Why I think the new Civics Centers will fail

Hint: the NCAA Transfer Portal

Almost in unison these past few years, “Civics” centers are cropping up at flagship campuses, mostly in red states – University of Florida’s Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education, North Carolina’s School of Civic Life and Leadership, University of Texas at Austin’s School of Civic Leadership, Ohio State’s Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society, University of Tennessee’s Institute of American Civics. There are others now working their way through state houses. According to press statements, they are being established to bring “balance” or “viewpoint diversity” to campuses that have seemed far too progressive and (to use the word of the era), “woke.” The legislative logic is to create new academic centers with new governance structure to “restore classical civics and leadership education” on campus.

At the same time, states including North Carolina, Texas, and Georgia are seeking to implement a mandated Civics Education course for all students. South Carolina already has such a requirement; Florida a similar one, as well as Arizona.

The higher ed press has been quick to cover these bumpy beginnings. But so far nobody has predicted how it will all, inevitably, end.

Some critiques are serious but not fatal. The left thinks Civics centers are too right wing. Others think they are too cloistered to change campus culture. Or there is no canon – there is no such discipline known as Civics or Civic Leadership or any of the other names. Even the oldest of these centers, ASU’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, founded in 2017, doesn’t claim a coherent canon (beyond “classic works”).

In the absence of a coherent canon or program I don’t see how there can be solidarity in the face of administrative incursion. And there will be incursion, whether the Center directors are aware of it or not. The NCAA transfer rules will demand it. I don’t see anyone on the academic side thinking through the implications of this.

What Problem are States Trying to Solve?

Are the Civic Life and Leadership Centers really designed to solve viewpoint diversity on campus? Maybe partly.

Compare the foundation of interdisciplinary Civics units to another interdisciplinary academic unit created in part to “solve” a campus problem: Black Studies (or African American Studies), protested into existence in the late 1960s. A strike founded San Francisco State’s College of Ethnic Studies in 1968, followed by calls across the country, including the armed occupation of Cornell’s Willard Straight Hall in 1969, which forced administrators to cede curricular authority to scholars and disciplines once excluded.

Black Studies undoubtedly solved the problem it was designed to: it pluralized the curriculum, diversified campuses across the country, supported new research and faculty lines. Universities took more seriously history and research questions overlooked or ignored. Students immediately flocked to the new courses (student newspapers talk of “overflow” and “standing room only”). Demand was never a problem. So by any account, Black Studies was successful.

Compare the trajectory of Civics, emerging largely from the South, flush with cash, with recurring public appropriations, protected status outside ordinary departmental vetoes, and a legislated mandate. Florida’s SB 266 not only created the Hamilton Center; it ordered every public campus to “prioritize instruction in Western and American political thought.” North Carolina’s trustees used the same language to justify the new center as did Ohio for the Chase Center and similar centers at other Ohio universities. These centers present themselves as having already inherited a canon – “great books,” “Western civilization,” the American founding.

But there is no real student demand. To have real impact (and return on legislative investment) they too will need full classes. Accordingly, more states are requiring students to take Civics courses. Why now?

The NCAA transfer rules are the problem States are trying to solve

Last year 31,000 athletes (including athletes at Florida, UNC, Texas, Tennessee, and Ohio State) entered the NCAA transfer portal. This figure may increase. The one-year sit-out rule was relaxed in 2021 with a “one-time transfer” rule, relaxed again in 2024, allowing athletes to play immediately after transfer, with some students leaving to play at a new school every year.

For student athletes to transfer successfully, they need a 2.6 cumulative GPA (which protects the team they are leaving from losing an APR retention point, when credits fail to transfer) and enough degree applicable credits to meet the NCAA’s “progress-toward-degree” benchmarks at the new school (six hours the first term, 24 the first year, 40/60/80% thereafter). A receiving school wants the newcomer on the field. The best writer to follow on this is Don Taylor.

What does this mean for undergraduate education? Schools must supply even more courses that are “substitutable bricks” for these players, that can stack toward a degree, that every other university will recognize and accept.

Some states have been working toward seamless transfer for years, such as North Carolina, with its transfer infrastructure. In fall 2024 17,349 students transferred into the 16-campus UNC System, primarily from community colleges. Every time a course travels cleanly with the student, it saves repeat work. At Chapel Hill a single 3-credit repeat costs a student nearly $1000 (tuition and fees). The economics make sense: faster completions mean a quicker bump to the tax base when graduates enter the workforce.

