If Civics Isn’t a Discipline, What Is? A Case for Policy Studies
by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
April 19, 2026
By any measure, we are witnessing a rapid and politically charged expansion of “civics” across American higher education. State legislatures are mandating civics coursework. Trustees are authorizing new institutes. Philanthropic and ideological funding streams are accelerating their growth.
At institutions like Ohio State University Board of Trustees, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Florida, and the University of Texas at Austin, these developments have sparked faculty resistance, raised concerns about academic freedom, and, increasingly, prompted deeper questions about governance itself.
Yet beneath the surface of these controversies—debates over intellectual diversity, curricular control, and ideological balance—lies a more generative question: What is civics, and can it meaningfully function as a discipline?
The answer matters because the stakes are not merely curricular. They are institutional. And they are political.
It is worth recalling that the effort to formalize civics as a field did not originate with the conservative actors now spearheading many of these initiatives. Nearly two decades ago—as mentioned by Messer-Kruse (2026) in a recently- published piece appearing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, scholars such as Elinor Ostrom, Jane Mansbridge, and Peter Levine advanced an ambitious vision for what they called “New Civic Politics.”
Their aim was not simply to teach students how government works, but to cultivate what they described as “civic artisanship”—the skills required for collective problem-solving in a participatory democracy. Civics, in this formulation, was not a static body of knowledge. It was a dynamic practice rooted in action, design, and co-creation.
That vision gained traction during the Obama era, particularly through A Crucible Moment: College learning and democracy's future, a report led by McTighe Musil (2012) and the Association of American Colleges and Universities. The report called on colleges and universities to make civic learning and democratic engagement central to their educational mission. However importantly, it did not call for the creation of standalone civics departments. Instead, it envisioned civic learning as distributed across the curriculum—embedded in disciplines, not isolated from them.
Even then, critics on the right raised concerns that “New Civics” might blur disciplinary boundaries and undermine faculty autonomy. Organizations like the National Association of Scholars warned that such efforts could transform universities into sites of ideological training. What is striking, in retrospect, is how closely those earlier critiques mirror today’s concerns—only now they are voiced by faculty responding to the rapid proliferation of state-backed civics institutes.
What has changed is not simply who is advancing civics, but how it is being institutionalized.
Where earlier efforts emphasized integration and faculty governance, the current wave of civics initiatives often reflects a more centralized and externally driven model. Trustees, legislatures, and advocacy organizations are playing a decisive role in shaping curriculum, sometimes over the objections of faculty.
At Ohio State, an “intellectual diversity center” was approved despite opposition from the faculty senate. At the University of North Carolina, transparency around the School of Civic Life and Leadership has been limited, with key findings withheld from public view. At the University of Florida, faculty members were investigated for allegedly interfering with the development of a new civics center—an action the faculty union characterized as a threat to academic freedom (Wang & Shanley, 2024).
At my own institution—and as documented by Price (2024)—the University of Texas at Austin has launched the School of Civic Leadership amid a broader conservative restructuring about which I have blogged that has raised urgent questions about shared governance, academic freedom, and who ultimately defines the civic mission of the university.
These developments are not isolated incidents but part of a broader reconfiguration of curricular governance—one reflected in policy and policy agendas, unfolding under sustained political pressure and increasingly visible to both faculty and the public.
What we are witnessing is not simply the addition of new programs, but a shift in who has authority over knowledge production and dissemination. In this context, civics risks becoming less a site of open inquiry and more an instrument through which particular ideologies and governance priorities are articulated, managed, and enforced (e.g., Wang & Shanley, 2024).
This raises a fundamental problem. When civics is defined externally—by political actors rather than scholarly communities—it risks becoming prescriptive rather than exploratory. It moves from asking questions to enforcing answers. And in doing so, it undermines the very democratic principles it claims to promote.
The difficulty of establishing civics as a discipline only deepens this concern.
Advocates often point to the urgency of civic education in a polarized society as justification for its elevation. But urgency does not make a discipline. To wit, there is no consensus on its core questions.
