For New Grant, Ed Dept. Favors Colleges With ‘Civic’ Schools

The federal government is funding educational seminars about the 250th anniversary of America’s founding. Applying institutions get a leg up if they have what are often criticized as conservative centers.

For New Grant, Ed Dept. Favors Colleges With ‘Civic’ Schools

Publication: Insidehighered.com

Author: Ryan Quinn

July 08, 2025

You can read the article HERE

Even as it freezes billions of dollars in higher education funding elsewhere, the Trump administration is offering colleges and universities grants to put on seminars for K-12 educators and students related to next year’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And it’s telling applicants they’ll have a better shot at earning some of the funding, estimated at over $14 million, if they meet a certain criterion.

“Priority will be given to applicants from institutions of higher education that have established independent academic units dedicated to civic thought, constitutional studies, American history, leadership, and economic liberty,” the Education Department wrote in a notice in the Federal Register last month. “These institutes should demonstrate a sustained commitment to robust civil discourse, the liberal arts, and the study of American history and politics through primary documents.”

The department didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for more information about this “Competitive Preference Priority” or the grant program as a whole. The metric could mean the Trump administration will bless—with federal funds—the growing movement among Republican-controlled legislatures and some university governing boards to establish civics or civil discourse centers at public higher education institutions.

Faculty critics have called them conservative centers, noting they’ve been spearheaded by GOP politicians and their appointees rather than established from within universities. They include the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Civic Life and Leadership, the University of Florida’s Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education, and Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. The Chapel Hill center has brought in multiple scholars with conservative-leaning views.

Paul Carrese, the ASU school’s founding director, who remains a professor there, said that by his “strict accounting,” 13 public university campuses across eight states—Arizona, Florida, Ohio, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah—have established civics units. Legislatures in Iowa and West Virginia appear to have followed suit, he said, but it remains unclear what the entities in those states will look like.

“It looks to me like somebody was reading about this” trend, Carrese said of the civics center criterion appearing in the grant program.

Carrese is also a senior fellow with the Philadelphia-based Jack Miller Center, whose website decries that “judging the past has become more important than understanding the past.” He’s a supporter of campus civics centers, which he traces back to 2016, when ASU became the first public institution to receive an order and funding from its State Legislature to establish a department “of civic thought and leadership.” Carrese also pointed to more recent civic education initiatives at Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Yale Universities, arguing that it isn’t just a red-state public university phenomenon.

“Civic education used to be a very high priority in American higher education—private and public universities. It no longer is,” he said. “That was a mistake and we ought to correct it.”

He added, “Just because the Trump administration is pointing out something doesn’t mean it’s wrong.” The Education Department may be preferring universities with civics institutes because “there’s faculty expertise in these colleges, departments [and] centers on precisely the topics that the grant wants to focus on,” he said.

The Education Department wrote in the grant description that applicants must “implement innovative” or “existing evidence-based approaches to seminars for educators or students specifically focused on American history and civics that directly commemorate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States.” The seminars must study “ideas, traditions, institutions, and texts essential to American constitutional government and the American heritage” and focus on “the first principles of the Founding, their inclusion in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, and their development over time.”

“Citizens must understand why our free-market democracy is a highly evolved system of cooperation made robust by our constitutional republic, and how it functions to secure the blessings of liberty for all Americans,” department officials wrote. “This understanding can only be acquired and prove to be lasting when rooted in a recognition of the nobility of America’s foundational principles, and an accurate and honest account of American history that shows how the United States has worked through profound challenges to its ideals, including the evils of slavery and segregation, in its ongoing battle to live up to them.”

The new head of a prominent scholarly association embraced the increased federal funding but questioned the specific civics center preference.

Sarah Weicksel, executive director of the American Historical Association. But she said she’d like to see broader engagement with historians outside the civics centers who also have expertise in these subjects.

“Many of these civics centers employ or are hiring historians,” Weicksel said. “But that is not the only place that historians are found.”

And beyond historians, she said, “You can find experts on those subjects in multiple departments across the university—including political science, including other humanities.” She said a civics center is just one slice, “and you want the whole pie.”

“Using the whole university—and not only one independent unit of it—is to the benefit of any kind of program,” she said, “as well as the students.”

Today is the deadline for universities to file their notices of intent to apply.