The economics are vastly higher stakes for NCAA student-athletes, where a credit that does not transfer could literally cost a school tens of millions of dollars.

Here’s how the math works: At Chapel Hill, which fields 800 or so student athletes (<1% of the student body) athletics brings in $164 million. One March Madness win is worth a $2 million “unit” to the ACC; UNC’s First Four victory this spring netted the league $4 million before the main bracket even began. The numbers for College Football are even higher: $4 million and can climb to $14 million by the semifinal. Calculate in ticket sales, media bonuses, donor gifts. Losing a star because he took an interesting, unique course that wouldn’t transfer to a new school is risking a seven-figure revenue hit.

The Duke transfer portal news just this past month shows just how serious this is. None of the sports coverage mentions the courses these athletes have been taking, assuming, it seems that at the back end (academics is the back end) all is well, every course taken is transferrable between schools. Who makes sure this happens? Stop wondering about higher ed administrative bloat.

Someone decided Civics Centers could help solve this problem¹

To quote James C. Scott, here’s the utopian dream: create a new set of Civics general education courses that look exactly like the Civics courses that all the other big universities are starting to offer. (The numbers are big – Florida serves about 730K undergraduates per year, Texas about 1.23 M; NC about 657K, Arizona about 198K). These State legislatures are already on board. As the foundation of these centers was already partly outside academic governance you solve two problems simultaneously: create courses that every NCAA athlete everywhere will take while skirting faculty senate protests about quality.

Right now, student athletes are advised to take the same 100- or 1000-level general education classes that every registrar knows will slot cleanly anywhere: first-year writing, college algebra, public speaking, introductory psychology or sociology, U.S. history survey, and basic science. The NCAA’s (pre-2024) Diploma Dashboards show that most majors are business, with STEM, Social Science, and Communication in play. Athletes take courses in communication, sociology, general studies, interdisciplinary liberal arts, criminal justice, and sports management, which exist at most transfer destinations, in majors that allow a high share of electives and few pre-requisite chains that derail eligibility when credits don’t map. High profile transfers still have to complete classes.

But at all universities there is (or should be) high variance. For athletes, unique and rigorous courses are flagged by advisors as hazards unless the athlete is certain of staying put. Many athletes switch out of high-credit technical majors to keep transfer doors open. By junior year a typical student-athlete transcript will show a heavy front end of transferable gen eds, a concentration of electives in one of six “cluster” majors (which student athletes gravitate toward) and very few unique or campus-specific courses.

I suspect that legislators behind the Civics centers will try to turn Civics into a “cluster” major, with the first task tagging Civics rhetoric courses as fulfilling first-year writing. Why? Because of the social justice pedagogies that dominate the writing field, embraced by the adjuncts and graduate students who staff these courses at about $4,000 a course, a model that some describe as a servant class. Texas is trying to end “critical race theory” legislatively but this is the better idea.²

My very first university teaching experience, as a graduate student at CU Boulder in the mid-1990s, was teaching first-year writing to a class half full of football players. Kafka’s Metamorphosis was on the syllabus (I didn’t pick the readings) and they were sort of interested in this. I’m sure there was some teaching and learning involved because I threw myself into my task. But the class was a semester-long box-checking enterprise for everyone. I don’t blame today’s teachers for making things political because how else do you keep exhausted athletes awake?

If Florida or North Carolina tag Civics rhetoric courses as meeting the official lower-division writing requirement, any student-athlete who moves across state lines will want full credit. Receiving systems, say SUNY or one of the California systems, are most likely already seeing the trend and planning for pre-approved equivalency. A nationwide market for a “Rhetoric & Civic Argument I-II” sequence will emerge with specified learning outcomes and a shared template to guarantee portability without friction. Faculty will protest, of course. But to create or replace a state mandated first-year writing course would not be hard: map the same “learning outcomes” to speeches anchored in “founding texts.”

I would welcome the thoughts of sports writers covering the NCAA transfer portal, what they are seeing/hearing.

