• In response to the failure of universities to provide a robust education on American history and civics, several state legislatures have established civics schools on public university campuses.
• These civics schools are independent academic units dedicated to educating students and citizens on the ideals and institutions of our constitutional republic.
• Unfortunately, the academic establishment has opposed these efforts to restore American civics to higher education. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has pledged to “knock out” the civics schools.
• To ensure that the civics schools have the ability to pursue their important missions, state governments must provide strong protections in state law that guarantee their independence from hostile faculty and administrators.
• This report offers a checklist of recommended provisions in state law and concludes with model legislation, drawing on current and proposed legislative provisions that would promote the flourishing of civics schools while allowing students to bypass some of the failings of legacy departments.

Despite universities’ claims of training America’s future leaders—as, for example, Princeton’s informal pledge to be “In the Nation’s Service”—college students graduate with profound ignorance of the basics of American civic institutions^[ii] Higher education is simply failing to prepare students to be informed citizens of the world’s oldest constitutional republic. The tale of civic ignorance is told by too many sorry data points. In a 2018 survey, 60 percent of adults could not identify the countries that the United States fought in World War II. More than half didn’t know how many justices sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.^[iii] Does anyone believe that recent college graduates score significantly better in these metrics? A 2025 study found that fewer than half of all Americans even know their state has a constitution, even though state governments are the primary governing institution in our compound federal republic.^[iv] And in 2026, nearly two-thirds (61 percent) of Gen Z survey respondents failed to identify what America’s 250^th anniversary commemorated.^[v] Nor does it seem that universities are even trying to fill this knowledge gap: according to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, fewer than 20 percent of the more than 1,100 universities it surveyed required a general education course in American history or government. And it’s highly doubtful that the small percentage that do require such a course have designed it to convey essential civic knowledge.^[vi]

Treating the disease of civic ignorance requires new interventions, not just larger doses of the same failed medicines. Simply requiring students to take more American government courses or hiring more political science professors will fail to restore civic health or awareness of constitutional principles when those disciplines have lost interest in those principles. The discipline of political science has unfortunately followed in the footsteps of many other academic fields, favoring research and teaching on race, gender, and “systemic oppression” rather than on the principles of our constitutional republic. A leading academic journal in political science, The American Political Science Review, was captured by professors who gave explicit preference to research that examined identity politics, while all but ignoring scholarship on constitutionalism.^[vii] Because the discipline is rewarding this kind of research rather than traditional topics such as the Constitution, simply directing an existing political science department to hire more professors will only result in more of the same teaching that fails to seriously examine or convey an understanding of federalism, separation of powers, constitutional limits on government power, or the principles of the Declaration of Independence and America’s Founding.

And even when not ideological, traditional departments have lost track of their mission to help train future citizens by teaching them the foundational principles, ideas, and history necessary to exercise citizenship. Traditional disciplines such as history and political science have focused on hyper-specialized research rather than transmitting foundational civic knowledge to future generations. Thus, new civics programs, with a focus on foundational texts of Western civilization and the American constitutional tradition, better fulfill those departments’ original purposes.

Recognizing the shortcomings of existing departments on campus, several states have established independent academic units at public universities dedicated to teaching and studying American history and civic institutions. The first such unit, the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL) at Arizona State University, was founded in 2016. More civics schools followed at the University of Florida, the University of Texas, Ohio State University, the University of Tennessee, and more.

As documented in 2026 by the nonpartisan Common Sense Institute, these civics units have already grown significantly in just a few short years, now generating thousands of student course enrollments annually.^[viii]

The specific missions and structures of these civics schools differ. They are united, however, in their goal to restore teaching and scholarship on American civics to public universities, which have abandoned their historical role of preparing students for thoughtful citizenship in the American republic.

Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, civics schools have faced continuous opposition from an academic establishment hostile to scholars who seek to understand and teach the principles of American liberty. At the University of Florida, even with an extremely supportive state government, board of regents, and president, the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education faced bitter bureaucratic resistance.^[ix] And in Ohio, after the state legislature passed a law creating the Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at Ohio State, the faculty senate of the university voted to oppose the establishment of the center.^[x]

In June 2026, John Sailer, a director and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, revealed that the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the most prominent faculty union in the country, was developing a targeted public relations campaign to undermine such civics schools. The AAUP received a $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to establish a “Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.” The director of this center stated his goal of “knock[ing] out” the civics schools as follows:

I would really love to see kind of a robust research project on these right-wing centers and individuals—like, naming and shaming and discrediting and undermining the legitimacy. . . . I would love to strategically map who these f—ers are, and figure out what the weaknesses are, and design a research agenda that just goes through them and tries to knock them out.^[xi]

Sailer’s reporting demonstrates that the opposition to the civics schools in academia goes deep, and elite grantmaking organizations, including the Mellon Foundation, are funding this resistance.

