From the same conference, discussion on Civic Engagement in the contemporary university setting. This portion is an hour and 20 minutes. All right, everybody, lets get started. Welcome back. I am yuval levin of the American Enterprise institute and i want to thank you very much for being here. I noticed quite a ways to go for a lot of people who are here, one of the best things about these gatherings for all of us is just being together and getting a sense of the kind of community of people thinking about these questions together, we are enormously grateful for it and getting started, i want to say a word of thanks to my colleagues for getting this together, building this community over the last few years and showing extraordinary leadership and i want to give them a hand, for the work they are doing. We get the bad cleanup in this session and there is some cleanup to do and in some ways it is related to the technical subject of the session which is also convenient because a lot of the questions that have been in some respects opened up and left open have to do with the fit between the university and Civics Education. There are questions about what civics is and the nature of the university but weve been confronting a set of questions about whether and how this project of Civics Education in 20thcentury 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 will do that through a conversation between two ideal people to think through these questions for us and with us, we are very grateful to have them here in this final session. I will introduce them and they will speak for a bit and we will enter into a conversation, start with pierre loving. For a lot of us when you think about civics entire education you think of peter levine. That has been the case for decades. I am sorry. Thats only halfway how i mean it. Peter is the lincoln professor citizenship in Public Affairs and he teaches Political Science and philosophy, he spent really an entire career engaged in a variety of efforts to bring scholarly work to bear on ways of strengthening american civic life, working on voting rights, public deliberation and more than anything on Civics Education and helping us to think about various ways it could be part of what Higher Education means, hes the author of many books including most recently what should we do . A theory of civic life published in 2,022 by oxford, a book really worth your while. Justin dyer is the inaugural dean of austen school of civic leadership and a professor of government, one of the civic schools that popped up in public universities at a number of states and this question of how civics fit into the life of the universitys for him a very practical question, daytoday question. She was previously professor Political Science at the university of missouri and also the author of many books on a variety of questions related to our subject, the place of thinking in the american political tradition in many questions that have to do with the ways in which the kinds of questions we think about in Higher Education there on our civic life both of them lately have been thinking and writing a lot about the question in various ways. From different angles which should make for a number of useful ways into this conversation. So please. Thank you so much. When we were all young and naive and hopeful by which i mean 9 00 this morning, bens story gave an introduction to the day and at one point said a case could be made for a new discipline of civic thought or civic studies and he looked at me, used my name, gave you the thumbs up because i know my job which is to make that case for consideration. Im not going to talk about the tactical tactics of whether i create a new department versus the substance. I am sorry, we changed the order. I have to go okay. There you go. Civics studies, a tangible program that gives you something to think about concretely. Its also a nascent and not very big but meaningful intellectual movement its very intellectual and i want to introduce you to that. Some people in the room know it but not everybody. Most people wont know about it and this is one way to describe it. It is intended as a Reform Movement identifying a problem and the problem is a gap where the other disciplines and social sciences are not doing what we need, the diagnosis, doing a port things but not what we need. The social sciences primarily are asking why do people act in the ways they do in a generalized sense and how it might change their behavior or how might their behavior change if things about the world changed. You can disagree but i will plow through my simplifying claims. About the behavior and why people behave the way they do. The humanities are much more about meaning, about what is meant by, not intended that meant by the products of human mind. Those are all good questions. Philosophy is asking about really good thoughts about what is right, what is good, what is fair, another way to put it is how should things be, primary question and political philosophy is how should things be, all of these are good questions. Ethics is often focused around a unit of analysis of human life is what makes a person good or what should i do in a particular situation, should i lie to the secret police at my door, those kinds of questions. Public policy often ends up being the question of what should be done, that can translate into the question of what the government should do. Libertarian or skeptical position toward government is included in public policy. Its about what government should or shouldnt do. The claim, students should study them but they missed the citizen question. Only four words long, what should we do. All those words really count. What should we do . The point is to act in the world, not to change it, good things about the world is action and choosing not to act is the right thing. The