All right, everybody. Lets get started. Welcome back. The American Enterprise institute wants to thank you very much, all of you for being here. I know its quite a ways to go over a lot of people. Getting a sense of the community thinking about these questions we are enormously grateful for it. I also do, Getting Started just want to say thanks for getting this together showing extraordinary leadership and i do want to give another hand for the work that they are doing. [applause] theres simply enough to do i think and in some ways it is related to the technical subject of the session that is also convenient because i think a lot of the questions that have been in some respect opened up and maybe less open has to do with the fit between the university and Civics Education and if thereare questions to think thrh whether and how this project of Civics Education and 21st education 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 are going to do that through conversation. We are grateful to have them here and we will enter into a conversation. Peter for a lot of us when you think about civics and Higher Education this has been the case for decades. Thats only halfway how, i mean, it. He is the lincoln professor at the college of civic life at the university and he teaches Political Science and philosophy. He spent an entire career to bring scholarly work to bear on ways of strengthening american civic life. But more than anything on Civics Education and helping us to think about the various ways that it could be part of what Higher Education means. The author of many books including most recently what should we do with serious civic life 2022 and its a book worth your while. The ut Austin School of leadership and professor of government that is of course one of the new civic schools that popped up in the universities at a number of states so the question of how civics fit into the life of every university is for him if daytoday question a variety of questions related to the subject with national law thinking and the political tradition and many other questions that have to do with the way in which the creative questions we think about in Higher Education bear on our civic life. Both of them lately have been thinking and writing a lot about. I was thinking when we were all naive and hopeful, which, i mean, 9 00 this morning, and the story give a lovely introduction of the day and said if there is a case that can be made for a new discipline and he looked over at me and i give you a thumbs up because i know my job and im not going to talk as much about the tactics within its good to create a new department. I will talk about it in two ways. Its a tangible program that gives you something to think about concretely and its also a nascent and not very big but meaningful intellectual movement that is mostly very international with some offshoots in the u. S. It is a Reform Movement and a kind of gap where the other disciplines are not doing what we need and the diagnosis is they are primarily asking why do people act in the ways that they do and the kind of generalized sense and how might their behavior change if things about their world change . Im going to say all this stuff and you can disagree but im going to just plow through my claims so its about human behavior, why people behave the way they do. Its much more about meaning and what is meant by the products of human mind. The primary question and political philosophy is how should things be, good question. All these are good questions. Its focused on either the human life and what makes a person good or what should i do and how should i lie to the secret service, secret police at my door, this kind of question. Public policy ends up being the question of what should be done and that can translate into the question of what the government should do which is included in Public Policy but not with the e government should or shouldnt do. Im going to take a few minutes to talk about each one in turn. The question is what should we do because its not to change it, the good things about the world is also action. Sometimes choosing not to act is a good thing but the ultimate purpose of a citizen in the Civic Community is to act or refrain from acting and theres a kind of intellectual discipline involved in acting for the question is what should we do because it has a great tendency to slip away in Different Directions. It slips away into the abstract and what should we do is a question at all scales for the very concrete group but also at the scale im interested where theres an actual we like the people in this room if we took that seriously we would have to do things like figure out how to organize ourselves to make a decision otherwise it doesnt really we. The question is what should we do. The questions are serious citizens even in an abstract way when they get into an actual decision they become very convinced and i know that this is a bit of a stretch but its my hope for saying the facts matter, inclination matters to decide what we should do how much things cost and what the probability and success would be and in some ways hope for the humanities. Why do we always think about what we should do and what if somebody else got their food on the back of our neck what if somebody else called the problem and have the resources to solve the problem and i think my basic answers are twofold even if the people because the problem they are not going to change unless somebody tries to get them to change and if somebody compels them to change and you make a request or demand and its effect of doing but also because theres something not just something that intrinsically and deeply rewarding no matter how you are situated so its not just a means but its also living