This year has witnessed an upsurge in intense and often violent protests on university campuses. Their immediate pretext is the war in Gaza, which commenced with Hamas’s savage and unprovoked attack on Israel on Oct. 7. But everyone can see that these protests reflect a broader problem: the failure of our most eminent universities to insist that their students show fundamental respect for their fellow students and our nation’s laws and civic institutions.
On campus after campus, the reasonable expectations of ordinary nonprotesting students have been pushed aside in favor of the loud and unruly minority (many of whom are not even students). Classes have been disrupted, and even commencement exercises have been canceled. Worse yet, the ugly strains of undiluted anti-Jewish hatred, urged on by Hamas’s savagery, have been allowed to fester almost unhindered, with only the most feeble and perfunctory responses from university presidents and other administrators. It has been an appalling spectacle.
The problem has many roots, but one of the deepest is many years of miseducation. Few can now deny that the United States has a big problem when it comes to its citizens’ civic knowledge. Leave aside the current protests for a moment and consider the fact that every year, the most highly regarded standardized measures of student knowledge, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, indicate an alarming decline in people’s historical and civic knowledge.
Failures that begin in the schoolhouse do not stay there but spread to society at large. The stakes are high, and our collective failures in this regard raise a crucial question. The United States of America was conceived as a republic, a country whose citizens rule themselves. Can a nation ignorant of its laws, institutions, and past sustain a republican form of government?
The nation’s founders would have said “no.” President Thomas Jefferson fully grasped that no popular government could flourish without an educated citizenry attuned to the virtues and duties of self-government and imbued with affection for that which is their own. As the late historian Donald Kagan put it, “Democracy requires a patriotic education.” We now appear to have abandoned this conviction, disparaging all civic education as mere propaganda. As a result, we’ve now also lost a set of mutually agreed-upon principles that can situate political controversies on common ground and give support to robust constitutional institutions in which our political conflicts can be fought out peacefully and productively.
But help is on the way. And in the best American fashion, it is not coming from Washington. The crisis of civic ignorance, even before the campus protests, had already begun to generate decentralized responses from state legislators, governors, and other officials who recognized the urgent need to address it. Their momentum is building, and the possible impact is immense.
Arizona State University, for instance, established in 2017 the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, a groundbreaking school built explicitly around the study of American civic thought and leadership. This bold example has given rise to similar institutes in seven other states, and the number of such institutes could swell to several dozen in the coming years.
North Carolina’s state legislature has been considering the North Carolina Reclaiming College Education on America’s Constitutional Heritage Act, which would require “at least three credit hours of instruction in American history or American government in order to graduate” from a UNC or community college. The bill has passed the lower house but stalled in the state Senate. But the UNC system has moved ahead with the design of a program called “Foundations of American Democracy,” to be implemented on all 16 state campuses beginning in 2025.
At the same time, Utah is considering a radical revision of how universities have handled general education. Senate Bill 226 can possibly revolutionize higher education in Utah and elsewhere. The bill would establish an independent academic unit called the School of General Education at each state-supported two- or four-year college in Utah.
The explicit purpose of these schools would be to educate students on the intellectual foundations of free countries, especially the U.S., and the principles, ideals, and institutions of law, liberty, and civic virtue that underpin the American constitutional order. Students at the University of Utah would have to take 42 semester hours of instruction in the School of General Education, including courses on the U.S.’s founding principles, constitutional history, and structure.
Attempts to address the crisis of civic ignorance through state-led initiatives always make academics nervous, given the rocky history of political interference in public universities over the past century. But academic freedom, though essential for a thriving university, is not an absolute right that overrides all other considerations. This is especially the case for public institutions, which exist to serve the public and must have some measure of accountability.
What responsibility could be greater than the task of helping citizens understand and appreciate their country’s history? This responsibility is acknowledged in the founding of public education in the U.S. as seen in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787: “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”
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While these proposals may not be universally popular on campuses, the gravity of our situation demands a bold response. The time for handwringing fatalism about the status quo is over. As President Franklin Roosevelt declared in the midst of the Great Depression, “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation.”
Never have those words been more apropos. Let these bold experiments take root and see which ones work and grow, as is starting to happen in Utah and other states. Nothing could be more American than that.
Wilfred M. McClay is the Victor Davis Hanson chair in classical history and Western civilization at Hillsdale College and author of Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story.