Making University Civic Centers Last

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | August 21, 2026 | Daniel Buck

[karpov]

Three years ago, Governor Ron DeSantis established the Hamilton School at the University of Florida. According to The Washington Post, the school now boasts “50 professors, four majors, 69 classes this spring.”

Similar efforts are afoot with the University of North Carolina’s School of Civic Life and Leadership and The Ohio State University’s Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society. Depending on your political perspective, these are either a promising effort to reform universities or, as The Post deems them, mere “conservative backlash” to combat “‘woke’ liberal indoctrination.”

Media coverage on these centers tends to focus on their novelty; however, the broader civic center movement is beginning to reach maturity. It arguably began with Robert George founding the James Madison Program at Princeton University in 2000, which acts as a model for civic-minded institutes that function within the university architecture. The first of the newer programs was Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL), established in 2016.

At present, there are no fewer than 45 centers at 41 institutions in 25 states. The question facing the movement now isn’t how reformers should establish such institutes or why—but rather, how can they sustain the movement.

In a recent report for the Conservative Education Reform Network at the American Enterprise Institute, Paul Carrese, the founding director of ASU’s SCETL, lays out three essential considerations to answer that question.

The first, and arguably most important recommendation, is simple: Prove excellence. The media will gnash their teeth, faculty will wail, and university administrators will work to stymie the effort, but, in Carrese’s words, “criticisms will prove hollow if these institutes train students well, produce exceptional scholarship, and offer robust civic discourse and civics resources on their campuses and for broader communities.”

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TOPICS: Education
KEYWORDS: college

[Twotone]

Every Red State should be looking at their land grant universities & telling them NO MORE Ethnic Studies or Women Study Centers. Bar everything that creates a division in society. Some Lefty Billionaire can fund that nonsense.