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Dive Brief:
A Texas A&M University committee unanimously ruled last week that the public institution wrongly fired an English professor amid conservative furor over her classroom instructionon gender identity.
The university terminated Melissa McCoulin September after a conservative state lawmaker shared a video of her teaching about gender and called for her to be fired. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott joined the lawmaker’s call to fire McCoul.
On Nov. 18, the university’sCommittee on Academic Freedom, Responsibility and Tenurevoted 8-0 that Texas A&M “had no justification for dismissing” McCoul and “failed to follow required procedures at multiple stages,” according to a Sunday statement from the Texas A&Mchapter of the American Association of University Professors.
Dive Insight:
In September,Texas State Rep. Brian Harrison posted a video to social media of McCoul teaching about gender identity in children’s literature and accused both her and Texas A&M of perpetuating “DEI and LGBTQ indoctrination.” Although Harrison didn’t name McCoul at the time and the video did not show her face, she was later confirmed to be the professor.
He called for both McCoul and then-President Mark Welsh III to be fired.
The university terminated McCoul just a day after Harrison’s social media posts. Welsh said she was fired for teaching coursework that did not match the class’s catalog description.
“This isn’t about academic freedom; it’s about academic responsibility,” Welsh said at the time. “Our degree programs and courses go through extensive approval processes, and we must ensure that what we ultimately deliver to students is consistent with what was approved.”
McCoul’s firing quickly drew backlash from free speech and academic freedom groups, including PEN America,the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the Texas American Federation of Teachers,and the Texas AAUP conference.They raised concerns about due process and accused the university of acquiescing to political pressure.
A Texas A&M faculty council in late September determined that the university’s decision to fire McCoul violated her academic freedomand that Welsh failed to follow university rules when dismissing her, according to The Texas Tribune. It also found that McCoul’s syllabus was consistent with the corresponding course catalog entry and description.
But a senior Texas A&M administrator dismissed those findings in an October memo, saying the matter had not been assigned to the council and that the group had acted outside of its purview.
The administrator classified McCoul’s firing as “largely unrelated to academic freedom” and said the council should not have reviewed the incident without the approval of the university’sFaculty Affairs office, according to the Tribune.
Last week, the university’s Committee on Academic Freedom, Responsibility and Tenure — which reviews faculty appeals of dismissals — ultimately voted in McCoul’s favor when reviewing her case.
The committee did not find evidence Texas A&M discussed its plans to fire McCoul with her, nor did it give her meaningful notice, according to excerpts of the decision shared by Texas A&M’s AAUP chapter.
CAFRT also disputed the university’s assertion that McCoul was responsible for the alleged discrepancy between her class’s course description and her instruction.
“The CAFRT committee found no documentary evidence that Dr. McCoul was included in discussions about the special topics course,” it said. “More critically, Dr. McCoul does not have the authority to designate her own courses; it is the College of Arts and Sciences and the English department administration’s responsibility to do so.”
Texas A&M’s interim president, Tommy Williams, may either accept or reject the committee’s findings. McCoul will be reinstated if he accepts them, but her dismissal will be final if he rejects them, according to a university webpage detailing the process.
A university spokesperson said Monday that Texas A&M officials “are aware of the non-binding findings.”
“Williams has received the committee’s report and will review it carefully before making a decision in the coming days or weeks,” the spokesperson said in an email.
McCoul’s lawyer, Amanda Reichek, told the Associated Press that Texas A&M appears poised to fight the committee’s decision amid continued political pressure. The dispute, she said, seems headed for court.
“Dr. McCoul asserts that the flimsy reasons proffered by A&M for her termination are a pretext for the University’s true motivation: capitulation to Governor Abbott’s demands,” Reichek said in a statement.
Texas A&M’s AAUP chapter on Sunday called the university’s rationale to fire the professor “troubling and bizarre” and called for her to be reinstated, saying the university had “improperly shifted blame for its own repeated failures to follow established written policies onto Dr. McCoul.”
“Dr. McCoul has a long and distinguished record of exceptional teaching and service to Texas A&M,” the group said. “The vilification, trauma, and reputational harm she has endured at the hands of Texas A&M for simply doing her job must be acknowledged and corrected.“
Last week’s news comes after the Texas A&M system implemented significant policy changes related to the conservative contretemps around McCoul.
On Nov. 13, Texas A&M regents announced that none of the courses at the system’s 12 universities “may teach race or gender ideology or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.” To teach such topics, professors will be required to get advanced authorization from their institution’s president.
The change similarly spurred outcry from academic and free speech advocates.
I used to get nostalgic attending Conservative Conferences in Manchester. Being shouted at by far-left protestors reminded me of my time as a right-of-centre student union hack in the early 1990s.
Just like the early 2020s, the early 1990s was a period when an unpopular Conservative administration was limping towards the end of its time in office. Trying to persuade other Manchester-based students to veer right rather than left was a challenge that guaranteed abuse. In one instance, someone kicked away one of my crutches (after I broke my ankle trying to high jump…). That still seems an odd way to convince me of the superiority of their views. There were lighter moments too, as when a fresher muddled up the Conservation Society with the Conservative Association. There are only so many times ‘Do you go out in thefield?’ can be answered with ‘We help out at local by-elections.’
