Civics, Partisanship, and the Academy
Higher education has become the latest casualty of America's partisan divide. Universities have long been left-leaning bastions, but they seemingly morphed into outright staging grounds for progressive activism following Donald Trump's first election, and grew all the more politicized in the wake of George Floyd's murder and in the aftermath of Hamas's attack on Israel.
The Republican response has been forceful. Congressional hearings toppled Ivy League presidents. The Trump administration banned diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in federally funded institutions and is threatening to withhold federal funds from Harvard University and other elite institutions. The National Institutes of Health announced caps on research-grant overhead, which may cut hundreds of millions in federal subsidies to universities. At this point, one side of our politics views higher education as dangerously out of step with American values, while the other sees it as insufficiently radical to drive change.
All the bad press has contributed to a steep decline in public confidence in our institutions of higher education. The share of Americans expressing "great confidence" in universities plummeted from 57% to 36% in the past 10 years. Over the same period, those expressing "no confidence" more than tripled, to 32%. This erosion followed partisan lines. Republicans, persuaded that campuses have become incubators for progressive ideology and are not worth the cost, have led the exodus.
But it is simply not sustainable for colleges and universities to alienate half the country. The trust deficit thus represents a major challenge to institutions already facing demographic headwinds and financial pressures. The path to sustainability requires rebuilding broad-based public support.
The most constructive (but by no means uncontroversial) response has come from legislatures in states that have enacted laws to institute new schools or centers promoting civic education in an effort to rebalance the campus climate. The most ambitious initiatives have emerged in states like Florida, Ohio, Texas, Tennessee, and North Carolina. However, several private universities, such as Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and Johns Hopkins, have also established new schools, centers, or programs with similar missions.
These moves reflect a growing recognition that higher education must reinvent civic learning to address political polarization and shore up liberal democracy. This is no remedial exercise, as Johns Hopkins University president Ronald Daniels attests. In his book What Universities Owe Democracy, he reminds us of what ought to be obvious but often is not: Universities, while dedicated to the study of reality, are themselves part of the reality they study. For this reason, civic education offers an opportunity to strategically reposition universities as central to the democratic project of collective self-government in a way that could both shield them from partisan attacks and reinvigorate public debate.
Properly conceived and executed, civic education should not be construed as antithetical to partisan thinking or competition, but rather as a condition for making partisanship into a productive component of collective self-government. Our premise is that partisanship itself is not the problem, but rather a necessary — although fallible — means for realizing the democratic ideal of popular sovereignty. Citizens need to be able to choose between broad political alternatives framed as competing partisan projects in order to meaningfully govern themselves.
The problem occurs when partisanship goes off the rails and begins to undermine the very conditions necessary for civil disagreement and peaceful alternation in power. The role of civic education should therefore be to help establish the broad basis of agreement on core constitutional principles and norms of civility that allows partisan groups to disagree and compete with one another productively.
By taking an active role in cultivating this democratic ethos, higher-education institutions can both shore up their political legitimacy and recover a more productive role as stewards of democracy. This task will require clarifying what should and should not be civic education's mission at the university level.
AGREEING TO DISAGREE
Democracy, as the word itself implies, means popular self-government. Yet, as the American founders recognized, citizens cannot possibly participate in all political decisions directly. Instead, citizen representation, whereby some are elected to rule others on a temporary basis, is necessary. Such representation is supposed to "refine and enlarge the public views" such that "the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves," as James Madison famously put it in Federalist No. 10.
The founders had hoped for a polity without political parties; they did not foresee just how dependent a representative democracy would turn out to be on partisan competition. Thomas Jefferson famously declared that if he "could not go to heaven but with a party," he "would not go there at all." John Adams expressed similar "dread" at the prospect of "Division of the Republick into two great Parties." The Democratic-Republican Party, founded by Jefferson and his allies, was initially conceived with the short-term aim of defeating Alexander Hamilton's Federalist Party, after which it could wither away. It would be a party to end all parties.
By the 1820s, however, party competition — and with it the notion that the losing party could legitimately oppose the sitting government — had become the key mechanism for connecting the people to the offices that the Constitution created. Martin Van Buren served as the bridge between the anti- and pro-party worlds. He was one of the principal architects of a new Democratic Party, first in New York and then nationally. As political scientist James Ceaser has shown, Van Buren argued that parties were not only compatible with the Constitution, but essential to its proper functioning. Well-organized parties could prevent the dangers of parties that the founders feared by channeling political conflict into stable, responsible organizations rather than personalized or regional factions.
