Transcripts For CSPAN2 Discussion 20240702

From the same conference, discussion on Civic Engagement in the contemporary university setting. This portion is an hour and 20 minutes. All right, everybody, lets get started. Welcome back. I am yuval levin of the American Enterprise institute and i want to thank you very much for being here. I noticed quite a ways to go for a lot of people who are here, one of the best things about these gatherings for all of us is just being together and getting a sense of the kind of community of people thinking about these questions together, we are enormously grateful for it and getting started, i want to say a word of thanks to my colleagues for getting this together, building this community over the last few years and showing extraordinary leadership and i want to give them a hand, for the work they are doing. We get the bad cleanup in this session and there is some cleanup to do and in some ways it is related to the technical subject of the session which is also convenient because a lot of the questions that have been in some respects opened up and left open have to do with the fit between the university and Civics Education. There are questions about what civics is and the nature of the university but weve been confronting a set of questions about whether and how this project of Civics Education in 20thcentury america fits in Higher Education and what it means to think about it in the context of the modern university and all that it is. We will do that through a conversation between two ideal people to think through these questions for us and with us, we are very grateful to have them here in this final session. I will introduce them and they will speak for a bit and we will enter into a conversation, start with pierre loving. For a lot of us when you think about civics entire education you think of peter levine. That has been the case for decades. I am sorry. Thats only halfway how i mean it. Peter is the lincoln professor citizenship in Public Affairs and he teaches Political Science and philosophy, he spent really an entire career engaged in a variety of efforts to bring scholarly work to bear on ways of strengthening american civic life, working on voting rights, public deliberation and more than anything on Civics Education and helping us to think about various ways it could be part of what Higher Education means, hes the author of many books including most recently what should we do . A theory of civic life published in 2,022 by oxford, a book really worth your while. Justin dyer is the inaugural dean of austen school of civic leadership and a professor of government, one of the civic schools that popped up in public universities at a number of states and this question of how civics fit into the life of the universitys for him a very practical question, daytoday question. She was previously professor Political Science at the university of missouri and also the author of many books on a variety of questions related to our subject, the place of thinking in the american political tradition in many questions that have to do with the ways in which the kinds of questions we think about in Higher Education there on our civic life both of them lately have been thinking and writing a lot about the question in various ways. From different angles which should make for a number of useful ways into this conversation. So please. Thank you so much. When we were all young and naive and hopeful by which i mean 9 00 this morning, bens story gave an introduction to the day and at one point said a case could be made for a new discipline of civic thought or civic studies and he looked at me, used my name, gave you the thumbs up because i know my job which is to make that case for consideration. Im not going to talk about the tactical tactics of whether i create a new department versus the substance. I am sorry, we changed the order. I have to go okay. There you go. Civics studies, a tangible program that gives you something to think about concretely. Its also a nascent and not very big but meaningful intellectual movement its very intellectual and i want to introduce you to that. Some people in the room know it but not everybody. Most people wont know about it and this is one way to describe it. It is intended as a Reform Movement identifying a problem and the problem is a gap where the other disciplines and social sciences are not doing what we need, the diagnosis, doing a port things but not what we need. The social sciences primarily are asking why do people act in the ways they do in a generalized sense and how it might change their behavior or how might their behavior change if things about the world changed. You can disagree but i will plow through my simplifying claims. About the behavior and why people behave the way they do. The humanities are much more about meaning, about what is meant by, not intended that meant by the products of human mind. Those are all good questions. Philosophy is asking about really good thoughts about what is right, what is good, what is fair, another way to put it is how should things be, primary question and political philosophy is how should things be, all of these are good questions. Ethics is often focused around a unit of analysis of human life is what makes a person good or what should i do in a particular situation, should i lie to the secret police at my door, those kinds of questions. Public policy often ends up being the question of what should be done, that can translate into the question of what the government should do. Libertarian or skeptical position toward government is included in public policy. Its about what government should or shouldnt do. The claim, students should study them but they missed the citizen question. Only four words long, what should we do. All those words really count. What should we do . The point is to act in the world, not to change it, good things about the world is action and choosing not to act is the right thing. The ultimate purpose of a citizen is to act or intentionally refrain from acting and theres a discipline involved in acting, what should we do as opposed to how, what is going on, asking what should we do is part of it intellectually. The question is what should we do and this is crucial because the wii has a great significance, it slips away in Different Directions to what should be done by somebody else, slips into the abstract or it slips into the universal, what should i do, what should we do is a hard question but on all scales, it derives from a concrete group but also at the scale of the human species but im interested in the wii where theres an actual we for example the people in this room, what should we do if we took that seriously we would have to do things like figure out how to organize ourselves to make decisions, how