This year, however, any abuse of passers-by was reserved for Labour’s Liverpool shindig, where a motley and shouty selection of anti-ID card, anti-abortion and anti-Israel protestors were in need of a Strepsil or two. Depressingly, I heard one protestor shout at a conference delegate who supported ID cards, ‘I bet you went to university.’ Even Steve Bray gave the Tories a miss this year, though his portable speakers were blasting away in Liverpool. (A friend suggested we should ask him where his extremely loud portable sound system came from … ‘Steve Bray as sponsored by Richer Sounds’?)
If there was nostalgia to be had at the Conservative Conference, it was for the 1970s. There were multiple screenings of Margaret v Ted – An inconceivable victory, in which Michael Portillo narrated the story of Thatcher’s victory in the Conservative leadership election of 1975. There were various fringe meetings on ‘why nothing works’ that also recalled the 70s, especially when held in the shadow of the old Free Trade Hall, where 49 years ago the Sex Pistols played their most famous gig (though Anarchy in the U.K. had yet to join the setlist). The problem for the Tories is that change takes time, so the state of public services in 2025 has more to do with past Conservative Governments than the Labour one elected in 2024 – and everyone knows it.
HEPI is non-partisan, always keen to publish views from across the political spectrum. That’s why we attended both the Conservative and Labour Conferences and why we are weighing up whether to go to Reform’s Conference next year. But I started this blog with shouty abuse because it links to the theme of HEPI’s fringe event held in conjunction with the University of Sussex, the University of Manchester and Goldsmiths, University of London: ‘How can universities best win back public support’.
Our speakers had different answers to this important question.
Neil O’Brien MP, the Shadow Minister for Policy Renewal and Development, ascribed the lukewarm approach towards universities to the (arguably) high number of low-quality degrees as well as to the lack of incentives on universities to prioritise economic growth.
Professor Sasha Roseneil from the University of Sussex (Kemi Badenoch’s alma mater) pointed the finger at endless negative media coverage, which she said was out of kilter with what the public really think about universities.
Professor Annabel Kiernan from Goldsmiths shifted the tone by reminding us about the many positives – not all financial – of a broad education, which Professor Duncan Ivison from the University of Manchester echoed before warning of the need to stop universities falling into the hole that already contains all those other areas of life that the electorate have deemed to be failing.
Finally, Alex Stanley of the NUS put students centre stage along with all the challenges they are currently facing. Anyone who thinks the NUS is still obsessed with the issues outside the mainstream of students’ concerns should listen to Alex’s wise words, which are always persuasively put.
There weren’t half as many events on higher education in Manchester as there were the previous week in Liverpool. But one other organisation that made the effort was the King’s College Policy Institute, which hosted a panel on ‘What is the Conservative approach to higher education and skills integration?’ in which I took part.
It wasn’t entirely clear if the title was referring to the Conservatives’ past, present or future policies but, for my take, I pointed out their early years in office after 2010 included a well-defined set of policies built around:
giving more power to students and institutions through the removal of student number caps; and
placing a renewed focus on teaching quality and student outcomes.
(As readers may know, I worked on these areas before joining HEPI in 2014, so declare an interest in them.)
I went on to note the biggest problems facing our system of post-compulsory learning are not actually in higher education. The OECD’s recent Education at a Glance, which HEPI helped to launch, showed we have a high participation rate, a low drop-out rate and excellent graduate outcomes (on average), whether we are talking about employment, wages or health. But it also showed terrible (average / relative) outcomes for those who leave school with only GCSEs or equivalent.
I ended my remarks by pleading with the Conservative Party to strive towards a ‘three Bs strategy’. By this, I meant focusing on the half of the population doing much worse educationally: Boys. For every 54 young women that make it to higher education, only 40 young men do so. Yet Minister after Minister and Government after Government have failed to adopt a dedicated focus on the scandal of male underachievement.
I also suggested a future Conservative Government should focus on Bilingualism or at least inculcating a Bare familiarity with a language other than English. Language learning has declined catastrophically since a second language stopped being compulsory at Key Stage 4 (GCSE-level) around 20 years ago. The idea then was that primary school language learning would be bolstered and lots of secondary school pupils would voluntarily enrol for a language GCSE or two. But it has not worked out like that: there are now more A-Levels taken in PE than in French, German and Classical Languages combined. It seems ironic that a factor nudging people towards Brexit was one of Tony Blair’s education policies.
My third B is ‘BTECs’ and similar, which the last Conservative Government and the current Labour one have been trying to kill slowly. Yet T-Levels and A-Levels are not right for everyone and much of the recent progress in widening participation in higher education has been among BTEC students.
