In May 2005, university administrators were rudely awakened from their civic slumber when the U.S. Department of Education issued an “Implementation Notice.” Without any prior comment from universities, Congress had passed and President George W. Bush had signed into law a rule proposed by Senator Robert Byrd: “Every educational institution receiving Federal appropriations for any fiscal year shall, on September 17 of that fiscal year, conduct an educational program on the Constitution of the United States for the students enrolled therein.”
The new requirement was met with a cool reception by colleges, which are represented in Washington by a variety of organizations that lobby for laws, regulations and money. Before the Department of Education’s intervention, few on most campuses were likely aware of the significance of September 17, the date in 1787 when delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed our founding document.
A 2002 survey of students at the nation’s top 55 colleges and universities found that four out of five of their graduates received a grade of D or F on exam questions from the standard high school history curriculum. Many similar surveys followed, all with the same dismal result. Most recently, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni conducted a civics study of college students that showed, among other sad facts, that less than a third of students know when the U.S. Constitution was written.
There is an obvious reason for this deplorable state of civic and historical understanding. That awareness, once considered relevant to responsible citizenship and human understanding, is no longer considered part of the mission of American universities.
How did the American academy come to be indifferent, if not hostile, to civic education in the traditional sense? There was a time in the not-too-distant past, as the late Allan Bloom described it, when the purpose of the college curriculum was to provide “intellectual clarity about the most important things.”
After World War II, however, especially immediately after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, both the mission and structure of universities were dramatically transformed. Two main currents of this change are still felt today: fragmentation and specialization of undergraduate studies and the politicization of academic life, from that of the New Left activists of the 1960s to the postmodern identitarian left of today. All coherence and hierarchy in the university’s curricular structure were sacrificed to the principle of mutual tolerance and respect between all disciplines.
The political unrest that erupted on American universities in the late 1960s began with the awareness that the university had lost its sense of common purpose. The questions that are perennial features of human existence – how should we live, what are the goals of life, what is the best political order – were no longer present in the curriculum of the specializations. Nothing stood in the way of a determined group that wanted to reorganize university life according to new directions and goals.
Would not a resumption of the study of American constitutional forms and their history be a realistic path back to a truly humanizing education? Through such study, we might rediscover the American principles of public law that have governed our civic life for most of our history. A renewed attention to the American Founding and to the Western philosophical and religious traditions without which the new American nation could not have been imagined would be an effective antidote to ideologies and practices that have led to their neglect.
And now the good news: A renaissance of civic education is taking place in America. Programs such as the Center for Constitutional Studies at Utah Valley University and the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton are currently being established at numerous public and private universities.
We have been left a “political edifice of liberty and equality,” said Abraham Lincoln. “If destruction is our destiny, we ourselves must be its authors and finishers. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time or die by suicide.”
Reviving the study of constitutionalism, and the American Constitution in particular, helps our young citizens rediscover the foundation of freedom and political security that our democratic republic provides. By promoting programs, curricula, and yes, Constitution Day celebrations dedicated to this learning, we can restore faith in our institutions, the loss of which is so widely lamented.
Bradford P. Wilson is the James Wilson Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Civic Thought at the Center for Constitutional Studies at Utah Valley University. He was recently appointed by President Biden to the Board of Trustees of the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation. He is co-editor of The Political Writings of Alexander Hamilton and The Political Writings of George Washington.
