Tension at Heart: Human Dignity, Rule of Law, Universities, and Free and Fair Democracy

Abstract

American universities have always reached beyond knowledge development. They are constituted through and often defenders of rights central to free and fair democracy. This article makes a novel case for reinvigorated commitments to democratic civic education, including a normative commitment to the dignity of all persons that is institutionalized through equality before the law. The analysis cuts through contemporary pieties of the left and right. The focus is US higher education, including relationships with governments, law, policy, and civil society, proceeding in six significant sections. After defining key terms and the plan of this paper, I clarify the relatively recent innovation of rights and their absence around the world. Rights are foundational for free and fair democracy. I then review critical moments among state, civil society, the rule of law, and higher education across US history, demonstrating that values commitments are essential to establishing basic freedoms for a functioning democracy. The legal and cultural architecture of the rights tradition also undergirds sacred ideals in higher education, including academic freedom and institutional autonomy. That analysis leads to two highly contested issues—national security and policing—to suggest how contemporary institutional patterns undermine progress on critical university goals: deepened insight and/or principled disagreement. Evidence indicates courses related to policing and its critiques are siloed within curricula, student self-selection and institutional socioeconomic sorting undermine potentially related democratic dialogue, and both connect to position campus discourse out of step with marginalized communities. These issues intersect with a key point of this article: individual rights and the formal, legal embrace of shared dignity require government entities. In the final sections, I focus on institutional-level recommendations for civic education that expands commitments to human dignity and the rule of law within a free and fair democracy.

1. The Plan of This Paper and Defining Key Terms

US universities have always taken sides, have always operated within and among contested values, and have frequently (though not always) aligned with the emergence of values supporting a free and fair democracy. In the paper that follows, I highlight specific moments when universities played instrumental roles in establishing democratic freedom and fairness through the building blocks of security, economic, political, cultural, and epistemic rights. A key feature of my analysis is clarifying the unique historical, legal, and cultural traditions that both permit and are advanced by the emergence of the contemporary American University. I employ a broad, global political economic analysis of institutions and their effects as modeled by research such as The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty (Acemoglu and Robinson 2019) or, much earlier, Development as Freedom (Sen 1999).

The analysis builds on Acemoglu, Robinson, and Sen not only methodologically, but also conceptually. They were concerned with critical manifestations of individual rights—liberty and freedom—and how those ideals manifest at the intersections among sufficiently strong governments, civil societies, and individuals. My conception of free and fair democracy builds on this tradition, attending not only to conventional political institutions but also governmental institutions and social structures that ensure basic personal security and economic liberty. Rooted in this theoretical tradition of global political economy, which frequently features comparative institutional and historical analysis informed by available data and rigorous analysis, this paper investigates three braided research questions. First, does the development and preservation of a free and fair US democracy require values commitments? Second, have US colleges and universities historically played a role in advancing those commitments? Third, what are the implications for contemporary debates about the appropriate role of US higher education? These three questions, when exposed to rigorous historical and global comparative analysis, yield novel insights for the fields of higher education and legal scholarship, in addition to the re-strengthening field of civic education for democracy.

I define five specific clusters of rights—security, economic, political, cultural, and epistemic—as the building blocks of a free and fair democracy. In taking this approach, I am deliberately drawing both from political–theoretical traditions and my own understanding and experience of Americans’ desire for democratic freedom and fairness. By integrating these multiple streams, I link to economic and security considerations, including basic economic infrastructure such as private property, questions regarding equality of opportunity, and basic individual safety. In my experience and in broader research, fairness can only be discussed with reference to these kinds of questions, which are invoked through the phrase “equality of opportunity.”

Many analyses contributing to the debate between universities as for truth or for justice imagine a teleological trajectory toward more rights for more people. Such a trajectory is not a given. This article’s methodological approach, drawing on development economics, American politics, higher education, and civic and global education, moves among defining key terms, considering historically provocative examples, and rooting those narrative examples within broader data and comparative institutional analysis. After defining key terms in Section 1, Section 2 therefore considers the historically anomalous presence of widespread rights in contemporary American life and moral imagination. Section 3 then traces instances within the emergence and distribution of rights-thinking through the civil society roles of higher education institutions, cooperating with, resisting, and serving the state. I have chosen several examples that illuminate the state role in contributing to rights’ expansion while still honoring the university and civil society roles that frequently spur the state to action. However, my analysis refuses reverence for either the state or for civil society. Rather, I suggest a more nuanced and, hopefully, more productive understanding of government–civil society contestation and collaboration toward rights’ realization.

I have selected historical examples that illuminate the roles universities and colleges have played in favor of (always contested) democratic values and principles. In the US Revolutionary and Civil War eras, higher education and government advocacy for democratic rights and creating a democratic society is explicit. Moving into the 20th century, with basic democratic rights at least somewhat established, higher education’s concern with rights began to look inward, clarifying a conceptual basis for academic freedom. That era’s progressive, positivistic social science, with a strong emphasis on expertise and the effort to obtain objectivity, also sets the stage for contemporary claims that universities are for truth alone.

The mid-20th century then embodied the paradox explored in this article: many higher education and governmental institutional stakeholders were strong advocates for rights’ expansion (both within the broader civil rights movement and, more institutionally, through the Truman Commission), while numerous other influential higher education and movement leaders expressed extraordinary distrust of the institutions involved in rights implementation. This pattern was again fully present in recent years, a phenomenon I trace through the movement for abolition of policing. The examples I draw upon are illustrative and not exhaustive. They are, clearly, empirical. Rather than suggesting a simple causal story, they complicate the recently popular narrative indicating universities at their best are and historically have been simply concerned with the pursuit of truth. Collectively, these examples demonstrate universities’ important intersection with advancing a particular kind of civilizational ideal: one in which each person is endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This truth, if it can be called that, is incredibly rare across human history and around the world.

The theme of contestation and collaboration among goods, held in tension, runs through this article. Conscious that this is a legal journal, and that the US legal system is rooted in an oppositional approach to truth-seeking, I implore the reader to seek opportunities to hold goods in tension, suspending the search for absolute certainty in favor of arriving at a more discerning wisdom, living among numerous legitimate pressures operating upon both US higher education and the quest for greater rights realization for more people. It is operating among certainties in tension where new kinds of frameworks, thinking, and opportunities can emerge.

This second Laws Special Issue on “Civic Engagement, Justice, and the Law in a National and International Context” grows from a call for articles promising continued consideration of “the public role of universities … the interaction between civically engaged universities and relevant laws and regulations … and the implications for policy today, and different scenarios of campus activism and protest” (Kabala et al. 2026). By drawing on global and historical comparative context, diverse literature, and relevant data, this article touches on each of those themes while also offering a novel contribution to existing scholarship, drawing attention to the tensions and interdependence among constitutional democracy, free inquiry, and universities. The analysis demonstrates that, like individuals, institutions in a democratic society must consider not only rights, but also obligations. That these obligations must be navigated with substantial autonomy is central to the challenge and opportunity. It is also foundational within US history. The Declaration of Independence closes, “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” (Second Continental Congress 1776). When campuses approach civic education, they advance the question of what we owe one another—individually and, indeed, institutionally.

Section 4 demonstrates how the forces of on-campus self-selection intersect with broader patterns of socioeconomic sorting to decrease multi-perspectival engagement around critical issues including national security and policing, arguably sowing distrust in higher education when it can appear that significant portions of influential campuses are against the legal apparatus of basic security rights. I document how these issues intersect before proposing a rubric of academic and operational responsibilities colleges and universities have to the maintenance and expansion of the United States’ free and fair democratic tradition.

The emergence and existence of rights is an extraordinary heritage, coupled with an even bolder set of ongoing aspirations1. Yet, a growing community of intellectuals have noted the extent to which numerous individuals among leading university faculties critique the US to such an extent that there is little time or space left for constructive building. This concern has been persistently expressed from the right (Gutkin 2026), but it is now prevalent among scholars associated with the center-left (Gluckman 2026; Goldstein 2025; Mounk 2024; Pinker 2025), in addition to left-leaning organizations such as the Progressive Policy Institute (Kahlenberg and Lin 2026), and a cadre of college leaders (College Matters 2026). New School Professor of History Natalia Mehlman Petrzela recently argued that the solution lies “in a recommitment to dispassionate scholarly rigor,” continuing “the sharp analysis of American ideas, images, experiences, and aspirations has never been more urgent” (Petrzela 2026).

My aspiration here is to connect historical context with an analytically rigorous understanding of the legal and cultural traditions of rights, democracy, and higher education in the US. The tension between detached empirical analysis and normative commitment to free and fair democracy pulses through this paper. While acknowledging the important role of ideals in American democracy, I aim to follow the analysis where it leads, a process that disrupts tidy theories tied to contemporary ideological disagreements. The US university must hold the tension between being inherently conservative due to its role in preservation and explicitly liberal due to its constant exploration. The tension between conservation and critique, along with deliberate design to encourage disagreement, is a core feature of universities (Ben-Porath 2023).

In Section 5, I close with recommendations for moving forward, including clearer, multi-year and scaffolded commitments to democratic education that embrace (1) a normative commitment to common human dignity and (2) a deeper understanding of institutions, the rule of law, and governments’ roles in securing rights.

This article proceeds at the level of generalities. This deliberate approach also foretells one of this article’s limitations, discussed more deeply in the conclusion. That is, some readers will want more precision regarding next steps. My aim here is to address the three research questions above regarding the question of values’ commitments for democracy, universities’ historic and current appropriate roles, and implications for next steps. While I do respond to the queries and indicate several tangible steps for moving forward, many more scholars or administrators may add additional suggestions. This is because democracy is not about being exactly correct as much as it is concerned with constructing and maintaining an appropriate framework for considering and contesting final truths. Despite these limitations, part of the power of these generalities is clarifying that they are at odds with several popular misconceptions, which I clarify now.