So most people who have considered the question, including Professor Becky Francis (who is overseeing the Curriculum and Assessment Review), agrees there should be a third way. Last week’s Labour Conference has left people expecting a brand new vocational qualification alongside As and Ts, producing a policy already confusingly labelled V-A-T (as if VAT were popular …). But the floor is littered with politicians’ attempts to design new vocational qualifications (GNVQs, diplomas etc). This approach is far from guaranteed to succeed: indeed, unless the errors of the past are meticulously avoided, the new approach will be more likely to fail than to succeed.
That surely gives His Majesty’s Official Opposition a duty to scrutinise the current Government’s approach and provides a possible opportunity for them to rebuild a reputation for being knowledgable, moderate and competent. Yet as I file this piece, news is coming in that the Leader of the Opposition will instead opt to focus her main Conference speech on Wednesday on kicking universities and promising to slash the number of university places. This will be accompanied by a promise of more apprenticeships … but they said that in government yet presided over a reduction.
It is almost as if someone believes saying, ‘Vote Conservative and we will stop your child(ren) from going to university’ could be a vote winner.
One of the consequences of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been a vast reconfiguring of Russia’s academic and intellectual life. Universities, thought of as a potential hotbed of opposition since the White Ribbon movement of 2011, came under intense control and its personnel placed under even greater scrutiny.
Many faculty fled. Connections with international partners in the West were severed. And then to top it off, the Russian government announced that it would abandon the three degree bachelor’s, master’s doctoral system introduced when the country joined the Bologna Process 20 years earlier.
All this has combined to create what some have called a slow motion collapse in Russian higher education. But to understand what’s been happening in Russian Universities since February 2022, you really need to go back to the dawn of the Putin era in January 2000, and understand how ideological control of institutions has come to rest squarely inside the Kremlin.
Joining the podcast today is Dmitry Dubrovsky. He’s a scholar at the Institute for International Studies at Charles University in Prague, where he has taught ever since being designated as a foreign agent by the Putin regime in early 2022. And he writes primarily about the politics of academic freedom and civil society in Russia.
He’s with us today to talk about this slow motion collapse, the internal governance of Russian institutions, and how the country might one day be put back on a track to integration with European academia. Over to Dmitry.
The World of Higher Education Podcast Episode 4.5 | Undoing Bologna: Russia’s Conservative Turn in Higher Education with Dmitry Dubrovsky
Transcript
Alex Usher (AU): Dmitry, I want to take us back to the year 2000. Vladimir Putin is the new president of the Russian Federation. What was the state of the higher education sector at the time, and how did Putin approach it? How did he view higher education as an instrument of state policy?
Dmitry Dubrovsky (DD): Well, the legacy of the 1990s left Putin with a serious challenge. The system faced underfunding and fragmentation. At the same time, scholars were eager to join the European system. There had been attempts in the 1990s, but the biggest problems were the lack of financing and the absence of international mechanisms or tools to fully integrate into the European system of higher education and science.
Putin saw higher education and science, first and foremost, as a tool to join Europe—to become part of the European family and a prominent member of the global market of ideas. That’s why Russia joined the Bologna Process in 2003 and actively pushed for internationalization.
AU: So in that sense, it’s probably not that different from most other countries in the former socialist bloc, like Poland or Romania—the idea that internationalization would bring about an improvement in higher education. Is that about right?
DD: It is right, with one very important difference. At first it might seem small, but it became a very serious issue. In higher education and science, everywhere in the world, there are always people who believe that their own system is highly advanced—at the very top.
The problem in the late Soviet Union and the Russian Federation was that a substantial number of people survived the collapse of the USSR still believing that Russian and Soviet science was the most advanced in the world. In some cases, for certain disciplines, that might have been true. But in most areas—especially the humanities and social sciences—it wasn’t.
By the late 1990s, there was a substantial group of people who were deeply disappointed in the results of democratic reforms and in what democracy had brought, both to the country overall and to higher education and science in particular.
AU: Okay, now, Putin was president until 2008, and then he switched places for four years with Prime Minister Medvedev. He returns to power as president in 2012. And as you say, it’s a different Putin—a much more authoritarian Putin. How did his approach to higher education change? If we think of “Putin 1.0” around 2000, what does “Putin 2.0” look like after 2012? How does he try to exert greater control over the system?
DD: It’s important to note that before Putin came back to power, there was a very significant period of reform in Russian higher education. Especially around 2007–2008, reforms were focused on improving quality and gaining international recognition. This was the era of what we call “managerialist modernization.”
The idea was to select flagship universities that would drive the rest of the system forward into a brighter future.
AU: And eventually that becomes the 5–100 Project.
DD: Yes, the 5–100, or “5–2020” project. The goal was that at least five Russian universities should appear in the world rankings. It was a very interesting period because it marked a serious transformation in the sociocultural landscape of Russian higher education.
For the first time, the so-called “effective managers” entered the system. From the mid-2000s onward, higher education began receiving serious investment from the state, making it appealing to a new managerial class and their approaches. Internationalization advanced, but it went hand in hand with growing managerial control over universities.
Even before Putin returned in 2012, higher education was already being used as a tool to demonstrate the effectiveness of Russian policy and as an instrument of soft power, particularly through supporting Russian universities in former Soviet countries like Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan.