a better life to be part of communities that asked what should we do. You find it connected to a lot of other questions so for example, who am i is inescapable because you do come in as a person or redefine that person is a slippery concept and also the groups hope constitutive you are so you end up thinking about who i am to think about what should we do. It can be quite a complex matter and as you can be complicit members of the group you dont admit you are part of and also think you are part of a group but nobody pays attention to you and you are not really part of the group so what groups or un is an ongoing question answer those questions act and i think they are perennial. But if we focus on the moment of what should we do a specific moment with three large three lf questions were topics, the group destroying to decide what to do in fact is going to think about the problems in private. Taxes are too high or schools need to be saved thats what they are going to talk about but theres another layer of problems which are perennial and intrinsic in the group so one set of questions is how to create a group that functions. There will be quite a challenge of turning the community or network into a group and that will involve things like the leaders in creating a budget and getting a stream of money and those are a set of questions and they are not easy and you dont learn them automatically. I have a much more complex version but a simple one would be you have to think through the kind of norms and rules to make any kind of Group Function and that is differentiated depending on the group. Shorthand for the very positive affects if it is invaluable we are going to disagree about the means and ends and people today have been terribly polite so how do we think about that at the level of talking and listening to other people so what is the appropriate kind of thing to say and how to reorganize institutions for discourse. U. S. Congress is another and a newspaper is another. How do we organize and structure the institutions. There are these other people in our group and dont want to become a pretty much devoted to Civic Education and higher ed. In terms of curriculum we think about the study and appreciative moments as those things that organize against opposition and especially the nonviolent strain in the social movements about nonviolence where you are in a functioning Civil Society and the nonviolent tradition they gifted resources about the topics so what would you emphasize Civil Rights Movement would be at the very top of the list. We have a major teaching the courses left which connects to the entrepreneurship. A number of students and they are all majors and civic studies. Im also inviting the International Movement not tremendously widespread but dozens of institutes of the studies for professors and Civil Society leaders. A lot of thinking about this has come out of other countries and about and in interaction with il society leaders. Mcmaster in canada. Theres a lot of evidence about infiltrating other disciplines. That activity is underway. I also think its going to stand with interesting contrast. [applause] i didnt really know what i was going to study or do. When i took the class we read political sermons and pamphlets and the notes on the constitutions. I changed my major and i was thinking about that and it introduced me to a lot of the questions that i was introduced to it in these texts thinking about who are we in who are we in the community with about the principles and whats right and just and how we live together as a community and how we constitute. It was my introduction and im grateful for having had that introduction. And i would not have been exposed to it had i not enrolled in that class it was by accident that i did that. One of the things i was introduced to ms. James wilson one of the forgotten american founders. They served in the Continental Congress and was a delegate to the convention credited with the structure of article two he was one of only six men assigned both to the declaration of independence of constitution to get a good resume. George washington appointed him to the court and then in 1790 while he was on the Supreme Court the trustees at the college of philadelphia appointed him as the first professor of law. One of the contemporaneous newspaper accounts as the first lecture and a number of ladies and gentlemen. They would be for american law and he understood it very broadly the constitutionalism and politics that it would be Something Like what had been for a generation of colonial lawyers but also didnt happen for wilson he died of malaria in 1977 at that time he had lost money and land speculation and spend time in prison while he was on the Supreme Court and he lived out his remaining days evading creditors. Theres a Broadway Musical waiting to be written about wilsons life. [laughter] and i think we could ask who lives and dies and tells your story. Scholars are starting to tell us now and are interested in the idea that he had particularly in his lectures on law and of those lectures that wilson gave show a deep appreciation. In his inaugural lecture wilson made to claims to help guide the conversation next. It cannot become the object of love and lust they become the object of our knowledge and a second he said of law and liberty that they should in some measure and in some degree the study of every free citizen and every free man. Every free citizen has duties to perform and rights to claim. In less than some measure and degree he knows he can never act at just an independent part that was until 1885 that henry and of wendell claimed the term civics to describe the civics duties and citizenship for this will will Higher Education going back to