Party competition allows the parties to offer the electorate alternative interpretations of the country's common good, in the form of competing policy packages among which voters are invited to choose. The choice between opposing party platforms allows the country to realize, if only approximately and fallibly, the democratic ideal of self-government. This truth provides the basis for political scientist E. E. Schattschneider's famous claim that "modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of the parties." For him, the people of a large commercial republic can at best be "semi-sovereign," in the sense of choosing slates of rulers offering competing interpretations of the common good of the country as a whole.
To say that partisan rivalry became an essential component of the American instantiation of popular self-government is not to say that it does not depend on prior conditions, nor that it cannot go wrong. Party competition must operate within an agreed-upon framework of shared norms and values that constitutes the basis for civil disagreement and peaceful alternation in power. Put differently, partisan actors need to share a certain political culture. Otherwise, each group will be tempted to cast its rivals as illegitimate "enemies" of the state itself and seek to wipe them off the political map. A delicate balance — between robust partisanship and civic consensus — underpins the democratic project.
In his study of how party competition became legitimate in America, historian Richard Hofstadter showed how shared norms of mutual respect and civility were progressively developed to make the peaceful transfer of power possible. This raises the question of what preconditions are required to make a system of party competition serve the democratic ideal of popular self-government.
Today, political disagreement and reciprocal mistrust have become so extreme that they threaten to undermine the basic rules of partisan competition itself. Instead of legitimate opposition, we now have bare-knuckled political conflict, whereby each party sees the prospect of the other's electoral victory as a threat to the health and stability of the system as a whole. This imperils the very idea of peaceful alternation in power — and, in turn, American democracy itself.
THE MEANING OF CIVICS
If the foregoing argument has merit, it suggests that to address the danger posed by current levels of partisan polarization, we must rebuild the underlying foundation of agreement on the "shared norms of mutual respect and civility" that provide the basis for civil disagreement and peaceful alternation in power among competing political parties.
This is a core function of civic education — and universities have a key role to play in advancing it. To develop a concrete civic-education program at the university level, university leaders and other stakeholders must clarify what needs to be agreed on for civil disagreement and peaceful alternation in power to function effectively.
Here, the etymology of the term "civics" can offer some guidance. The contemporary English word derives from the Latin adjectival form civicus, which is itself derived from the substantive term civitas, meaning city or state. And the city, in this original conception, was assumed to be what all the citizens (cives) had in common; that is, the form of government to which they were all subject. Rome, for example, was assumed to be a city in the sense that it comprised a set of institutions that governed all Romans, binding them together as citizens.
From this perspective, civic education's domain is that which pertains to the city as a whole. This is, first and foremost, its constitution, understood as the overall structure and operation of its political institutions. Promoting civic education must therefore mean promoting an understanding of — and adherence to — a given political order's basic constitutional structure and the principles on which that structure is grounded. No political system can function effectively without its citizens' having a basic understanding of and commitment to the constitutional rules of the game. This is what civic culture and education are primarily required to promote.
But that is not all. The term "civics" is also related to the Latin term civile, the root of the verbal form civilizare, which is understood as the activity of making people civil in that they are capable of operating effectively within a given constitutional framework. This etymological variation contains an important political lesson, which is that for a given city (i.e., government structure) to function, citizens not only need to understand and subscribe to its formal constitutional framework; they also need to share certain basic principles of civility. This, in turn, requires an exercise in civilization, understood as the inculcation of a certain culture relating to the appropriate ways of interacting with one another.
Another way of making this point is to say that, for a given system of government to function, it not only needs all of its citizens to understand and subscribe to its core constitutional principles, it also needs them to cultivate a shared ethos of civility, comprised of unwritten norms of mutual respect and understanding. That is what has historically been assumed to distinguish "civil" government from "uncivilized" barbarism, which is effectively reducible to the logic of war.
One of the most significant intellectual influences on the American founders, the Baron de Montesquieu, captured this point in his treatise The Spirit of the Laws by distinguishing between the "form" and the "principle" of political regimes. Whereas for Montesquieu, the "form" of a political regime refers to its legal institutional framework, its "principle" refers to the basic motivating drive that must move citizens to act in particular ways within the legal framework. His point is that in order to function effectively, each political form supposes a specific principle.