Entrenched interests in the universities are rooting for—and in some cases actively working for—the failure of these civics schools. If these islands of excellence at public universities are to survive and thrive, they need strong protection in state law.

As Andrew Gillen at the Cato Institute observed in prescribing necessary protections for a civic program to succeed in its missions, such a center “would be largely independent from the existing college. It should be meant to challenge the status quo, and therefore the status quo cannot be given veto power over it. . . . [A]llow the new center to teach any class required for graduation. . . . the new center needs to be able to hire without interference by the existing faculty.”^[xii] One need not go that far in terms of specific proposals to see the underlying premise: it makes no sense to create new institutions because of dissatisfaction with the old ones, while allowing those old institutions to continue to impose the status quo.

State governments created civics schools to rectify an unconscionable gap in civics knowledge at public universities. The civics schools will fail in this purpose without strong safeguards in state law that enable them to fulfill their mission. In the following sections, we make recommendations for specific provisions that would strengthen and defend civics schools. Some of these provisions already appear in statutes establishing particular civics schools, others in legislative proposals, while others build on the principles of existing statutes and/or align with recommendations for program improvement provided by organizations including the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and the National Association of Scholars.

Any money appropriated from a state government to fund a civics school should be for the exclusive use of that school, not for university overhead or indirect costs. State law should also guarantee that any donations made to the school from private entities shall not be appropriated by the university for expenses outside the civics school. Finally, state law should also require universities to provide adequate and appropriate physical space for civics schools, and universities should be prohibited from charging rent or overhead fees to such schools.

By statutorily protecting funds for civics schools, this provision removes the possibility of university administrators unilaterally defunding such schools or using their resources as slush funds for other parts of a university.

Civics schools must have the ability to hire their own faculty without interference from other parts of the university. This guarantee of independent hiring authority is essential to prevent civics schools from being captured by faculty who wish to water down or obstruct a school’s mission.

If a civics school includes tenure-track faculty positions (see discussion on tenure below), then the faculty who merit tenure should be tenured in—and by—the civics school. In other words, the civics school should be their “home” department, not a separate history, political science, or other department. This arrangement ensures that faculty in a civics school are not dependent on the approval of hostile administrators or faculty whose antipathy to such scholars are why the civics programs are needed in the first place.

Just as civics schools should be independent in matters of hiring and tenure, they should have the authority to offer courses without permission or approval from any other university unit. Unfortunately, universities effectively give pre-existing programs the ability to obstruct new offerings, which falls particularly heavily on the civics programs. Thus, civics programs face the difficulty of getting classes approved in an era of declining enrollments—with the humanities and social sciences desperate for enrollments after spending decades destroying their own reputations, and eager to suppress a rival. This obviously goes beyond simple turf battles: civics programs have the additional obstacle of legacy departments using these turf or duplication claims to hide their ideological objections.
Legislatures are not creating these units so that legacy departments can point to old, no-longer-taught classes that are still “on the books” as a pretext for blocking civics programs from teaching their core content. Instead, if a civics unit’s class in American constitutionalism becomes popular, and a legacy political science department wants to re-capture those enrollments, it can start or resume offering its own high-quality offering, too.

Along with offering courses, civics schools should have authority to offer degree programs (majors, minors, and certificates) without permission from other university units.

Creating degree programs within civics schools comes with several benefits. Majors offered by the civics school provide alternatives to ideologically captured majors in traditional academic departments. For example, many history departments have abandoned U.S. military and diplomatic history in favor of the history of race, class, and gender. Civics schools have sought to correct this gap in historical study by offering degree programs such as War, Statecraft, and Strategy (Hamilton School at University of Florida)^[xiii] and Strategy and Statecraft (School of Civic Leadership at University of Texas).^[xiv] These new programs provide healthy competition for traditional academic departments. More focused minors or certificates enable a nursing, business, or engineering student to fulfill humanities and social sciences general education requirements in a coherent and intellectually rigorous way, akin to an older core curriculum.