The following claims, I submit, are truer than they are false, though their form and intensity may vary across settings. First, the vast majority of accredited, nonprofit (and even for profit) higher education institutions depend upon the state for recognition, protection, basic economic facilities and legal guarantees, and subsidies in the form of student loans, Pell grants, and, at times, larger research and teaching grants (see

Table 1. Direct and indirect support for public and private higher education.

	Student Fees, Alumni, Private Foundations, Businesses	Local Governments	States	Nation
Public Institutions—Direct Support	The average net price paid by students at public institutions is $15,200 per year (National Center for Education Statistics 2024). Alumni give, but often at lower rates and amounts than private institutions. Opportunities for grants with private foundations and partnerships with corporations.	Community college regional and county-based tuition subsidies; many municipal student aid grants are portable to public or private institutions; research grants and public–private contracts	Subsidies toward tuition; many state student aid grants are portable to public or private institutions; research grants and public–private contracts. Grants formal status to governmental institutions	Pell grants, federally subsidized student loans, major research grants such as NSF, NEH, and others. Grants’ tax exemption to governmental institutions and public university foundations formed as 501(c)(3) organizations
Private Institutions—Direct Support	The average net price paid by students at private institutions is $29,700 per year (National Center for Education Statistics 2024). Alumni giving rates and amounts trend higher than public institutions. Opportunities for grants with private foundations and partnerships with corporations.	many municipal student aid grants are portable to public or private institutions; research grants and public–private contracts	many state student aid grants are portable to public or private institutions; research grants and public–private contracts	Pell grants, federally subsidized student loans, major research grants such as NSF, NEH, and others. Grants 501c3 tax status to institutions founded as 501(c)(3) organizations
Indirect Support		Policing, fire, and ambulance services, local roads, schools attended by children of campus faculty and staff,	State policing, support for local security services; state courts, roads, and partnerships for ports of entry and transportation infrastructure	National security, including cyberdefense, legal suprastructure via final constitutional appeals through federal court system; ports and documents of entry for international students; major highways

below). While the state action doctrine historically limits the extent of constitutional enforcement on private campuses, Table 1 demonstrates the extent to which all of higher education is enmeshed within government funding and policy. Regardless of the precise, current interpretation of constitutional doctrine, this article implores educators and administrators to consider appropriate voluntary obligations owed to a larger system of rights’ respect, emergence, and enactment.

Second, the pursuit and expansion of common human dignity is a central part of American identity: from the Declaration of Independence to the post-Civil War Amendments, to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s sense that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice and Ronald Reagan’s sentiment that the beautiful thing about America is that anyone can become American. Third, the moral aspiration rooted in common human dignity is realized through the legal structures of democratic and human rights; this claim of equal worth and deserved recognition also underlies the appropriate conditions for open inquiry: mutual respect, principled disagreement, free speech, etc. From universities to dignity to human rights, specific roots and manifestations vary considerably.

For the purposes of this paper, however, the generalities are more important than their variance: higher education institutions are dependent upon the state systems around them; appreciating human dignity is a central emphasis of American identity; and dignity is realized through rights expansion. These truths are at odds with several more related misconceptions, specifically, the notion that private higher education institutions are not supported by or obliged to the state, the suggestion that education in general and civic education in particular can or should be exclusively objective and independent of values discernment, and finally, any suggestion that the cultural and legal foundations of rights traditions that underlie the contemporary American University are fixed or transcendent (obvious when stated as such, perhaps, but frequently absent from discourses centering university and faculty rights). This analysis clarifies the extent to which US universities are dependent upon the cultural imagination and legal architecture in which they are embedded while identifying the broad, moral foundations and legal institutions that US universities should be concerned with both critiquing and conserving.

The state can extend or reduce rights. When rights have a long historical, legal, and cultural tradition, they are often perceived as “natural,” but history and comparative analysis show how rare rights are. Today, constitutional legal structures and their enforcement face attacks from left and right. Democracy, liberty, and flourishing maintain at and among a cluster of legally enshrined and culturally reinforced rights: economic, political, cultural, epistemic, and security. By referring to rights clusters, I am calling attention to the ways in which frequently invisible and indivisible legally recognized rights combine to create experiences of particular kinds of freedom (Donnelly 2013; Sen 1999); such clusters are given greater specificity in

Table 2. Rights clusters through programs, policies, the constitution—and UN aspirations.

Rights Cluster	Government Programs and Policies	US Constitution	UDHR
Economic	Market transparency promotion through corporate disclosure and mandated financial reporting; Maintaining competitive markets through anti-monopoly and antitrust actions; Various programs aim to temper inequality, including social security, Medicaid and Medicare, unemployment compensation, and any grants or aid redistributing or advancing access to education	Takings Clause (5th Amendment); Contracts Clause (Article I, Section 10); Due Process Clauses (5th and 14th Amendments):	Articles 17 (right to own property), 22 (social security) and 23 (right to work, fair wages, unemployment protections, and trade unions)
Political	State and local regulations may provide additional guarantees; state and local authorities are typically delegated the enforcement of fair elections and peaceable assembly	15th Amendment prohibits denial of voting rights on basis of race; 19th Amendment prohibits denial of voting rights on the basis of sex; 1st Amendment right to petition the government	Articles 20 (peaceful assembly, association) and 21 (right to vote)
Cultural	Local, state, and national historic and interpretive sites, museums, and parks, including their maintenance, staffing, etc.	1st Amendment freedoms of religion and assembly	Article 18 (freedom of thought, conscience, and religion)
Epistemic	Public school funding and promotion of foundational academic standards, library systems, and any freedom of information and/or transparency acts that promote access to facts	1st Amendment freedom of speech and the press	Article 19 (freedom of opinion and expression)
Security	First responders provide redress against accidents, as well as conflict or arbitrary violence from other persons, while maintaining basic order. Local, state, and national governments recruit, train, moderate, and remunerate these ambulance, fire, police, and other related forces.	4th Amendment protections from unfair searches and seizures; 5th and 14th Amendment protections of due process	Articles 3 (security of person), 5 (prohibition on degrading treatment), 6 (recognition before the law), 9 (prohibition on arbitrary arrest)

. These rights exist in productive tension with one another and various other goals. Universities and higher education associations have frequently confused various components of good citizenship, liberal arts education, or free speech and protest opportunities—with holistic democratic education. To articulate a full set of democratic commitments representative of our specific cultural and temporal moment in the 21st century United States, I offer an overview of rights clusters and a corresponding definition of free and fair democracy.

Economic rights allow for ownership, market participation and transparency, the right to contract for one’s own labor, and sufficient space to innovate and trade. Economic rights also include tempering inequality with various forms of social support, from equality of access to education to policies improving access to housing or healthcare. Political rights provide an individual with opportunities to participate in the governance of the society of which they are a part. Cultural rights permit individuals to embody various forms of the good life while co-existing with one another in a spirit of inclusive toleration. Freedom of religion is one such bedrock right that permits difference without needing to resolve final truths beyond the mandate of peaceable coexistence. Epistemic rights invite open exchange of ideas. Freedoms of speech, inquiry, and conscience are foundational in the search for truth. Undergirding all of these are basic security rights: the right to be free from arbitrary violence, on behalf of the state or as advanced by other citizens. One cannot enjoy other rights when violence is a continuous threat (Chamlee-Wright 2021; Donnelly 2013; Marshall 1950; Sen 1999). A selection of governmental programmatic, policy, and constitutional contributions to these rights is exhibited in Table 2, which also includes the expression of these rights within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR; discussed in more detail in Section 3). Drawing on these diverse rights clusters and considering their importance across history, I define free and fair democracy as follows:

A free and fair democracy is a legal and cultural system that encourages and accepts diversity by offering every citizen: voice and influence in the governance of society, freedom of conscience, economic opportunity, basic security, and the chance to continuously learn and contest ideas. My definition presumes continuous opportunities for the society to grow through immigration, moderated according to the political and economic moment, but with the observation that immigration has been a net positive contributor to growth and dynamism—to an extraordinary extent—for the United States in particular. Around the world and over time, free and fair democracy—even in an imperfect form—is exceedingly rare.

2. Exceptional or Odd—The US Is an Anomaly

The moral imagination contained in the Declaration of Independence has led most Americans—and billions of other people around the world—to believe this claim: I have rights.

The claim—imagined as universal—reflects specific cultural ideals and political compromises, enshrined within legal institutions (Donnelly 2013; Lepore 2018; Ignatieff 2001). Widespread respect for rights is historically odd and remains the exception (Human Rights Watch 2026a).

Since European contact with the Americas and before, colonialism, conquest, exclusion, enslavement, arbitrary violence, and oppression have been global phenomena. The 1500s witnessed Spanish expansion across most of the Americas, displacing the Incan Empire in the Andes. The Portuguese played formative roles in the transatlantic trade in human beings, including establishing conditions of enslavement in Brazil, which would continue that institution through to 1888. Across the 1600s, the Mughal Empire ruled the entire subcontinent of India, becoming one of the world’s richest empires after a period of steady military conquest. Reunifying a frequently dominant Persian people, the Turkic Qajar Dynasty established Tehran as the capital of Iran in 1796, before taking control of a region expanding into the Caucasus. In a similar era, the Qing Dynasty took control of Manchuria (late 1600s), Inner Mongolia (1720), Tibet (1759), and Xinjiang (mid-1800s). The Asante Empire controlled an area of Western Africa one and a half times larger than modern Ghana from the late 1600s through formal British Colonization across the mid to late-1800s. Throughout its history, it participated in and profited from the slave trade. From 1800 through to the US Civil War, an expanding Russia retook the Caucasus. Farther west, the Ottoman Empire’s influence waned by the early 20th century, but not before the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Genocides led to the deaths of some two million persons. Has the United States, which has existed for less than 5% of recorded human history, been meaningfully different from its contemporaries?