to have otherwise its not really a we. The question is what should we do because it is as we say in academia about whats right or wrong, not what you want. Its not how things are and its not what your interests are, it is what should we do. You can look up and questions of should are disputed but serious citizens even if they are in an abstract way theres no right or wrong answer to the questions when they get into an actual decisionmaking forum, they are convinced that they may believe in his right and have reasons for it so citizens use the language of should and should, this is a bit of a stretch but my hope for saying information matters in order to decide what we should do you have to know how much what is going on, how much things cost, what the probability of success would be, should is the hook for the humanities and the social sciences and the Natural Sciences although the distinction is blurred. Quick sort of defense here because if you think about this long enough, someone will say why do we think about what should we do, what if somebody has the boot on the back of our neck, someone else has the resources, my basic answers are twofold. Even if the other people caused the problem, they wont change, to compel somebody else to change or make a request or demand is a form of doing but also because there is something, not just something but much intrinsically rewarding about asking the question what should we do no matter how the situation goes. Not just the means but living a better life but part of a community can ask what can we do . If you start with the question of what should we do it is embedded and connected, who am i is inescapable because in coming into a community you come in as a person or redefined that. Its a slippery concept and also the figure youre in helps to constitute what you are so you think about who i am to think about what we should do and which groups i belong to which is not a simple factual matter but a complex matter. You could be complicit member of a group you dont admit you are part of and you can think youre part of a group and they dont like you and you are not part of the group. What groups are you in is an ongoing question. Those questions can act and they are perennial but if we focus on the moment of what should we do as a specific moment, to get leads to read large categories of questions or topics. A group thats trying to decide what to do in fact is going to think about the immediate problems in front of him, taxes are too high or souls need to be savored or stop discriminating, thats what they are going to talk about but theres another layer, perennial and intrinsic to being a group, so one set of questions is how do you create a group that function so they can do anything . It would be a challenge if turning this community your network of people into a group, would involve doing things like choosing leaders, creating a budget, getting money, those are a set of questions and they are not easy and you dont learn them automatically as a developing human being. You have to learn them. To write that down, i have a more complex version of this, you have to think through the kind of rules and norms that work to make any Group Function and thats differentiated depending on the group and you have to think about how to create the human connection, i will say trust as shorthand for the various positives to relationships necessary to the group. Thats the first category. The second category, we have a big group ended if and if it is a Diverse Group we will disagree about means and ends. People have been terribly polite but disagreed. How do we deal with that . One set of questions that follows in is what are the ethics of the skills involved at the individual level of talking and listening to other people . Whats an appropriate thing to say and in what way . We might use a word like civility but what is civility . But how do we organize institutions for discourse, university is one, social network is another, a newspaper is another. How do we organize the structure of institutions for discourse . The third category, these other people who are not in our group and dont want to be, this is a group devoted to Civic Education and higher read, talking all day about the others like we do, how do we deal with them . And any group always has another. In terms of curriculum i tend to think about the study, critical certainly but also appreciative of movements broadly defined as things that organize or may change against opposition and especially nonviolent strains of social movement not because im a pacifist, i am not, i am supportive of military action in a number of cases. Nonviolence is in cases where you are in a functioning Civil Society with your fellow citizens and because nonviolent tradition gives us deep resources for thinking about these topics so when we think about questions from the earlier panel about what you would emphasize, it would be at the top of my list because among other things nonviolence allows you to act with the resources you have as a human being, not with what you are given like guns. A few more thoughts. We have a major, 89 majors, thats a pretty intricate number of majors teaching courses with minors, one of which can give us entrepreneursship. We have a Prison Program and the number of incarcerated students studying and they are all majors in those studies who graduated and done amazing things. I think this might be my last slide. Theres more to be done about this program if you want to hear about it. I invite you to join civics studies at the International Movement that is not huge, not tremendously widespread in the United States but meaningful with activity and opportunity. We have i should have counted but dozens of 2week long studies, College Students and others, professors and Civil Society leaders in ukraine where we do those for five years and a lot of thinking about this is coming out of other countries and interactions with Civil Society leaders. It is 60 something volume. Various programs have popped up that are using the model explicitly, mcmaster in canada, it is because it is canadian but they took to the studies specifically, talking about infiltrating other disciplines, civic studies group, a number of access, that activity is underway and that is it, and it will be an interesting contrast and that is good. [applause] when i was an undergraduate student i took a class at the university of oklahoma called foundations in american politics and i didnt really know what i was going to study or do or go to law school, business major at the time. When i took that class we read political sermons and pamphlets of the founding era, James Madisons notes on the constitution, antifederalist papers, some of tocqueville, closed with the Lincoln Douglas debates and i loved