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Public discussion of this movement has centered on its partisanship. Liberals tend to view these new civics institutes as intended to colonize their campuses with bastions of conservatism; conversely, conservatives defend them as necessary to educate responsible citizens and foster a wider range of intellectual inquiry on campuses dominated by the left. Such political fights involve important questions about the role of higher education in society and the nature of academic freedom, but dwelling on them alone is to miss the deeper questions: What is civics, as a field? How does it fit into the structures of inquiry prized by the modern university? Who is going to be responsible for teaching all these new civics classes? Who owns civics, anyway?
Those are thorny questions, because civics never established itself as a discipline in its own right or even as an established subfield. In fact, many of the disciplines one might associate with civics have disowned it as an embarrassment to their empiricism, their professional ethics, or their sense of their more elevated position. This peculiar history has left higher education structurally unprepared to integrate civics into its core curriculum.
Public schools had been teaching morality and citizenship for a generation by the time academe laid the groundwork for incorporating civics into its core curriculum. Only after the federal government began funding public colleges by giving them vast grants of land did some university leaders begin advocating that citizenship should be included in their curricula. In 1885, the presidents of Amherst College and Yale, Tulane, and Brown Universities joined hands with powerful politicians such as Sen. Justin Morrill of Vermont, father of the Land Grant law that endowed many flagship colleges, and Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, to found the American Institute of Civics.
Their timing was perfect, as the social tensions dawning with the Gilded Age lent a sharp sense of urgency to their advocacy. At its first annual meeting, U.S. Rep. William Heilman of Indiana gave the keynote address, “When Shall Teaching in Civics Begin?” Edmund James, the first professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, complained that “in the majority of college courses, almost nothing of value is offered in relation to this important subject.” Civics education, he declared, was needed to “cure the evils of strikes and communistic governments.”
With amazing swiftness, the rhetoric of “civics” was embraced by academics. Less than a year later, at the annual convocation of the State University of New York, S.G. Williams, a professor of geology at Cornell University, presented a model curriculum for the nation’s colleges, a quarter of which was dedicated to what Williams termed “elementary science,” which included “civics and psychology.” The American Institute of Civics rapidly mushroomed into a national organization and published a succession of journals that devoted most of their pages to advocating for citizenship education: The Citizen, Law and Order, The Magazine of Civics and finally just plain Civics.
This collegiate enthusiasm for civics dimmed as quickly as it had flashed onto the scene. After the establishment of the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Chicago as America’s first research universities in the late 19th century, a new focus on the scientific method drove both the professionalization of existing disciplines and their fragmentation into ever more exclusive domains. Scholars abandoned the republican mission of civics in favor of a more rigorous and empirical “political science.” Chicago’s School of Civics and Philanthropy split into separate departments of sociology and social service administration. Worse, those “applied” fields like civics that were rooted in practice, especially those that attracted notable numbers of women, were downgraded in the academic hierarchy. By the 20th century most college leaders had defined civics as a subject for the growing high-school movement rather than their own hallowed halls.
The two disciplines possessing the greatest claim to civics — history and political science — grew to harbor a deep jealousy of it. When the newly formed American Historical Association considered the relationship of civics to history education in 1899, its committee of seven august experts concluded that civics was not a separate field but was contained in what historians already did: “While we have no desire to underestimate the value of civil government as a secondary study, especially if it is written and taught from the historical point of view, we desire to emphasize the thought that appreciation and sympathy for the present is best secured by a study of the past.” By the 1940s, academic historians bemoaned how civics squeezed the time available for the teaching of analytical history. As the University of Iowa historian Philip D. Jordan and the Stanford historian Edgar Eugene Robinson wrote in 1944, “It seems inescapable that formally organized courses in American history are disappearing from many of the public high schools of California ... [as] Government or civics, as a proper part of this required course, further limits the time needed for the presentation of United States history.”
Perhaps because civics and political science were born of the same womb (Columbia University’s pioneering political-science department was influenced by organizers of the American Institute of Civics), these siblings developed a rancorous rivalry. Henry Jones Ford, who would serve as president of the American Political Science Association from 1918-19, wrote sneeringly in 1904 of “civics” as the “political mythology now in vogue”: “Back of the real people one sees in the shop, the factory or the office, there is an ideal citizenship of great purity and intelligence which if brought into political activity would establish the integrity of our institutions.” The following year, W.A. Schaper, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota, in an address to the APSA annual meeting, referred to “that inane term,” civics, “the worst faded-out word in our educational terminology.”