The politicized state of many English departments, with their contempt for the traditional purpose of the humanities, makes them an increasingly poor vehicle for writing and composition training. Some critics have suggested that the rot in English departments is so pervasive that it requires effectively eliminating writing-related requirements altogether.^[xv] A better alternative would be to simply allow completion of relevant civics school courses—which require robust writing—to fulfill these requirements.

Just as these civics programs fulfill the genuine purposes of the disciplines of politics and history, so too are they capable of imparting college-level writing skills, a goal largely abandoned by politicized English departments. This would also mirror standard practice in many elite liberal arts colleges, where taking specific sections of larger courses, or particular courses in a humanities or social sciences department, can fulfill a writing requirement if the syllabus includes the necessary elements.

Similarly, many schools’ honors programs were originally supposed to fulfil something akin to the Columbia Western Civilization sequence, ensuring that the strongest students at a university—and thus, potential future leaders of state and nation—were versed in the traditions, ideas, and intellectual heritage of our civilization. As one professor observed of the founding of Arizona State University’s Honors program, “We had a course called The Human Event, which was required of all freshmen, and it was basically a Great Ideas course modeled on the kind of similar courses at some of the best private universities—Chicago, Stanford, Columbia.” But, as ASU’s college newspaper, the State Press, observed, these courses quickly shifted, first by replacing that canon with new texts, and then by sharply moving away from their initial purposes.

Barrett professors introduced non-Western texts to their classes in an effort to teach students about key ideas from civilizations worldwide, as opposed to just Western civilizations. “It’s more stimulating to me because I get to read more widely in a lot of different cultures, rather than restrict myself and my students to reading (Western books),” [Professor Michael] Stanford said. “I would say that we’ve advanced, we moved on, we’ve progressed.^[xvi]

As a recent Goldwater report revealed, this “progression” away from Western civilization did not stop at simply adopting a broader comparative perspective. Instead, instructors have used their honors courses to indoctrinate students in anti-Western, anti-capitalist, and identity politics dogma.^[xvii]

If state law empowered civics schools to offer honors courses, then the most talented students at public universities could fulfill their honors requirements by taking academically rigorous courses grounded in classic texts—as university honors programs originally were designed to do—rather than subjecting those students to relentless DEI indoctrination sessions.

We strongly recommend that rather than relying on existing university requirements, the civics school should define its own criteria for tenure and advancement that aligns with its mission.

Standard tenure requirements at major research universities (known as “R1” universities in the Carnegie classification) heavily favor a faculty member’s research record, downgrading the importance of the faculty member’s teaching ability and public service. For most academic departments, earning tenure requires a long record of publications in peer-reviewed journals or a small number of university-operated presses. Other forms of publication, such as a rigorous book with a popular (non-peer-reviewed) press, often count for nothing in tenure determinations. Forcing the civics schools to adopt this emphasis on research is contrary to their mission in several ways.

First, several civics schools require faculty to provide significant public service to the state in the form of K-12 teacher training, the production of civics curricula for public schools, and consultations with state government.^[xviii] Although these activities require significant content knowledge and produce outputs of real value to the state, they do not count as scholarly publications for the purposes of tenure at a research university. Despite any notional policy language to the contrary, those making tenure decisions, as most scholars will attest, pay only minimal attention to either teaching quality or public service contributions.^[xix]

Second, the academic research complex, especially in the humanities and social sciences, shows disturbing signs of corruption. Civics schools should be able to adopt alternate measures of scholarly quality that go beyond articles published in academic journals or that follow the trends of what the current professoriate deems fashionable.

The evidence for the corruption of academic research continues to mount. Prominent scholars recently released a crucial report, commissioned by the chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis, on the state of scholarship in the humanities. They conclude that many humanistic disciplines enforce “norms that often serve to suppress scholarship that challenges a rigidly enforced orthodoxy on certain politically charged issues, and which substitute moral and political standards for properly academic standards in the evaluation of scholarship” (sic). The authors of the report state that many professors are subordinating scholarly norms to the goal of “turning the humanities into vehicles for social justice,” including “anti-racism,” “the ‘decolonization’ of the academy and society more generally,” and “the replacement of ‘neoliberal’ capitalism with some form of socialism.”^[xx] The AAUP, the faculty union that is planning to “knock out” civics schools, has declared that “fascism generally doesn’t do great under peer review, but perhaps it’s the intellectual values of academia, which emphasizes critical inquiry & challenges traditional norms, that may be inherently less appealing to those with a more conservative worldview.”^[xxi] In other words, the AAUP is suggesting that peer review is working as intended to screen out conservative viewpoints—“fascism” in the AAUP’s disgraceful rhetoric. But academic journals have no problem with publishing egregious “scholarship,” even if it argues for discrimination on the basis of race. In 2025, The Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research (published by the University of Chicago Press) accepted an article that detailed the authors’ deliberate attempts to make white students uncomfortable—not students of any other race—in their social work course.^[xxii]