them and i thought that is what Political Science was. I changed my major and said sign me up. Thinking about that, introduced me to a lot of the questions he was outlining about civic studies, i was introduced to it through these texts, who are we and who are we in community with . How do we debate about principles and what is right and just and how to live together and constitute a new phenomena and . Thats my introduction, grateful for having had that introduction. What i would have gone on to do would have been a valuable thing for me to study and i would not have been exposed to it had i not and rolled in that class. It was by accident that i did that. One of the figures i was introduced was james wilson, one of the forgotten american founders who studied law under john dickinson, he wrote one of the influential political pamphlet in 1774 against colonial taxation without representation in parliament, served in the Continental Congress as a delegate for the constitutional convention, credited with the structure of article 2, he played a major role in the pennsylvania ratification debate, served as associate justice on the First Supreme Court and was one of six men to sign the declaration of independence and the constitution, a good resume. In 1789 George Washington appointed him to the court and in 1790 while he was on the Supreme Court the trustees at the college of philadelphia appointed him professor of law. One of the contemporaneous newspaper accounts of his first lecture when he was a professor at the college of philadelphia noted that in attendance were george and martha washington, john adams, both houses of congress, both houses of the state legislature and a number of ladies in gentlemen. For wilson as he was giving this and preparing a series of lectures, he hoped it would be for american law and he understood law very broadly, american politics, it would be Something Like what blackstones commentaries had been for a generation of colonial lawyers. That ultimately didnt happen. He died of malaria in 1797. At that time, he had lost money and land speculation, spend time in debtors prison on the Supreme Court and lived out his remaining days continually evading creditors. s lectures were never published in his lifetime. There is a Broadway Musical waiting to be written about wilsons life and like hamilton, we could ask who lives and who dies and who tells your story. Scholars are starting to tell wilsons story in full and are interested in the ideas that he had, particularly his lectures on law and those lectures engaged a deep appreciation for the role of education and in this context it is Higher Education, sustaining the new republic. In his inaugural lecture, wilson made two claims that are relevant for our conversation that help guide our conversation next. Law and liberty cannot become the object of our love unless they first become the object of our knowledge. Second, he said of these things, they should in some measure and some degree be the study of every free citizen and every free man. Every free citizen has duties to perform and rights to claim. Unless in some measure and some degree he knows those duties and those rights and can never act an independent part. It wasnt until 1885 henry coins the term civics to describe the study of the rights and duties of citizenship and this idea of having a role for Higher Education and sustaining the republic goes back to the beginning of the american experiment. George thomas has written a book, some of the founders even before ratification of the constitution were advocating the creation of a National University to educate the republics future leaders which unites people from different parts of the country. George washington took up this idea in his inaugural message to congress. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important, what duty, more pressing, on his legislature, than to patronize a plan of communicating to those who are future guardians of the liberty of the country . Among others of the founding generation, some suggest the idea of Public University at the state level . Many of their mottos of public state universities reflect a course Civic Mission built into the foundation of the university, this is true from texas and boston which is charted much earlier and opened in 1880 at the same time americans are talking about civics as a new discipline of study and the reason they are talking about civics, combining the latin word for citizen and greek suffix, creating a new idea, they are deeply concerned about houses sustain freedom after the civil war. Theres a reason this is happening in the postwar period. At the university of texas at austin, our motto, with apologies to jed if he is here for latin, study of the guardian of the city. A loose translation of a line from lumbars first message, cultivated minds, the guardian genius of democracy, lamar went on to ask in a way that echoed George Washington, how shall we protect our rights if we do not comprehend them and how can we cover him that unless we acquire knowledge of the past and present condition of things and practice the habit of an light and reflection . William battle was a classical scholar who was tasked with designing the university of texas in the early part of the 20th century and he put the latin motto against a blue background, that, he said, was to emphasize sincerity and truth seeking, the academic mission. The seal has an open book in one of the top fields that symbolizes study of the past, accumulated 4 battles of the discipline necessary to sustain flourishing societies in the future. The reason they mirror the state of texas, the Political Community which the university exists. After designing this field for the flagship Public University in texas, the motto incorporated was justification of the universitys existence and an ideal of its future. Question looking back on this is how to carry out this task in the 21st century . This is the central question for all of us, what do we and vision for the new institute in the schools, how do we carry this forward . The answer to that, we should reflect on our moments and our opportunities. For our moment, we should face it head on, confident in Higher Education is at historic lows. Gallup poll showed 36 of respondents express high level of confidence in Higher Education, down 20 since 2015. Among republican respondents the percentage was 19 and thats prior to october 7th. The scrutiny Higher Education has received since then in the spring of protests we just had, the number is arguably lower and still declining. Some of this dissatisfaction is related to the perception that Higher Education has become an ideological monoculture close to the range of reasonable perspectives represented in our pluralistic society. Whether or not you think