- Is it about the structure of government or the practice of collective action?
- Is it normative, prescribing how citizens should behave, or
- analytical, examining how they actually do?
Nor is there agreement on method. Civics draws from political science, sociology, philosophy, history, and education, but lacks a distinctive methodological framework of its own.
In this sense, civics is better understood not as a discipline, but as a site of convergence—a space where multiple fields intersect around questions of governance, participation, and power; it is precisely here that policy studies emerges as the discipline we may not only need, but urgently need more of.
At its best, policy studies already does what civics aspires to do. It examines how decisions are made, implemented, and contested. It situates governance within historical and social contexts. It equips students to analyze power, discourse, and institutional behavior. And it connects theory to practice through engagement with real-world problems.
Crucially, policy studies also teaches students to see policy not merely as text, but as process—as something lived, negotiated, and often resisted. It brings into focus the dynamics of bureaucratic discretion, institutional drift, and the chilling effects of politicized oversight. In doing so, it offers a far more nuanced and critical form of civic education than what many current civics initiatives provide.
To put it plainly, policy studies does not just teach about democracy. It teaches students how to navigate, question, and reshape it.
If we are serious about strengthening civic education in higher education, the answer is not to create parallel structures that impose narrow definitions of civic knowledge. It is to invest in interdisciplinary policy programs that integrate civic learning across the curriculum, albeit in contexts where faculty enjoy autonomy, together with a support for pedagogies that connect students to communities and institutions in meaningful ways.
This approach does not reject civics. It reclaims it.
The current wave of civics initiatives reflects a genuine concern about the state of American democracy. But if civics is to contribute meaningfully to that project, it must resist becoming a tool of governance rather than a subject of inquiry. It cannot be reduced to a set of sanctioned viewpoints or scripted conversations. Nor can it be engineered through administrative fiat.
Civics, if it is to matter, must be practiced—messy, contested, and alive.
And for that, we do not need a new discipline. We need to take seriously the one we already have.
Reference
McTighe Musil, C. (2012, Feb. 15). A crucible moment: College learning and democracy's future. Association of American Colleges and Universities
North Carolina Campus Compact Tenth Anniversary Conference. https://www.elon.edu/images/e-web/org/nccc/A%20Crucible%20Moment%20NCCC%2010th%20Anniversary%20FINAL.pdf
Messer-Kruse, T. (2026, April 10). Civics is a cause, not an academic discipline: Before it was trendy on the right, it was trendy on the left—and always incoherent. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/civics-is-a-cause-not-an-academic-discipline
Price, A. (2024, August 20). UT launches civics school amid conservative makeover. Axios. https://www.axios.com/local/austin/2024/08/20/ut-civics-school-conservative-curriculum
Wang, T., & Shanley, G. (2024, July 8). UF ends investigation into whether six faculty “interfered” with Hamilton Center following pressure from union, major donor, The Independent Florida Alligator. https://www.alligator.org/article/2024/07/uf-ends-investigation-into-whether-six-faculty-interfered-with-hamilton-center-following-pressure-from-union-major-donor
Civics Is a Cause, Not an Academic DisciplineBefore it was trendy on the right, it was trendy on the left — and always incoherent.by Timothy Messer-Kruse | Chronicle of Higher Education | April 10, 2026
The rapid expansion of funding for “civics institutes,” along with the spreading of state mandates that civics be taught as a core subject in colleges, has ignited much controversy. Debates focus on whether civics should be prioritized above other vital subjects, whether civics education should be concentrated in autonomous centers on campus, and whether states should dictate how it should be taught. Ohio State University’s trustees approved the creation of an “intellectual diversity center” over the objections of OSU’s Faculty Senate. At the University of North Carolina flagship, the results of an independent investigation of its School of Civic Life and Leadership, recently chartered amid faculty protests, were kept secret. The University of Florida investigated six faculty members for having allegedly “interfered” with curricular development at its newly created Hamilton Center Classical and Civic Education, which the UF faculty union condemned as “institutional censorship or discipline to circumvent academic freedom.” Beyond these problems lies a more fundamental question: Can civics become a proper discipline?
