The “Renaissance” in Civic Education: Beyond the Salmon P. Chase Center
By Madison Wallace | Former John R. Oller Special Projects Reporter
“I know of no country,” historian Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “where there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.”
In his 1830s work, Democracy in America, the French political thinker – a beloved figure of classical and democratic education – penned his fascinations in observation of the tyranny of majority and social conformity that can suffocate any democratic society – even the freest nation in the world.
The implications of his observations serve to warn all democratic constituents – political scientists, politicians, academics, entrepreneurs, military officials, blue-collar workers, immigrants and social media influencers – about the dangers of polarization and free market echo chambers.
It is this school of thought – launched by several advocacy organizations aiming to usher academia back to its unifying and inspiring role in civic education – such as the educational nonprofit, the Jack Miller Center, and its “Renaissance in Civic Education”, or the U.S. Department of Education’s MAGA-led civics education coalition – have led to the creation of the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture and Society at Ohio State, and the subsequent policy diffusion establishing similar centers at universities in Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.
While the Miller Center strives to achieve its founding mission to address the critical disappearance of America’s founding principles and history from our nation’s classrooms, the U.S. Dept. of Education politicizes its funding power by prioritizing discretionary grants for educational programming at institutions which “promote patriotic education”, a presentation of American history grounded in an “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring and ennobling characterization of America’s founding and its principles.
As civic knowledge declines and trust in institutions collapses, lawmakers and some scholars argue the state has a duty to reclaim the university’s original civic mission of education for citizenship through reinvigorated lessons in American history, founding documents and the sociology of being an active, informed citizen.
Ohio State faculty warn that imposing legislative mandates, ignoring a long-held tradition of faculty input on curriculum and hiring, and channeling politicized funding threatens the very independence and democratic legitimacy higher education is meant to protect.
Map of civic studies centers inspired by the Jack Miller Center.
# **The “Renaissance” Comes to Ohio**
It was 2023 when state lawmakers inserted a measure into the state budget creating the Chase Center as one of five institutions at state universities intended to expand civic education programming and K–12 outreach across Ohio.
Senators who sponsored the legislation promised to restore American constitutional order and fundamental democratic society through civics education that keeps ideology from replacing history on campus, according to the Senate’s website.
To some faculty members, this legislation errs a little too closely to that of a similar, historic bill – Senate Bill 1 – passed on Mar. 25, 2025. That bill banned diversity, equity and inclusion programming and faculty striking, limited the teaching of controversial subjects and required course syllabi to be public online, according to prior Lantern reporting.
“Our number one general position right now in AAUP is to remind people of the origins of the Chase Center – that it originated alongside SB1, sponsored by the same people,” said Pranav Jani, associate professor of English and member of the American Association of University Professors’ Ohio State chapter.
Much like the budget measure – sponsored by Sen. Rob McColley and Sen. Jerry Cirino – Jani said, “even though Lee Strang consistently says this is independent of SB1, it exists in the same climate as a ‘corrective’ to what they claim is faculty indoctrination of students at the university, as something they believe is going to bring balance to the world.”
Lee Strang – inaugural executive director of the Chase Center and former constitutional law professor at the University of Toledo – worked alongside Sen. Rob McColley to create the center. He served as Toledo’s first director of the Institute of American Constitutional Thought and Leadership located in the college of law before he was hired at Ohio State in 2024.
According to Strang, while academics – like all individuals in a campus community – may have political views, their role is not to work for political interest or partisan relations, but to advance civic education for their local and state communities.
“The one sentence summary for the Chase Center’s mission is – teaching and research of the American constitutional tradition in society – and I’ve never run into anybody who thinks that’s a terrible mission,” Strang said.
“If the Chase Center were to actually come out against the way SB1 limits intellectual diversity, which is what they’re supposed to be about – [this] kind of repression of free speech being done by the administration. If they would come out about the abuse of the legal system and political system going on in the current government, where civics seems to be simply an act of power – I think there would be areas to work with,” Jani said.
Professors like Jani and AAUP board member, Erynn Beaton, believe a fundamental academic freedom comes from the sanctity of shared governance – a university model where faculty expertise over curriculum and hiring takes precedence – which was ignored by the mandated implementation of the Chase Center.