ultimate purpose of a citizen is to act or intentionally refrain from acting and theres a discipline involved in acting, what should we do as opposed to how, what is going on, asking what should we do is part of it intellectually. The question is what should we do and this is crucial because the wii has a great significance, it slips away in Different Directions to what should be done by somebody else, slips into the abstract or it slips into the universal, what should i do, what should we do is a hard question but on all scales, it derives from a concrete group but also at the scale of the human species but im interested in the wii where theres an actual we for example the people in this room, what should we do if we took that seriously we would have to do things like figure out how to organize ourselves to make decisions, how to have otherwise its not really a we. The question is what should we do because it is as we say in academia about whats right or wrong, not what you want. Its not how things are and its not what your interests are, it is what should we do. You can look up and questions of should are disputed but serious citizens even if they are in an abstract way theres no right or wrong answer to the questions when they get into an actual decisionmaking forum, they are convinced that they may believe in his right and have reasons for it so citizens use the language of should and should, this is a bit of a stretch but my hope for saying information matters in order to decide what we should do you have to know how much what is going on, how much things cost, what the probability of success would be, should is the hook for the humanities and the social sciences and the Natural Sciences although the distinction is blurred. Quick sort of defense here because if you think about this long enough, someone will say why do we think about what should we do, what if somebody has the boot on the back of our neck, someone else has the resources, my basic answers are twofold. Even if the other people caused the problem, they wont change, to compel somebody else to change or make a request or demand is a form of doing but also because there is something, not just something but much intrinsically rewarding about asking the question what should we do no matter how the situation goes. Not just the means but living a better life but part of a community can ask what can we do . If you start with the question of what should we do it is embedded and connected, who am i is inescapable because in coming into a community you come in as a person or redefined that. Its a slippery concept and also the figure youre in helps to constitute what you are so you think about who i am to think about what we should do and which groups i belong to which is not a simple factual matter but a complex matter. You could be complicit member of a group you dont admit you are part of and you can think youre part of a group and they dont like you and you are not part of the group. What groups are you in is an ongoing question. Those questions can act and they are perennial but if we focus on the moment of what should we do as a specific moment, to get leads to read large categories of questions or topics. A group thats trying to decide what to do in fact is going to think about the immediate problems in front of him, taxes are too high or souls need to be savored or stop discriminating, thats what they are going to talk about but theres another layer, perennial and intrinsic to being a group, so one set of questions is how do you create a group that function so they can do anything . It would be a challenge if turning this community your network of people into a group, would involve doing things like choosing leaders, creating a budget, getting money, those are a set of questions and they are not easy and you dont learn them automatically as a developing human being. You have to learn them. To write that down, i have a more complex version of this, you have to think through the kind of rules and norms that work to make any Group Function and thats differentiated depending on the group and you have to think about how to create the human connection, i will say trust as shorthand for the various positives to relationships necessary to the group. Thats the first category. The second category, we have a big group ended if and if it is a Diverse Group we will disagree about means and ends. People have been terribly polite but disagreed. How do we deal with that . One set of questions that follows in is what are the ethics of the skills involved at the individual level of talking and listening to other people . Whats an appropriate thing to say and in what way . We might use a word like civility but what is civility . But how do we organize institutions for discourse, university is one, social network is another, a newspaper is another. How do we organize the structure of institutions for discourse . The third category, these other people who are not in our group and dont want to be, this is a group devoted to Civic Education and higher read, talking all day about the others like we do, how do we deal with them . And any group always has another. In terms of curriculum i tend to think about the study, critical certainly but also appreciative of movements broadly defined as things that organize or may change against opposition and especially nonviolent strains of social movement not because im a pacifist, i am not, i am supportive of military action in a number of cases. Nonviolence is in cases where you are in a functioning Civil Society with your fellow citizens and because nonviolent tradition gives us deep resources for thinking about these topics so when we think about questions from the earlier panel about what you would emphasize, it would be at the top of my list because among other things nonviolence allows you to act with the