Ironically, the impetus to make civics a discipline came from progressive scholars nearly 20 years ago, not the conservatives now founding civics institutes across the country. In 2007, a group of political theorists including Harry Boyte, Rogers Smith, Peter Levine, Jane Mansbridge, and Elinor Ostrom (who two years later would win the Nobel Prize in economics) gathered at the University of Maryland and drafted a manifesto for what they called “The New Civic Politics.” Their aspirations were not humble; they believed that “New Civics” would soon become “a discipline.”
For this group, civics was not simply teaching facts about the structure of government. It was the science of citizen action in a participatory democracy. As their manifesto explained, “Existing fields and departments simply did not have room for thinking about citizens as ‘co-creators’ of our institutions and culture.” The goal was to teach students the “design skills” and the “civic artisanship” required to make a better world. “We need,” they proclaimed, “a civic intellectual community, a discipline, a forum for debates, in which these issues will be central.”
Their arguments caught wind during the Obama administration. In 2012 the Department of Education contracted with the Association of American Colleges and Universities under the direction of its senior vice president, Caryn McTighe Musil, to produce a report, “A Crucible Moment,” calling on colleges and universities to “embrace civic learning and democratic engagement as an undisputed educational priority.” Such trumpeting of civics was hardly new, though the report’s insistence that academe had “an obligation to build a broader theory of knowledge about democracy and democratic principles in this contemporary age marked as it is by multiplicity and division” was new. Civics was no longer seen as merely a body of facts that citizens needed to know, but a field of exploration where new discoveries can be made.
“A Crucible Moment,” nevertheless, did not specifically call for the founding of new departments of civics. Rather, the prevailing idea at the time was that “understanding the depth, complexity, and competing versions of what ‘civics’ actually entails” could take place in a distributed manner, throughout institutions and across the curriculum. But the work of institutionalization was quietly proceeding.
The Good Society, an academic journal that had previously concerned itself mostly with the pedagogy of civics, became the intellectual center of the emerging discipline. Most of the drafters of “The New Civic Politics” manifesto were brought on to join the journal’s editorial board; the journal began devoting space to the question of disciplinary formation. As one board member, Karen Edward Soltan, explained, The Good Society needed to become “more self-conscious” in development of “civic science,” which was necessary to developing “a distinctive formulation of the nature of this discipline.”
Back in those innocent days, conservatives worried that the “New Civics” was nothing but a cover for turning universities into training grounds for progressive activists, and so they formulated a sophisticated argument for why civics should not be considered a discipline. Peter W. Wood and David Randall of the National Association of Scholars defended traditional departments against the encroachments of New Civics programs, which they argued undermined established curricula with “‘cocurricular activities,’ run by nonacademic administrators.” They accused New Civics proponents of aiming to “destroy disciplinary instruction and faculty autonomy,” the same thing critics today say as conservative-controlled civics institutes sprout up like spring daisies under a warm shower of state funding.
The right-wing seizure of state educational structures in President Trump’s first term, and the conservative blockage of the Civics Secures Democracy Act in the Biden era, which would have appropriated $1 billion for civics education, forced New Civics proponents to turtle rather than advance. By the time states began mandating civics curricula and the federal government began tying funding to rooting out “wokeness,” progressive plans for elevating civics into a discipline were in disarray.
Once progressives retreated from constructing a civics discipline, conservatives seized the initiative and, like hermit crabs, occupied their enemies’ homes. Pillars of the right like the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) took the lead, redefining civics as “civic thought.” In 2023, Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey, senior fellows at the AEI, authored “A Proposal for University-Level Civic Education,” noting that, although states were creating new civics institutes, academe had not yet recognized civic thought as an academic unit. To do so, civics requires the “articulation of a distinctive intellectual mission,” one that develops “a program of teaching and research with a particular scope of study and a characteristic approach, one that will train scholars in a demanding and recognizable discipline.”