“In that mandate, I think that there was a lack of understanding about ways things happen on campus and how we protect academic freedom, and about the importance of shared governance with faculty. So, by having the center come from the outside it becomes really problematic for a lot of reasons,” Beaton said.
Those reasons include – of debatably utmost importance – concerns about ideology versus duplicity, Beaton said, and whether or not “the Chase Center is bringing about anything new that doesn’t already exist” in regard to the general education requirements already in place at the university.
Lights from advertisement boards backlight the Ohio Statehouse in the early morning of February 17, 2026. _Credit: Sandra Fu | Managing Photo Editor_
Advocates for mandated civic centers – such as Paul Caresse, former inaugural director of The School of Civic and Economic Thought and Learning at Arizona State University, also known as SCETL – believe citizenship education is a duty to healthy democracy, fulfilling itself through the social contract between America and her universities, which has eroded since the mid-1900s.
“Every graduate of every college and every university in the country, private, public, large, small, every single one, should have an American civics course taught by some department or other,” Caresse said.
“That is one of dozens of important questions addressed: the Constitution, knowing the Constitution and knowing it in a more serious way and the reasons behind it and the complexities of it and the disagreements about how to interpret it. Because this is daily life for anyone who takes seriously being an American citizen or an aspiring citizen,” Caresse said.
According to Strang, only 10-15 percent of his constitutional law students – after K-12 and four years of higher education – have read and studied the Constitution in its entirety.
“Seeing the lack of knowledge about some of the fundamental documents and some of the fundamental claims about a core aspect of our civil society, which is our constitutional system, suggested to me that there’s a real lack of knowledge about those important aspects,” Strang said.
Polls across The Chamber of Commerce, the American Bar Association and Gallup show civic literacy is plummeting – with nearly one-third of respondents, including registered voters, unaware that there are three branches of government, the Constitution is not the supreme law of the land and even non-U.S. citizens have to pay taxes while living on American soil.
“I don’t think you are going to hear from anyone on campus that civic education isn’t important. We think it’s incredibly important,” Beaton said.
Jani said the issue does not lie within partisan or ideological differences; in fact, there are plenty of conservative forces across different institutions and departments at the university.
“Their being conservative is neither a problem nor anything new. I might argue with it, I might debate with it, but that’s not why I’ve been positioned against it. It’s because it’s riding on the back of these kinds of laws that are about suppression and limiting the freedoms that we have,” Jani said.
Jani said he urges members of the community to understand the origins of the Chase Center so that they may understand the present moment and the current inequities.
“We still need to remember where it came from, which helps explain why they’re getting $3 million grants from the Department of Education, while other apartments are just struggling to make sure that we can teach the courses that we want, hire the people that we want,” Jani said.
Jani said while certain other departments – such as the humanities and social sciences – are being starved of certain freedoms of excess, like hiring and teaching various curricula in abundance.
“They are flush with money,” Jani said. “They’re hiring people [with] much higher salaries coming in than even people like [me], who are in year 22 at Ohio State.”
# **THE CONTROVERSY: Social Contract Trumps Shared Governance
**
Top-down – a method of decision-making that originates with high-level government officials – mandates for civic education have brought about questions of legislative authority over the university model, leaving questions as to whether or not bridging the educational gap takes precedence over respecting the shared governance model of the university.
“One of our main concerns for the AAUP is this issue of shared governance – one of the things that we as faculty feel is fundamental to our academic freedom is having faculty input into how the university is run and that is primarily done through faculty council,” Beaton said.
Caresse said any instance of non-academics, such as a Board of Trustees or a state legislature, making demands with funding and mandates is sure to be controversial among faculty members at any university.
“There’s a deeper principle as to why it’s controversial for the faculty. For about a century, the dominant model, even in public universities, has been that universities are research and teaching units. Departments are in research fields [and] faculty of expertise – even though they’re publicly funded and governed – there’s faculty expertise over the curriculum and faculty hiring, such that, the faculty use this term ‘shared governance,’ ” Caresse said.
“What they really mean is that faculty veto – or a substantial faculty role – in anything related to hiring and curriculum, teaching, etc… The AAUP is a sort of institutional body for this, so principles of academic freedom and shared governance are cited,” Caresse said.
Beyond shared governance, Beaton said she believes “there were other avenues for a unit like the Chase Center to appear on campus”, leading faculty to question their motives even further.
