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Schools aim to teach students to ‘think critically, analyze rigorously, and engage constructively’
Leaders of several university civic thought and leadership schools across the country say their programs are showing signs of growth and student interest despite pushback from some academics.
Since 2016, 17 public universities in a dozen states have established civics schools or centers, also known as CTLs, in an effort to educate future leaders on American civics, classical philosophy, logic, economics, and related fields.
The College Fix reached out to several schools this month asking for more information about their programs, enrollment trends, and responses to recent criticism about their programs pushing partisan political views.
Lee Strang, executive director of Ohio State University’s Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society, told The Fix about how the program is growing.
Officially launched in August 2025, the center offers a bachelor’s degree in civics, law, and leadership. The center started with 35 students in two classes in fall 2025, and it has met its fall 2026 goal of 400 students in 13 classes, Strang said. They plan on holding 27 classes for 800 students in spring 2027, he said.
One of the courses Strang touted was a spring 2026 class called “Love and Friendship.”
“Universities’ studies of their students show that one of the leading concerns students identify is loneliness,” Strang said in a recent phone interview.
Two faculty members who happen to be married taught the class. They covered a variety of reflections of friendship, including marriage, using texts from Aristotle, Jane Austen, and the Hebrew Bible among others, to explain and model friendship. Strang said the students loved the course.
Outside of the classroom, the center also runs the Chase Society, which currently has over 320 student members. One recent experience the society offered was a study abroad trip to Oxford University, where 20 students learned about America’s English heritage and debated with Oxford students.
The center also holds public events. Last year, 10 events garnered a total attendance of approximately 1,000 students, including a talk by George Will, a Washington Post columnist and one of the “founders of the American conservative movement,” Strang said.
But the center has not been without challenges. As noted in last year’s annual report, the University Senate rejected a proposal to give the program “University Center” status.
Strang said many members of university communities do not recognize the deep and broad public distrust of American higher education.
He said schools of civic thought “are a positive way to respond to such criticisms by enhancing universities with news courses, degree programs, public programs, and student opportunities” focused on shared American civic tradition.
Several other civic education schools also have reported signs of growth.
Last May, as previously reported by The Fix, the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education graduated its first three students in its philosophy, politics, economics, and law major. For the coming fall, the program has 146 enrolled students.
The University of Texas at Austin’s School of Civic Leadership, established in 2023, also is growing.
In the fall of 2027, the school will begin offering two new majors: great books honors and strategy and statecraft, according to a university news release. Two years ago, the school launched its first Bachelor of Arts in civics; and 103 students enrolled, according to UT News.
Meanwhile, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced last year that its School of Civic Life and Leadership would become an independent academic unit.
Nearly 1,000 students enrolled in its courses. The number of students declaring a civics minor also increased by more than 90 percent in a single semester, according to a school announcement.
This growth took place in spite of opposition from the president of the state’s American Association of University Professors branch, Jay Smith.
“Though they would never admit it, the faculty of SCiLL benefited from affirmative action, but of the unjustifiable kind that works in reverse,” Smith wrote in a 2024 op-ed at The Daily Tar Heel after UNC announced the hiring of 11 faculty members for the civics school.
The national professors association’s media relations office directed The Fix to an article in its Journal of Academic Freedom when contacted for comments on the CTL movement.
The article by sociology Professor Katie Rainwater at Florida International University and history Professor Robert
Cassanello at the University of Central Florida asserts that these civics schools are a “strategic” effort by partisan donors to push libertarian political views on college students.
“For more than two decades libertarian billionaires have made donations to universities to establish academic centers as part of an effort to restructure society around the notion of ‘individual freedom’ and restrict the state’s role in the provision of public goods,” the authors wrote.
Rainwater and Cassanello linked the civics programs to donations from the Koch brothers, philanthropists known for supporting libertarian and conservative causes.
“The centers are … depicted as furthering the university’s mission of free inquiry by funding teaching and research on ideas unjustly suppressed by the ‘indoctrinators.’ However, the purpose of the centers is not to promote free inquiry but to proselytize preferred speech,” they wrote.
But other education scholars believe these schools are needed.
Paul Carrese, director for Arizona State University’s Center for American Civics, laid out his vision on the future of these programs in an American Enterprise Institute report published last month.
Carrese said he wants to see CTL be established as an academic field on its own. Two major steps he outlined in the report are to establish PhD degrees in CTL units and to start an academic journal for the emerging field.
These steps are already starting to take place.
For example, the first batch of admitted PhD candidates at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School will start taking classes this fall. The school offers two tracks: history of ideas, or war, statecraft, and strategy.
“Beginning in fall of 2026, UF Hamilton School graduate students will be trained to think critically, analyze rigorously, and engage constructively—developing the intellectual tools to navigate complex problems and lead with insight,” the school’s website states. “Our programs cultivate an environment where open inquiry thrives and pathways to impactful careers are intentionally built.”
Carrese told The Fix in a recent email that since his report has been published, he became aware of more CTL leaders in “the formal process of proposing a PhD” with their school. Others have contacted him about starting a new academic journal, he said.
When asked about obstacles to his recommendations, Carrese mentioned the “covert opposition from faculty and administrators” that CTLs units have been facing.
“For all of the progressive tendencies and momentum of the research model of the university across the past 150 years, most left- and farther-left-leaning faculty in the humanities and social sciences are now quite close-minded in defense of their predominance in particular fields and across academia generally, suppressing and excluding any serious thinking, teaching, and research deemed heretical,” he said.
Meanwhile, Strang at Ohio State said there is an “ongoing debate” whether CTL is an academic field or a body of knowledge. He said the Chase Center will facilitate this debate when it hosts the annual conference on civic thought at the end of September.
Strang provided The Fix with a draft article of his arguing that if CTL becomes an academic discipline, it “is oriented toward things that are truly good—our Republic; our fellow citizens; the Rule of Law—and wishes to help young Americans come to know and love these goods of our pluralistic Republic.”
Supporters of the civics schools also believe they are helping win back public trust for higher education.
“Fifty years from now, this movement could mark not just the founding of a few schools and centers across the country but the beginning of a broader restoration of the university’s civic mission,” Carrese wrote in his report.
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