The following year, the AEI partnered with the Johns Hopkins University to launch the Civic Thought Project, and in 2025 sponsored an invitation-only conference in Washington, D.C., to discuss the “Intellectual Foundations of Citizenship.” The event was packed with notable civics advocates from around the country, including Peter Levine, one of the signers of the New Civics manifesto. For the most part, however, there was less talk of the need to institutionalize civics as an academic discipline than there was of using the newly created civics institutes to give conservative voices a bigger megaphone on campus.
To the extent that the Civic Thought Project does promote the reformulation of civics as an intellectual discipline and not just a New Deal-style jobs program for conservatives, it assumes that once civics settles on a coherent set of “daunting, even paradoxical questions,” to quote the Storeys, it will have earned its place at the academic table. But there seems little agreement on what such elemental civics questions should be.
Recently some civics champions have boldly asserted that teaching the methods of deliberative democracy is essential to the entire academic enterprise. Proponents of civics institutes claim they are needed to arrest the coarsening of civil discourse and rebalance ideologically skewed campus cultures. Even assuming these are real problems, is there really much more to be investigated or discovered regarding the importance of listening and talking in turn? Do we really need a new field of inquiry to improve upon the timeworn principles universally taught at an age when pupils are given naps?
Most cheerleaders for the current state-mandated civics seem to assume that civics deserves a higher place in the university because of the supposed urgency of its knowledge. Students’ lack of basic understanding of how their government is structured and the ideals underlying it are often pointed to as the reason American society has become increasingly polarized and tribal. In the same year that Harvard’s Danielle Allen called for “a renewed focus on civic education” to combat “pernicious polarization,” Stanford University’s Debra Satz and Dan Edelstein editorialized in The New York Times that our society’s increasing “intolerance of ideas” in part “results from the failure of higher education to provide students with the kind of shared intellectual framework that we call civic education.” Both liberals and conservatives look to educators to solve the problem of hyperpartisanship by making better citizens.
But disciplines, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant showed, should not rest on the perceived contemporary importance of a problem. Disciplines rest on a body of related principles that purport to reveal something about the natural world or human meaning, as well as on a set of proven methods with which to test claims. The most glaring obstacle to civics’ path toward disciplinarity is that its potential community of scholars is deeply fractured over the question of which principles, and which methods, count.
For example, the Civic Thought Project’s conception of an appropriate subject for civic investigation is narrowly focused on the state and its “framework of laws.” This version of the discipline is crafted to exclude what conservatives have denounced as “action civics,” — a broader conception of popular involvement in governance that looks beyond the state to fostering direct action in community.
Karol Edward Soltan, an early advocate of elevating the field into a discipline, described civics in a way nearly opposite to the Civic Thought Project’s model. We should, she wrote, “consider the simple exercise of dropping the word ‘citizen’ entirely from the goal of this emerging field. Civic studies, we could say, aims to develop ideas and ways of thinking helpful to human beings in their capacity as co-creators of their worlds. I think that would be a good start.” Clearly, the scholars who have gathered under the umbrella of civics cannot agree on what is keeping them dry. To be a discipline, at minimum, there needs to be some agreement on what the boundaries of knowledge of this pursuit are. The deeply fractured state of the field is easily quantified. A check of the 228 faculty members who staff a dozen newly created civics institutes and centers against the 274 scholars who have contributed to The Good Society as either authors, editors, or members of the editorial board turns up not one name on both lists.
Ultimately, civics is unlike all other pursuits that have graduated into disciplines. It is not itself a skill like reading, arithmetic, or foreign-language acquisition; it only borrows and applies the competencies it uses from other more fundamental fields. It is not a creative pursuit like painting, music, or poetry. It is not a codified branch of scientific research. Nor is it a field of structured disputation like philosophy or history. As long as its purpose is to ennoble rather than enlighten, civics will remain more of a crusade than a discipline.
Timothy Messer-Kruse
Timothy Messer-Kruse is a professor of cultural studies at Bowling Green State University and author of Slavery’s Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution (LSU Press, 2024)