For instance, the principle of monarchy, for Montesquieu, was honor, in the sense that monarchies can only function effectively if citizens recognize that different individuals occupy different ranks or status positions within the established social hierarchy. He also believed that the principle of a republic was virtue, understood as a willingness to put the interests of the polity ahead of one's own. For this reason, he maintained that a republic could only function effectively if its citizens were trained to be virtuous.
Analogously, we might say that a democratic regime can only function if its citizens are trained to be civil, in a way that requires them to recognize and respect differences of opinion and interest. They must also acknowledge the basic constitutional principles that organize the peaceful alternation in power among competing political parties. These are what civic education needs to inculcate in all citizens in order for the American system of government to work.
SEPARATING CIVICS FROM PARTISANSHIP
Civic education is controversial from the point of view of a purely liberal (or procedural) conception of democracy. The reason is that liberalism is generally supposed to imply agnosticism with respect to substantive conceptions of the good life. For example, some have argued that the Madisonian system can function autonomously, even substituting for the "defect of better motives" (in Madison's terms) among its participants. This autopilot view of procedural democracy holds that institutions alone, irrespective of the character of the individuals who comprise them, will be sufficient to force compromises and make decisions to address society's most vexing problems. By contrast, civic education necessarily implies some form of substantive soulcraft.
But even a purely procedural conception of democracy requires citizens to agree to certain substantive principles and values in order to function effectively. Consider the peaceful transfer of power: It requires citizens to accept the principle that election losers should step down voluntarily, without which the procedural rules become meaningless. Or take majority rule: For congressional procedures to persist, members of Congress must accept the substantive principle that certain rights are protected even from democratic majorities. Otherwise, the institution's rules would undermine themselves.
Liberal democracy thus harbors a fundamental tension: The system is predicated on certain normative foundations that it cannot, through its own mechanisms, guarantee or justify. To secure these presuppositions, liberal democracies must therefore engage in a form of civic education that is at odds with their supposed commitment to value neutrality. In other words, liberal democracies cannot be neutral with respect to their own foundational principles; they must educate their citizens in the normative foundations of liberal democracy precisely as a condition of enabling civil disagreement, and therefore choice, between other, less fundamental value orientations.
This yields the critical distinction between civic (or constitutional) values and issues, about which consensus must be presumed or produced, and partisan (or political) values and issues, about which disagreement is not only legitimate, but also necessary for democracy to function. Thus, the point of civic education becomes to shore up, or to teach, agreement over certain foundational values and procedures, in order to enable civil disagreement and therefore choice between partisan political options.
Of course, this distinction itself poses its own problems, and is susceptible to controversy over what exactly should be considered civic as opposed to partisan. But liberal democracy requires that the distinction be operative, which implies agreement on at least some basic civic principles.
The tension at the heart of liberal democracy can, at least in part, be lessened by restricting the scope of what is considered civic in several ways. One is to avoid the shortcut of scoring political points by smuggling partisan views into civic education. Such education can only retain its legitimacy if educators and their institutions exercise a form of self-discipline aimed at keeping partisan disagreements at one remove. A commitment to a form of partisan neutrality is thus essential for preserving the legitimacy of any civic-education project.
For instance, whether redistributive taxation is or isn't good policy is a political question, one on which different partisan interests are bound to have legitimate disagreements. If a civics class were to take up this question, it should be framed as a partisan one with the recognition that it cannot be settled. However, that government requires some form of taxation in order to exist cannot be the object of legitimate partisan disagreement and is therefore something that civic education may well have to teach its students. Even the most ardent libertarian must adopt this view.
Another way of lessening the unavoidable tension between liberal democracy's commitment to value neutrality and the requirements of civic education is to restrict the latter to elucidating broad philosophical alternatives over boundary issues that involve both civic and political components. For example, the American Declaration of Independence asserts a commitment to "certain unalienable rights," construed as self-evident truths. However, what makes these rights self-evident is open to interpretation. The statement might be read as implying a commitment to a Lockean doctrine of natural law — which was probably Thomas Jefferson's own view — but could also be seen as stemming from a more historically grounded process of value-commitment consolidation over time, as in more recent, positivistic interpretations of human rights that see them as constitutive pre-commitments of the political community itself.