Across each of those empires, individuals’ liberties, freedoms, and opportunities were tied more tightly to specific caste, national, and/or religious identities than was the case for even the Colonial US. The country’s uniqueness grows from the phrase that “all [people] are created equal,” along with its expression through another assertion in the Declaration, “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted” (Second Continental Congress 1776).

Keeping an eye on US strengths need not disappear its violences. Before and after the 1776 Declaration of Independence, the United States has been riven by the horror of enslavement and the racial exclusions that have followed it. Indeed, struggles toward reconciliation are appeals to American ideals: enacting in life and in law, through shared governance, a country that embraces the dignity of all persons. When Octavius Catto collaborated with Frederick Douglass to recruit eleven regiments of Black soldiers to the Union side in the Civil War, he advanced this moral imagination (Holness 2016). When Catto was gunned down on the streets of Philadelphia in 1871, on election day, his murder denied American justice and desecrated American ideals (Smith 2026).

Slowly yet steadily, the US became dominant; so, it is easy to imagine respect for rights as inevitable. But it may be the other way around. Establishing individual freedoms through the rule of law helped ensure the United States’ rise to power—because broadly distributed, legally enshrined rights unleash human agency, creativity, and potential (Acemoglu and Robinson 2019).

When rights are uncertain, so too is the logic of investment or hard work. Rights cluster together to support opportunities for individual empowerment—economically, politically, and otherwise (Acemoglu and Robinson 2019; Sen 1999). Around the world, most countries do not offer robust clusters of rights. From the center, right, and left, civil society organizations rate the US as freer than most while identifying concerns about the present. The ratings and their methodologies are summarized in

Table 3. Measuring rights and freedoms around the world.

Index/Report	Organization	What Is Measured?	How?
Freedom in the World	Freedom House	Political rights and civil liberties	“The Freedom in the World report is composed of numerical ratings and supporting descriptive texts for 195 countries and 13 territories. External analysts assess 208 countries and territories, using a combination of on-the-ground research, consultations with local contacts, and information from news articles, nongovernmental organizations, governments, and a variety of other sources. Expert advisers and regional specialists then vet the analysts’ conclusions. The final product represents the consensus of the analysts, advisers, and Freedom House staff. For each country and territory, Freedom in the World analyzes the electoral process, political pluralism and participation, the functioning of the government, freedom of expression and of belief, associational and organizational rights, the rule of law, and personal autonomy and individual rights” (Freedom House 2025).
Index of Economic Freedom	Heritage Foundation	Economic freedom and opportunity	“We measure economic freedom based on 12 quantitative and qualitative factors, grouped into four broad categories, or pillars, of economic freedom: Rule of Law (property rights, government integrity, judicial effectiveness); Government Size (government spending, tax burden, fiscal health); Regulatory Efficiency (business freedom, labor freedom, monetary freedom); and Open Markets (trade freedom, investment freedom, financial freedom). Each of the twelve economic freedoms within these categories is graded on a scale of 0 to 100. A country’s overall score is derived by averaging these twelve economic freedoms, with equal weight being given to each” (The Heritage Foundation 2026).
World Report	Human Rights Watch	Human rights violations	“Human Rights Watch conducts regular, systematic investigations of human rights abuses around the world. At any given time we are actively researching, reporting, and advocating for change in more than 100 countries. We choose our countries of focus, and the issues we address, based on where we think our attention is needed, and where we can make a difference. We respond to emergencies, but we also challenge entrenched, longstanding, or steadily deteriorating human rights problems. At the heart of the work are more than 80 researchers on staff. The researchers work to an established, proven, and consistent methodology based on information gathering from a broad range of sources, and with field-based research at its core” (Human Rights Watch 2026b)

.

Americans generally experience more rights and freedoms2 than people in most countries3. If one were to group the ten other largest countries in the world (beyond the US, which sits at number 3)—India, China, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Brazil, Bangladesh, Russia, Ethiopia, and Mexico—they would collectively comprise 54% of the world’s population. Their systems all include fewer freedoms than those broadly experienced in the US.

From the center and right, Freedom House and the Heritage Foundation rate the US as “free” and “mostly free” with respect to political rights, civil liberties, and economic freedoms. The world’s other most populous countries all rate lower than the US (Freedom House 2025; The Heritage Foundation 2026). Coming from farther to the left, Human Rights Watch (HRW) recognizes the US has never been a perfect rights defender nor enactor. However, it has historically been a key—likely the key—proponent of a rules-based global order grounded in rights thinking. Now, executive director Philippe Bolopion wonders:

Has the US switched sides on the human rights playing field? While US engagement with human rights institutions has always been selective, China and Russia have long pursued an illiberal agenda. They stand much to gain from a US government that now expresses open hostility to universal rights. China and Russia remain strategic rivals of the US, but all three countries are now led by leaders who share open disdain for norms and institutions that could constrain their power.

(Human Rights Watch 2026a, p. 4)

For hundreds of years, indigenous dispossession, racial and ethnic exclusion, arbitrary violence, and imperial (mis-)adventure have been global themes, with great powers emanating from across Africa, The Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Emerging from this context, for the last half century, the US has been among world leaders with respect to the acceptance and establishment of rights4 (Acemoglu and Robinson 2019; Sen 1999). It has been far from perfect, but its citizens have enjoyed a cluster of rights unique in the world, available in a relatively small portion of countries and only for a numerical minority of the world’s people. Rights defenders often and understandably wish to see more rights—and sometimes even assume rights gains as cumulative. However, global history shows that freedoms may wax and wane. Related, consideration of “higher education” in the US is too often premised on the unexamined certainty of an emerging or functioning free and fair, democratic United States. The presence of that democratic country is not guaranteed. In earlier eras, the struggle for democracy, democratic values, and democratic institutions was more explicit.

3. Ideals Amidst Geopolitical Pressures—Dancing Toward Democracy

This section draws on several empirical examples to illustrate the complex emergence of rights advocacy and structures. Universities embody tensions between conservation and critique throughout each era, sometimes emerging as strong rights proponents, as institutions and through the individuals they employ and educate. Across each era, however, universities are also complex actors that rarely behave in a unified fashion. Frequently, state institutions push universities toward greater democratic freedoms, though often in response to alliances among some universities and civil society groups.

The purposes of the colonial American College were hotly contested. Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary were established with explicitly religious purposes (Geiger 1999). Rhode Island’s Collegiate Charter (which eventually led to Brown University) was noteworthy because it was an exception, calling for “full free absolute and uninterrupted Liberty of Conscience” (Thelin 2011, p. 13). Another exception was the University of Pennsylvania, and its early years indicate the radical nature of religious freedom and democratic commitments (University of Pennsylvania Libraries 2026a).

Benjamin Franklin turned his attention toward what would become the university in 1749, proposing a curriculum inclusive of those things that are “most useful and most ornamental,” (emphasis in the original), including history that had a civic orientation. Franklin wrote the subject’s coverage:

will also give Occasion to expatiate on the Advantage of Civil Orders and Constitutions, how Men and their Properties are protected by joining in Societies and establishing Government; their Industry encouraged and rewarded, Arts invented, and Life made more comfortable: The Advantages of Liberty, Mischiefs of Licentiousness, Benefits arising from good Laws and a due Execution of Justice, &c. Thus may the first Principles of sound Politicks be fix’d in the Minds of Youth.

(Franklin 1749)

Note the simultaneity of inquiry and advocacy across this passage. The curriculum envisioned will expand upon forms of government emerging against the prevailing monarchical structures. Those civil orders, Franklin makes clear, will include economic rights, in the sense that property will be protected and labor rewarded. Societies will benefit from social arrangements ensuring justice through law. Even before the advocacy the university would later embrace during the Revolutionary War, Penn’s foundational document oriented it toward the establishment of economic and security rights. Cultural rights5 were central too, as Franklin’s influence ensured the university would not have a theological orientation.

Penn was unlike Harvard and Yale in that it lacked a divinity school (Feldman 2025) and explicitly aimed to balance the influence of the city’s major Protestant denominations among various leadership roles. Such balance, however, was both countercultural and at odds with the identity politics of the era, which included an association between Anglican identity and British loyalty. As tensions grew, the university trustees mandated an Anglican majority on the board in 1764, contributing to suspicions of loyalist bias that would maintain through the beginning of the American Revolutionary War (University of Pennsylvania Libraries 2026a).

After the British occupation of Philadelphia and 2000 disease-driven deaths among the Continental Army at Valley Forge, PA, state leaders sympathetic to the revolutionary cause investigated the university, triggering its formal dissolution. According to the state assembly, “the College had been ‘in the hands of dangerous and disaffected men’ who have provoked ‘tumult, sedition, and bloodshed’ (University of Pennsylvania Libraries 2026b).

A new university was immediately mandated—and the leadership was diverse across Protestant sects, even including Catholic representation. The leaders, however, were uniform in their support for the American Revolutionaries. “An oath of loyalty to the new Pennsylvania constitution was required of all Trustees and faculty” (University of Pennsylvania Libraries 2026b). Through arms, ideals, persuasion, and policy, the revolutionary side would emerge victorious and influential. According to education historian Roger L. Geiger, “instilling selflessness, patriotism, and virtue in the citizens of the new republic” was part of the ideal collegiate education until the end of the 18th century (Geiger 1999, p. 7).