“My response to the concern of whether this is an outrageous, anti-academic attack on universities coming from the state government or board of regents would be, well, it may be abnormal beyond the current academic norms, but they’ve got a point,” Caresse said.
The School for Civic and Economic Thought and Learning at Arizona State came as a result of the 2016 mandate by Gov. Doug Ducey. The unit was the first instance of a state-mandated civic education, based on the original university model emphasizing the social contract between universities, the state and democracy itself.
“The governing authority said, ‘We see an important lack – we see a need to restore the civic education mission of a public university, but we’re just going to give a general mandate and general funding to the state university.’ Then the state university leadership stepped forward and said, ‘here’s how we’re going to build it,’ ” Caresse said.
After its first academic year in 2017, Caresse said the phone calls and emails came in constantly about what was going on at Arizona State, what political scientists would refer to as policy diffusion.
“To just – in a nice gentle way – ask: ‘Gee! Would you do more of this?’ It’s not likely to have a very fast or productive response. So, the policy diffusion that occurred was to say the Arizona State government did a smart thing,” Caresse said.
Knowing candidly that the idea of state-mandated civic education reform is intellectually and academically conservative, Caresse said, it remains an important and academically valuable reform in higher education.
“To hear out, campus by campus, the concerns from the existing faculty who do not like to be told, in effect, from a governing authority: “ We disagree with your priorities. You took your research field and your discipline in this direction, we think there needs to be space for this, over here and you are a public university, and we want to restore the original public mission of the university,” Caresse said.
“That’s controversial and it’s difficult, but if put forward in this academic liberal arts spirit, it can be seen not as an attack, not as threatening, but as a correction, as a reform, as a renewal,” Caresse said.
# **WHAT DO AMERICA’S UNIVERSITIES OWE TO DEMOCRACY**
Caresse said the social contract between America and her universities is one that emphasizes civic education – clearly stated under the constitutional order when the country was formed.
“Just like Stalin and the Soviet Union said – you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you . . .You may not be interested in politics and civic affairs, but it’s interested in you – means – especially for university graduates – you’re primed to be leaders.”
Paul Caresse
****“The social contract [between America and her universities] for 80 years – since the second World War – has been that academia is going to get funding and support, all kinds of latitude and prestige, funding from the federal government as well as state governments.
Academia is going to get all of that in return for academia producing STEM expertise, science, technology, engineering, math, economic development, expertise, competitiveness, preparation for careers, right? Over those 80 years, just civics – preparing citizens – completely fell out of the social contract,” Caresse said.
According to Caresse, a constructive response to the Trump administration’s criticism of academia right now could include higher education admitting it recognizes the deficit in civic education and restoring it to a primary role in order to reduce concerns about ideological imbalance.
“If we did it in a philosophically balanced way, a liberal arts kind of civic education, it would show the entirety of the country that we care. Academia would show we care and that would be part of the social bargain being renewed between federal funding and state funding,” Caresse said.
“A renewed argument to require civics [and] to restore it to top-tier priority needn’t be seen as a partisan move on higher education. It can be seen from within academia as we turned away from this, we had other priorities, we ought to restore a priority within civic education,” Caresse said.
Caresse said some grumbling comes along with most things “required” of undergraduate students, but the mission to educate them for lifelong success as democratic citizens outweighs such.
“Stalin and the Soviet Union said, you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. So, the adaptation – you may not be interested in politics and civic affairs, but it’s interested in you – means, especially for university graduates, you’re primed to be leaders. In the public sector, in the private sector, in your profession, in your communities. Civic knowledge is going to be useful for you everywhere because government and politics and political debate are everywhere,” Caresse said.
Caresse said his “outrageous claim” comes directly from the book “What Universities Owe Democracy” by the president of Johns Hopkins University, Ronald Daniels, who would not be considered an academic conservative, according to Caresse.
“Every college and university in the country – private, public, large, small, every single one – they should all require at least one course in what I call American civic knowledge, he calls it ‘democracy education’. That shouldn’t be a partisan issue, that’s just a responsibility that higher education in America owes to this political community that provides it prosperity, security and privilege,” Caresse said.
The John Glenn of Public Affairs Building. _Credit: Daniel Bush | Campus Photo Editor_
# ****THE CONTROVERSY: Hiring Outside Peer Review****
The AAUP has been keeping a close eye on the Center since the idea was proposed in 2023. It has chronicled the origins and history and ensured that policies are being followed, such as course approval, hiring and public knowledge, according to Beaton.
