Western Civ on Mars

Where that Utah mandate may work best

Everyone has asked me, as a former humanities dean in Utah, what I think about Utah’s new “Western Civ” bill, just signed into law, creating a new Center for Civic Excellence at Utah State University. Ok I will tell you. But to make it interesting, I will answer in the context of what I call “Elon Musk thinking” – what would this legislation look like on Mars?

The brilliance of approaching conditions on Earth by imagining a do-over on Mars is that it demands truly fresh thinking. If we were going to have colonies on Mars of any substantial size would everyone have a car and a garage? No. Would we need to be super-efficient in resource management and infrastructure construction? Yes. What would HUD or the Post Office look like? Both would be lean and efficient. Would the weight of Earth’s history be lifted such that Mars colonists would see each other as equals more easily than they do on Earth? This seems to be the goal.

I think about the question “what does higher ed look like on Mars” all the time. (I’ve already posted on Stanford on the Moon.) Were Musk to ask me, I’d redesign a university from scratch, asking fundamental questions about what the point of it all is, why Earthlings for millennia seemed to think that founding colleges was important, what we can learn from history about what worked and why efficiency metrics have broken the sector. I would throw out the airlock much of the academic bureaucracy – accreditation checklists, state-mandated learning outcomes, credit-hour mandates, diversity mandates, curriculum committees, time-to-graduation metrics, faculty development evaluations, job placement statistics, articulation agreements for credit transfer – all that red tape. Mars U would be about hiring the best faculty members to teach all that cannot be learned on an AI platform (as I’ve argued) and giving them the freedom and autonomy to teach according to their expertise.¹ As someone who thinks most public higher education general education programs in the U.S. in the AI era are wasteful and deeply problematic, this project is exciting.

The stakes of higher education on Mars are existentially different. With limited physical resources and the constant danger of environmental catastrophe, some ideas would need to be accepted as foundational. Questions of basic governance and resource allocation could not be continuously relitigated. And yet innovation would be crucial for survival. So Mars U would need to model both intellectual conformity on survival-critical issues and radical freedom to innovate.

Mars-born college students, presumably already steeped in practical lessons for survival, will need to understand some version of humanity’s intellectual heritage. They need to learn the good, the bad, and the ugly about the planet they left behind. The Western tradition offers positive lessons about governance, scientific inquiry, and human flourishing but also cautionary tales about authoritarianism, environmental exploitation, and ideological rigidity. So with that in mind…

Western Civ on Mars

Offering a coherent general education curriculum centered on great texts and meaningful questions about the human condition is, first, a good idea for Mars U students. In the absence of Mars literature and culture, it is worthwhile to focus on what worked on Earth: the individual minds and societal structures that enabled the human race to flourish, to solve technological challenges, and to invent rocket ships to explore the galaxy. The Utah bill doesn’t address any of the hard questions of implementation. That’s fine – that’s what Musk hired me to do.

The Utah bill outlines specific texts and thinkers for study but remains silent on how this learning should occur. On Mars, with limited physical resources, educational delivery would likely differ significantly from Earth norms. Digital learning environments, AI-assisted instruction, or even brain-computer interfaces might replace traditional classrooms. Would these technological mediations fundamentally change how students engage with “foundational primary texts,” as the Utah bill calls the category? The focus on content without addressing delivery methods leaves open intriguing possibilities for Mars education.

The Utah bill creates an efficient structure where a single vice-provost – this is my job in this thought experiment – appoints all faculty, approves all teaching materials, and evaluates all faculty and student performance in general education courses. It’s a big job and I would come at it with humility. I’ve got a picture of the great inventor/polymath Benjamin Franklin on my desk, whose list of virtues ends with “Humility: “imitate Jesus and Socrates.” Yikes. Mars students should learn that key traditions of Western civilization were founded by teachers who felt so strongly about how people should live that they were willing to die for their views. Socrates was executed for “corrupting the youth” by encouraging them to question authority and conventional wisdom. We do want this on Mars, but in moderation.