A recent Goldwater report provides even more evidence for this corruption, showing that the peer-review process has become increasingly biased against scholarship that deviates from the leftist consensus of academia. The report shows how a group of faculty calling itself “the Feminist Collective” took over one of the top journals in political science and openly bragged about favoring research on race, gender, and systemic oppression. According to Goldwater’s analysis, the journal published more than 100 articles on these subjects while accepting only three articles on American constitutions (even then, one of these three contended that interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning was primarily a project of racial oppression).^[xxiii] Publishing in academic journals is no guarantee of intellectual quality; in too many cases, the reverse is true.

These same forces that made civics programs necessary in the first place also make it essential that the programs be able to set their own criteria for promotion. Elite programs are often not interested in either teaching or training the sorts of subjects that the civics schools prize, but they can still wield a veto through setting the agenda and priorities of the profession, which prestige-conscious administrators typically follow. For example, administrators and Boards of Regents often insist on tenure candidates securing letters of support from outside tenure evaluators at “peer or aspirational peer institutions.” The problem is that the faculty of these ostensibly superior programs are typically indifferent—if not hostile—to the very fields the civics programs were designed to teach, which makes securing such evaluations challenging at best.

Even if academic publishing were freed from today’s ideological capture, the civics programs need the authority to define their own criteria, rather than simply follow pre-existing university norms. Only this will unleash them to best fit their distinctive mandate: educating university students for citizenship in the American republic.

State legislatures established civics schools to fill a yawning gap in the education that students receive at public universities. The legislatures correctly recognized that public universities are not teaching students foundational principles of our constitutional republic, along with the history of American political development. One of the most important functions civics centers must perform—if not the most important—is to provide outstanding teaching on these subjects to the thousands of students that matriculate through the universities each year. Pressuring the civics schools to adopt the “publish or perish” mentality of the rest of the university takes energy away from the central teaching mission of these programs.

It is essential to recognize that the supply and demand curves for faculty able to teach basic American civics—of the kind many state legislatures are now requiring—are wildly out of alignment. The virtually non-existent pipeline of scholars studying American constitutional history and public law, Western Civilization, and military history, is compounded by the gatekeeping that makes their research much more difficult to place in academic journals (which, for example, prefer social to military history, or quantitative analysis and identity politics to constitutionalism).^[xxiv] Together, these factors mean that there is not a sufficient population of faculty capable of making tenure at R1 civics departments to fulfill the explosive demand for them.

This has resulted in such fierce competition for those few faculty among the already existing civics programs that there are simply not enough of them to do the essential work of civics education—particularly if each faculty member has to spend a disproportionate amount of time churning out publications rather than leading instruction, which defeats the primary purpose of civics schools. Thus, the best use of their time and talents is not research but primarily teaching, whether directly to university students or even in doing K-12 teacher trainings.

Most controversially, the extreme mismatch between the explosive demand for such scholars and their limited supply may require institutions to rethink how to achieve the important goal of constitutional education until the market eventually corrects. Several possibilities for reform exist, but some of these may require universities to break from existing practice and norms that, in the last few decades, have arisen and become deeply entrenched in academic culture and practices.

Because of this mismatch, one possibility would be for civics schools to have the bulk of the faculty be full-time, teaching-focused faculty (often called lecturers) with larger teaching loads and little to no emphasis on research. Some have argued that the civics schools should entail 4-4 teaching loads, or four courses per semester.^[xxv] Our view, which has developed from having observed it as faculty at Arizona State (Beienburg) and the University of Kentucky (Minella), is that the optimum is a non-research, 3-3 load (three courses per semester), with non-trivial requirements for service to the civics school and public. The reduced research load fulfills three functions: first, it allows faculty to do the service necessary to start a civics school from scratch; second, it, enables the scholar to undertake the public service obligations these institutions are charged with; and third, it allows for more serious engagement with individual students and thus better teaching.