3.1. The 1800s: Surviving Conflicts, Advancing Democracy

The early 1800s witnessed a resurgence in fervent faith coupled with less public support. This combination contributed to the proliferation of faith-based, private higher education institutions. Though some forms of faith restrengthened enclaves, others fueled inclusion (Geiger 1999). Many of the civil society networks that compose higher education began to reach out across gender and race.

In 1833, Oberlin College was founded and immediately admitted both men and women. In 1835, Oberlin became the first college in the country to adopt a race-blind admission policy. The institution, like Swarthmore and Guilford, played a key role in the underground railroad (Bordewich 2005). So too did many of the country’s earliest Black colleges and universities, like Wilberforce, Lincoln, and Cheyney—all founded in this era. As these American institutions of higher education took root, the first half of the 19th century was punctuated by warfare and geopolitical struggle.

The US was growing but faced real threats from established global empires positioned to the north (Britain) and south (Spain), in addition to warfare with several Native American Nations. As the 1860s began, nearly 750,000 Americans were killed in the Civil War. In this context, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Land-Grant Act into law on 2 July 1862.

The 1862 Morrill Act was democratic in the sense of expanding access to education, indicating that any states granted land must ensure the “maintenance of at least one college where the leading object shall be … learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts … in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life” (Morrill Act 1862). It was also strategic with respect to state power and national security, including the stipulation that learning would include “military tactics,” and that “No State while in a condition of rebellion or insurrection against the government of the United States shall be entitled to the benefit of this act” (Morrill Act 1862). As in the Revolutionary War, educational institutions were assets leveraged in geopolitical struggle toward legally enshrined democratic freedoms.

The Confederacy was explicitly opposed to the principle that all people are created equal (Serwer 2020). After the war, the United States rapidly passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, abolishing slavery, extending due process, and prohibiting race-based voting discrimination. This was a major achievement for the rights regime—in the US. Legally sanctioned slavery would continue in Brazil until the end of the 1800s; Belgium implemented a regime of forced labor in the Congo until the mid-twentieth century; in the Indian Ocean world, slavery would also last through the mid-twentieth century, only achieving a true global ban in 1981. Legal structures are not the only guarantors of freedom, however.

Legally enforced reconstruction in the US was soon repelled by unrepentant racism, in alliance with xenophobia, sexism, antisemitism, and anti-Catholic sentiment. In many places across the US, north and south, cultures of exclusion reinforced separation and oppression despite the new legal arrangements. Many universities expressed the norms of the era. Yet, other institutions created spaces for opportunity.

Several Black universities were established before the Civil War, and Berea College became the first interracial and coeducational institution in the South in 1855. In the last half of the 19th century, Black students would graduate from a breadth of public and private institutions across the country. Civil society action and organizing pushed this inclusion forward, and then federal policy intervention was instrumental too.

Alcorn State, the first land grant university for Black students, was founded in Mississippi in 1871. Predominantly white land grant institutions, such as Cornell and Kansas State, admitted Black students in the late 1800s. The Second Morrill Act of 1890 required states to either admit Black students to existing land grant institutions or to establish separate institutions, leading to the creation of nineteen universities for Black students across the south. This was a step forward in some ways, but a reflection of continued racism as well. Teachers colleges, or “normal schools” as they were known, emerged in this era too, further advancing standardization, and slowly yet continuously increasing inclusion of people across social class, race, and gender (Geiger 1999; Paterson 2021). The expansion of higher education, supported by law, broadened Americans’ experience of meaningful economic rights, while the 13th–15th constitutional amendments further formalized the promise of political rights. Institutions were also places of public engagement with inclusive and democratic ideals. Frederick Douglass delivered his last public lecture on 1 February 1895, at West Chester State Normal School (now university) in West Chester, PA.

Throughout, support for higher education, who it includes, and what its curriculum emphasizes were questions negotiated between and among civil society actors interested in moral formation, government leaders negotiating economic, security, and democratic development at the state and federal levels, and business interests expressing desire for skills and capacities among incoming employees. As standardization proceeded in the early 20th century, faculty members formed a civil society network representing their interests, the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP.

3.2. Early 1900s: Awakening Academic Freedom and Asserting Expertise

As the 1800s rolled toward the 1900s, domestic labor and racial purity arguments fueled a eugenics movement that captured the imagination of otherwise-agile minds, including the Princeton University Professor who would become President, Woodrow Wilson, as well as the Stanford University Professor whose dismissal was central to the founding of the AAUP, Edward Alsworth Ross (Bruner 2025). Ross was involved in analysis and political agitation that put him at odds with Jane Stanford, the institution’s co-founder. He opposed the gold standard and spoke strongly against Japanese immigration, calling for racial purity while dismissing owners’ interests in immigrant labor (Levine 2023).

The tensions persisted for years. Then, in 1900, Ross spoke at a meeting of the United Labor Organization, where he insisted that it would be better to “train our guns on every vessel bringing Japanese to our shores rather than to permit them to land.” His comments were less controversial than the context: a public, civil society meeting where partisan preferences were expressed. After more infighting at Stanford, Ross resigned, triggering seven additional resignations—or about 10% of the faculty—from an institution that had been founded only fifteen years prior (Levine 2023).

As prominent academics embraced eugenics, Asian Americans appealed to the courts for full implementation of the 14th Amendment. In United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), the court recertified the plain meaning of the 14th Amendment, ruling in favor of an individual born in America to Chinese parents, finding that he was properly granted citizenship at birth. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Asian appeals for full civic recognition continued through the courts. Finally, in 1965, relief would come through the legislative branch, when Congress abolished quotas based on national origin (Jordan 2026). But the Ross dismissal from Stanford put the focus on academic freedom, not democratic inclusion, when academics met in 1915 to found the AAUP. Its 1915 Declaration is still influential today.

Faculty rights are the focus of that 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure. There is no mention of democratic or civic education and little focus on student learning (Levine 2023). There is also an inadvertent moral gap. The declaration precedes the postmodern understanding of multiple truths yet comes after the establishment of religious pluralism and the related clarity of a secular state. The authors were part of a progressive era of social science that believed social scientific inquiry would lead to discovery of immutable laws of social behavior (Levine 2023). Any question of broad moral or civic formation therefore sits uncomfortably between the notion that expertise is what legitimizes and constrains academic speech and the idea that a single moral truth may yet be discovered. The document asserts a growing secularization intertwined with the idea that questions of morality are not for general consideration, but instead properly investigated by experts (AAUP 1915). This contrasts with Franklin’s hope above, for a broad orientation to the importance of civil orders and constitutions among all students, such that “the first Principles of sound Politicks be fix’d in the Minds of Youth (Franklin 1749).

The AAUP Declaration wrestles with duties owed to a public, but institutional duties are limited to research, instruction, and “to develop experts for various branches of the public service” (AAUP 1915). While 1915 marks the emergence of this civil society-generated set of principles conferring a clear set of epistemic rights to freedom of thought and academic contestation, those rights are contested and confirmed through US Supreme Court cases over the coming century (AAUP 2026). Once again, it is a strong yet restrained state, collaborating with a dynamic civil society (in which the university is a key actor), to cocreate rights and norms codified into legal policy and cultural practices—to produce greater freedoms. Indeed, academic freedom as a concept only makes sense within cultural and legal traditions that respect rights and their expansion.

It is understandable, given the regularity of faculty dismissals and the precarity of academic labor in the early 20th century, that the AAUP’s Declaration focused as it did on faculty rights and expertise. This era’s elite obsession with eugenics is also a reminder that academics are not always right. One of the central commitments of both the scientific method and a free and fair democratic system is humility. Knowledge must be held tentatively, aware of the likelihood of competing truth claims and stronger truths yet to come, due to ongoing, rigorous and disciplined inquiry. This era’s democratic expansion proceeded off campus in significant ways too, though—as always—colleges and universities were diverse in their orientations, and some contributed mightily toward strengthening free and fair democracy.

Numerous colleges and universities remained largely and even wholly segregated, but the NAACP developed a long-term, courts-centric legal strategy to expand inclusion in housing and education, beginning in the 1930s, under the leadership of Charles Hamilton Houston and his student—Thurgood Marshall (Barker et al. 2018). Simultaneously, the spiritual father of the civil rights movement and mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Elijah Mays, was one among a vital network of faculty and administrators across historically Black colleges and universities who were developing not only young minds, but also righteous souls, training the foot soldiers of the civil rights movement (Wilson 2023), which was well underway by the mid-50s. The Montgomery Bus Boycott took place for 13 months across 1955 through late 1956, more publicly opening the Civil Rights and Antiwar Era.

That era would bring two key conceptual tensions related to universities and the legal frameworks in which they were embedded into full view. First, having helped establish normative free and fair democratic structures and expectations, and having expanded through inclusion consistent with those aspirations, colleges and universities centered detached objectivity as a dominant value, even as many governments and civil society organizations attempted to double down on democratic expansion. Yet, as discussed below, creating robust conditions for the pursuit of truth requires entwining rather than separating these two goods—normative commitment to the dignity of persons and scholarly commitment to detached analysis. Second, civil society external and internal to universities began to trumpet a sticky yet inaccurate narrative: that rights simply exist, and that major institutions are individuals’ primary obstacles to rights realization.

3.3. Post World War II: Free Speech, Civil Rights, and Peace—With, Then Against Institutions?

World War II witnessed more than sixty million people killed in fighting that spanned six continents. The Allies were determined not to repeat the horrors of the preceding two generations; they established the United Nations to prevent future wars and promote human rights. The rights framework was developed through global consultation, leading to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The UDHR begins with aspirations of global fraternity, immediately asserts human dignity and obligations to one another, and clarifies the inclusive nature of that commitment.

