July 4, 2026, is the 250th anniversary of America’s Declaration of Independence. It seems like a moment for this nation’s civic and educational institutions to celebrate.
But I detect a certain ambivalence and uncertainty about how to mark the occasion. At a time when the American political system is under great strain and the future of democracy is up for grabs, this 4th of July should be a time to recommit to the American project envisioned at the founding of this country.
That project was to establish a nation committed to the principle that “all men are created equal.” Harvard University’s Danielle Allen rightly observes that the Declaration of Independence “makes a cogent philosophical case for political equality” and that governments have a noble purpose: to protect rights and promote the conditions under which citizens could pursue “happiness” in their own way.
She does not shy away from the injustices that its authors condoned, but insists that “the hypocrisy of the eighteenth-century revolutionaries does not negate the enduring wisdom of their words.”
As we approach the 250th anniversary of that document, colleges and universities should lead the way in highlighting that case and exploring why it matters today. But it is also a good time to critically assess the recent proliferation of civic education programs in higher education.
Unfortunately, many are promoting a version of American history and politics that may please the Trump Administration, even as it does a disservice to the students who will be exposed to that form of civic education. The investment in civic education, especially in state universities, is part of what the Hechinger Report calls “a new conservative playbook.”
“A growing number of Republican legislators,” it explains, “are using their power in the name of intellectual diversity to get right-leaning professors in front of all students, including, and maybe especially, the liberal ones. They are stepping in to influence who is hired and what is taught on public campuses, hoping to wrest back control from what they say has been an unchecked left-wing indoctrination of America’s college students.”
The Trump Administration is proceeding along a parallel track.
Last July, an article in Inside Higher Education described the administration’s program this way: “Even as it freezes billions of dollars in higher education funding elsewhere, the Trump administration is offering colleges and universities grants to put on seminars for K-12 educators and students related to next year’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And it’s telling applicants (that) priority will be given to applicants from institutions of higher education that have established independent academic units dedicated to civic thought, constitutional studies, American history, leadership, and economic liberty.”
“These institutes,” the article explained, “should demonstrate a sustained commitment to robust civil discourse, the liberal arts, and the study of American history and politics through primary documents…. The metric could mean the Trump administration will bless—with federal funds—the growing movement among Republican-controlled legislatures and some university governing boards to establish civics or civil discourse centers at public higher education institutions.”
Public university campuses across the country—including in Arizona, Florida, Ohio, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah—have developed civics programs that venerate America even as they marginalize or downplay critical perspectives. They embody the belief that, as the website of the Philadelphia-based non-profit Jack Miller Center puts it, “judging the past has become more important than understanding the past.”
An example of this eschewing-judgment approach is found at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, which, as The Washington Post reports, “in just a few years has grown from an idea into a full-fledged school with nearly 50 professors, four majors, 69 classes this spring and tens of millions of dollars appropriated directly by the Florida legislature.”
Its program represents “a conservative backlash to the liberalism that prevails on many campuses, something a growing number of schools have acknowledged. In response, red states are installing a new breed of civics centers like the Hamilton School at public universities, focused on America’s founding and Western civilization — the history, culture, and politics centered in Europe that laid the groundwork for American institutions.”
In Florida, as elsewhere, the promotion of civic education in colleges and universities has gone hand-in-hand with efforts to purge them of courses on “identity politics” or on “theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States.”
Or take Ohio State University’s Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society. The Republican-dominated legislature created it “with the explicit goal of enticing students to take courses taught by a newly hired group of conservative philosophers, political scientists, and historians.”
The Miller Center sees those centers as part of an effort to end what it calls “polarizing civics.” As Hans Zigler, President of the Miller Center, argues, “Each generation has a sacred obligation to understand the core ideas, documents, and history of America, to act on that knowledge in our daily lives as citizens, and to pass it along to the next generation.”
The Trump Administration describes that sacred obligation this way: “Citizens must understand why our free-market democracy is a highly evolved system of cooperation made robust by our constitutional republic, and how it functions to secure the blessings of liberty for all Americans. This understanding can only be acquired and prove to be lasting when rooted in a recognition of the nobility of America’s foundational principles, and an accurate and honest account of American history that shows how the United States has worked through profound challenges to its ideals….”
Long ago, civic education failed in this country because it embraced that approach. It is not likely to flourish if it becomes just a code word for conservatism and what Arizona State University Professor Paul Carrese labels a “defensive-nostalgic” focus “on American triumphs and folklore, with minor attention to any failings to live up to the Declaration’s principles of the equal natural rights of all humans to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
When they come back into session in the fall, colleges and universities should celebrate, if belatedly, the principle that Allen says is core to the Declaration’s purpose and America’s identity. Because we live at a time when the government in Washington, DC, does not honor that principle, it is more important than ever to educate students and the broader public about it.
This does not require embracing a kind of blind patriotism. Nor is this a moment to double down on the kind of uncritical civic education that is all the rage in higher education.
College students need to be taught both to understand and judge our history.
The 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is an occasion to use love of country as a motivation to recall what this country stands for. It is a time to point out the progress we have made in realizing our ideals, as well as the tragic incompleteness of that progress.
Doing that offers a way to enliven civic education and rescue it from the conservative ideological indoctrination now being pushed at many of our nation’s colleges and universities.
Austin D. Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is an internationally renowned scholar whose interdisciplinary work examines law in relation to culture, violence, and the liberal arts. His academic foundation includes a B.A. from Providence College (1969), an M.A. (1970) and Ph.D. (1973) from the University of Wisconsin, and a J.D. from Yale Law School (1988). He has also received honorary degrees, including an LL.D. from Providence College (2008) and an A.M. from Amherst College (1984). Sarat has also been awarded the Jeffrey B. Ferguson Memorial Teaching Prize at Amherst in 2022 and the Ronald Pipkin Service Award as well as many others
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