resources you have as a human being, not with what you are given like guns. A few more thoughts. We have a major, 89 majors, thats a pretty intricate number of majors teaching courses with minors, one of which can give us entrepreneursship. We have a Prison Program and the number of incarcerated students studying and they are all majors in those studies who graduated and done amazing things. I think this might be my last slide. Theres more to be done about this program if you want to hear about it. I invite you to join civics studies at the International Movement that is not huge, not tremendously widespread in the United States but meaningful with activity and opportunity. We have i should have counted but dozens of 2week long studies, College Students and others, professors and Civil Society leaders in ukraine where we do those for five years and a lot of thinking about this is coming out of other countries and interactions with Civil Society leaders. It is 60 something volume. Various programs have popped up that are using the model explicitly, mcmaster in canada, it is because it is canadian but they took to the studies specifically, talking about infiltrating other disciplines, civic studies group, a number of access, that activity is underway and that is it, and it will be an interesting contrast and that is good. [applause] when i was an undergraduate student i took a class at the university of oklahoma called foundations in american politics and i didnt really know what i was going to study or do or go to law school, business major at the time. When i took that class we read political sermons and pamphlets of the founding era, James Madisons notes on the constitution, antifederalist papers, some of tocqueville, closed with the Lincoln Douglas debates and i loved them and i thought that is what Political Science was. I changed my major and said sign me up. Thinking about that, introduced me to a lot of the questions he was outlining about civic studies, i was introduced to it through these texts, who are we and who are we in community with . How do we debate about principles and what is right and just and how to live together and constitute a new phenomena and . Thats my introduction, grateful for having had that introduction. What i would have gone on to do would have been a valuable thing for me to study and i would not have been exposed to it had i not and rolled in that class. It was by accident that i did that. One of the figures i was introduced was james wilson, one of the forgotten american founders who studied law under john dickinson, he wrote one of the influential political pamphlet in 1774 against colonial taxation without representation in parliament, served in the Continental Congress as a delegate for the constitutional convention, credited with the structure of article 2, he played a major role in the pennsylvania ratification debate, served as associate justice on the First Supreme Court and was one of six men to sign the declaration of independence and the constitution, a good resume. In 1789 George Washington appointed him to the court and in 1790 while he was on the Supreme Court the trustees at the college of philadelphia appointed him professor of law. One of the contemporaneous newspaper accounts of his first lecture when he was a professor at the college of philadelphia noted that in attendance were george and martha washington, john adams, both houses of congress, both houses of the state legislature and a number of ladies in gentlemen. For wilson as he was giving this and preparing a series of lectures, he hoped it would be for american law and he understood law very broadly, american politics, it would be Something Like what blackstones commentaries had been for a generation of colonial lawyers. That ultimately didnt happen. He died of malaria in 1797. At that time, he had lost money and land speculation, spend time in debtors prison on the Supreme Court and lived out his remaining days continually evading creditors. s lectures were never published in his lifetime. There is a Broadway Musical waiting to be written about wilsons life and like hamilton, we could ask who lives and who dies and who tells your story. Scholars are starting to tell wilsons story in full and are interested in the ideas that he had, particularly his lectures on law and those lectures engaged a deep appreciation for the role of education and in this context it is Higher Education, sustaining the new republic. In his inaugural lecture, wilson made two claims that are relevant for our conversation that help guide our conversation next. Law and liberty cannot become the object of our love unless they first become the object of our knowledge. Second, he said of these things, they should in some measure and some degree be the study of every free citizen and every free man. Every free citizen has duties to perform and rights to claim. Unless in some measure and some degree he knows those duties and those rights and can never act an independent part. It wasnt until 1885 henry coins the term civics to describe the study of the rights and duties of citizenship and this idea of having a role for Higher Education and sustaining the republic goes back to the beginning of the american experiment. George thomas has written a book, some of the founders even before ratification of the constitution were advocating the creation of a National University to educate the republics future leaders which unites people from different parts of the country. George washington took up this idea in his inaugural message to congress. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important, what duty, more pressing, on his legislature, than to patronize a plan of communicating to those who are future guardians of the liberty of the country . Among others of the founding generation, some suggest the idea of Public Univer