that is true, that perception poses a challenge for those who want to see it thrive and part of that perception stems from the loss of conservative voices in Higher Education over time. John shields wrote an article for National Affairs a while back called the disappearing conservative professor, his Research Found conservatives Makeup Makeup 4 of historians and sociologists and 2 of literature professors, many departments, that effectively means there are none. This disconnect between the public and the university particularly in texas where we are a red state in a centerright country with a blue faculty on campus, that disconnect has not been good for either one. At the same time academic disciplines, while theyve become more ideologically homogenous have also become more special. This is not necessarily bad, this kind of specialization. Many disciplines have sophisticated methods. The body of knowledge is deeper. The questions they ask are more sophisticated. But as weve done this, we exchanged breadth for depth and what constituted broad Civic Education have been separated into different disciplinary units or dropped out altogether. Always for neff areas motives, no one asking these questions and doing this work anymore and this creates faith for new interdisciplinary academic units that focus on the core competence of the citizen for Civic Education and this is what our system board of regents asked our campus to do when they adopted a resolution last year directing our president to take steps to implement a new school of civic leadership. The resolution calls for, quote, a comprehensive Interdisciplinary Program of research, teaching, training, equipping students in knowledge and aptitudes necessary to lead a free society. And goes on to say the school would do this by providing students with foundational knowledge and Critical Thinking skills, whenever we think Critical Thinking skills might be steeped in the western tradition in american constitutional history and educating students in the values and principles of a free society while equipping them to be the next generation of leadership for our state and nation. This, coming back to the perception on campus, this work is attractive to conservatives. Not only conservatives. It is only conservative in the small see sense of the word, what is best and worth preserving our political institutions, imparting foundational knowledge to our students so they can take responsibility for the world, a good steward and improve those institutions for the next generation, but the work isnt and ought not to be partisan. Partisan fights are too ephemeral, political winds too unpredictable for any institution that seeks to tie itself to a partisan mask. We live in a polarized time, not by being moderate but something else. For lack of a better word, started calling this free partisan. Before partisan disagreements, some common object of love. This is agusta thinks about being united by common object of love and this is something james wilson picked up on. Of law and liberty are the objects of our love they must first be objects of knowledge and love in this formulation is too will the good of the other. To will the good of our Political Community we must first know something about it and its underlying principles and its history, not to tear it down or deconstruct it but to make it better. It can be made better presumes that it is open to critique. Civic education like liberal education must be committed to quote, freedom of thought, speech, civil discourse and the pursuit of truth. There are no prescribed orthodoxies not because we are neutral on the question of truth but the question that these norms flow. In an essay many of you are familiar with in the middle of the 20th century about the lost tools of learning, she was talking about grammar, logic, rhetoric, which she described as tools we could take to study all sorts of subjects, something that would continue long after formal education and she concluded that the primary end, the purpose of education would be to teach students how to think, not what to think. It is with Civic Education, we can turn models of the past to think about the foundations of our civic life and to learn how to think about the foundations of civic life and how to think about the responsibility that falls on us as citizens. But on the details, we will disagree. That the sign we are free and thinking independently. That must be true of these new schools and institutes of civic fought. That is our moment. What of our opportunity . Weve been given an opportunity and have a responsibility now to build these institutes in a way that will be meaningful and lasting and look back in 25 years and longer and seek this moment as a moment that was significant for Higher Education. This isnt happening in a vacuum. We are here to talk about various projects around the country, public universities in particular, busy on this front, new schools and institutes of civic fought and various stages of development in arizona, florida, tennessee, north carolina, utah, ohio and elsewhere, i would think. And so i will leave us with four broad thoughts about what is required in this moment and we can think through the details of that but the four major elements of success, the first that we need to build within the University Structures and according to its norms and procedures, we want to be part of the university. The second is we want to hire scholars who are distinguished for their academic excellence. We want to have serious scholars with serious work including on the Research Front and people who are not just researchers. They are committed to teaching, mentorship, have an Entrepreneurial Energy and desire to build, in a conventional academic project so you need people who want to get to work. The third is the collectively we nationally need to develop innovative curriculum that offers something unique and distinctive to those coming to the university of that connects with each other around the country. It is important to have recognized programs that study where we understand that we are all part of this same international project. These things are proper province of every citizen. These ideas are part of our civilizational heritage and it would be necessary for our students to wrestle with them whatever walk of life they go in and whatever vocation to pick up if theres to store the fragile enterprise of constitutional selfgovernment in the future. Thank you. [applause] thank you both for really rich discussions. He gives us a lot to talk about. Im tempted to start by asking you to respond to one another because i do think there is a difference of opinion here about maybe the very subject of inquiry. There is a sense i think in your approach, peter, that civics is Something Like the