Beaton also said the organizational body found a lot of faculty were unaware of the Chase Center’s existence or that it was going through the University Senate for a vote.
“We hear about the Chase Center very infrequently at this point, and that’s one of the main concerns – that it’s unclear whether processes are being followed according to shared governance, because it’s happening under the radar or behind a screen,” Beaton said.
“An example of this would be it’s really unclear how all of those faculty got hired. I mean, the legislation gave Strang permission to choose, basically, whoever he wanted. My understanding is that’s pretty close to what happened, but that is not the way tenured-track faculty get hired.”
Beaton said hiring processes are very rigorous for any potential candidate in a tenured track position with laws and university policy in place to ensure a fair, unanimous decision.
“We have a search committee. We have to look at every single application that comes through. We have to use a rubric to grade them. We have phone interviews as a search committee, then we have to have fly-outs. Then, at the fly-outs, the prospective faculty have to give what we call ‘job talks,’ ” Beaton said. “So, they will give a research presentation to the entire college, then the entire faculty vote on new people added to the college. It’s a very, very rigorous process because the university and the college [are] making a lifetime commitment to the scholar. To not know anything at all about how they were selected is astounding to me,” Beaton said.
University spokesperson, Chris Booker, said in an email “the Chase Center follows Ohio law and university hiring procedures for its employees, including tenured faculty.”
# ****THE CONTROVERSY: Ideology and Duplicity (Branding Disguised as Neutrality)
****
Source: American Pride Slips to New Low (2025)
At Ohio State, general education requirements include civic education and the entire model of the university is centered around citizenship –
“If the argument is that there isn’t duplication, then the question becomes if it isn’t duplicative if we have all of these citizenship classes and there isn’t overlap, then the answer becomes ideology,” Beaton said.
“Ideology is not meant to be part of the campus environment, so much so that it comes from professors or courses. We discuss ideology, but it’s not about bringing a particular ideology from an authoritative place,” Beaton said.
Caresse said his own disciplines – political science, economics, philosophy and history – have all turned away from civic thought and leadership in their curricula.
“It’s just a matter of facts. You look around the country – at the PhD granting departments at major private and public universities – the number of faculty in a history department who are experts in early American history, American constitutional history, American political history, let alone military history, also diplomatic history – all of those have declined,” Caresse said.
In reference to duplicity, Caresse said, in reference to the social science and humanities departments across many universities, the level of expertise has declined dramatically in the last 50 years.
“Various departments may say, we already do this, but I think if you were to go through various faculty and staff in these departments and say, how many experts do you have and how many courses do you have focused on these civic thought subjects,” Caresse said.
While the shift in priorities in higher education may be indisputable, Jani said civics education that emphasizes democratic processes and inalienable rights is ultimately more valuable than the latter, which “promotes the myth of the Founding Fathers – slaveholders and colonizers.”
“If your civics education is to tell me about how the law works and how people get elected, great. If not – if your civics education is oriented towards showing that the United States is the best government that’s ever existed in the world, and that talking about slavery and genocide and imperialism is a distraction from this myth of the United States that you want to project; if the main goal is to tell people of color that you ought to just be quiet and salute the flag because you shouldn’t talk about things that have happened, because America’s the best and any correction that’s needed already happened and was envisioned by the Founding Fathers – I have to disagree,” Jani said.
“When lawmakers point to educators and universities – K-12 and all – and blame them for not teaching this stuff, but [fix] it in a narrow way that’s just meant to enforce their own ideology while closing their eyes to every abuse of civics that’s happening in our society and government from the people who ought to know better, that’s when I have a problem,” Jani said.
Strang said he agrees with the notion there have been misuses of patriotism in the past, maybe the present and certainly in the future, and this will occur because humans continue to make mistakes.
“What the Chase Center tries to do is to create a culture in which patriotism doesn’t mean the negative things that people think it means, like maybe unblinking allegiance to an individual or leader, or unblinking allegiance to a set of political propositions or a party, right? But patriotism, in fact, is the healthy human phenomenon of one having a reasonable love for one’s political community,” Strang said.
However, Strang said, the Chase Center intends to respond to the inappropriate use of patriotism that may be a widespread view by giving students an opportunity to see other conceptions of patriotism where they are free to come to their own conclusions about various vehicles for national pride.