The UDHR was adopted in December of 1948, with the vast majority of the world’s countries6 voting for it, none against, and with eight abstentions. The UDHR urges legal recognition of fundamental rights across economic, political, security, cultural, and epistemic rights clusters. It results from governments and civil society convening, worldwide, to determine common commitments to the dignity of extraordinarily diverse persons around the world. This human achievement—the Declaration—is an institutional document resulting from institutional collaborations.

This era is marked by increasing cultural and legal commitment to free and fair, democratic principles. President Truman commissioned a report on Higher Education and American Democracy. The Commission, Chaired by President of the American Council on Education George Zook, proclaimed that, “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” (United States President’s Commission on Higher Education 1947, p. 9). The report continues:

The fundamental concept of democracy is a belief in the inherent worth of the individual, in the dignity and value of human life. Based on the assumption that every human being is endowed with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, democracy requires of its adherents a jealous regard, not only for their own rights, but equally for the similar rights of others …

It is the responsibility of higher education to devise programs and methods which will make clear the ethical values and the concept of human relations upon which our political system rests. Otherwise we are likely to cling to the letter of democracy and lose its spirit, to hold fast to its procedures when they no longer serve its ends, to propose and follow undemocratic courses of action in the very name of democracy

(pp. 11–12).

Yet, only about fifteen years later, a dominant narrative emerges positioning “the university” and “the government” not as allies but as obstacles to rights realization. From 1964 to 1973, the United States drafted 2.2 million young men for military service in Vietnam (University of Michigan 2016). Again, college campuses were impacted by external geopolitical struggles. Young people played vital roles in the civil rights and anti-war movements.

Mario Savio was one of the student leaders in the free speech movement at Berkeley in 1964, following his participation in the Freedom Summer in Mississippi. Savio came back to campus committed to organizing for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) civil rights campaign, but quickly learned that Berkeley had a new prohibition on student organizing. After another young organizer, Jack Weinberg, was arrested, students protested, encircling the police car where Weinberg was held. Thousands of individuals soon surrounded that vehicle, triggering speeches from its roof, negotiations with university administration, the seizure of an administration building, the arrest of 800 students and allies, and an expansion of speech rights associated with a political shift paving the way for the progressive wins of the 1960s (Rosen 2025).

One of Savio’s most frequently cited speeches positions the students against “the machine.” That machine represents the university, the police, the trustees, and the government (Savio 1964):

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus—and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it—that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all!!

This dichotomy, however, suggests a simplicity that did not exist in the moment and has never existed in rights implementation. Rights manifest at the intersection of a strong yet constrained state and vibrant civil society (Acemoglu and Robinson 2019). The state is “the machine.” Rights advocates need it to work. It is the only historic rights guarantor (Donnelly 2013).

The prominent roles of Weinberg, who organized on behalf of the Congress on Racial Equity (CORE), and Savio have associated this moment with the progressive left, but student organizers in the movement included conservatives, Republicans, and Goldwater supporters (Rosen 2025). They were all interested in the right to free speech—and the legion of lawyers who defended them after arrest, along with the courts and policy makers who eventually found in their favor—were all part of the increasingly free and fair democratic machine dancing between and among state and civil society. The movement was advanced by a faculty vote supporting the student demands—a group of old, institutional men, many of whom were still smarting from Berkeley’s overreach with a 1949–51 loyalty oath. Despite this complexity, the idea of the (progressive) students (and some faculty) against the (conservative) machine would become a dominant narrative; a narrative that led to student, faculty, and organizer actions that still reverberate today.

Yet, the state was actively expanding democracy too. The Federal Work Study Program emerged in 1964, the same year The Civil Rights Act was passed. The Voting Rights Act came in 1965. Women’s rights in colleges and universities were substantially advanced with the 1972 legislation known as Title IX. These legal and policy achievements followed extensive civil society activism. Despite these state-mandated advances for free and fair democracy, the narrative of progressive students and faculty against the institution had taken root. By the end of the 1960s, antiwar activists advocated not only for peace, but also for the dismissal of military-affiliated individuals and programs.

The US Military’s collegiate officer training program, the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), was removed from several elite institutions and reduced at others. The Office of the Command Historian at Fort Monroe, Virginia, considered implications of this pattern late in the 20th century, writing:

The abolition of ROTC units at elite institutions along the eastern seaboard was more than offset, quantitatively at least, by the creation of additional detachments at state institutions in the South and West. The trend away from elite schools, however, worried some Department of Defense officials. They feared that the average quality of ROTC students would drop and that the social balance of the Army officer corps would be upset.

(Coumbe and Harford 1996, p. 33)

In Arms and the University: Military Presence and the Civic Education of Nonmilitary Students, Downs and Murtazashvili focus on Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale Universities—where ROTC prohibitions would last nearly forty years. Drawing on student surveys, interviews across students, faculty, and administrators, student-soldier testimony, and curricular review, the authors conclude that these changes reduced the rate of dialogue across civilian–military communities at elite institutions. Further, the overarching dynamics, the authors suggest, contributed to regional political polarization, adding to growing distance between civilian leaders and military personnel and leaders. Their curricular reviews also demonstrated decreasing emphasis on security in international studies and policy programs at highly selective institutions (Downs and Murtazashvili 2012).

Activists and organizers began with important goals that often translated to public support. They wanted to decrease state-sponsored violence and deaths while increasing overall safety and stability. However, instead of clear progress in those areas, Downs and Murtazashvili’s (2012) research indicates they pushed critical questions and related populations off campuses and out of classrooms.

Like all societies across time, our society will necessarily be forced to mitigate and stand against violence, and our state will be deployed in those efforts (Downs and Murtazashvili 2012; Galston 2025). How to maximally consider more peaceful and sustainable pathways, and how to maintain state capacity while restraining its worst excesses are excellent topics for robust university learning in a democratic state. Nothing here should be construed as blindly patriotic or apologetic for military and/or executive overreach. Enlisted and officer resistance to unnecessary warfare and poor policy analysis is widespread, and examples of added insight through civilian–military discourse in and outside of classrooms are numerous (Downs and Murtazashvili 2012; Eisenhower 1961; Kalin 2017; Klay 2022). From a campus-based analytical perspective, the issue is that greater diversity of identity and experience adds insight—a notion repeatedly advanced by the US Supreme Court in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) and Grutter v. Bollinger (2003). While the Supreme Court more recently found that this argument was insufficient to pass strict constitutional scrutiny in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (2023), that decision does not undermine the overall import of the idea: diverse discursive participation enriches democratic dialogue and collective insights.

The patterns around military inclusion, expulsion, dialogue, and analysis are paralleled in the more recent phenomenon of the Cops off Campus movement, a campaign that is particularly marked by rhetorical refusal to consider the role of state institutions in maintaining basic rights.

4. Rights Advocacy Against Rights Guarantors

Four separate issues weave through this section. They are distinct as a matter of principle and with respect to who is responsible. As a matter of practice, they overlap, with significant implications for trust in higher education. One issue is the assertion that classrooms and formal campus curricula ought to achieve sufficient neutrality to permit robust intellectual inquiry, debate, and discovery in pursuit of ever-greater truths. This orientation toward a challenging search for truth calls faculty and students to actively seek academically robust contrary evidence or interpretations, particularly in relation to social and political phenomena. A second issue is that sometimes classroom analysis leads students (and at times, faculty) to take political action through various kinds of speech. In environments fostering robust and continuous learning, particularly where students and faculty enjoy not only epistemic but also political freedoms, this kind of activity will always be emergent. The absolutist approach of significant portions of the movement for police abolition run contrary to what is known about rights diffusion, in that the movement quickly appeared to feature educated elites acting upon others (Appiah 2010). Third, the movement also ran up against the core tension at the heart of this article: individual rights and formal, legal embrace of shared dignity require government entities. Fourth, long-standing patterns of socioeconomic sorting intersect with the preceding issues, now inflamed by the reality of educational attainment differentiation by political party.

Together, these issues may have contributed to decreasing trust in higher education, as the movement had significant associations with higher education networks. Because this section is so marked by overlapping issues and dynamics, it must be noted that the only conclusions to be drawn are associational: research suggests numerous classrooms failed to encourage substantial disputation regarding the intersections among discouraging crime, addressing violence, and mass incarceration; students and faculty from among a small, often highly selective subset of universities were affiliated with movements to abolish police; legally enshrined rights require the presence of the rule of law and policing forces; long-standing socioeconomic sorting decreases the likelihood that either people from communities experiencing high rates of crime or people involved in policing are significantly present within discourses about crime and/or mass incarceration on highly selective campuses.

Twenty-six years ago, at the dawn of the 21st century, life expectancy had risen across racial and gender categories in the US and around the world. Other key indicators, such as extreme inequality and infant mortality, dropped precipitously (Pinker 2011; Ridley 2010; Rosling et al. 2018). As these indicators improved, a broader spectrum of persons gained rights to self-determination and self-governance, both through a half-century of emergence of scores of new countries and through more widely distributed rights to vote and petition the government. Across the US and globally, there was also unprecedented scholarship documenting the histories, lives, ontologies, and epistemologies of historically excluded groups.

Increasingly diverse scholars amplified and centered previously marginalized histories, both through cultural institutions and through government installations. In 2010, “The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation” brought the tension and tragedy at the heart of the nation’s founding into full view of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Chaco Canyon was established as a National Park in New Mexico in 1907; by the early 21st century park rangers spoke with reverence about the traditions and worldviews of the indigenous people who inhabited the location historically, as well as the Navajo (Diné) who live in the region currently. But there were cracks in the system.

The 9/11 attacks killed thousands of Americans, friends, and allies—in the name of neo-fundamentalism—sparking a series of domestic policing expansions and international wars that would take millions of lives (Costs of War Project 2026). Simultaneously, massive global growth was unevenly distributed. As the first quarter of the century proceeded, life expectancy dropped in the US for the first time, inequality rose radically, and police violence against Black men was documented and amplified, sparking the Black Lives Matter movement. By the mid to late-2010s, public support for police reform was high (Parker and Hurst 2021; Vaughn et al. 2022).