The bill specifies engagement with “the intellectual contributions of ancient Israel, ancient Greece, and Rome; and the rise of Christianity, medieval Europe, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and post-Enlightenment.” A magnificent tradition, certainly, with Homer, Plato, and Shakespeare listed. These are texts I’ve taught for years and as vice provost and I’m happy to include them. It’s good to see Chinua Achebe and Lao Tzu as well – I’ve taught both. Could I hire a philosophy professor to teach a unit comparing Platonic and Daoist approaches to governance? The legislation doesn’t explicitly prohibit it, but the Western emphasis is unmistakable. Is this what we want on Mars? I think so.

If I start with Socrates, I would be inviting questions about the nature of my extraordinary authority. I would be in a Philosopher King position that Plato might have endorsed but that Socrates would raise an eyebrow or cup of hemlock too. Let me table Socrates for now until I confer with Mars U upper leadership to confirm my power.

In my experience, teaching “perennial questions about the human condition” to first-year humanities students at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins works best with multiple cultural perspectives. I’m reminded of two Chinese students in a Bible as Literature course who were aghast to learn that most American kindergartens have cartoon posters of “a genocide” – Noah’s Ark – on their walls. I think this would be an excellent conversation on Mars, where the goal would be to build a culture without genocide. Does the legislation prohibit teaching the Bible as a text of genocide? Yikes. I’ll table this for now too.

Speaking of utopia, it’s clear that the Utah legislation imagines classrooms neatly organized around foundational debates, with students poring thoughtfully over Shakespeare and Locke, with earnest professors carefully shepherding civil discourse. But universities are the opposite of utopia. Only in the movies are there such idyllic scenes. Classrooms are messy places of intellectual discovery, debate, and faculty autonomy bordering on rebellion.

It is expensive to fly faculty to Mars. So the usual choices of, say, hiring a widely published renowned senior classics scholar who challenges Plato, thinking his utopian republic is dangerously authoritarian, or a fresh-faced newly minted PhD who has never had a job outside of academia, who will dutifully present Plato as a timeless sage without critique, are even higher stakes than usual. What does the legislation suggest? What would Musk do? What is expertise? Would I choose death rather than compromise on this? Tabling for now.

As a scholar of 19^th century American history, I might volunteer (for free!) to teach Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, a text beloved by legislators for its sharp-eyed praise of early American democracy. I might teach it alongside the Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers I co-edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., which we saw as a kind of companion to Tocqueville, introducing writings by some of the most disempowered Americans who showed unbelievable spirit and optimism, immersing themselves in the great texts of Western civilization, founding schools to educate future generations. What a model for Mars U students!

And yet, I fear I would be accused of teaching race difference and racism. The category of “foundational primary texts” on enduring themes such as liberty, justice, and the good life ought to include works by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Hannah Crafts, about how important liberty and justice and the freedom to live a good life meant to Americans initially left out. But it’s risky. Yikes. Tabling this idea for now too.

Academic Freedom on Mars

The Utah bill mandates one person to approve syllabi, evaluate teachers annually, hire and fire at-will instructors. Despite my yikes above, the centralized, efficient power structure is necessary on Mars, even if it seems like bureaucratic meddling and surveillance. I imagine my English professor friends sending me their syllabi for approval, making sure their interpretations of Shakespeare or Woolf don’t veer too far into contested political territory. My friends know I’m thoughtful and benevolent, so my questions will be about helping avoid trouble; my detractors will think I’m meddling (which of course is the point of the role).

Say I approve a Shakespeare course with two weeks on Twelfth Night, on how gender fluidity is a recurring theme in Western civilization (if you’ve read the play you know this is legitimate). The Utah bill’s requirement that syllabi be posted publicly online, keyword searchable and readily accessible, means that in fact I don’t have power if a parent complains. It sounds transparent and democratic, but in reality, it sets the stage for ideological battles to be fought not in the university but on social media (on Mars X) and in the halls of Mars government. I’m more at risk than the faculty member I’d need to ship back to Earth, unless the Mars students advocate for gender innovations.