The temptation that many universities are falling prey to is to create a clear two-tiered system, where those in teaching-focused positions are wildly overworked and underpaid. As the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard recently observed, reviving civics will require “universities, particularly highly selective research institutions, [to] explore new ways to make rapid progress in teaching and learning, recognizing that the pool of candidates for elite tenured or tenure-track positions is small.” The solution includes “enticing, well-respected, and well-compensated senior teaching faculty positions.”^[xxvi]

Another possible technique may entail civics programs, even at ostensibly elite institutions, hiring from programs that the rest of their prestige-obsessed university looks down on (e.g. Hillsdale College’s small PhD program focusing precisely on American constitutionalism and the Western tradition that gave rise to it), rather than the small handful of programs that generate the overwhelming number of PhDs but simply do not produce civics-relevant scholars. For example, a 2012 study found that four programs—Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Michigan—produced 20 percent of political scientists, with an additional seven programs producing roughly another 30 percent of those working at research universities (where nearly all of the civics schools are being developed).^[xxvii] Of the top four schools, only Princeton had a dedicated program in or substantial emphasis on American constitutionalism—which graduated roughly one PhD candidate per year. If R1 universities insist on hiring from peer or aspirational peer institutions, they will either fail to hire or, as prestige-conscious administrators likely prefer, hire someone whose qualifications are more about pedigree than substantive expertise in the field.

Dealing with the pipeline problem could also entail more readily using MA graduates to teach basic American constitutionalism courses, perhaps designed by senior faculty or adopted from another civics program. Arizona State has assembled a robust course, CEL 200: Great Debates in American Constitutionalism and Politics,^[xxviii] which, with minimal adaptation, can meet the civics requirements of various states. This is well within the allowed policies of universities: most use PhD candidates, who have completed their master’s degree, to teach introductory undergraduate courses. Similarly, only an MA is required to teach community college classes.

Civics programs might also develop teaching-focused doctorates, whether formally called PhD or other models (such as the Doctor of Arts degree experimented with in the 1970s) that prepare graduates for teaching, with a heavy emphasis on American constitutional history, more than research methods.

This discussion of teaching-focused faculty relates to one error that well-meaning legislators have sometimes made: insisting that hires made into civics programs be exclusively tenure-track. For example, the authorizing language for the Chase Center at Ohio State says, “Not fewer than fifteen tenure-track faculty positions shall be allotted to teach under the center.”^[xxix] The purpose is to protect these faculty, but this arguably is a mistake for the reasons above. Any such language should not constrain the hires to research-oriented faculty, but allow for lecturers, professors of practice, and the like as best allows a civics unit to accomplish its objectives.

Civics centers might be statutorily assigned to place a higher emphasis on teaching, whether measured as quality of intense liberal-arts college style teaching, with smaller teaching loads and Socratic seminars, or wide coverage of basic American civics and Western civilization, or some combination thereof. The specific teaching styles will vary based on the individual program and its obligations, but legislators should consider making the primacy of the civics school’s teaching mission explicit.

For these reasons, state legislatures might consider adopting Goldwater’s American Higher Education Restoration Act (AHERA).^[xxx] This reform creates a new teaching-focused pathway to tenure for the faculty of civics schools—a pathway that merely restores older practices once common in higher education. Under this policy, civics faculty could earn tenure from their teaching performance rather than their research output. They would no longer be beholden to ideologically captured academic journals for career advancement. More importantly, this arrangement would enable civics faculty to prioritize what is most needed: teaching constitutionalism.

Even if state legislatures do not adopt the specific tenure pathway detailed in the AHERA, they should still empower civics schools to define their own criteria for tenure and advancement, freeing them from outdated measures of scholarly achievement and recognizing the unique challenges and charges of civics schools.

The success of a civics school depends greatly on the competence and mission alignment of its director. State legislatures should not leave the crucial appointment of civics school directors to existing faculty or administrators at universities, who could easily appoint directors antithetical to the very purpose of such schools.

We recommend that state legislatures require procedures that ensure directors are committed to their school’s mission, approach, and priorities, as several legislatures have done. First, legislatures should ensure the appointment of founding directors of civics schools through a special committee. For vacancies following this initial appointment, the faculty of the civics school should make an appointment (whether one of their own or an external hire) to fill the office, with the approval of a board of advisors made up of prominent civics scholars from around the country.

