A Civic Education That Extends America

In their recent essay in National Affairs, Daniel DiSalvo and Carlo Accetti argue that civic education should function as “a condition for making partisanship into a productive component of self-government.” That is a conviction worth taking seriously. The aim of civic education at colleges and universities today cannot simply be to dampen political disagreement, but to give it a shared framework within which citizens can genuinely disagree. This matters beyond the classroom. Students will enter a world of constant conflict and competing claims, and how well they have learned to navigate them those will not only shape their own civic lives, but the health of the communities and institutions to which they belong. 

The harder task is figuring out what that framework demands. Minimally, it means asking what our colleges and universities have historically said their civic purpose was, why that purpose is fiercely contested, and whose voices and traditions have been left out of the conversation as we chart a path forward. 

Universities and Their Charters

The United States formerly ascribed great importance to civic education. That’s evident to anyone who has examined the charters and founding documents of institutions of U.S. higher learning, as I have done. Many speak about the importance of civic virtue, discharging one’s duties to the wider community, and being useful to society. In the 1789 Act Establishing the University of North Carolina, the mission was to fit students “for an honorable discharge of social duties of life….” In 1818, the Board of Commissioners for the University of Virginia told us that the task of the University was to form students to “habits of reflection, and correct action, and rendering them examples of virtue to others and of happiness within themselves.” In 1764, the institution where I teach, Brown University, declared that “institutions for liberal education are highly beneficial to society by forming the rising generation to virtue, knowledge, and useful literature, and thus preserving in the community a succession of men duly qualified for discharging the offices of life with usefulness and reputation…” And when the Morrill Act of 1862 was passed, and when it was extended in 1890, it provided lands for states to found schools of higher learning and also fund a set of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The goal was at once to democratize access while promoting the “liberal and practical education of the industrial classes.” Who could participate expanded, but the mission remained.

That original charters often spoke in this way is not a sufficient reason to affirm the mission. The affirmation that I would make, however, is less about blind fidelity, and more about our continued critical attachment to the political vision that makes our free and equal existence possible. In orienting students to liberal education, the charters and founding documents of America’s colleges and universities are not neutral to the fact that we remain in spirit, if not always in practice and in all quarters, an aspiring democracy. The charters envision liberal education as the key training ground not just for political participation, but for the habits of mind and character that sustain a democratic culture, and I agree with that claim. Yet I worry that some of today’s efforts at civic renewal are being undermined by the very political dynamics that brought them into existence. 

Civic Renewal and Educational Decline

Today’s observers often diagnose polarization in higher education, then prescribe civic education as a remedy. In his 2024 essay, “Higher Education Reform, Civic Thought, and Liberal Education,” Peter Berkowitz argues that “our colleges and universities have been . . . indoctrinating students in leftist articles of faith: The one and only prism for viewing moral and political life is the distinction between oppressor and oppressed….” He identifies the period from the 1960s through the 1990s as the era of the rise of illiberalism in higher education. His lament updates and extends Allan Bloom’s earlier assault on the 1960s in his famous The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. He too viewed the period as a moment of decline in American education.  

The claim, in short, is that universities have narrowed political and moral life to a single ideological lens, and in doing so, have alienated half the country. They must therefore rebuild the trust they once held by recovering their original civic mission. Berkowitz’s view is a frequent one on the political right, where universities are now thought to be hotbeds of ideological conformity and political radicalism. 

These accounts too quickly assume that the trust deficit is primarily the product of universities themselves. They also downplay the politicization of universities by external, mostly conservative, forces. This line of criticism leaves insufficient room for the possibility that universities have also become targets in a broader political effort to erode confidence in institutions, expertise, and forms of independent authority. 

This raises a problem for the ongoing attempt to foster institutionalized schools of civic thought at public and private universities. As Steve Teles notes in his recent essay “Beyond Academic Sectarianism,” creating a parallel intellectual universe at a university, and calling it a school of civic thought, has become a popular strategy to ensure conservative representation in the academy. But that strategy may backfire: 

Such schools, however, may “simply reinforce the polarization of higher education” that they seek to address.

We should also think carefully about the historical transformation of the university in the middle to late decades of the last century. The 1960s through the 1990s were precisely when we began to see an infusion of diversity into colleges and universities, both in the student body and the faculty.¹ What is said to be the moment of illiberalism was an important period in democratizing higher education, expanding the ranks of the professoriate, and diversifying the curriculum with substantive points of view that already defined the changing landscape of American life. 

