A Chance to Build Rather than Ban

The new civics schools are disruptive, scholarly misfits. We need more of that.

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Entire sectors of academia contain few centrists and hardly any conservatives. The consequences of this political homogeneity—for research, teaching, and the social contract that sustains higher education—are corrosive. At Heterodox Academy, we've long documented these distortions. But recently, something new has emerged in response: a wave of initiatives for "civic thought" centers (within universities) that teach political discourse, study democratic texts, and hire a more ideologically mixed set of professors. Excitingly, these centers have the potential to lead the way toward broadening ideological diversity in other academic units, too.

As Rose Horowitch notes in The Atlantic, the reactions to attempts to hire more conservative professors reveal telling ironies. Progressives, typically alert to structural exclusion, often dismiss the lack of viewpoint diversity as a simple matter of merit. Conservatives, typically wary of identity-based remedies, argue for ideological-identity representation in their own case. These tensions run through many of the new civics centers, but so does genuine potential for change.

These centers alone won't dramatically shift higher education's ideological makeup. The pool of conservative candidates is small, and the centers earnestly seek to hire individuals who come with a range of views. But progress doesn't require perfect balance. If students are more likely to encounter even a small number of professors who earnestly hold views they've never heard defended, that alone matters. As John Stuart Mill argued, students must hear arguments "from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them." Hiring even a few conservatives at a university may also begin to change the path dependency problem that constricts the pipeline of scholars-in-training.

But civics centers also address a deeper challenge: a narrowing, not only in who is represented in academia, but in which academic topics and approaches are considered worthwhile. Ideological homogeneity shapes the academic agenda in the social sciences and humanities, for example: which topics are investigated, which methods and “lenses” are applied, which questions are asked, which courses are taught, and which subfields are cultivated. As the academic imagination around social questions has narrowed, institutional pressures—institutional rankings, citation metrics, association politics—have narrowed inquiry further.

What should be done about this problem? Declining public trust in higher ed and shifting politics that threaten institutions’ stability mean ignoring the problem isn't an option. The costs of inaction are already mounting, as even sympathetic scholars like Matt Lutz have pointed out. But even non-financial coercion—idea bans, ideological quotas, political micromanagement—are deeply harmful to the academic enterprise.

The new civics centers show another way: a choice to build rather than ban. Schools and centers within universities organized around themes the mainstream has neglected, led by credible scholars, could address the narrowing of research and teaching through broadening inquiry rather than constraining coercion.

Consider what this looks like in practice. Arizona State University's network of research centers includes the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership where scholars are exploring questions that would be academically unfashionable elsewhere: Can federalism and states' rights be harnessed to advance progressive policy goals? Are natural law and natural rights philosophically compatible despite their apparent historical divergence? Is it possible to forge a unified American identity that honors the founding ideals of 1776 and also recognizes the historical reality of slavery? These aren't partisan questions, but they would be marginalized by disciplinary orthodoxies at other institutions.

Similarly, family structure is extensively studied throughout the social sciences. But scholars like Brad Wilcox, who carefully examine the potential benefits of marriage, operate from analytical frameworks that prevailing academic assumptions discourage. As economist Melissa Kearney has recounted, the idea of advantages to marriage is one that many academics, for well-meaning reasons, are reluctant to discuss.

The evolution of scholarly pursuits is as old as the academy itself. Scholastic fields were reoriented by Renaissance humanism, then reimagined again during the Romantic era. The disciplines we now take for granted were themselves products of institutional innovation. The natural and social sciences emerged from earlier frameworks. Area studies, anthropology, and cognitive science all began as attempts to apply new analytical approaches to existing questions.

Indeed, the tactic of building new centers—focused on neglected perspectives and buffered from the homogenizing pressures of academic hierarchies—need not be limited to the field of civic thought. There are already odd corners of academia that zig where others zag: cognitive scientists who look at wisdom traditions, builders and architects reviving historic design languages, ethicists of hunting as part of land management. The more such outposts are created as new centers, the more cracks and crannies will be available for unexpected thinking—and the less easily universities will be dismissed as "captured" by the interests and assumptions of a single political or cultural tribe.

If higher education is to recover its vitality and regain public trust, it must reform itself through academic means: by creating space for overlooked questions, welcoming a greater range of intellectual traditions, and building institutions capable of genuine scholarly pluralism.

The new centers won't fit easily into existing disciplines and rankings. They won't be the cool kids with fashionable arguments. But they represent an academic solution to an academic problem, and a model for the kind of productive disruption higher education desperately needs.