Note that South Carolina, Florida, and Arizona have all met their new Civics mandates on the cheap, by retrofitting the U.S. history/government surveys they were already running, not by hiring new faculty. South Carolina’s 2021 REACH Act simply designates the existing HIST/POLI 201 sequence (or a Blackboard module for transfers) as the required 3-credit course that covers the required content. Florida’s SB 1108 (2021) does the same with POS 2041 (American Government) and AMH 2020 (U.S. History since 1877), layering a statewide civics exam on top. Most sections are taught by lecturers, adjuncts or graduate TAs. Arizona’s Board of Regents updated Policy 2-210 so every undergraduate must satisfy an “American Institutions” area, again by scaling up 400-seat POS 110 and HIS 103 surveys that pre-date the change.

Critics are already questioning whether this scaling up has educational value. At South Carolina, transfer students can simply click through a no-instructor Blackboard quiz. In Florida, parents and faculty raised concerned that the civics test “dumbs down” college civics, Meanwhile, the University of Arizona Faculty Senate warns that the swift rollout of its American Institutions curriculum risks becoming “politically loaded” and assessment-driven at the expense of scholarly rigor.

Until then, the question is this: what will these new Civics centers do when asked to oversee courses for hundreds of thousands of students (if not millions) without an existing pool of trained faculty ? The most likely outcome is to convert Ph.D. candidates and under-employed MAs into “civics lecturers,” pay them adjunct rates, and hand them a common syllabus, like in first year writing. Given advances in AI, all general education courses should be delivered by AI, as I have been arguing, but until the NCAA agrees that AI-taught classes will “count” toward progress-to-degree, this won’t happen.

A credit factory, I predict, is what Civics education will become in three years. The Civics centers will fail because the centralized machinery of seamless transfer, seat counts, and dashboard targets narrows the field of action for the bulk of the faculty. Centers will be pleading for new funding to “support instructional quality,” just like writing center directors’ annual fight for a living-wage stipend, turning them into social justice warriors when it was rejected. Civics Centers will turn into the units they were meant to replace.

Ultimately, the American push for state-chartered, credit-bearing civics centers is sui generis: no other OECD member – neither Australia with its federally funded Civics & Citizenship Education Hub nor Europe under the Bologna Accord’s credit-portability regime – compels every college student to take a constitution-and-founding-documents course embedded in general education. This is a US phenomenon.

Anyone who thought that the Civics Center legislation was about deeper conversation about the republic was not paying attention for the decade as first-year writing and all gen ed was flattened into transferable “skills” that soon states will be using AI to deliver.³

In the end, the new Civics centers will “solve” the problems administrators know how to measure – seat allocation, transfer articulation, athletic eligibility – not civic ignorance. There will be little serious wrestling with “foundational texts,” at least in the mandated classes.

All seamless transfer policies equate logistical uniformity with actual learning, prioritizing plumbing for water. What education flows with the credits?

1

• 2010-16 zero movement.

• 2017 ASU’s SCETL and Purdue’s Cornerstone.

• 2022 Florida’s Hamilton and UT-Austin’s Civitas double the total.

• 2023 UT-Knoxville’s IAC, OSU’s Chase Center, UNC-Chapel Hill’s SCiLL—plus three fresh white papers (Kansas, Kentucky, West Texas A&M).

• 2024-25 West Virginia’s center moves from concept (orange, 2024) to enacted (gold, 2025).

2. The swift birth of Hamilton, Chase, UNC SCLL proved that legislatures can earmark money, create a school, and have its courses appear in the Humanities or Civic Literacy gen ed column within a year. ASU’s SCETL, for example, already offers many courses that satisfy lower-division General Studies requirements (Humanities HU, Social-Behavioral Sciences SB, Historical Awareness H, Cultural Diversity C, Civic Literacy CIVI, Advanced Literacy L, etc.)

3. When the quality or expertise of the faculty do not matter, when the learning outcomes are all that matter, the answer is AI delivery of general education, as I have argued here and here. When states have determined the learning outcomes, they can be embedded as system prompts in the AI/LLM. The “class” becomes a structured dialogue: each week students receive a scenario prompt – say about the 14th amendment or habeas corpus – together with a guide to the intellectual understanding expected. Students refine the prompt, interrogate the model’s answer, and produce a brief artifact demonstrating competence. Every exchange is logged, every artifact appended, forming a transparent portfolio of learning. ​This is what should happen, if big athletics universities are paying attention.