to formulate their own judgments by studying the bedrock texts of political thought. In short, they teach students “how to think.” By contrast, the standard government and political science tracks focus on teaching students “what to think.”
Cicero warned that “the authority of those who profess to teach is a hindrance to those who desire to learn.” The centers for civic thought and leadership mitigate that risk by shifting authority away from the instructor and toward a diverse body of original texts, direct and unfiltered engagement with which offers the true promise of a liberal education.