study of how people can live in society with one another and as you can see how can we get to where we can act together. In your view of this, justin, theres a sense the purpose of civics is to familiarize the student with his or her own tradition and starting point. They seem like very Different Things. Are they very Different Things . And how do you, peter, think about what just lays out that what civics teacher . On tempted because i like what justin is doing, would like to be part of the come would like it too be also dash on tentative smooth the differences but its more interesting to create a contrast. So its not an argument but a contrast. Yes. I mean, i think in my mind the American Republic, its form and its history of the relations in at gived it into the larger picture because thats one of the week thats i for example, ad part of and to support to me, because daschle also because its a rich tradition tells us a lot about the more generic issues. For example, the federalist papers are great textbook especially federalist ten about how do you form groups in general. To me its a puzzle piece. Not the puzzle. I was involved in the project, that is defined as a project about American History and civics. Thats completely appropriate because partly because it was advice advised to states, 50 u. S. States for the kind of programs bishopric or in Public Schools and probably the puzzle piece of the American Republic should be pretty big in a k12 american and curriculum. But im very interested in ukraine. Ive done five intensive study civics estop theit right puzzle piece for ukraine. I dont think,r so this, this is a bit situational. For example, its interesting question how big that piece of the puzzle should be at tufts. We just Something Like 20 of of her students were not use citizens. A lot of our use citizens students are very interested in the rest of the world. Im not sure but one could make an argument should be a bigger piece of that is. But just comes up would think the American Republic as the super for example, that particularly important for those of us were americans but not sort of the basic question. That does get into interesting, deeper questions about how you think about traditions which has been talked about all day. I didnt use word. I do value traditions a lot but i suppose to make a sharper contrast i am talked about a sort of an analytical approach in which one takes on. So last thought is im interested in a curriculum in which certain kinds of questions are treated as fairly generic and universal to the human condition. How do you form groups . How to get people to collaborate . Game at 30 a significant part of our curriculum. Game theory plays come you can look at plato as an early game theorist, ways in which theres a a tradition thats a very different mindset. Theres a bigger dose of social sciences and theres a bigger sense of baby a cumulative research trying to figure a out how to solve problems if that is different from a curriculum that is based on a bunch of great booksks and dialogue with each other. To think what justin is describing as a part of that or is it the other way around . It could be that each could be part of the other and a world that should be a properly complicated. Where im sitting the american philosophical political philosophy tradition with its antecedents and its connections is part of it. Its just part of it. Im not sure how big a part it should be. Justin, how do you think about this tension . I i wonder how much of it is focused on the particular versus the universal . The definition which are surprised to find out ive mention civics as as a term originates in the 1880s. I assumed it was a older term. Civics is something you know but the civics is now an american. The definition is the study of the rights and duties of citizenship so they get you into the question of what does it mean to be a citizen . I citizen of what commonwealth . And then youci get into the question of the regime. In order to ask what it means to be a citizen you have to know something about the regime youre a part of and you get into history and the principles of that regime, and the question but what it means to be a good citizen versus a good man is an ancient question, but it didnt require should think about the citizenship in light of a universal understanding of what it means to be a good person and so you are measuring, theres a critical aspect of it, thinking about what accent you can be a good person in this regime as a good citizen. Thats not going to be true of every regime in. So i think in some ways its maybe the entry point looks very different. So the interplay becomes our history, our tradition, the story of america but i can take you in all sorts of timber leases. Thator can take you into the pat because you can know about the antecedents of america and so studying classical history and classical philosophy on through the modern era into the american founding i think isic a part of that. Then if you take the lines forward iin think then you also get into questions about americas relationship to the world and you got to think about a global context of the american founding and its American History. As as a way which all the subjs get pulled in but the emphasis often is more particular that it is general. Es a way that i thik our project leads the civics and leadership in a way that a lot of peace institutes and schools are now putting those two things together into the leadership component brings in some of what youre doing so if you want a question to begin with is what kind of education we want the leaders to have. But if you asked about the education at least some part of it is going to be thinking through questions on the dimension that youre talking about that wont necessarily be specific historical case studies but actual applied research and social science methods in thinking through all those questions. How do you go from there and then also the relative priority. It seems another is the centrality of the nationstate. For the action in our particular society for the regime that seems not to be part of how your describing what you do. That is a good contrast. There are powerful thinkers that we think of in the regime and one of the authors a little stronger than she might shes thought theres no such thing as a state theres many Different Levels and structures from the micro to the macro. But its also a way in which it is for the present moment so we are not embedded in a regime. To me it becomes an example to what extent is it continuous over the 250 years because it sure looks different and not just because of the changes in the constitution or politics but the Industrial Revolution is at the same regime and that becomes a question but to find that it has one is going to surprise you. Is