Civics Centers as Ivory Towers

Federalism in the classroom, silence on the street

I often wonder what America’s founding generation would think about the preoccupation with universities over town halls and state capitals as somehow the most important sites for debates about citizenship and freedom.

The Federalist Papers were published in newspapers and addressed to the citizens of New York. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay assumed their readers would deliberate about ratification in public—in taverns, town halls, state legislatures, and ratifying conventions. They presumed that constitutional debates would happen among the people who would live under the government being proposed. Universities appear nowhere in the Federalist Papers, and when Washington and Madison later advocated for a national university, the purpose was regional unity among elites, not civic instruction for all. The idea that citizenship is primarily formed in a classroom rather than in the practice of self-government would have puzzled the founders.

And yet the worry that college students aren’t being taught about American citizenship, constitutionalism, and liberal self-government provoked state governments across the South and Midwest (and spreading outward in the last three years) to appropriate well over $160 million to establish freestanding civics programs inside public universities, with protected budgets, faculty lines, and a mandate to teach foundational texts.¹

The argument went something like this: universities were failing in their civic duty. Humanities and social science departments had become “leftist hotbeds” of critical theory and identity politics, cancelling anyone to their right, and shirking all responsibility to make citizens that understood the rigorous demands of liberty.

What’s missing from the “let’s found a civic center” response is a clear theory of how campus politics translate into civic life. Is the point of these centers to reform universities or to educate citizens for the practice of self-government? The distinction matters because what happens on campus is mostly ignored outside, in the real world. Most communities resolve disagreements through Robert’s Rules of Order rather than curated debates that “viewpoint diversity” apps are selling. If legislators really believe that the best place to teach citizenship is in college classrooms, I’d like to see the argument for it.

So far, all the intellectual “civics” energy has been directed inward, as another front in the campus culture war, with social media posts crowing about conservative speakers and the end of “woke.” When the Hamilton Center or the School of Civic Life and Leadership speaks of “courage” or “robust discourse,” they’re talking about voicing an unpopular opinion in a seminar room. Civics seems only concerned with campus power. The “tyranny” they oppose is the tyranny of social ostracization or overreach by DEI bureaucrats.

They aren’t talking about Minnesota.

Whatever one thinks of federal immigration enforcement in principle, the civil rights conflicts in Minnesota over the past several weeks are all about limits of federal executive power, the role of individuals and states in resisting federal action, the doctrine of First Amendment retaliation, the standards for Fourth Amendment stops and detentions, and the administrative-law constraints on major enforcement campaigns. Hundreds of encounters have generated primary-source material: pleadings, judicial orders, official statements, and video evidence circulating widely enough that national media are showing frame-by-frame reconstructions of harrowing incidents.

What protections should a citizen expect when questioning the actions of federal agents? A U.S. citizen was shot and killed. Dozens of legal observers have been detained for standing and filming on public sidewalks and in their own cars. Deploying federal agents unilaterally overrode state and local policing priorities. The National Guard has been mobilized to monitor federal agents. The Minnesota Attorney General has sued the Department of Homeland Security, citing the Tenth Amendment, arguing that the federal government lacks the authority to commandeer the streets of a sovereign jurisdiction. All of this is testing the vertical separation of powers and the ability of a state to protect its citizens from federal overreach.

Centers don’t have to issue partisan statements or declare a preferred outcome. But you’d think there would be some interest in framing the real constitutional issues for students. What are the doctrines at stake, what readings might connect the Founders’ fears of consolidated power to contemporary enforcement capacity? How best to analyze the difference between lawful authority and abusive practice?

I have seen nothing from the major institutes—Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas. Granted, many universities have been on winter break, but as of January 20, the public-facing news and events pages for the Hamilton School, UNC’s School of Civic Life and Leadership, UT Austin’s School of Civic Leadership, Ohio State’s Chase Center, and Tennessee’s Institute of American Civics show no programming, statements, or commentary addressing the Minnesota conflict. Their feeds remain oriented toward grants, faculty announcements, curriculum development, and general constitutional commentary, not the Fourth Amendment implications of checkpoints in St. Paul.

Again, these new civics centers did not sell themselves as ordinary departments told to hush because of institutional neutrality. Their founding was justified by legislators as corrective units to better teach civic responsibility, rigorous engagement with constitutional structure, and the preparation of citizens capable of sustaining a free society. Ohio State’s Chase Center builds on the politics of its namesake: Salmon P. Chase’s opinions are “still regularly cited today,” including cases that affirmed “federalism and limited and enumerated powers.” The center was established by the State of Ohio in 2023. Tennessee’s Institute of American Civics is equally state-centered in its founding documents: state law defines its purpose as fostering understanding of “the structures and institutions of federal, state, and local government,” and even authorizes it to provide “nonpartisan resources” to “state government agencies,” while also specifying that it may be physically housed in the Howard H. Baker, Jr. Center at UT Knoxville. UT’s announcement of its institute emphasizes state politics, describing the $6 million appropriation by the governor and lawmakers.

If federalism, limited powers, and the state’s place in the constitutional order are part of the public identity here, why the silence on the clashes in Minnesota? What, to these state-founded centers, are the state’s rights and remedies when federal agents override local policy in the name of enforcement, and what protections constrain federal power when protest, detention, and street-level coercion become the arena of constitutional conflict?

Enough preoccupation with campus politics, I say. Surely the goal of establishing centers for civic education was for more than training students to tilt at academic windmills. The founding generation, who understood tyranny well, would laugh at the idea that the enemy was gender studies.

The civics centers were sold to legislators and taxpayers as places to make citizens. Protected budgets and dedicated faculty lines were justified precisely because civic education was too important to leave to departments that might subordinate constitutional principles to ideological fashion.

Minnesota is the test of that premise. The doctrines at stake—federalism, executive overreach, the rights of citizens against a standing enforcement apparatus—are central to the conservative intellectual tradition the centers claim to embody.

The silence suggests the centers may have been designed for the narrower purpose of simply winning arguments inside the academy. Civics centers face pressure to fill seats. Student interest is thin, even as more centers are being founded, in Utah and West Virginia. The likely end is that they’ll be absorbed into the general education machinery, as I’ve argued. But the centers have already shown what they’re for, and it isn’t federalism in action. If legislators wanted citizens, the $160 million would have been better spent on courtroom access, civic journalism, or legal aid: institutions that engage constitutional questions where the stakes are arrest, detention, and death rather than seminar-room discomfort.

The Federalist Papers appeared in newspapers because the founding generation understood that civic argument happens in public, among citizens with something at stake. They did not write the Bill of Rights to protect unpopular opinions in faculty meetings. They wrote it to constrain the coercive power of the state. Civics centers that cannot address that coercive power in action have not yet justified their existence.

1. The University of Texas System committed $100 million to UT Austin’s School of Civic Leadership to restore “classical civics and leadership education.” North Carolina lawmakers directed UNC–Chapel Hill to establish the School of Civic Life and Leadership to foster “public discourse and civil engagement” informed by American history and political tradition, supported by biennial appropriations. Florida authorized the University of Florida’s trustees to use state funds to establish the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education, later developed into the Hamilton School. Tennessee lawmakers appropriated $6 million for the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, framed as a statewide effort to strengthen civic education and constructive debate. Ohio’s legislature created the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at Ohio State as part of a statewide civics consortium, with the center describing its mission in terms of civic renewal and foundational principles.