“In this environment of open engagement and dialog – to not propagate or indoctrinate but engage in genuine truth-seeking together. I want to find out answers and the best way to do that is in conversation with fellow humans, is to help students experience that same liberating environment of truth speaking,” Strang said.
The Chase Center plans to reinforce more honorable lessons in patriotism by offering a future course dealing with Plato’s symposium in order to share with students “the riches of human reflection throughout history, according to Strang.
“Plato, of course, was a student of Socrates, who was condemned to death by Athens. What does he owe it, if anything? The answer that Socrates gives – which I think has been the standard answer that Westerners have given and continue to give today, and I think is actually the healthy answer – is that that my political community, like my family, has helped create me the type of good being that I am, and it’s right for me to be loyal to it,” Strang said.
# ****Establishing the Need – What the Data Says
****
In partnership with the Center for Human Resources Research at Ohio State, Strang said the 2025 study on civic education and public trust in higher education found only half of the respondents knew Ohio had its own constitution.
According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s 2024 civic literacy survey, one-third of respondents did not know there are three branches of government and more than half did not know the amount of representatives in the House.
Furthermore, the American Bar Association’s 2024 Survey of Civic Literacy found 42% of respondents incorrectly believed the Constitution was the only supreme law of the land (it’s the Constitution and other documents), also finding half believed the general public was not well-informed.
Source: New Study Finds Alarming Lack of Civic Literacy Among Americans (2024)
In a bipartisan, cross-ideological study called Educating for American Democracy – also referred to as EAD – Caresse said he was the conservative lead author of six other academics to capture the reality that American civic education has to teach about debate and disagreement.
Coupled with “the contentiousness, pluralism, complexity and the need to confront the reality that civics has become polarized,” Caresse said they put together an idea of American civics that captures a wide range of views and ideas, while also finding that primary through secondary school teachers were struggling with civics due to a lack of support.
“If it’s required, it’s only required on paper. It isn’t fully supported in terms of time, resources, testing,” Caresse said. “So it’s just a second-tier or even third-tier priority in reality, day to day, in public schools. If it’s a bad situation in K-12, it’s not going to get better unless higher education steps forward to say this is a priority.”
“Are things going well with American civic knowledge? Are things going well with American civic culture? Don’t we have substantial evidence of civic disintegration, increasingly violent political language, increasing political violence itself? Younger folks having declining status regard for America itself. ‘How important is it to live in a democracy?’ is one way the polling asked.
How patriotic are you? Are you proud of being an American? Under 30, these numbers are really bad. So, for state governments, or a board of regents, to say we’ve got a real problem, it’s an urgent problem, we need to do something fast – here’s something that’s been done in other states, here’s how we’re going to do it in our state. To me, it’s obviously contentious, but it’s a reasonable governmental policy response to an urgent need,” Caresse said.
# ****WHAT NEXT: How Can the Chase Center Succeed and How Far Will the Government Reach
****
The success of SCETL at Arizona State and its national influence – according to Caresse – has come in due time as the school has shown its value to the university and campus community through tangible civic education outcomes and outreach.
“We’ve had nine years of funding renewal. In the initial years, it was perceived as partisan, because it was a Republican-controlled House and Senate in the Arizona State legislature, with a Republican governor. After a few years, we got Democrats in the state legislature to vote for the funding, and for the past three years, we’ve had a Democratic governor renew the annual funding at a doubled-level, now six million dollars per year,” Caresse said.
The three founding missions coined by Caresse – unwavering commitment to the liberal arts education model, public outreach and K-12 engagement – have proven its value and ensured its long-term success through funding and support, Caresse said.
“Those are the kinds of things we’ve done to show [value], and that’s why it paid off for us in a more immediate, concrete sense, in that we eventually got Democratic members of the State House and the State Senate to vote now to renew our annual funding. Not only the money value, but the academic and civic public value.
“There’s a wider national movement – private elite universities, as well as the public university – a renewal movement for civics and civic education. So, part of what Lee could say to the Ohio State community is, hey, let’s get in the ballgame. Have you seen what’s happened at Stanford? Have you seen what’s happened at Johns Hopkins?”
The Renaissance in Civic Education: Beyond the Salmon P. Chase Center - Madison Wallace