there a knowledge of your own tradition and object of love whether we have to know before we can belong are you assuming it needs to be inculcated before its fair . Its a good question about whether it needs to be inculcated and i accept that, though i hope that would have been earlier. Is there knowledge, absolutely, of all kinds. The diagram i showed is a bunch of questions to me those are Lifelong Learning questions and also a map of the Research Agenda so how do you create a trust inside of organizations, that is a person that has been studied so these have a huge literature but its also not going to be resolved because of changes when the social media collapses into the world changes so the agenda changes. What you need to learn is whatever we know at the present moment about how to solve the problems that are on my list plus the skills, and im talking about intellectual skills. But i would put some things most people wouldnt be so interested in. So game theory and the way that it generalizes across the different scales and contexts and collaboration. In your view there is a big we at the center that needs to be known and you emphasize knowledge. Is there a way in which that can obstruct our understanding and vision at the end of the day are we studying this thing we inherited so that we know it or is this a path toward something more like the real education instead of questions how oppressive are you letting that tradition be in the study that you described . Its a good question weve talked about between liberal education and Civic Education. I do think on the knowledge aspect as we thought through what the curriculum would look like we do want there to be a body of knowledge that the students are introduced to and that anybody that goes through a course of study on civics will be able to say that they were exposed to some core elements of what we think would constitute that body of knowledge and so at a very basic level if you go through and have a bachelors degree from that and youre at a Job Interview and they ask about the constitution, you should be able to say you read it and thought about it for all of those kind of things we hoped we would be part of a broad Civic Education to that extent it also gets you into a liberal education. They all disagreed with each other but being introduced to the argument that had and then youre assuming the reasons they gave for the positions they had so it becomes a kind of liberal education by proxy where you are being introduced to all the things they are thinking about and others questions that end up being pretty weighty reading the Lincoln Douglas debates those are big universal questions and embedded in a very particular historical moment so i think it does get you into that and the other aspect of the liberal education is the part about leadership. What kind of education do we want the future leaders to have andy liberal education done well is an education thats appropriate to free people so the idea that it prepares you for freedom and is worthy of your freedom is the kind of study that free people would engage in and it also prepares them for a kind of intellectual freedom and selfgovernment. So to that i dont think Civic Education or liberal education are at odds were necessarily at odds. Civic education in a different regime might be quite at odds with liberal education but i dont think it is in the u. S. At this moment in relation to that challenge liberal education liberates the students from what is suppressing the students and theres certainly times when what oppresses students is an overbearing presence of what is his own. Too much knowledge of your own the city is more or less what he was liberating students from and they needed to think through some things. They need to be liberated into kind of a universal understanding but maybe, and i wonder if this is what you are doing or not, they need to be liberated from a set of shared notions that are not familiar enough with the tradition. Students dont know as much as they should know. How much of you will learned in the last few years, we havent learned that much. To ask an 18yearold is to much. Thats a little bit of the stereotype. I am in favor of more than that. I do like the idea of freedom and i think that one piece of freedom is not the freedom of a complete individual against the society but rather the collective freedom of people and the freedom to associate and then do things thats the kind of freedom that also referring to de tocqueville is a global thing and that is the kind of freedom that is always at risk from oppression from the top and also their failure to be able to coordinate to do something collectively together so if we imagine it as nonrestraint, thats not what im interested in. You can see how what hes doing would be as natural a fit for them. Do you think this is something that everyone who comes into the university of texas often contributes . I would hope so. I get that question about foreign students and to what extent. I do think its an important thing for us to offer as a State University we have a certain obligation with citizens of the state and first and foremost supported by the state Legislature Supporting the education of students who would become leaders and those foreign students and i think that they would benefit from studying civics in the american context partly because it gives a broad appreciation for the states but also because it does get you into those questions that are perennial and how its sorted out in the u. S. And you can apply that to different contractors and that comparative. A student that was in my constitutional law class and asked for a reading list, anything you want me to read, just let me know. So its an interesting question and very practical. I want to think about questions we have before we do that one more is what youre doing a critique of the existing disciplines and what is the relationship of this kind of Civics Education and the university to the educator department, the Political Science department . I think our existence is in a way and an implicit critique of the status quo. Youre making the argument that theres something needed and by saying theres something needed, there is something lacking. And i think that we could answer that in multiple ways. One thing i mentioned earlier the specialization of the disciplines that theyve gone in Different Directions but what constitutes a broad Civic Education has not been fully consumed in any one department, so as an example of many Political Science departments are heavily quantitative in orientation and they have not asked some of these questions like im talking about the class that i took that i began with probably wont be taught in the future as new faculty come online and Research Interests take over whats