When Putin came back, however, the situation changed dramatically. What I call the “conservative shift” began—not just in politics broadly, but within higher education and science.
AU: And some of that has to do with the broader crackdown at the time. I remember there was a lot of pressure on foreign organizations, which made international cooperation more difficult. For example, the government targeted the Open Society Foundations, George Soros’ network that had been active in supporting the social sciences and humanities. There was also a crackdown on things like gender studies and spaces for LGBTQ students.
Masha Gessen wrote about this in her book The Future is History. Why did that happen at that moment? What was it about Putin that made him say, “This is an area I want to control and push in a more conservative direction”?
DD: First and foremost, we have to remember the protests of 2011–2012. That was the time of the so-called “white ribbon” movement. It came very close to a revolution, though in the end it never happened—we failed. I was a member of that movement myself.
The significant participation of scholars and students in those protests put higher education under special scrutiny from the security services and the political apparatus. They believed that control over the education system could restore their legitimacy and symbolic power in society.
And remember, these leaders were, in many ways, Soviet people. They genuinely believed, “This is how the Soviet Union ruled—through control, especially in education and ideology.” And to some extent, that was true. The Soviet Union consolidated its power in part through universities.
Putin believed the same could work for him—that restoring control over higher education would allow him to strengthen his government, which had been undermined by the events of 2011–2012.
AU: We’ve been talking about the relationship between institutions and the government, but the government also changed the way institutions were run a couple of times, right? How has the exercise of power within Russian universities changed? I’m pretty sure there’s been a change in the process of selecting university leaders. How has that affected Putin’s ability to control universities?
DD: The specificity of Russian universities in the 1990s was that there was an enormous amount of democracy. There was absolutely no money in the system, so it was extremely poor—but at the same time, it was a kind of “poor democracy.” There were numerous elections, and the whole system of university governance was very active in self-governance.
There were real political struggles. People fought for the position of dean, they competed for the position of rector. Even department chairs could be elected. Almost every administrative position within a Russian university could be filled through an election.
When Putin consolidated power, especially during the managerial reforms, there was pressure—particularly on the flagship universities in the 5–100 Project—to amend their charters and replace elections with government appointments.
The official explanation was simple: if the state was providing so much budget support, then the state should also assign the rector rather than leave it to an election.
Even now, some Russian rectors are still technically elected. But in Putin’s Russia, an “election” is not an election in the normal sense. The ministry proposes the candidate, people watch the process, and it ends up looking very much like the way Putin himself is “elected.”
AU: Dmitry, in the early days of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, one thing that surprised a lot of people in the West—it seemed to come out of the blue—was a letter in support of the invasion signed by several hundred university rectors. Why did they do that? I mean, presumably they were ordered to by Putin, but why did Putin think that would be legitimizing?
DD: In post-Soviet societies there is a very high level of trust in higher education and science. The leaders of higher education were expected to officially support the so-called “hard decision” about the war.
But it’s important to remember—something some of our colleagues abroad seem to forget—that most of these rectors were never democratically chosen. They do not represent the voices of Russian scholars, lecturers, or faculty members. They mostly represent the vision of the presidential administration. Their role was to collect names for a list of support and then sign this shameful document.
And of course, this didn’t start in 2022. Under the “foreign agent” law of 2015, the government began a long anti-Western campaign—searching for “un-American” groups of influence, cutting connections with international centers, and declaring institutions like Central European University or Bard College in New York to be “undesirable organizations.”
This created a climate of fear and anxiety among the leaders of higher education. And there was direct blackmail: if you decided not to sign, that was your choice—but you had to think about your faculty, your team, your colleagues. They would probably be fired soon.
AU: What changed on university campuses after the invasion? Obviously, if I were in Putin’s position, I’d be worried about student unrest. So what happened in terms of surveillance on campus, and how did faculty react? I mean, you were a faculty member at the time, and you’re one of many who left fairly quickly after the invasion. How big a brain drain was there?
DD: Not as big as you might think, for different reasons. Academics can’t move as easily as other people—they need to be sure they’ll have a way to continue working, and for many there simply wasn’t anywhere to settle quickly.
My personal story was different. By coincidence, I had an invitation for a fellowship. Long story short, I relocated quickly from my home city of St. Petersburg to Prague. But for many others, leaving was far more difficult.
As for institutional surveillance—yes, it was there. It looks like Russia had been preparing for war for about two years beforehand. Around two years before the invasion, they started introducing special vice rectors responsible for “youth” whose actual role was to monitor and control loyalty.
At the same time, they established special departments within Russian universities with very long titles—things like “Promoting Civic Consciousness, Preventing Extremism, and Managing Interethnic Relations.” In practice, these were institutions embedded in higher education to control and discipline students and scholars.
Their real work was searching social networks, looking for so-called “betrayal” behaviors among students and faculty, and reporting them to the security services and police. Today, almost every region of the Russian Federation has one of these departments to oversee and report on improper behavior.
