Saving The Humanities
Maybe it will. In the years since Trump was first elected, the GOP has shifted its battle tactics. Rather than just letting humanities departments die off, red-state legislatures have flooded public universities with something like a Works Progress Administration for academics. These new programs, dubbed civic centers, are designed to reclaim and “save” the humanities from their capture by the left, reinstate ideological diversity in higher education, and restore Great Books programming. To my surprise, I learned that the most important of these centers—the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education—was stationed at my humble alma mater.
Many of the Founding Fathers believed that our democratic republic’s prosperity would depend on a system of rigorous public education. The duty of legislatures, wrote John Adams, was to secure the general diffusion of “wisdom and knowledge” among the people. George Washington’s last will and testament included a proposal and bequest for establishing a national university. (It was never realized.) Benjamin Rush wrote that a national system of public education would bind Americans together and turn them into “republican machines” ready to “perform their parts properly, in the great machine of the government of the state.”
The contemporary civic-center movement, which claims to uphold this mantle, was born in Arizona in 2017, when Arizona State University set up the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at the behest of the state’s Republican-controlled legislature. When the center attracted criticism in outlets like the New York Times, its founding director issued a statement defending its “mission to reconnect liberal education and civic education.” This is the thesis underlying the civic-center movement: that there is a natural affinity between a liberal-arts education—often combining materials like the Federalist Papers and lectures on John Locke and John Stuart Mill—and an ability to bridge differences and participate with informed enthusiasm in the American political process.