being taught. Thats not necessarily a criticism its saying something is being left out. In economic history as another example you dont have a lot of people doing economic history in the econ departments or history departments or economic thought in Political Science departments so theres aspects of what would constitute a good Civic Education and if they are being taught its isolated in different communities, so the promise of the new interdisciplinary unit is bringing those pieces together. Now there is also the component i talked about before which is the perception and reality of the kind of ideological monoculture and one promise of the schools and institutes is that you can help remedy that in a certain way partly because the kind of classes we are talking about and the kind of subjects taught are going to be attractive to right of Center Students and faculty and not exclusively and it doesnt need to be a rightwing version reacting against i think that is a bad idea but its a kind of university with institutes of schools and university as a whole. Do you worry about this intellectual diversity problem is that part of what youre responding to also . I agree with everything justin said. The value distinction is another part of the problem because the citizen is not distinguishing and they are closely intertwined. It would be implicit both in what you said and in some ways its been coming up all day the tension between the aspects of Civic Education and theres different layers to this one of them is rhetorical we dont like to sound aristocratic or exclusive but at the same time we want to explain why they should send their children to study with us we have to be doing something different. The relationship between the aspect. One quick thought. Students are going into finance and consulting so despite whatever you might think about ideology in the classroom at least 7 of students i think a few more will go to law school so theres also enrolling predominantly and then the sort of rhetoric that a lot of students are aware of and we find in interested in talking about that arent really embodying or working through that so then what we are offering is a Civic Education where theres a lot of democracies for people that are going to be running powerful economic institutions in new york city or boston so thats an irony. A short essay called Democratic Education where he thinks through that question and makes the case that the kind of education isnt the kind of education that sustains democracy so it was an argument against democratizing educational standards in terms of the kind of education you offer and you want some people to have a pretty high Level Education and i think we are already doing that with our University System so a Public University with 40,000 undergraduate students at the top 6 of the graduating classes get admission so we are enrolling 40,000 valedictorians and its elite education at the scale that we have a lot of talented students and part of our premise is that the students will be leaders in their communities in the future. Its a question of what kind of education you want them to have while they are there. We did propose the degree as an honors degree berkeley for this reason we recognize its going to be attractive to a certain subset of students so we want to recognize that group and some of the students who come and will be highly motivated and require a lot of them so we will pitch that and it also addresses the question to the extent people are thinking about it whether this is something they should have gotten in k12 and for our students theyve discovered if you ask them that they dont know about civics so they dont have the dissociation that its remedial to some of the other people the answer to that is worth teaching at the k12 level than its worth having serious people doing serious work at the Higher Education level and theres no other subject that we would think we dont need to bother with that subject because it is somehow beneath us so i think it is the same thing that part of the history of this if you go back when he gave his gift at pennsylvania he thought in terms of civics about the kind of education Business Leaders should have theres a way in which we can reclaim and recapture that as something that is not a liability but a strength. One quick thing that k12 schools look to the college disciplines for their guidance so a lot of them would answer that they had to take that has various limitations weve talked about and thats what students are demanding but its Political Science. Thinking about the content of education and the manners of the citizens do either of those demand particular approaches in the classroom . I dont know that they do necessarily. I know that there is a value in having small courses and something beneficial about a seminar setting where students can talk with each other and develop those kind of virtues but i also think theres something that is value about the large lecture class having students listen to and learn from a good lecture that can be valuable. Theres all sorts of techniques that can be brought to the subject matter and a mix would be beneficial but at the end of the course of study you do want to students that have developed certain habits and aptitudes and thats going to involve their ability to write and speak and communicate and gets us back into the question of the lost tools of learning so what are the tools they pick up along the way and i think we need to model the courses were the designer courses. In the way that its done it depends on what works and its likely to be a mix. I do think that you made an earlier description in the qanda of the seminar of the humanities classroom is a place where the question of the substance and what its about they might or might not be about anything civic. There is probably something to be learned from the interaction and learning to have introductions about people who disagree with you and it becomes an object for the benefit. This is one of the reasons i love teaching constitutional law because it will get you into every controversial issue we have in american politics but in a concrete way. Its not hypothetical, we have parties, effects of the case and then students read both opinions. It requires them to think about things in a different kind of way rather than what do you think about xyz, in a very structured way. We started the panel by saying we are thinking about the relationship between Civic Education and the university. And i wanted to followup by asking you to say a little about the concept of expertise. I was struck by. As the particular every free man and citizen. It reminded me that theres a kind of those in the study of civics and a similarity that i tell my students we are going to be asking questions children