A properly conducted civics class need not necessarily choose between these competing philosophical interpretations, but could productively teach them all, together with their respective political implications. Such an approach opens up space for students to make up their own minds about which particular interpretation to embrace while also recognizing that other competing views are possible and legitimate. From this perspective, the goal of civic education becomes mapping a broad spectrum of possible interpretations of core American values, laying the foundations for civil political disagreement between them.
To be sure, the decision over which interpretations of core American values to teach in civics classes is itself inevitably value laden. The tension between the civic and the partisan components of civic education cannot therefore ever be fully resolved; instead, civic educators must assume it as an ongoing democratic responsibility. However, recognizing and engaging that tension is likely to be both pedagogically and civically fruitful. In order to agree to disagree, we must inevitably agree on something, which is what civic education is all about.
In this sense, civic education depends on significant intellectual effort. This is one reason why it belongs in the academy, and why it is important to think through what kind of place or role it ought to have within universities. The current debate about civics education is not merely about curricular disputes over what to teach or how to teach it, but also about fundamental struggles over institutional authority and academic territory. Just as liberal democracies struggle to justify their own normative foundations, universities have created no institutional home for the awkward but essential question of what, if anything, they owe the democratic order that sustains them.
To meet this challenge, Benjamin and Jenna Storey of the American Enterprise Institute have made the bold argument that civic thought should become its own field or discipline within the academy. Without institutional moorings in the form of a distinct academic discipline, they contend, civic education will remain perpetually vulnerable to the shifting winds of academic fashion and administrative convenience. Furthermore, they argue that civic education possesses a substantive intellectual agenda that cannot be adequately served by parceling out its components among existing departments. The concept of democratic citizenship provides more than a useful organizing principle: It opens up fundamental questions that cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries yet receive little systematic attention from most of them. Only with an institutional home, the Storeys contend, can we directly confront the intellectual challenges of civic education.
CIVICS AND PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES
Nothing stated above implies that civic education should not also take place in elementary and secondary schools, as it does in much of the country. But colleges and universities have a particularly important role to play in the facet of civic education highlighted. This is because they help form the members of the citizenry that are most directly involved in partisan competition.
The principle of political representation demands that there exist some class of political leaders as a vital component of a democratic order. In Federalist No. 10, Madison emphasized that elected representatives must have a "patriotism and love of justice" such that they will pronounce the "public voice" of the people better than the people themselves. But beyond political elites narrowly defined as those directly involved in partisan competition, a realistic look at the way American democracy actually functions indicates that the larger swath of college-educated citizens also plays a critical role.
Reams of empirical studies have shown that those with college degrees tend to be much more politically active than those without them. The college-educated are more likely to vote, to donate to candidates, to attend rallies and protests, and to volunteer for campaigns and community activities. Even beyond such political activity, this broader group often sets the nation's cultural tone by leading the media and entertainment industries as well as the non-profit and business sectors.
Insofar as higher-education institutions form political elites, both narrowly and broadly defined, it is especially important that those who attend universities undergo some additional and more extensive form of civic education relative to the one that takes place in elementary and secondary schools. Yet many signs indicate that colleges and universities have not been providing the sort of civic education the nation sorely needs.
Indeed, research by Morris Fiorina of Stanford University suggest that, at present, political elites in the United States are more ideologically polarized than ordinary citizens. This makes them less likely to abide by the critical distinction between civic and political values introduced above, which threatens the health and stability of the democratic order as a whole.
To be clear, this is not meant to be a defense of the "elitism" of colleges and universities. Rather, the institutions that select and form political elites should themselves be open and accessible to all citizens on a meritocratic basis. This fulfills the democratic promise of equal opportunity, understood in a Jeffersonian sense of open access to positions of leadership within society, in contrast to aristocracies, which are instead founded on the principle of elite selection through lineage.
This is also the reason why public (or at least publicly funded) universities have an especially important role to play in the project for civic education. A handful of mostly private elite universities are generally assumed to play the most important role in forming America's elites, and have consequently received the lion's share of attention in ongoing debates about the role of universities in fostering civic culture. But this disproportionate level of political attention does not square with empirical reality: Indeed, a much larger group of primarily public universities produce a huge slice of the nation's top civic leaders. Andy Smarick of the Manhattan Institute, for instance, has shown that public universities produce most governors, state attorneys general, state supreme-court justices, state legislative leaders, and state education superintendents.