And what about Mars U students? As the offspring of intrepid Mars colonists, I cannot expect them to be passive vessels into which a curriculum is poured. They would be sharp, critical, and differently safety minded (it will never not be dangerous to live on Mars). They will question ideas in new ways. How is a Western civ faculty member to shepherd civil discourse around the question: “why can’t I make an embryo with my sister or my daughter?”

Even on Earth, what the Utah bill assumes will be a smoothly operating engine of civic virtue will surely be a complicated, contested experiment, a civics lesson in itself, demonstrating how democracy, education, and intellectual freedom rarely march neatly in line. The academic freedom arguments are real.

What about figures like Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, both geographically Western, yet ideologically disruptive? There is no question that both shaped Western intellectual history, though neither appears on the bill’s list. Would they be useful on Mars? It would surely be helpful for a young Mars student looking at Earth to understand their influence.

And then there’s Freud, whose works, like Darwin’s and Marx’s, have left an indelible mark on Western intellectual history, on literature, psychology, philosophy, and popular culture. Freud’s messy, uncomfortable emphasis on humanity’s darker impulses does not allow him to fit neatly into the orderly picture of civic virtue and moral clarity imagined by lawmakers. And yet might it not be helpful to teach Mars youth how Freud’s theories of unconscious desire, sexuality, repression, and human irrationality are why some people decided it would be best to start over on another planet?

One appeal of Mars is the chance to escape Earth’s historical burdens. Mars could be a place where people see each other as equals more easily than they do on Earth. The best way to teach the Western tradition is through the arguments for meritocracy and warnings about how quickly new hierarchies can form.

Given the hard realities of Mars life, the educational canon will always involve tradeoffs between a cultural question and a survival one. So it’s important to ask what aspects of Earth’s intellectual heritage merit inclusion. The Western tradition’s emphasis on individual rights and scientific inquiry will matter, but so do Eastern traditions of communal harmony and resource stewardship.

Showing Problem Faculty the Door (or the airlock)

The Utah bill specifies that all instructors will be on two-year “at-will” appointments. This is the key problem for a Mars thought experiment. Nobody is going to risk Socratic thinking under these circumstances, even without wondering if they’d be paid for the six month trip back to Earth if they got fired. Socrates himself might appreciate the irony: “I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state... arousing and persuading and reproaching... And now you have killed me, you will not easily find another like me.”

Under a structure where every general education instructor serves at the pleasure of a single administrator, I can’t even imagine how a renowned scholar of American history might teach the Federalist Papers. “Today, students, we will explore Hamilton's views on executive power. But please note that my interpretation has been pre-approved by the vice-provost, and my continued employment depends on not straying too far from the approved viewpoint.”

And yet. On Earth, certainly I can imagine the outrage on X when a faculty member assigned Edward Said alongside Rudyard Kipling. But such a pairing may work on Mars because the whole point of a Mars colony would be to avoid the geopolitics that produced both Said and Kipling.

After re-reading the legislation, attending more closely to the tension between its stated goals and methods: championing “viewpoint diversity and civil discourse” yet creating a highly centralized structure for curriculum and faculty oversight; celebrating critical thinking while prescribing specific textual traditions; emphasizing “engagement with enduring questions of meaning, purpose, and value” but placing this engagement within a tightly controlled administrative framework; I’m concluding that the only place the Utah bill will work without fireworks is on Mars.

So I hope I have answered everyone’s question. I believe in the law’s potential (and I like Great Books!) but only on Mars would it be possible to navigate comfort with a benevolent dictatorship (the only logical ruling structure for a Mars colony and a Mars university) with the wisdom and nuance that the great texts of Western civ teach us. Will Mars U students come away with more or less commitment to democracy? With more or less annoyance with Philosopher Kings? With a higher or lower value on freedom and justice and the good life? These are the gadfly questions to ask.

1. Maybe a couple of deans to take the complaints, as Jethro advised Moses, but with as minimal bureaucracy as possible.