USC launches new civics center amid national debate

A roiling national debate over the political and intellectual culture of American college campuses reached the University of South Carolina this week, as school officials announced plans for a new academic center focused on civics and civility.

And depending on who you talk to, it’s either a meaningful step toward restoring rigor and comity in American scholarly life — or part of a well-financed national conservative effort to reshape the academy in its own image.

Nevertheless, school leaders are strongly backing the initiative, dubbed the Center for American Civic Leadership and Public Discourse.

“Studying the American civic order and teaching our students to be good citizens should be a core function of higher education in America,” said Thad Westbrook, chair of the USC Board of Trustees in a release. “Over the past few years, we have strengthened our policies supporting free speech on campus, and we believe this center will elevate that work with a renewed focus on civil discourse.”

USC President Michael Amiridis added the center would help the school meet its mission of molding graduates who can succeed and lead in their communities.

“The value this new academic center brings is its focus on equipping students with the knowledge, perspectives, and reasoning skills for meaningful interactions as citizens and community leaders,” he said.

A USC spokesman confirmed the center is being funded through the president’s office in its first year, but that fundraising will be a major goal going forward.

A national trend with a political agenda?

The new USC program is one of more than a dozen civics centers that have sprung up at American universities over the past decade, many in red states and all modeled on the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton.

Founded in 2000 by widely-respected conservative scholar Robert P. George, the Madison program sponsors nonpartisan conferences, lectures and fellowships, while managing a track of courses dedicated to American civic order, according to its website. In interviews, George has said the program models a classical mode of scholarship based on “reason, evidence and arguments.”

Early funders of the Madison program reportedly included well-known conservative benefactors like Steve Forbes, the John M. Olin Foundation and the Bradley Foundation.

But the debate over civics centers like USC’s is about more than funding or partisan affiliation. It’s a clash of frameworks — one rooted in traditional civic ideals, the other in concerns about equity and representation. Supporters describe spaces for reasoned debate and intellectual diversity. Critics see structures shaped by imbalances of power and influence.

That tension leads scholars like Lauren Lassabe Shepherd — a historian at Indiana University and author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America — to question not just the funders but the larger project itself.

“The centers have a political agenda, no matter their claims to neutrality,” she said in a July 24 email interview with Statehouse Report. “Who is funding their projects? What other projects do those benefactors fund? Who is accepting the invitations for these events?”

Shepherd places the trend in a longer conservative tradition of shaping higher education — one, she argues, that has often worked to limit academic freedom.

“The right has long intervened in higher education to prop up its social and economic goals,” she said. “That’s come in several forms: anticommunist purges of faculty, requiring loyalty oaths from students, funding research to deny climate change or promote race science, and a host of other intrusions to academic freedom.”

As for the centers’ claims that they support ideological diversity on overwhelmingly progressive college campuses, Shepherd is dismissive.

“We should remember ‘ideological diversity’ is not a form of actual diversity — look at the racial, gender and religious makeup of the people involved with the centers — but a code phrase that actually means forcing a platform for conservative ideas that have been discredited,” she said.

A ‘model’ for free speech and mutual respect

Christopher Tollifsen is a professor of philosophy at USC and interim executive director of the new center.

He describes it as a response to several national trends, including an increase in partisan polarization, a loss of trust in critical mediating institutions including universities, and a decline in civic engagement.

“We’ve started this new center,” he told Statehouse Report on July 24, “as a way to address those issues.”

To do that, he said, the center’s scholars will model a form of academic inquiry and debate rooted in free speech and mutual respect, beginning with the program’s first public offering — a discussion featuring board members Robert P. George of the Madison Program and Cornel West, a longtime public intellectual on the American left and former professor at Harvard and Yale.

As for the charge that the center is conservative, he argues that any civics center dedicated to preserving the founders’ vision of America — a liberal democracy rooted in unalienable rights, ordered liberty and the rule of law — could be given that name.

That said, he notes that “conservative means a wide variety of different things” — among them, the preservation of American civil and democratic rights that historians associate with the term “classical liberalism.”

“We think it’s important to maintain a grip on that tradition of liberalism, and come to understand it and maintain that understanding,” he said. “So we’re about conserving in that sense.”

And in answer to the allegation that civics centers invite conservatives to speak on campus, he says that’s part of having a productive debate based on reason, evidence and arguments.

“We think it’s important that there be some friction — some creative friction, some productive friction — so that different people who hold different positions can disagree with one another,” he said. “At worst, [they’ll] come to a better understanding of their own views and how they relate to the views of people they disagree with — and at best sometimes result in people changing their views.”

Asked to describe what success for the center would look like in five years, Tollefsen spoke of high-level scholarship and major public events — and of the university’s responsibility to help form good citizens.

“The university is a civic resource, and the students are resources for citizenship within the state,” Tollefsen said. “I don’t think we’ll see the full fruit of those efforts in the next five years, but I hope we’ll have sown the seeds, and begin to see them in the years after that.”