This is one reason why some American founders recognized that publicly funded universities would play a central role in fostering the civic culture required for the republican system of popular self-government to function. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, articulated this point most explicitly in 1786, advocating that the government fund an institution designed to instruct youth in "republican knowledge and principles." James Madison went further, promoting the establishment of a national university, of which George Washington emerged as one of the most ardent proponents. In his inaugural 1790 address to Congress, Washington suggested lawmakers create an educational institution capable of teaching students to, among other things, "distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority."
While none of these early proposals for a national university came to fruition, the basic argument underpinning them still stands: Publicly chartered higher-education institutions have an essential role to play in advancing civic culture among the nation's elites, mainly because they are able to educate a much larger proportion of the country's population than elite private institutions. By at least one obvious measure, reaching more citizens is better for advancing civic culture.
Furthermore, regarding exposure to viewpoint diversity and the cultivation of an ethos of civil disagreement, public universities frequently demonstrate superior abilities, primarily because their student bodies reflect greater socioeconomic and demographic diversity. Unlike elite private institutions, where students oftentimes emerge from relatively homogenous backgrounds, public universities attract students who are more reflective of the country's sociological diversity, and are therefore ideologically cross-pressured in various ways. As a consequence, public-university students more often defy neat categorization into conventional political taxonomies.
The main challenge in reorienting political focus toward public universities, therefore, appears to lie in a persistent form of elite bias, which channels the lion's share of attention and resources toward select prestigious institutions while neglecting the fact that we can obtain greater political dividends by investing in civic education at public universities.
Our own modest contribution to this effort has been to found a new academic center at the City College of New York (CCNY) named in honor of the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, for whom CCNY itself launched a remarkable career in public life. Over the course of his time in government, Senator Moynihan worked for two Democratic and two Republican presidential administrations before serving for almost a quarter-century in the U.S. Senate. He played a critical role in many landmark government initiatives — from the expansion of welfare programs in the context of President Lyndon Johnson's "war on poverty" to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Richard Nixon, up to the architectural renovation of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., and Penn Station in New York City.
This did not require Moynihan to relinquish his partisan affiliations — he remained a Democrat throughout his life. Rather, it demonstrated the productive potential of political engagement across lines of ideological difference. Moynihan therefore represents a model of the kind of civically informed partisanship that we now sorely need to cultivate in the political leaders of the future, beginning with the public higher-education institutions from which the senator (like many other outstanding politicians of his generation) emerged.
THE ART OF BOUNDED DISAGREEMENT
The preoccupation with government regulation as a threat to universities reveals a curious myopia about a deeper institutional problem. What demands our attention is not simply external political pressure, but the universities' own gradual abandonment of their responsibility to cultivate the civic sensibilities necessary for democratic partisanship.
The solution lies not in a retreat from politics, as some suggest, nor in the intensification of one particular political orientation over another. Rather, universities must reconstitute themselves as environments where political differences can be articulated within a framework of shared civic understanding. This is not a matter of avoiding partisanship, but of providing the institutional context that gives partisanship productive potential beyond mere intergroup fighting.
Strengthening partisan competition within appropriate boundaries would, in the long term, serve American liberal democracy well. Learning the art of bounded disagreement — or the capacity to maintain fundamental respect while contesting ideas vigorously — is particularly crucial for those who will assume positions of cultural, economic, and political leadership. Concern for cultivating this skill in students has deteriorated noticeably among our elite educational institutions.
We would be mistaken to focus exclusively on prestigious private universities in this enterprise. The key to regenerating America's civic foundations lies primarily with our public universities, which reach a far broader segment of the population. Both legislative bodies and philanthropic organizations would do well to direct their attention to strengthening civic education at these flagship institutions, rather than fixating on the handful of elite private schools that command disproportionate media scrutiny.
What this requires is not a civic education that seeks artificial consensus, but one that develops the capacity for structured, principled disagreement — the kind of disagreement that has historically provided the dynamic tension necessary for democratic vitality and adaptation. There is nothing contradictory about seeing partisan contestation as essential to liberal democracy; indeed, this understanding represents the mature realization of democratic principles.