But if we interpret the era of diversification of colleges and universities as also the era of their decline, as Berkowitz invites us to do, then the renewed interest in civic education risks collapsing into a nostalgic longing for an older, less democratic vision of higher education. 

The Diversity the Revival Forgets

 Here we find the tension within many civic education initiatives themselves. If the goal is viewpoint diversity and a richer conversation about democratic life, why do so many of these civic thought centers struggle with racial and ethnic diversity among their faculty, fellows, and invited speakers? Why are they so often populated by scholars drawn from a relatively narrow set of intellectual and political networks? Are we really to believe that only one segment of American intellectual life has something meaningful to say about citizenship, constitutionalism, civic obligation, and national identity? If institutionalized schools of civic thought are worth having, then the traditions and voices they draw on should reflect the actual range of American political thought and practices, not just one corner of it. 

African-American history alone, for example, contains some of the deepest reflections on these questions. In my book The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought, I argued that figures such as Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ella Baker, and James Baldwin devoted their lives to asking what it means to belong to a democratic people, what democratic responsibility requires, and how a nation might reconcile its principles with its practices. They were profoundly interested, I maintain, in the habits and virtues required of us to meet the democratic aspiration. For this very reason, there is much to learn from them. 

Yet they hardly spoke in a unified voice. Douglass has often been read as a defender of natural rights and constitutionalism, even as he struggled with the betrayals of Reconstruction and the limits of the United States in recognizing the free and equal status of African Americans. Du Bois moved from confidence in an elite-based vision of democracy toward a more egalitarian and internationalist one. He raised questions about the moral and political exhaustion of American democracy itself. Ella Baker questioned whether leadership-centered politics could successfully cultivate people’s ability to advocate for themselves and govern in their name.  Attending to these differences requires precisely the forms of intellectual diversity, interpretive openness, and civic inquiry that advocates of civic education rightly prize but sometimes fail to realize in practice. It also requires that we recognize African-American thought and experience as central rather than peripheral to America’s ongoing and often frustrated goal to be better than it is.²

Two Visions of Civic Education

The question, then, is not whether higher education should recover a civic mission. Paul Carrese is right that problems of social disintegration require a recommitment to our shared project and an understanding of the virtues that enable us to manage disagreement within that project. This, though, forces another, more significant question—namely, whether civic education will foster a genuinely expansive inquiry into democratic life, or whether it will become another arena in which political factions seek to reproduce their preferred vision of the nation. 

Here one must move with care and qualification. I have centered a set of figures that undoubtedly capture one way of affirming the nation. Importantly, I think, it is a set of figures that always spoke about expanding freedom and equality rather than narrowing their scope. A civic education that does not take a stand on the scope of freedom and equality in its very framework lends itself to profound confusion. And if it does take a stand on this, but to the exclusion of these figures, then the question of its aims becomes unavoidable. An inclusive institution strengthens democracy by expanding its scope, and a non-inclusive institution does not. The latter treats democracy as a settled inheritance, while the former thinks of civic education in a democracy as an unfinished project aimed at expanding its participants. The non-inclusive institution narrows us in imagination and in civic life; the inclusive one aspires to expand us.

The difference between these two ways of thinking about civic education is also a difference in how we understand our fundamental framework of getting on together. Educating students to civic life must be about recognizing democracy as an ongoing project of formation rather than an accomplished fact. I am reminded of that powerful line of Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval in his reflection on what he took to be a healthy relationship to the constitution:

Jefferson’s insistence on critical engagement stands against blind fidelity. He understood that thinkers from the past, philosophical schools of thought, Founders and Framers can be useful because they draw our attention to the perennial questions of social organization. But he also thought, and we should hold on to this idea, that past actors had their go at things, with their distinct problems and concerns. We must now have ours. This point becomes even more significant when we consider that we inherit those perennial questions and often must deal with the consequences of an earlier generation’s answers. Viewed from this perspective, students must come to acquire skills and habits of judgment necessary to bear this burden with something more than luck while affirming their own dignity and that of their fellow citizens. 

And yet one must insist: judgment cannot be neutral among possibilities, no more than the founding of many universities was neutral with respect to training students to be useful to society. Students in a democratic society must learn to distinguish between those traditions and iterations of our past that expand freedom and equality and those that do not. This is what civic education must make possible.