asking and answering them in the way that lawyers answer them. Thats not how it works in the university. Its institutionalized into there is such a thing as philosophical expertise. How would you say it is different to are similar to the academic fields of study . I think the question connects to the conversation earlier about. Its generalization list in the sense that a citizen has to be able to take on information that can be generated through expertise. For example if you are trying to make decisions about the questions of the pandemic they have an expertise but its in one area. But in the one area the knowledge might not be enough to make decisions taking in knowledge thats gained from every area. Part of what youre doing is training students in the habit of thinking through bigger questions and sympathizing information. But you are not training them to be in expert of any particular area so the post secondary education when you go to graduate school you can develop your expertise. But for the kind of training that youre talking about, really that has to begin before you get to the university and it should be accomplished so it is a deepening of the education but if this is the province of every free citizen and man in the community, thats got to take place earlier so this would be the comment about one of the things the universities can do is educate the people who will be going out in the k to 12 world because i think that one of the most important issues right now is what were doing with k12 education and that is an area that we need to put time and attention on. A classic profession like medicine the future position is its taught a lot of information, skills, content, concepts into kind of way of being. Find people that are part of the medical profession but which were specialized. So a phd whos a biochemist and then what you might specialized you go through a point at which you are a doctor, thats what you are. With that, its assumed that youre going to be a doctor. What if we step back i think it is somewhat similar. Some of the people in the discussion are more expert including the faculty that teach things, so you dont want to study from someone who doesnt know about it. You want to be an expert on wells and or a Civil Society leaders and state academic you might want to specialize. Expertise is part of it and thats part of it, but not to produce a whole bunch of specialists, the point is to produce the general practitioner and thats the kind of model we think of in the liberal arts. One more question in the back. University of america. Like you, my life was transformed by a class of political thought and sponsored by none other than jim ceaser, so im going to bring up my Favorite Book is a vehicle for my question. In liberal democracy and Political Science, jim argues that traditional Political Science was aimed for at the statesman. The traditional role to cultivate the habits, the skills into the knowledge necessary to govern. Modeled Political Science is the aberration in this history. So is the modern moment an opportunity for the revival of a sort of long standing tradition rather than the invention of a new discipline . Thank you. When i was first hired in the faculty will have to crack to school i had a reception where an emeritus professor was attending and he asked what hei stood and told what i was doing and he saidsa throwback. [laughing] i did know i was a throwback until that moment. Theres something about that come the First Political site, the founding document that the goal of political sites as the create this school to study politics from the perspective of history, philosophy and law. Theres this builtin interdisciplinary aspect to what Political Science originally was about, and that was focused on training future leaders. So that was a goal of the school of Political Science at columbia. That was explicit goal when you look at the founding documents of university of virginia. All these different places were very selfconscious when thinking about what kind of curricular public and education should our future leaders have. The thing that was on the list, uva, a little bias the virginia founders but it was you were going to read washingtons farewell address and the declaration ofpe independence, because t addition, the federalt papers. So very similar actually the kind of curriculum we had in mind what theyre doing and passed. In that same era of the founding of the first school of political site is also when americans are talking c about civics as a serious thing we need to be doing. I think theres a big element of coming back to, returning to a discipline that was already there and recovering it. Part of the story, this is not just a lyrical science. The history of philosophy and law and other social scientists and other humanities, that all that becomes part ofrt this discipline we have in mind. But it is something, its not really, were not inventing something new. Where we are coming something spend their and trying to improve it from the future. Weekly, i think its not education, then what is it. When answer is defined. Its value descriptive, explaining whats happening. Its in asking the question of what should we do. Thats a primary reason. Assess patient suspiciot what should we do as opposed to science because it seen as being somehow value laden and a problematic way, although i dont agree with that because i believe in value but values have come back anyway. The other conversation come people can say this. If you think, if you take statesmen socially do with any at the moment . We dont have very many. For what it with my view would be an ocean view. We fed millions or thousands of statesman. Its just the scales of leadership is quite diverse. Those are political but also church. We think most people can be faithful. While, that is our time. Were going to close with a few Closing Remarks on ben but lets first thank our group. [applause] Nonfiction Book lovers, cspan has a number of podcasts for you. Listen the bestselling nonfiction authors and influential interviewers on the after words podcast. On q a here wide ranging conversations with nonfiction authors and others for making things happen. Booknotes episodes are weekly hourlong conversation that feature as dating authors of Nonfiction Books on a wide variety of topics. The about books podcast takes you behind the scenes of the Nonfiction Book Publishing Industry with insider interviews, industry updates and bestsellers list. Find all of our podcast by downloading the free cspan now app or what have you get your podcasts, and on a website cspan. O pcasts. 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She gave a speech before is announced at the International Criminal court with seeking an arrest warrant for israeli leaders. This is about 20