These protocols would help ensure that director selections are made by individuals who are much more likely to support the vision of civics schools than general university faculty.

Finally, we offer one further observation about the qualifications for directors of civics schools. Directors should be chosen for administrative capability and commitment to the mission of building a civically-oriented department, rather than conventional academic prestige measured mostly by publications. The number of scholars who not only study the relevant and relatively rare subjects, but also are competent and enthused administrators, and have the research portfolio of a full professor at an R1 department, is extremely small. As in the discussion of tenure, civics schools should disregard conventional measures of research productivity in favor of more relevant qualifications: mission alignment and administrative competence.

According to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), less than 20 percent of the 1,100 colleges and universities it surveyed required students to take a course on American government or American history.^[xxxi] The disappearance of civics from general education leaves American students unprepared for their responsibilities as citizens of the world’s oldest constitutional republic. To correct this deficiency, state legislatures should charge civics schools with developing and overseeing courses on American civics that would form a core piece of general education at public universities throughout their state.

At least two states, Utah and Kentucky, have already given this charge to their civics schools.^[xxxii] Goldwater’s Freedom from Indoctrination Act also offers model language for the requirements of a general education course in American civics.^[xxxiii]

An additional way to ensure a civic school’s continued existence is to include language guaranteeing the distribution of the faculty into appropriate academic units should the civics school be closed, as was established in the language creating a civics program in West Virginia. This provision would help with recruitment, since faculty joining upstart units unsurprisingly do not wish to suddenly become unemployed with a change in political fortune. But this provision also creates a disincentive to dissolve the program. The history department at the University of Florida, for example, would likely not be pleased to have a large contingent of traditionalist historians focusing on constitutional, political, intellectual, diplomatic, or military history from the Hamilton School as voting-eligible colleagues within their department.

By including a provision allowing civics schools to issue an annual report to their state legislature and to testify before that legislature, state governments could provide for the accountability and transparency of their operations.

Many civics schools and centers sponsor public events such as debates about current policy issues and forums for scholarly disagreement. These events can further a civics school’s goal of promoting the civil exchange of ideas on campus. This role should be protected in law by stipulating that civics schools should not require approval from other university departments to hold public events, and that universities may not charge excessive security fees for these events. Legislatures can look to Goldwater’s Campus Free Speech Act for model language on this issue.^[xxxiv]

This is not an abstract issue: a small civics program (then called the Program on Political History and Leadership) at Arizona State University had its events canceled when other history faculty attempted to claim a veto over speaker invitations. Only intervention by the university president restored the lecturers (while elevating the program to the Center for American Institutions and thereby insulating it).^[xxxv]

To ensure that the provisions recommended in this report are faithfully implemented in states where they are enacted, it is also necessary for state lawmakers to include a direct enforcement mechanism. Specifically, legislators should include a simple provision to give standing to full-time faculty (and/or additional stakeholders) to enjoin a university from violating any of the provisions specified in the civics program’s autonomy language.

The first legislatively established civics department, the School of Civic Thought and Leadership (SCETL) at ASU, was originally little more than a line item in an appropriation. But as newer civics programs have come into being, legislatures have increasingly sought to ensure that the same deficiencies that caused the need for civics centers do not simply repeat themselves. As such, they have attempted to create relative autonomy for these centers in a variety of ways, such as explicit curricular and/or hiring autonomy.

Some, such as in Texas and Florida, even made civics programs their own colleges to reduce friction from hostile humanities and social science faculty. This latter approach, however, is a double-edged sword, requiring civics programs to develop administrative expertise with university bureaucracy and protocols (e.g. with a faculty member acting at the level of a dean with appropriate staff) and thus may not always be desirable. A more general approach is simply to ensure that other units in the humanities and social sciences do not have veto power over curricula, hiring, tenure, and the like. Nonetheless, our model language includes the option of College status.

Much improvement in ensuring the relative autonomy of these centers has been made between the creation of SCETL at ASU (2016) and the more robust legislative protections of the Chase Center at OSU, and now, the Center for Intellectual Freedom at the University of Iowa, which have arguably the most expansive language implemented in law. Still, more can and should be done.