AU: After that rectors’ letter, Russia was suspended from the Bologna Process, and in retaliation Putin announced a return to the pre-Bologna system. So, getting rid of the bachelor’s, master’s, PhD framework and bringing back the old Russian model with the second PhD. How is this process unfolding? How easy is it to undo Bologna?
DD: That’s a good question. I don’t think Russia is really going to undo Bologna. They’re not planning a full reversal or trying to recreate the Soviet path.
From one side, there’s direct pressure on the Ministry of Higher Education and its bureaucrats to dramatically change a system that has been built over twenty years. But this system cannot simply be reversed. Legally, if students have already been admitted to a particular program, the state can’t just stop it midstream. At the very least, it would take four or five years to change. It can’t happen overnight.
Secondly, to me this feels like an exercise in mimicry or emulation from the old Soviet-style bureaucratic circles in higher education. I follow what’s happening closely—the statements from the Minister of Education—and they always try to explain what will be different, but they can’t. They have no clear idea what they’re trying to create.
Officially, they say, “This is not Bologna anymore. It has proved to be ineffective. Now we will collect the best achievements of the Russian system of education.” But what does that even mean? It’s absolutely impossible to understand. From my perspective, they are trying more to sabotage the process than to implement something substantial.
AU: Looking ahead, what do you think a post-Putin higher education system in Russia might look like? Is there a path back into the European higher education space, and what would it take to undo the damage that’s been done since 2012?
DD: That’s a good question. Currently, I would describe the situation as a “fourth deglobalization.” We’ve essentially gone back to the conditions of 2003, before joining the Bologna Process.
That doesn’t mean there’s no capacity—many faculty members still working in Russia earned their degrees in Western institutions. There is still substantial expertise within the system. But the fate of Russian higher education is very difficult to predict because it is so closely tied to the political fate of the Russian Federation itself.
If sanctions were to decrease and the war were to end, perhaps things could return to something like “normalcy.” But even that is debatable—what would “normalcy” mean in this context? At best, it might look like the Cold War era, perhaps similar to the late 1970s.
There are already serious restrictions in place: academic sanctions, boycotts, and bans on cooperation imposed by many institutions and countries. These severely limit Russia’s ability to develop visible academic exchanges with Europe. Instead, Russia is turning elsewhere—towards an “alternative globalization,” aligning more closely with countries like China, Iran, South Africa, and Brazil within the BRICS framework, [a political and economic bloc of major emerging economies that positions itself as an alternative to Western-led alliances].
AU: Dmitry, thank you so much for being with us today. It just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Sam Pufek and Tiffany MacLennan, and you, our listeners, for joining us. If you have any questions or comments on this week’s episode, or suggestions for future ones, please don’t hesitate to get in touch at [email protected].
Join us next week when our guest will be Joshua Travis Brown from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education. He’ll be joining us to talk about his fascinating new book from Oxford University Press, Capitalizing on College: How Higher Education Went from Mission-Driven to Margin Obsessed. Bye for now.
*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.
Amid rising political violence, the need for nonpartisan civic education has never been clearer. Yet saying, “civic thought” or “civic life and leadership” now reads conservative. Should it?
With the backing of a legislature his party dominated, Republican governor Doug Ducey created Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership in 2016. Both SCETL and its founding director, Paul Carrese, are now understood as key leaders in a movement for civic schools and centers.
In a March 2024 special issue on civic engagement in the journal Laws, Caresse outlines a deepening American civic crisis, including as evidence, “the persistent appeal of the demagogic former President Donald Trump.”
He’s not exactly carrying water for the MAGA movement.
Whether MAGA should be considered conservative is part of the puzzle. If by “conservative” we mean an effort to honor that which has come before us, to preserve that which is worth preserving and to take care when stepping forward, civic education has an inherently conservative lineage.
But even if we dig back more than a half century, it can be difficult to disentangle the preservation of ideals from the practices of partisanship. The Institute for Humane Studies was founded in the early 1960s to promote classical liberalism, including commitments to individual freedom and dignity, limited government, and the rule of law. It has been part of George Mason University since 1985, receiving millions from the Charles Koch Foundation.
The editors at Persuasion, which ran the column, certainly would seem to think so. But Persuasion also has a bent toward “a free society,” “free speech” and “free inquiry,” and against “authoritarian populism.” The founder, Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, has been a persistent center-left critic of what he and others deem the excesses of the far left. Some of the challenges they enumerate made it into Steven Pinker’s May opinion piece in The New York Times, in which Pinker defended Harvard’s overwhelming contributions to global humanity while also admitting to instances of political narrowness; Pinker wrote that a poll of his colleagues “turned up many examples in which they felt political narrowness had skewed research in their specialties.” Has political narrowness manifested within the operating assumptions of the civic engagement movement?
Toward the beginning of this century, award-winning researchers Joel Westheimer and Joseph Kahne pushed for a social change–oriented civic education. Writing in 2004, in the American Educational Research Journal, they described their predispositions as such: “We find the exclusive emphasis on personally responsible citizenship when estranged from analysis of social, political, and economic contexts … inadequate for advancing democracy. There is nothing inherently democratic about the traits of a personally responsible citizen … From our perspective, traits associated with participatory and justice oriented citizens, on the other hand, are essential.”