Security guarantees are at the center of US Constitutional aspirations “to ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense” (United States 1787) and contemporary campus–culture clashes. The exclusion of ROTC, its impact on campus dialogues, and the reduction in related security studies content was mentioned above. A recent study documents a related civic education knowledge gap with respect to “US international relations, military, and national security” (Schnaubelt et al. 2025, p. 2). Another study suggests campus conversations are severely siloed in relation to domestic security.

Drawing on a database of millions of syllabi, Shields, Avnur, and Muravchick demonstrated that scholars frequently fail to assign texts that have reached empirical conclusions at ideological odds with one another. For instance, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow appeared as assigned reading within several thousands of the syllabi they reviewed. Yet, it was rarely assigned with the academic critique that emerged with it. Critics included Yale Law Professor James Forman, who observed that Alexander “fails to consider black attitudes toward crime and punishment, ignores violent crimes while focusing almost exclusively on drug crimes, obscures class distinctions within the African American community, and overlooks the effects of mass incarceration on other racial groups” (Shields et al. 2025). Forman and similar scholars, such as Michael Fortner, John Pfaff, and Patrick Sharkey, are almost never in the same syllabus as Alexander—less than 4% of the time (Shields et al. 2025).

Alexander is an insightful author. I appreciate her book and was awestruck by her interview with Tippett (2016). The issue that Shields et al. identify is not with Alexander’s research. The issue is when texts assigned with hers are exclusively of the same ideological orientation, such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag. In some contemporary American universities, student choice intersects with this environment to reduce the likelihood that students may have an iteratively challenging, ideologically diverse pathway over four years. Rather, they have the freedom to reaffirm curricular, methodological, and ideological preferences as they select their courses (Zimmerman 2026). To the extent that students can avoid challenging ideas and/or do not find themselves exposed to a full array of academically robust considerations of key topics under consideration, institutions are not delivering on their missional commitments to knowledge cultivation, contestation, and continuous improvement.

Alexander and Gilmore are both prominent prison abolitionists. Narrowly, that stance calls for the end of the US prison system as it currently exists. This is one vital and important orientation within a system characterized by particularly high rates of incarceration that hit with different magnitude across gender, racial, and socioeconomic categories. Just as it is most obviously the case that legislatures should be incredibly reticent to consider any kinds of limits on speech or inquiry in a free and fair democracy, campus academic leaders and faculty also have a responsibility to maintain environments of robust disputation. Wherever it may be the case that students are not exposed to academically robust competing evidence, that is a concern about the quality of university disputation that faculties and institutions should address.

Beyond the classroom, there are sometimes protests on campuses. Careful analysis indicates most college students are not protesting and sustained protests are more likely to occur at larger and/or highly selective institutions (Andrews and Ngo 2026). In other words, most students, faculty, and institutions are not involved in sustained protest campaigns. Yet, some campuses played pivotal roles in advancing an off- and on-campus movement for police abolition.

Founded during the summer of 2020, the Cops off Campus Coalition defines itself as:

a “coalition of coalitions” building coast to coast across Turtle Island (North America). … the Cops Off Campus Coalition coheres around an ongoing commitment to the end of policing and police occupation of sovereign Native land as the (il)logic and procedure by which any and all learning spaces respond to and manage interpersonal harm and the systemic crisis of capital. We advocate for the complete dissolution of policing in all spaces of education (and ultimately across all aspects of our society).

(emphasis mine)

While Andrews and Ngo’s (2026) research indicates campus organizing was rare, it was networked across the country and frequently at influential institutions. Local news stations reported as advocates called for the dissolution of their campus police forces from the East Coast (Western Mass News 2023) to the West Coast (Salamy 2021) and in the Midwest (CBS Chicago 2020). The values that propelled the emergence of Cops off Campus and similar movements are sound: reduce arbitrary violence, invest in community wellbeing, and improve broad experience of rights and freedoms. Yet, the movement advanced under slogans that are empirically untrue (e.g., “Cops make people less safe” may be true within specific scenarios, but it does not track with broad, global empirical data demonstrating people live longer where stable states are present (Acemoglu and Robinson 2019)) and overreached with its ultimate goals. Moreover, the movement ultimately took on the form of many unsuccessful movements attempting to advance justice of some sort in that the perception that outsiders are driving change frequently leads to some kind of pushback (Appiah 2010). People most impacted by calls to end policing, including both police and communities experiencing high rates of disorder, are not particularly well represented among the selective institutions where abolitionist organizing often advanced.

In the Ivy League, more than 60% of students come from families in the top quintile of income-earners (Chetty et al. 2023). This socioeconomic sorting intersects with relatively low upper-class representation in the military (Cooper et al. 2020) and the observation that many police officers (like most Americans) do not hold four-year college degrees. While two-year degrees are more common among police, approximately one-third of police hold bachelor’s degrees, largely earned at public institutions (Gardiner 2017). Police officers who hold bachelor’s degrees are less likely to use force and more likely to hold positive police–community relationships (Texas Southern University Center for Justice Research 2021). Where future police attend college, they can participate in, contribute to, and learn from on-campus democratic dialogue initiatives. Yet, they—and individuals most impacted by both crime and police violence—are less likely to be present on the most selective campuses. This is not any single individual or institution’s fault, but it must be addressed in relation to civic education efforts. On and off-campus, policing continues.

On 17 September 2025, three Americans were killed defending a woman’s most basic rights. Cody Becker, Mark Baker, and Isaiah Emenheiser were ambushed by an assailant who firebombed his ex-girlfriend’s car, spied on her home, and invaded her house. Headlines did not focus on the rights under attack, emphasizing “Three Pennsylvania detectives killed” (Associated Press 2025). On 27 March 2026, federal authorities arrested two men accused of threatening mosques in Ohio and Pennsylvania (The Arab American News 2026). Earlier the same month, NYPD Chief Aaron Edwards leapt over a fence to disrupt an ISIS-inspired attack outside of New York City’s Gracie Mansion (Zanger 2026). These are all examples of police defense of basic democratic rights to security in the face of sexism, misogyny, Islamophobia, and neo-fundamentalism. Most police work seems comparably drab; some policing actions are documented as wrongly abusive. Yet, the broader public—including most Republicans, Democrats, and Black Americans—continues to show a preference for order over disorder, coupled with a suspicion of radical change (Klein 2024; Anderson et al. 2022).

A small scholarly industry has emerged to explain the overlapping distrust in higher education and the realignment of political parties in relation to educational attainment (Al-Gharbi 2024; Henderson 2024; Lind 2020). Though the data and phenomena I have reviewed above are merely associational, I suspect that some of that distrust stems from gut-level reactions to a campaign promising to upend the barebones structures of our civil order through its commitment to “complete dissolution of policing in all spaces of education (and ultimately across all aspects of our society)” (Cops Off Campus Coalition n.d.).

Such a call is at odds with how numerous cities have voted in recent years. Voters, who had been generally positive on police reform, pushed back on calls to defund or abolish police (Parker and Hurst 2021; Vaughn et al. 2022). An early 2020s slate of mayoral candidates then won progressive, mostly majority minority cities on platforms promising to address crime and expand policing (in Atlanta, Buffalo, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia, San Diego, and more).

Voters may have been expressing something that many academics seemed to miss: security rights are foundational. Early in the 2000s, Joel Westheimer and Joseph Kahne advanced the theoretical groundwork for a social change-oriented civic education. In the American Educational Research Journal, they described their predispositions: “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” (Westheimer and Kahne 2004). They published similar work in a Special Issue of Phi Delta Kappan, focused on teaching democracy (Kahne and Westheimer 2003).

While Westheimer and Kahne are right to note there is nothing inherently democratic about personally responsible citizens, there is also nothing inherently democratic about various empowered individuals, acting separately toward their own understanding of the good, without regard for or understanding of the rule of law. Personally responsible citizenship, which includes behaviors such as following the law, working, and paying taxes, got short shrift, leading to a disposition where teaching citizenship, as framed by these and other influential authors, was about teaching for change. As Hartman (2025) demonstrates, Westheimer and Kahne are part of a broader disposition toward change also documented through Thomas Deans’ research, the interpretations of Keith Morton’s research, and the lack of an explicit link to democracy or democratic education within leading parts of the community engagement and service-learning movements. This disposition toward change seems to assume the continuity of previous generations’ contributions to free and fair democracy. Yet, such an assumption is misplaced. Civic education should include critical consideration of what inheritances should be preserved. When surveyed, Americans name obeying the law as second only to voting as a core civic duty (Yudkin 2026).

At a broad level, in a democratic system, the rule of law is advanced by legislatures, through courts, and, as a last resort, by policing forces. The modern state can only protect liberties and guarantee rights when it has sufficient power. Since the advent of rights, governments have served as the singular rights guarantor (Donnelly 2013). Acemoglu and Robinson (2019), like most Americans, saw a clear need for police reform and were sympathetic to the Black Lives Matter movement. They, like Alexander, Gilmore, and many other scholars, trace legally enshrined racism from the country’s founding through to today’s inequities in policing and incarceration. Civil society groups, from the ACLU to the Cato Institute, critique militarized policing and patterns of inequity within policing while holding police departments and institutions to constitutional and legal standards. Acemoglu and Robinson would encourage such activity. They are clearly concerned with unrestrained American policing—as any proponent of democracy should be. Yet, their data, and comparative data generally, show the value of maintaining a free and fair, rights-respecting, legal architecture that includes a last resort of police power. They do not want to bring down the machine; they wish to leverage it in service of promoting, protecting, and preserving human freedoms.