For example, legislative supporters of the Center for American Institutions, a civics-oriented program at Arizona State that had experienced bureaucratic opposition from other parts of the university, went a step further in proposing additional protections for the center in the 2025-2026 legislative session. These were part of a budget passed by the legislature but vetoed by the governor.^[xxxvi]

Here, we analyze the legislation that founded the civics schools in several states. We provide a scorecard that shows which of our recommended provisions are included in each state’s legislation.^[xxxvii] This scorecard thus shows how state legislatures can draw on our model legislation to improve the laws that enable existing civics schools to pursue their mission. It can also help states that have not yet established civics schools to understand and implement our recommended provisions and thereby create programs with the strongest possible legal foundation.

University Civics Program Autonomy Model Provisions

To view the model civics program legislative provisions, please click here.

Endnotes

^[i] Sean Beienburg is an Associate Professor in, and the former Associate Director of, the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL) at Arizona State University. Timothy Minella is the Director of Higher Education at the Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy at the Goldwater Institute. The academic affiliation is provided for identification only, and this document does not represent the opinions of SCETL or Arizona State University.

^[ii] Speech First, No Graduation Without Indoctrination: The DEI Course Mandate, April 2024, https://speechfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Speech_First_DEI_Report.pdf; Timothy K. Minella, Peer Review Gone Wild: Flagship Political Science Journal Shows How Academic Gatekeepers Promote Ideology Over Scholarship,” Goldwater Institute, December 2, 2025, https://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/policy-report/peer-review-gone-wild/.

^[iii] “National Survey Finds Just 1 in 3 Americans Would Pass Citizenship Test,” Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, October 3, 2018, https://citizensandscholars.org/resource/national-survey-finds-just-1-in-3-americans-would-pass-citizenship-test/.

^[iv] Joshua Dunn and William Lyons, “America’s 250^th Birthday Is a Test for Civic Education,” RealClearEducation, June 22, 2026, https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2026/06/22/americas_250th_birthday_is_a_test_for_civic_education_1190237.html.

^[v] Emily Ekins, “New Poll: Nearly Half of Americans Don’t Know What America’s 250th Is Celebrating,” Cato Institute, July 2, 2026, https://www.cato.org/blog/new-poll-nearly-half-americans-dont-know-what-americas-250th-celebrating.

^[vi] “Numbers Tell the Story,” What Will They Learn?, accessed June 10, 2026, https://www.whatwilltheylearn.com/numbers-tell-the-story.

^[vii] Minella, Peer Review Gone Wild.

^[viii] Ben Murrey, Quentin Chediak, and Hoang-An Andy Nguyen, Market Demand Assessment–University of Iowa Center for Intellectual Freedom, Common Sense Institute, April 29, 2026, https://commonsenseinstituteus.org/iowa/research/education/market-demand-assessment-university-of-iowa-center-for-intellectual-freedom/

^[ix] Emma Pettit, “U. of Florida Investigates Whether Professors ‘Interfered’ With Western-Civ Center,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 22, 2024, https://www.chronicle.com/article/u-of-florida-investigates-whether-professors-interfered-with-western-civ-center; Emma Pettit, “How a Center for Civic Education Became a Political Provocation,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 22, 2023, https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-a-center-for-civic-education-became-a-political-provocation.

^[x] Allie Vugrincic, “Ohio State University Senate Rejects State-Mandated ‘Intellectual Diversity Center,’” WOSU, January 24, 2025, https://www.wosu.org/politics-government/2025-01-24/ohio-state-university-senate-rejects-state-mandated-intellectual-diversity-center.

^[xi] John D. Sailer, “The Mellon Foundation Is Funding a Resistance Against Civics Schools,” City Journal, June 11, 2026, https://www.city-journal.org/article/mellon-foundation-funding-civics-schools.

^[xii] Andrew Gillen, “Higher Ed’s Politicization Feel Inevitable, but It Doesn’t Need to Be”, RealClearEducation, June 17, 2026, https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2026/06/17/higher_educations_politicization_is_currently_inevitable_but_it_doesnt_need_to_be_1189307.html

^[xiii] Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, “Undergraduate,” accessed June 12, 2026, https://hamilton.ufl.edu/undergraduate/.

^[xiv] School of Civic Leadership, “Strategy and Statecraft Major,” accessed June 12, 2026, https://civicleadership.utexas.edu/about.

^[xv] George Leef, “How English Departments Became Broken,” James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, October 17, 2025, https://jamesgmartin.center/2025/10/how-english-departments-became-broken/.