Other scholars have also pointed to change as an essential goal of civic education. In 1999, Thomas Deans provided an overview of the field of service learning and civic engagement. He noted dueling influences of John Dewey and Paulo Freire across the field, writing, “They overlap on several key characteristics essential to any philosophy of service-learning,” including “an anti-foundationalist epistemology” and “an abiding hope for social change through education combined with community action.”
Across significant portions of the fields of education, service learning and community engagement, the penchant toward civic education as social change had become dominant by 2012, when I inhabited an office next to Keith Morton at Providence College. It had been nearly 20 years since Morton completed an empirical study of different modes of community service—charity, project and social change—finding strengths and integrity within each. By the time we spoke, Morton observed that much of the field had come to (mis)interpret his study as suggesting a preference for social change over project or charity work.
While service learning and community engagement significantly embraced this progressive orientation, these pedagogies were also assumed to fulfill universities’ missional commitments to civic education. Yet the link between community-engaged learning and education for democracy was often left untheorized.
In 2022, Carol Geary Schneider, president emerita of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, cited real and compounding fractures in U.S. democracy. Shortly thereafter in the same op-ed, Geary Schneider wrote, “two decades of research on the most common civic learning pedagogy—community-based projects completed as part of a ‘service learning’ course—show that student participation in service learning: 1) correlates with increased completion, 2) enhances practical skills valued by employers and 3) builds students’ motivation to help solve public problems.”
All three of these outcomes are important, but to what end? The first serves university retention goals, the second supports student career prospects and the third contributes broadly to civic learning. Yet civic learning does not necessarily contribute to the knowledge, skills, attitudes and beliefs necessary to sustain American democracy.
There is nothing inherently democratic about a sea of empowered individuals, acting in pursuit of their separate conceptions of the good. All manner of people do this, sometimes in pursuit of building more inclusive communities, and other times to persecute one another. Democratic culture, norms, laws and policies channel energies toward ends that respect individual rights and liberties.
Democracy is not unrestrained freedom for all from all. It is institutional and cultural arrangements advancing individual opportunities for empowerment, tempered by an abiding respect for the dignity of other persons, grounded in the rule of law. Commitment to one another’s empowerment starts from that foundational assumption that all people are created equal. All other democratic rights and obligations flow from that well.
Proponents of civic schools and centers have wanted to see more connections to foundational democratic principles and the responsibilities inherent in stewarding an emergent, intentionally aspirational democratic legacy.
In a paper published by the American Enterprise Institute, Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey consider next steps for the movement advancing civic schools and centers, while also emphasizing responsibility-taking as part of democratic citizenship. They write, “By understanding our institutions of constitutional government, our characteristic political philosophy, and the history of American politics in practice as answers to the challenging, even paradoxical questions posed by the effort to govern ourselves, we enter into the perspective of responsibility—the citizen’s proper perspective as one who participates in sovereign oversight of, and takes responsibility for, the American political project. The achievement of such a perspective is the first object of civic education proper to the university.”
This sounds familiar. During the Obama administration, the Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement National Task Force called for the “cultivation of foundational knowledge about fundamental principles and debates about democracy.” More than a half century before, the Truman Commission’s report on “Higher Education for American Democracy” declared, “In the past our colleges have perhaps taken it for granted that education for democratic living could be left to courses in history and political science. It should become instead a primary aim of all classroom teaching and, more important still, of every phase of campus life.” And in the era of the U.S. founding, expanding access to quality education was understood as central to the national, liberatory project of establishing and sustaining democratic self-government. Where does this leave us today?
Based on more than 20 years of research, teaching and administration centered around civic education, at institutions ranging from community colleges to the Ivy League, I have six recommendations for democratic analysis, education and action to move beyond this hyperpartisan moment.
Advance analysis rather than allegations. I started this essay with two critiques of President Trump advanced by leaders at centers ostensibly associated with conservativism. More recently I demonstrated alignments between current conservative appeals and civic aspirations under two popular Democratic presidents. We should spend far less time and ink debating whether something emerges from Republican or Democratic roots. Our proper roles as academics and as citizens direct us to consider specific policies and practices, to compare them historically and cross-nationally, and to gather evidence of impacts. We now have a landscape that includes more than a dozen new civic schools and centers. We therefore have opportunities to assess their differences, similarities and impact.
Demonstrate that rights derive from shared governance. Work with students to understand the relationship between good government and everyday functions such as freedom to move, freedom to associate, freedom to contract and freedom to trade. These rights manifest through the promise made in the Declaration of Independence. “Governments are instituted,” it reads, “to effect … Safety and Happiness.” Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration is an indispensable aid in any such effort.