The attack against democracy, however, accelerated from an entirely different ideological space in 2025, when the Trump Administration moved to defund universities, restrict the prevailing interpretation of the Citizenship Clause within the 14th Amendment with Executive Order 14160, and radically expand policing capacities with little regard for constitutional restraint or shared human dignity. Once again, individuals on the left are turning to the machine, in this case at the level of states and courts, for rights. And once again, the institutional apparatuses of rights reach to enforce and guarantee them. Since work on this article began, the US Supreme Court held, in Trump v Barbara (2026), that children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment. Popular university discourse is now understandably and justly focused on defending universities from attacks on higher education and democratic rights. However, I hope my review to this point has clearly demonstrated three things that stretch beyond this moment.

First, American colleges and universities are interwoven with efforts to advance the free and fair democratic state. They hold a vital, values-based and continuously emergent civil society role, grounded in respect for the dignity and rights of every person. Second, the state has been and must continue to be a key partner in advancing a free and fair democracy, including universities’ role therein. It is incumbent upon institutional leaders and faculties to continue to search for and improve upon the social contract between the country and its vast, impressive network of higher education institutions (Allen 2025). Third, much of the contestation regarding the appropriate role of universities and of the state proceeds through an understanding of legally enshrined rights that are, in such discourses, typically undertheorized. Rights are not maintained without cultural and legal commitments to the dignity of every person, a reflection of values grounded in and expressed through the institutions enabling the American Experiment. In the following section, I further clarify universities’ roles in maintaining those rights in a free and fair democracy.

5. Higher Education’s Opportunities and Obligations

The preceding sections demonstrate the intersections among the state, civil society organizing, universities, equality before the law, and the rights central to free and fair democracy. Colonial Era universities were tools in open warfare against Colonial Rule. Revolutionaries establishing democracy won but failed to implement the full force of their ideals. Progress on those ideals—centering human dignity and its recognition via equality before the law—would advance through the 1800s, owing both to civil society organizing and the triumph of the Union over the Confederacy, a struggle advanced on the battlefield and through the carrots of government policies such as The Morrill Act. As universities grew, the ideal of academic freedom developed—an ideal built atop a rights-based legal order. Following the global horror of World War II, cultural and legal recognition of rights expanded in the US and globally. However, vital civil society movements increasingly articulated a notion of progressive action against “the machine,” a collection including government, universities, military, and police. A review of rights implementation clarifies that all these institutions play vital roles in the development, expansion, and protection of rights. Most recently, fighting the machine was embodied in the move from police reform to police abolition, a move in activist circles that overlaps with concerns regarding ideological narrowness or siloing on some college campuses, as documented through the syllabus study and the related challenge of socioeconomic sorting across campuses.

Universities have been dynamic partners in the expansion of rights across US history, as shown in

Table 4. US universities, rights’ expansion and challenges.

	Revolutionary Era	Civil War Era	Early 20th Century	1950s and 60s	21st Century
Free and Fair, Democratic Rights Expansion	Declaration of Independence focus on human dignity couples with moral aspirations at heart of several universities; Constitution and Bill of Rights clarify range of political, economic, cultural, and security rights	13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments extend political and security rights to Black Americans; several colleges and universities admit students regardless of race or gender; Morrill Act expands access	AAUP authors a seminal document on academic freedom; Era includes a growing breadth of inclusion in higher education opportunities	Free speech and civil rights movements win substantial gains in public sphere, courts, and through legislative action; founding of UN and creation of UDHR globalize commitments to human dignity	Growing breadth of inclusion across US higher education; epistemic and cultural pluralism create conditions for broader understanding of diversities of being and knowing
Problem	Compromise with institution of slavery baked into Constitution; higher education institutions (HEIs) exclude women and people of color	Inclusion is minimal even where it is offered; Morrill Act is part of ongoing warfare against Native Americans	Progressive academic voices at heart of AAUP founding also allied with popular genetics movement; inclusion remains minimal; democratic theorizing overly predicated on expertise	Vital steps wrongly associated with a teleological historical imagination; emergence of overly dichotomous narratives regarding “the machine,” referring to HEIs, governments, etc.	Departure from commitments to common human dignity and equality before the law; higher education landscape wrenched by ways in which it tracks across socioeconomic sorting and political polarization

.

University discourse in recent decades, however, has been critiqued as insufficiently balanced, less than rigorous, or one-sided. Allying with civil society, leading universities removed ROTC from campuses for much of the last half of the 20th century. Scholars have documented a related decrease in courses on security studies and realism. Across the country, most faculty attend a relatively small number of elite higher education institutions for graduate school (Wapman et al. 2022). The distance that several of these institutions maintained from the military from the late 1960s through the early 2000s, along with socioeconomic sorting endemic to US higher education, may have undermined military–civilian and civilian–police interaction among a substantial portion of US higher education faculty. The syllabus study presents a concerning picture of campus intellectual silos. Taken together with the Cops off Campus Coalition, it indicates a great distance between parts of campus discourse and the broader public. Unanimity is not the goal, but contestation and critical consideration are important components of a university experience, especially in a free and fair democracy.

A study at the intersection of universities and the civilian–military divide (Downs and Murtazashvili 2012), along with the syllabus study (Shields et al. 2025) and socioeconomic sorting data (Chetty et al. 2023), suggests universities ought to systematically consider how their campus pull factors may group socioeconomically and culturally similar individuals—calling attention to how interventions can support students not only seeing the perspective of other students who may hold somewhat different political positions, but also other citizens who they have never met and may never contact.

Campuses may be excellent at providing a breadth of expertise to their students, cultivating their understanding and discernment thereof, and linking that knowledge development and systematic refinement with experiential learning that builds community, fuels dialogue, and connects students with a broader range of perspectives off-campus. It appears Dartmouth is leading on these efforts under President Sian Beilock (The Chronicle of Higher Education 2026). Yet, there are two challenges relevant to this article.

First, Dartmouth’s 4500 undergraduates represent a great range of nationalities, religions, US regions, backgrounds, and political identities. But, in another way, they are necessarily similar: they are winners in a system that attempts to be meritocratic yet disproportionately reproduces social class while asserting that universities play an important role in democratic equality and the defense of democracy. At such selective Ivies and liberal arts institutions, administrators and faculty regularly champion and implement various important civil discourse initiatives. These initiatives are meant to build dialogue skills among people who have very little in common—except that an admissions team had a strong hand in “assembling a group of students who match the institution’s culture and its vibe while also having very different backgrounds” (Bogost 2026). In these contexts, students may experience considerable disagreement among various ideological valences, settling into an understanding of inclusively informed common sense—that is, overly representative of political perspectives and legitimate truth claims unique to highly educated individuals. Yes, it is true that Dartmouth and numerous other elite institutions invest mightily in supporting first-generation college student access, but the discursive space these numerically minoritized students enter is heavily influenced by the preceding half century and more. Across that century, elite institutions primarily accepted and educated financially elite young people. While racial and geographic diversity increased during the 21st century, economic diversity has not (Abramitzky et al. 2024). Such a dynamic can create a skewed sense of common sense. Yet, the good news is that this system is not written in stone. A free and fair democracy could widen its pathways into and through particularly strong higher education opportunities.

Second, when President Beilock insists that “our mission is education and knowledge production. We’re not a political institution,” she is ignoring a longer history and broader cultural context (The Chronicle of Higher Education 2026). This parallels Jonathan Haidt’s mistake contrasting universities as in the pursuit of truth or social justice (Haidt 2016). Both analyses assume some bedrock social norms, legal standards, and security systems that are at the heart of free and fair democracy’s enacted traditions. The Yale Report, published as I put the finishing touches on this article, continues this evasion, suggesting first that Yale must return to its earlier, core mission, to “create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.” Then, immediately in the following section in the same report, it insists that the university must also “Protect Free Speech …. Support Academic Freedom …. Make Higher Education Affordable …. Open the Gates” (Yale University Committee on Trust in Higher Education 2026, pp. 23–27). Focus on the creation and dissemination of knowledge, in other words, so long as rights to speech and economic opportunity are also part of the equation.

To admit to the plain reality that free and fair democracy is a theory of justice is not to open the gates to radical activism at every turn. Yet, if we wish to make progress in this challenging discourse about university purposes we must have the courage to recognize that the social order that gives rise to open inquiry and academic contestation through speech rights, equal rights to educational access, and commitments to shared dignity is itself rooted in values. Clarifying this tension and working through the empirical and normative implications will improve collective insights in this difficult terrain, where it is simultaneously true that we must strive to create conditions for detached analysis and stay committed to a set of values that recognize every person’s rights to speech and participation.

To have higher education systems that are particularly strong at leading in the contestation and continuous development of greater truths and improved insights, we must carry democracy forward—and democracy springs from norms. It is not only about productive interpersonal dialogue. It is also about equality before the rule of law across a population, in the US case, of hundreds of millions. As the Truman Commission warned, “It is the responsibility of higher education to devise programs and methods which will make clear the ethical values and the concept of human relations upon which our political system rests. Otherwise we are likely to cling to the letter of democracy and lose its spirit” (United States President’s Commission on Higher Education 1947, pp. 11–12).

“The spirit” of democracy has many roots and, equally, many faiths, ideologies, and movements that wish to claim it. As outlined in Section 1, this paper has deliberately advanced at a level of generalities, that is, the general spirit of free and fair democracy. Other scholars will wish to debate the degree of truth one might attach to religious or civic conceptions of dignity; various generations of rights thinking and their relative influence; the relationship of this article to the literature in legal doctrine and legal theory; and the intersection of the military and policing sections to various theories of violence. Those analyses are outside the scope of this article, but will support the ongoing discernment at the heart of democratic life as they emerge. Similarly, precisely how to stagger learning across the undergraduate experience is a question for faculty and curriculum committees. For the present analysis,

Table 5. University responsibilities to free and fair democracy: academic to operational.