^[xvi] Sam McGee, “Demystifying Barrett: The Past, Present and Future of the Honors College,” The State Press, November 8, 2023, https://www.statepress.com/article/2023/11/magazine-demystifying-barrett.

^[xvii] Timothy Minella and Matt Beienburg, Desert Brain Drain, Goldwater Institute, March 12, 2026, https://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/policy-report/desert-brain-drain/.

^[xviii] Fla. Stat. § 1004.6496 (2025), https://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&Search_String=&URL=1000-1099/1004/Sections/1004.6496.html.

^[xix] Mike Nichols, “UW-Madison Losing One of Few Conservative Professors,” Badger Institute, May 30, 2024, https://www.badgerinstitute.org/uw-madison-losing-one-of-few-conservative-professors/.

^[xx] Paul Boghossian et al., Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences, Vanderbilt University, April 5, 2026, https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wpfsx/wp-content/uploads/sites/51/2026/06/State-of-Scholarship-Report-final.pdf.

^[xxi] Daniel Buck (@MrDanielBuck), “Has anyone checked on the AAUP recently?,” X, October 21, 2025, https://x.com/MrDanielBuck/status/1980688215440019462.

^[xxii] Emma Pettit, “‘I Don’t Feel Safe in This Classroom,’” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 5, 2025, https://www.chronicle.com/article/i-dont-feel-safe-in-this-classroom

^[xxiii] Minella, Peer Review Gone Wild.

^[xxiv] [citation missing]

^[xxv] David Randall, “In Praise of the 4-4 Load,” James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, April 22, 2026, https://jamesgmartin.center/2026/04/in-praise-of-the-4-4-load/.

^[xxvi] Intellectual Diversity and the Mission of Higher Education, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, May 5, 2026, https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/news-and-ideas/intellectual-diversity-and-the-mission-of-higher-education.

^[xxvii] Colleen Flaherty, “Prestige Hiring Across Academe,” Inside Higher Ed, September 22, 2022, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/09/23/new-study-finds-80-faculty-trained-20-institutions.

^[xxviii] Arizona State University, Course Syllabi, CEL 200, accessed October 16, 2026, https://syllabus.apps.asu.edu/syllabus/2271/24154

^[xxix] Ohio Rev. Code § 3335.39 (2025), https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-3335.39.

^[xxx] American Higher Education Restoration Act, Defending Education, Goldwater Institute, and the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, https://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-11-18-Higher-Ed-Research-Teaching-Reform-Suite-EMBARGOED89.pdf.

^[xxxi] “Numbers Tell the Story,” What Will They Learn?

^[xxxii] Utah State Legislature, S.B. 334, 2025 Gen. Sess. (2025), https://le.utah.gov/Session/2025/bills/enrolled/SB0334.pdf; Kentucky General Assembly, S.B. 4, 2026 Reg. Sess., Acts ch. 154 (2026), https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/law/acts/26RS/documents/0154.pdf.

^[xxxiii] Goldwater Institute and Speech First, Freedom From Indoctrination Act, https://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Freedom_From_Indoctrination_Act_Model_Policy_2023_3_3161.pdf.

^[xxxiv] Goldwater Institute, Campus Free Speech Act, https://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Campus-Free-Speech_Model-Legislation_Web.pdf.

^[xxxv] Corinne Murdock, “ASU Cancels Conservative Events After Faculty Oppose Them in Survey,” AZ Free News, March 22, 2022, https://azfreenews.com/2022/03/asu-cancels-conservative-events-after-faculty-oppose-them-in-survey/.

^[xxxvi] HB 2947, Fifty-Seventh Arizona State Legislature, First Regular Session, 2025, accessed October 1, 2026, https://apps.azleg.gov/BillStatus/BillOverview/83468.

^[xxxvii] Most of our recommended provisions are taken from existing statutes, though not all. Several are drawn from Arizona’s failed HB2947 in the 2025-26 session, in which legislative supporters attempted to strengthen the Center for American Institutions, a smaller program not within the civics school (SCETL) at Arizona State University but instead loosely attached to the history department there, and which, as noted above, other faculty attempted to block lectures from. This suite of provisions also aligns with various recommendations made by others including Michael Poliakoff of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (see: “Best Practices for a Last Best Hope”, https://lawliberty.org/best-practices-for-a-last-best-hope/) and the National Association of Scholars (see: “School of Intellectual Freedom Act”, https://civicsalliance.org/school-of-intellectual-freedom-act/).