When universities scrambled to integrate citizenship education into their newly minted “general” curriculum after the Bolshevik Revolution, their new civics courses were not allocated to any particular discipline but uniquely distributed across the entire faculty. Stanford’s famous civics class, begun in 1923, gathered students into one mass lecture delivered by professors from every corner of the university. (Today, Stanford’s “Citizenship in the 21st Century” course is taught by faculty across all departments and colleges.) Cornell’s first course in citizenship featured lectures not from its own faculty but from prominent “men of affairs.”
A reckoning with this contract emerged not from within the disciplines that were still in the full glory of funding and expansion, but from student dissidents who found their professors’ claimed objectivity to be hollow and their conclusions institutionally biased. Beginning with the Students for a Democratic Society’s Port Huron Statement in 1962, to the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1965, and then the San Francisco State University strike of 1968, it was student activists, often from oppressed communities, who demanded that university research be tied to moral ends. It was these movements that called for the creation of women’s studies, Black studies, Native peoples studies, and ethnic studies. These new disciplines, student activists thought, would anchor academic theorizing in what the Students for a Democratic Society called “the living events of the world.” In other words, the various “studies” were born with the spirit of civic engagement that the old disciplines had rejected.
It was Africana studies, ethnic studies, and women’s studies that first broke away from traditional disciplines in the 1970s to investigate the meaning and construction of ethnic and gendered identities in the context of government policies and structures. Interdisciplinary approaches were indispensable in understanding the nexus between government and group formation, the interactions of law and identity, and of self, culture, and power. If civics is conceived as embracing the question of the shaping of a pluralist society — and our pluralism is certainly among the most exceptional things about the American experience — then the “studies” have a firm claim on delivering it. In this, they have carried on the “community” and “social” civics first advocated by John Dewey in his seminal 1902 essay, “The School as Social Centre,” in which Dewey resisted thinking about citizenship simply “in terms of relation to the government, not to society in its broader aspects,” advocating instead a broadly “social” understanding:
We find that our political problems involve race questions, questions of the assimilation of diverse types of language and custom; we find that most serious political questions grow out of underlying industrial and commercial changes and adjustments; we find that most of our pressing political problems cannot be solved by special measures of legislation or executive activity, but only by the promotion of common sympathies and a common understanding.
One need only examine the typical syllabus of an ethnic-studies course to recognize that most of it is essentially civics. Such courses often begin with an examination of the “peopling” of early America, the intercultural conflicts of settler colonialism, and the nature of the early modern state. They then examine the nature of the American republic, the consequences of its concepts of citizenship, and the impact of its constitutional structures upon the extravagant range of communities within it. It is in these long-established courses where the distance between ideals and realities, between the Bill of Rights and the behavior of governments are plumbed in greatest detail.
This reveals a glorious irony: The branch of academe’s taxonomy most equipped to make civics a legitimate subject of scholarly inquiry is the one the GOP is working to eradicate. While the sponsors of civics-education bills would resist this conclusion, there are very practical reasons why university administrations will not.
As colleges struggle to incorporate civics into their general-education programs, they will have to decide if they will simply add new civics classes to their requirements or if they will pack the elements specified by their state legislatures into an existing course. Bean counters will strongly favor the latter option, since adding anything to the list of general-education courses costs real money (since it requires more faculty) and can extend time-to-degree completion or lower student-retention rates. The safer and cheaper option is to find some way to integrate or combine civics with something already taught.
Many colleges have some version of a “cultural diversity” general-education requirement. The simplest option for administrators in these institutions will be to simply slide the new civics mandates into existing cultural-diversity courses that already spend a large proportion of their time examining issues of immigration, racial and gendered oppression, and the uneven and fitful progress the nation has made toward fulfilling its proclaimed founding goals of liberty for all. In the end, the new civics may not be easily accommodated in those century-old departments that had their chance to champion civics but dismissed it as beneath them. Instead, civics may find its home in the interdisciplinary studies that have always embraced the social commitments that best distinguish civics from citizenship education.
