There is a role for a new civics center at UK, but it must be done the right way
As the Kentucky Lantern covered, legislation in the last legislative session mandated the creation of a new Center for American Civics at the University of Kentucky. Though the legislation itself is somewhat opaque about its intentions, it clearly aimed to set up a full academic unit in a style increasingly familiar across the United States.
Kumble Subbaswamy, the former provost of UK, has made clear that academic programs should emerge from the will of the faculty at that institution. The same article also observed that the crisis of civic education is more than anything a phenomenon at the level of k-12 schools. Both of these arguments contain a great deal of truth. As a professor myself, I fully understand the need for robust faculty governance. Likewise, I have previously argued that we will never truly restore the basic knowledge necessary for self-government without a serious reworking of our local school systems.
Yet Dr. Subbaswamy does not address why so many state legislatures across the country have felt the need to firmly mandate the creation of centers and colleges for civic education. While an element of the cynical view – that Republican legislators wish to create conservative enclaves – may be true, more broadly speaking these legislatures are addressing the fact that for many decades, large state flagship universities have done little to address the mounting civic literacy crisis. This is not so much because universities are too liberal but because they are too driven by prestige and profits to engage in the hard, slow work of repairing our frayed social fabric. The academic divisions of most large research universities tend to focus on narrowly specialized scholarship for the sake of scholarship rather than the sort of public-spirited role that true civics education requires.
It is right and proper that the Kentucky General Assembly should intervene to ensure that the University of Kentucky creates a Center for American Civics of genuine service to the commonwealth. Without clear instruction from the legislature on what sort of shape the center may take, they risk creating a center that indulges the typical vices of UK – expensive, oriented towards largely useless research, and geared primarily towards making the university money.
Model centers
So what should a good civics center look like? First, it should be given as much independence from the broader administrative and academic apparatus of the University of Kentucky as possible. A center dedicated to civics should not exist to please the university to which it belongs, nor should it exist to please the General Assembly. Instead, a good civics center should exist to serve the broader community in which it is embedded. The director of the center should partially serve the provost but also answer to a bipartisan board of committee members and legislators who select the director and make most major decisions for the center’s future.
Second, and most importantly, a Center for American Civics should focus its intellectual and educational energies on the collapse of civil society in Kentucky. This means partly educating future leaders for the nonprofit and governmental sectors, and promoting research that offers firm solutions to the many problems facing Kentucky and rural America. Instead of grounding itself in the very broad work of various social science disciplines, the center should dedicate itself to the very practical, particular problems that confront our commonwealth. While many professors and academic programs nobly pursue knowledge for its own sake, a civics center should exist almost entirely for the benefit of the wider community.
Thus, the director should be a professor and scholar with an impeccable reputation in the classroom and beyond. However, they should also be someone with a track record of community involvement and outreach—capable of taking knowledge outside the ivory tower and into the world.
Lastly, any Center for American Civics must understand civics in the fullest and broadest sense. There are three major approaches to civics education: the traditional method (memorizing government branches and constitutional amendments); teaching civic engagement and community involvement; and the liberal arts (using great books to equip students with critical thinking for sound political judgment). The center should pursue all three pathways. Any academic curriculum should build upon all approaches—to narrowly focus on one method to the exclusion of others is a grave mistake.
There can be no denying that there is a major and sustained crisis facing the future of American society. This crisis derives in no small part from our concerning lack of civic knowledge and our mounting inability to use the tools of self-government so nobly bestowed upon us by the blood, sweat, and tears of our ancestors. Though tackling this problem will not be easy, an important step is funding any and all mechanisms to address it. A Center for American Civics at the University of Kentucky could very well be one such mechanism.