Encourage historic political-economic comparisons of rights. Diving deep into history from all corners of the world clarifies various kinds of colonizing forces and diverse approaches to good government, from imperial China to the Persian Empire and American expansion. Last year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson, received the award for research demonstrating that societies with well-established rule of law and individual rights are more likely to become economically prosperous. Consider this and other, disciplinarily diverse explorations of the structural conditions for human flourishing. Push past dichotomizing narratives that sort history into tidy buckets. Rights as we know them—expanded and protected through state institutions—are tools of liberation with an extended, colonial and global heritage. Mounk’s podcast is an excellent resource for contemporary, comparative interrogation of the structures and cultural commitments that advance rights.
Wrestle with power and violence. Despite national and global history riven with conflict and conquest, many progressives came to imagine that democracy is a given, that having rights in conditions of comparative peace is the natural state. Yet those rights only manifest through the disciplined commitments of state officials doing their jobs. In a recent article in Democracy, William A. Galston, a Brookings Institution senior fellow, professor at the University of Maryland and former Clinton administration official, suggests democracy is on the defensive because citizens too frequently “regard the movement toward tolerance at home and internationalism abroad as irreversible.” Nonsense, argues Galston. History shows us societies descend into evil, governments revoke liberties and armies invade. Democratic liberties are co-created political commitments. They have always depended upon judicious, democratic stewardship of policing power at home and military power abroad. Questioning state structures of enforcement should be part of university-level civic education, but so too should respecting them and understanding the reasons for their persistence. Here and throughout, civic education must balance respect for the past, its traditions and its empirical lessons, with possibilities for the future.
Embrace and interrogate foundational democratic values. Meditate on the intentionally aspirational commitment to American democracy, embodied in the assertion that all people are created equal. Nurture the virtue of respect for others implied by inherent equality. Foster—in yourself and in your students—an embrace of human dignity so strong that you seek bridging opportunities across the American experiment, working to find the best in others, seeking connections with individuals who seem most unlike you. Even if they offer no reciprocity, never forget any person’s basic humanity. Before analyzing or convincing, listen and find ways to listen well beyond your normal circles. My colleague at the University of Pennsylvania Lia Howard is modeling such efforts with systematic approaches to democratic listening across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Most of all, if principled, rigorous, honest analysis beyond partisan dichotomizing appeals to you, know that you are not alone. Danielle Allen (Harvard University), Kwame Anthony Appiah (New York University) and Eboo Patel (Interfaith America) lead among numerous scholars and organizers refreshing democratic ideals for our era. They demonstrate that democracy does not manifest without attention to our shared heritage, our collective institutions and our willingness to respect one another. They hold a pragmatic space between civic education as unquestioning nation-building on one extreme and as unmoored social justice activism on another. Readers curious about their approaches can begin with Allen presenting “How to Be a Confident Pluralist” at Brigham Young University, Appiah making a cosmopolitan case for human dignity and humility in The New York Times Magazine, and Patel in conversation with American University president Jonathan Alger in AU’s “Perspectives on the Civic Life” series.
This essay, it must be noted, was almost entirely completed before the political assassination of Charlie Kirk. It now becomes even clearer that we must identify ways to analyze beyond partisan pieties while embracing human dignity. Some leaders are reminding us of our ideals. Utah governor Spencer Cox’s nine minutes on ending political violence deserves a listen. Ezra Klein opened his podcast with a reflection on the meaning of the assassination, followed by his characteristic modeling of principled disagreement with a political opponent (in this case, Ben Shapiro). It is the second feature of that Klein podcast—extended periods of exploration, disagreement and brief periods of consensus regarding critical democratic questions—that we must see more of across campuses and communities. One of the worst possible, and unfortunately plausible, outcomes of this movement for civic schools and centers could be the continuing balkanization of campuses into self-sorted identity-based communities, with very little cross-pollination. That would be bad for learning and for our country.
Whatever the political disposition of civic centers or other programs across campus, we need more and better cross-campus commitment to democratic knowledge, values and beliefs if we wish to continue and strengthen the American democratic tradition.
Eric Hartman is a senior fellow and director of the executive doctorate in higher education management at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.
The Oversight Project, a spinoff of the conservative Heritage Foundation known for deluging government agencies with public records requests, has set its sights on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
According to Chapel Hill’s open records request database, Mike Howell, the Oversight Project’s president, submitted a sweeping request to the university on July 2, asking for syllabi and class materials presented to students in roughly 70 courses that contain “any of the following search terms, whether in titles, body text, footnotes, metadata, or hyperlinks.” He then listed 30 search terms he wanted Chapel Hill to use, including “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging”; “gender identity”; “intersectionality”; “white privilege”; “cultural humility”; “racial equity”; “implicit bias”; “microaggressions”; “queer”; and “sexuality.”
The courses whose materials he asked the university to search included Gender and Sexuality in Islam, Increasing Diversity in STEM Research and Black Families in Social and Contemporary Contexts, as well as Right-Wing Populism in Global Perspective; First-Year Seminar: Mobility, Roads, NASCAR, and Southern Culture; and Introduction to the American Stage Musical.
Howell also asked the university to waive any fees for searching for or providing these possibly voluminous records. His explanation for why the Oversight Project deserved to pay nothing suggested what he was seeking to do with the information.
