American Enterprise Institute conference on Civic Thought and Practice

Remarks as delivered at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center

Thank you so much, Jenna.

I am delighted to welcome everyone to the Hopkins Bloomberg Center—and to the JHU-AEI conference on Civic Thought and Practice: The Intellectual Foundations of Citizenship.

We are honored to be hosting this conference in a building whose very animating spirit is to be a place for convening and discovery across different perspectives.

And what an auspicious home for an event that is about the promise of bringing together thinkers from across the nation, across the ideological spectrum, and across universities and think tanks, to consider how to nurture the human capacity for thinking and acting as a citizen.

This conference is occurring at a striking moment in the history of civic education in the United States.

In the last several years, public universities across the nation have built schools, institutes, and centers in civic education and thought. We are fortunate to have a number of their leaders here today.

And through these entities, nearly 200 tenure and career track faculty lines have been created—particularly in fields in the humanities such as history, philosophy, classics, and English.

We are seeing investments in teaching democratic citizenship at many private universities as well. At my own university, we built the SNF Agora Institute, an interdisciplinary institute devoted to strengthening democracy, and several years ago it launched a minor in civic life. Many of the SNF Agora faculty are participating in this conference.

And indeed, this conference itself is a testament to the enthusiasm for these issues at this moment—faculty representing more than 50 universities from across the country are registered to be here today, along with so many other thought leaders from the private and public sectors.

What explains the extraordinary growth of interest in civic thought in such a short period of time?

Is it a view that the university has drifted from an education in these virtues—that the specialization of disciplines, the elevation of student options in the curriculum, a departure from core texts, has left the instruction of students in citizenship impoverished?

Or is it that there are fundamental questions that are not being fully explored elsewhere in the academy—and that as in so many other cases where new interdisciplinary fields have emerged in response to emerging societal trends, we are seeing questions emerge that demand an integrated approach?

Might the emerging enthusiasm for these questions be a response to the failure of universities to recruit across the ideological spectrum—and the hollowing out of subfields that were seen as hospitable to conservative thought?
 
Finally, does it reflect a hunger for something more . . . an exploration of our common humanity—and our shared role as citizens—at a moment that feels so divided by politics, rended by technology, isolated by the erosion of civic life?

We cannot endeavor to answer all of these questions over the next two days, but we can try and the conversation at this conference can be a meaningful next step to building on the momentum we are seeing—and fulfilling the obligation that we owe to society and to the students and scholars who care deeply about sustaining the great civic experiment that is this nation.

And I am delighted that Johns Hopkins and the American Enterprise Institute are hosting this conversation together.

Our collaboration here is born of a separate conversation in 2023—when I had the opportunity to join Jenna Storey at AEI for a discussion of ideas with which I had long been wrestling. These ideas were the basis for a book, arguing that universities are indispensable to democracy—and that in specific ways, they had lapsed in their responsibilities to our democracy.

In its pages, we were seeking to argue in particular that universities should commit to a democracy requirement—to educating students in the history, values, skills and dispositions necessary for democratic citizenship.

And that universities’ truth-seeking mission compels us to ensure that our ideas are being tested from within by those whose perspectives, experiences and thoughts broadly differ from one another—and therefore universities must open ourselves to more thinkers and ideas from the conservative end of the intellectual spectrum.

Jenna had been thinking and writing deeply about these questions, too.

And out of that conversation at AEI eventually emerged a broader collaboration that serves as the basis for our time here today.

As Jenna referenced, for more than a year, Hopkins faculty and AEI fellows have been developing a series of initiatives together. . .

A grant program through which interested scholars from JHU and AEI will partner together on teaching or research endeavors and embed themselves into the intellectual life of each other’s institutions;

A graduate student mentorship program through which senior faculty in the social sciences will mentor young conservatives who may be interested in careers in the professoriate;

And the Civic Thought Project, and this conference, which has brought us together here today.

I want to extend my appreciation to everyone at the American Enterprise Institute who contributed to making this conference and this collaboration happen. And to all of you here today for lending your voice to the questions we are considering.

And I want to extend a special thanks to Robert, Jenna, Yuval, and Ben for their collaboration. For their generosity of spirit. And for their faith in what is possible if we reach across our differences in service of realizing the full promise of our bold democratic pursuit.

Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us today and being part of this important conversation.