the american experiment as George Thomas has written a book about. The National University to educate the publics leaders and unite people from different parts of the country. George washington took up this idea in the inaugural message to congress. What do the more pressing on its legislator than to patronize the plan for communicating it to those who want to be the guardians of the liberty of the country. Some took up the idea of a Public University at the state level. At the university of texas at austin which is chartered much earlier but americans after the civil war are talking about civics is a new discipline and the reason they are talking about civics combining this word for citizen and the greek suffix theres a reason why it is happening in that postwar period into the university of texas motto with apologies if hes here we study at the guardian of the city. Its a rules translation from the first message in 1838 where he said the cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy and he went on to ask in a way that echoed how should we protect our rights if we do not comprehend them and the habit of enlightened reflection. William battle was a classical scholar and former resident tasked with designing the university of texas in the part of the 20th century and he put the motto and that emphasized sincerity and truth seeking in the mission and then in the top field symbolizes study of the past thats accumulated wisdom and lessons and that is to discipline free and fair societies in the future. The reason it mirrors the state of texas the Political Community for which the university exists and after designing this for the flagship Public University the motto incorporated in the field had once the justification of the universitys existence in an ideal of its future so a question reflecting back on this is how we carry out this task and what do we envision and carry this forward. The answer we should reflect on the moment and opportunity in a moment we should face head on, confidence in Higher Education is at historic lows in the spring of protests that we had i think that number is arguably lower and still declining. Some of this is related to the perception that Higher Education has become an ideological monoculture closed to the full range of perspectives represented in our pluralistic society. Whether or not you think thats true that perception poses a challenge. For the voices in Higher Education over time there was an article for the National Affairs a while back called the disappearing conservative professor and his research they found that conservatives make up only 4 of historians and literature professors in many departments that effectively mean that there are none and the disconnect between the public and universities with a very blue faculty on campus the disconnect has not been good for either one and at the same time these academic disciplines while theyve become more ideologically homogenous have also become more and more specialist. This is not necessarily bad. Many of the disciplines of sophisticated methods. The body of knowledge is deeper with the questions they ask are more sophisticated but part of what constituted the broad Civic Education have been separated from each other into different disciplinary units or theyve just dropped out altogether and not always for the various motives. Theres just no one asking these questions were doing this work anymore. For the core tasks of Civic Education this is what our system board of regents asks our campus to do when they adopted a resolution directing the president to take steps to implement the new school of civic leadership. The resolution for the comprehensive Interdisciplinary Program of research and equipping students and then in theknowledge and aptitudes necessary to lead a free society and it goes on to say providing foundational knowledge and Critical Thinking skills steep in the western tradition in the constitutional history and educating students in the values and principles of the society equipping them to be the next generation of leadership for the states and nation. This work is attractive to not only conservatives but conserving what is best and worth preserving and the Political Institutions with foundational knowledge to our students so that they can take responsibility for their world and improve those for the next generation but it isnt that ties itself to the partisan mass. It must transcend that polarization not by being moderate or value free but by being Something Else altogether. For lack of a better word i started calling this partisan. Before the partisan disagreements, we must be united by some common objects. This is a common object of love into something that james wilson picked up on in his first lecture on law if law and liberty is the object of our love they must first be objects of our knowledge. It is to wield the good of the other and we must not deconstructed but make it better. But it can be made better resumes that its open to critique. Civic education must be committed in the pursuit of truth and not because we are neutral on the question of truth but because we actually put a stake in the question that these norms flow about the lost tools of learning. They get to study all sorts of subjects into something that would continue long after the formal education and she concluded that the primary and the purpose of education would be to teach students how to think not what to think so it is i think with Civic Education we can turn to models of the past that to think about the foundations of our civic life and learn how to think about the foundations of our civic life and how to think about the responsibilities that fall on us as citizens but on the details we will disagree. That is a s