“Disclosure of these records will contribute significantly to the public’s understanding of university operations and student-facing programming, particularly considering ongoing public concern regarding institutional compliance with current Executive Orders issued by the President of the United States,” Howell wrote, specifically mentioning President Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders from January. The records “will shed light on potential inconsistencies between internal practices and public representations made by officials in a matter of substantial national importance,” he wrote.
Government agencies that are subject to open records requests such as the one the Oversight Project has submitted often charge for such work; the State Department’s fees range from $21 to $76 per hour, depending on the personnel fulfilling the request, and $0.15 per page, for example.
It’s another example of conservatives using open records laws to target what’s being researched or taught—or what they think is being taught—at public universities. And using keyword searches for terms such as “DEI” echoes the approach federal agencies under Trump have adopted to search grants to determine which might be canceled. Some universities have also conducted their own similar hunts to find content on internal websites and within courses that may run afoul of federal or state prohibitions related to DEI.
In February, the UNC system ordered its 16 public universities to immediately stop requiring “course credits related to diversity, equity and inclusion,” without defining what that meant. Some university administrations used keyword searches of course descriptions, looking for terms such as “cultural” to choose which courses to review. The system allowed institutional chancellors to grant waivers for dozens of courses with diversity themes that remain necessary for certain degrees. A system administrator said about 95 percent of programs identified for exemptions “had accreditation and licensure requirements attached.”
The request for syllabi is also another example of conservative groups targeting UNC system campuses for allegedly continuing to practice DEI, despite multiple efforts by the UNC system Board of Governors to stamp it out. Since April, another group, Accuracy in Media, has released undercover videos allegedly showing staffers at other UNC institutions still promoting DEI.
Chris Petsko’s business course, Leading and Managing, was among those the Oversight Project requested records for. Petsko, an assistant professor of organizational behavior, said a small part of the course includes segments on stereotyping and prejudice as they relate to workplace outcomes, such as hiring.
Petsko said the university notified him of the request, and he looked up what the Oversight Project was. Based on what he found, he won’t give up his course materials, he said. He didn’t like the request’s implication that he was violating executive orders and said those sympathetic to the Trump administration seem “perfectly willing to make outlandish legal arguments that they know will lose in lower courts simply to give their ideology some kind of legitimacy.” The Oversight Project has been accused of releasing misleading information before.
Petsko said he didn’t want to give the Oversight Project something to “twist” in its mission to keep “targeting public universities for doing the work they need to do.”
‘Meant to Intimidate’
Chapel Hill says it’s a faculty member’s right not to share their course information. Though the media relations office didn’t provide an interview Monday, a university spokesperson wrote in an email, “The University has not responded to this public records request and is still in the process of identifying what—if any—records will be produced. Course materials, including but not limited to exams, lectures, assignments and syllabi, are the intellectual property of the preparer and are owned by the preparer as non-traditional work.”
The Oversight Project also didn’t provide an interview to Inside Higher Ed. In an email, Howell wrote, “UNC is a public school which has a long track record of discrimination. Syllabi are public records and belong to the public. We intend to let the public know what is being taught at a public school. That’s not intimidation, it’s good governance and transparency. If a professor is too much of a wimp to let me read his syllabus then he’s in the wrong business.”
When asked to provide a list of donors to the Oversight Project, Howell responded, “And no of course I’m not sending you a list of donors but please do send donors to our website.”
Petsko shared his research into the rules regarding responding to Howell’s group with other faculty on LinkedIn.
“At many public universities, syllabi are considered intellectual property,” he wrote in a post. “As such, at many schools (mine included) professors are not required to share their syllabi in response to public records requests. My advice is to check what your university policy is prior to complying with requests in advance.”
He also wrote that “at public universities, you have a legal right to decide how to teach your course and to decide what topics to include” if it’s relevant to the course.
“Keep doing the work you were trained to do,” he wrote. “Keep educating others. Keep sharing your expertise. And don’t let vague references to executive orders make you question whether you have a right to be sharing your knowledge with the world.”
Zach Greenberg, a First Amendment attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said his organization advocates for narrow exemptions to open records laws to keep private faculty records, correspondence and other written materials for the purpose of scholarship, research and teaching.
“These very broad and vague requests for faculty academic records such as syllabi and faculty communications about their academic pursuits chill free speech by putting a large burden on the faculty members and revealing private academic information they use to teach their classes,” Greenberg said. Forcing disclosure, he said, can result in altering these courses.
Joan Scott, a member of the American Association of University Professors’ Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure and one of the founders of Chapel Hill’s women’s studies program, said this use of open records requests is “not a new tactic.” She said these requests are “meant to intimidate” and suggested the targeting of Chapel Hill is part of a pressure campaign on state legislators to overturn the Democratic governor’s veto of anti-DEI legislation.
“Whatever they’re claiming the legal right is, it’s a violation of academic freedom, it’s a violation of individual free speech rights and it’s an intrusion into the teaching of university faculty in the name of, it seems to me, a right-wing ideological agenda,” Scott said.