	University Responsibilities: Academic and Operational
Dignity as foundational democratic commitment	Include the normative political theoretical dimension—the assertion of shared human dignity—in discussions of democracy as a system of government; stagger learning to support students’ deepening commitment to the dignity of others; apply policies equally across all students; treat external guests with equal respect and consistency
Security rights	Educate students on the variation in this and other rights across different social arrangements, including where the US does better and worse; work with local police and, if necessary, campus security forces to guarantee safety
Cultural rights	Expose students to multiple ways of being and approaching the good life; provide a robust liberal arts education; ensure campus permits freedom of expression, worship, and conscience
Political rights	Develop student understanding of how to influence the operations of the governments that impact them, locally, at the state level, nationally, and even through global governance. In addition to on-campus vote drives, develop capacities to speak publicly, communicate with officials, and to understand the operations of government with respect to specific policy areas; collaborate with student government to enhance capacities for self-governance during university experience
Economic rights	Connect political economy to civic discussions and vice versa; deepen understanding of comparative economic rights and structures across the US and around the world; promote transparency in the cost and benefits of an education specific to the institution; support educational access and academically rigorous completion to the fullest extent possible; cooperate across higher ed to enhance access and inclusion across socioeconomic classes
Epistemic rights	Cultivate curricula that deepen insight on critical contemporary topics through broad and multipartisan perspectives that are rooted in rigorous scholarship; over the entirety of an educational experience, include a wide array of disciplinary, on-campus, and off-campus perspectives, through rigorous courses, civil discourse initiatives, and experiential learning, always seeking to consider the perspective or voice not in the room in the moment; use the privilege of education to cultivate continuous questioning and principled, pragmatic, humble steps forward in the finest tradition of the liberal arts

suggests university responsibilities in efforts to sustain free and fair democracy.

Individuals committed to free and fair democracy and equality before the law are in an awkward yet principled position. On the one hand, organizers have been saying for many years that “there’s no difference between the two parties” and that it is important to “fight the machine.” On the other hand, a movement has overtaken government with the goal of fighting the machine—legacy media, universities, professors, the deep state, judges—including anyone who disagrees with the power and impulse of a single executive. The problem with these positions should be catnip for university educators: they are both dichotomous and simplistic. A proper role of universities is to support student and broader public discernment in wrestling through contradictions, identifying improved pathways forward (in addition to knowledge development).

While I critiqued some dichotomizing expressions of the abolitionist movement above, I have also learned immensely from critical studies in that area and many others. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s framing of reformist reforms and nonreformist reforms is a useful tool in understanding pathways toward more mental health and community interventions when those modes of engagement can improve individual and community safety (Gilmore 2007). Eve Tuck’s review and explanation of ‘critical thirding’ challenges analysts and civic actors to move beyond either/or thinking across assets and deficits in community work, instead embracing a desire-based orientation (Tuck 2009). Wayne Yang reminds rights advocates that human rights have historically been limited to a legal promise that one day all people will have the entitlements that only the privileged now enjoy (Yang 2015). Each of these scholars has also written and/or been interpreted in dichotomizing and final ways. Perhaps those absolutist interpretations are right, but my read of history, their broader scholarly contributions, the importance of humility, and the purpose of higher education suggests otherwise.

6. Conclusions and Recommendations

Discourse and disagreements about academic freedom, rights, and citizenship largely proceed atop the assumption of universities existing within a democratic nation that generally adheres to the rule of law. The existence of any such nation is rare across history and presently—even where such conditions have maintained, they have been imperfect and emergent. A review of US history indicates the extent to which democratic emergence has been propelled by the American Revolutionaries and the form of government they established, then advanced by abolitionists, civil rights activists, government authorities, and academics, among others. Across that history, each of those entities has failed and flourished depending on the era and the individuals involved. The common theme is not justice or injustice, liberation or oppression, but emergence and adaptation grounded in the assertion of shared human dignity.

Flowing from that commitment to common human dignity, democracy is enacted through states that are strong enough to enforce rights, disciplined enough to respect separation of powers, and confident enough to permit a flourishing civil society. Civil society can and should nudge states toward better practices, but the democratic state is a fundamental element in a functioning democracy, creating the legal institutional space for civil society.

Human Rights Watch Executive Director Bolopion wonders whether the US has switched sides in the global movement for human rights—a fair question. Will higher education resume its historic role as an ally in that movement, counterbalancing the state when it goes astray and offering a nonpartisan, principled space for rights realization despite political cycles and ideological trends? In addition to principled investigation that can lead to resistant stances, civic education must do a better job of embracing the state structures that ultimately implement and enforce rights. Civil society organizations that share democratic values should both challenge and support the state’s free and fair, democratic structures. When these structures function well, they are less visible.

This article indicates three areas for action from among university faculty, student affairs professionals, administrative leadership, and governing bodies. First, that democratic rights and freedoms—including free speech and academic freedom—reflect a specific, culturally contingent, co-constructed, normative reality is unassailable. This means we must push beyond the dichotomy of universities as for truth or for justice. From the level of individual courses and research up through departmental curricular design and, vitally, general education requirements, it is time for institutions to move past a modernist, teleological conception of the US university and acknowledge its cultural foundations, along with its role in advancing the democratic project. As Benjamin Franklin suggested, it is vital that “the first Principles of sound Politicks be fix’d in the Minds of Youth” (Franklin 1749) (and people of all ages, I would add).

Related and second, understanding human rights as moral aspirations impels institutions to make more significant, staggered and developmental curricular space for understanding our civil order as a reflection of a contingent and evolving legal architecture. Just like the effort to understand and foster an embrace of a shared commitment to common human dignity, supporting students’ comprehension, critique, and future capacities to contribute to the legal structures of constitutional democracy must be a nonpartisan, rigorous, and intellectually open effort. Finally, these first two efforts, which sit across faculty and administrative co-creation of curricular requirements, in alignment with board and legislative expectations, will be advanced along with more systematically diverse—and broad—incoming classes (specifically including greater socioeconomic diversity). Diversity of ideas, people, experiences, and backgrounds are vital ingredients for robust learning experiences, especially if that learning is in service of fostering knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs to understand and maintain this rare, free and fair, democratic project.

Civic education requires reinvigoration and cross-campus commitment. Civic education in US higher education has recently emphasized on-campus dialogue (Kelderman and Diep 2025), off-campus community engagement (Zhao 2024), or founding principles and texts (Baiocchi 2025). These kinds of initiatives make positive impacts without providing a robust, holistic contribution to maintaining and advancing our democratic story—and unfortunately they are also often polarized (Messer-Kruse 2026).

Educators and administrators must connect the strands among these discrete types of coursework and programming, supporting students’ learning journeys and ensuring that every student thinks rigorously about the complex of values, attitudes, beliefs, norms, rule of law and institutions that maintain democracy. This will take time, commitment, and resources. Such an effort requires cross-campus learning that is transdisciplinary and democratically inclusive. Competent understanding of these issues, structures, and norms cannot be left only to those students who self-select into specific programs of study, nor should civic education be confined to a single year or single course within a curriculum.

Concretely, universities and governments must invest in multi-year, developmental civic education, grounded in the liberal arts, with the full understanding that democracy depends upon it—and that democracy is not guaranteed but contingent.

Numerous universities are expanding programming and resources related to the issues raised here. Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and Vanderbilt Universities have substantially committed to inclusive and broad civic education, as has Arizona State and Rutgers Universities. ASU is seen as a leader in the movement for civic institutes (Carrese 2024), a movement that will be interesting to the extent that it is truly nonpartisan—and concerning to the extent that conservative legislatures reify conservative safe spaces for conservative students and scholars. The goal here is robust learning across ideologies, including robust discursive and analytical conflict between and among people of divergent viewpoints. Dartmouth demonstrated unique capacity to leverage expertise toward dialogues open to campus and streamed to broader publics in the weeks and months after 10/7.

Tufts, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Delaware have variously gathered scholars and practitioners for focused learning and development on these themes. I have great respect for Danielle Allen and the network of engagements with which she is involved, including the K-12 focused Educating for American Democracy Initiative. That initiative’s thematic questions include “What are rights? What is law?” and “What is constitutional democracy?” Similarly, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) includes lesson plans targeted toward both high school and collegiate levels on critical topics such as varying forms of government. Additional resources come from both sides of the aisle, including the George W. Bush Presidential Center, Citizen University, Interfaith America, the Institute of Citizens and Scholars, the Civil Learning and Democracy Engagement Coalition, The Interactivity Foundation, Campus Compact, More Perfect, SNF Paideia, the Community-based Global Learning Collaborative (The Collaborative), Project Pericles, and the Jack Miller Center. CFR and The Collaborative both bring the added benefit of an explicitly global orientation—a lens that can help Americans understand the unique inheritance of “natural” or “self-evident” rights. These resources are important—and will have little impact without significant curricular redesign.

There is more to be done, both with the systems we inhabit and with respect to the new systems we must build. It makes great sense—with the massive expansion of authentic access to higher education, the increased frustrations from among those who do not have access, growing economic inequality, and the hyperproliferation of new technologies that give everyone the opportunity to live in their own safe silos and comfortable cocoons—that there is tension in the system. This world is complex. Mediating among competing truth claims and values is difficult. States have been the single largest violator and only historic guarantor of rights (Donnelly 2013).

The post-World War II expansion of human rights rhetoric and, in some places, application, is but a historical blip—only about 1.5% of recorded human history. If we wish to see more of such social and legal arrangements, we will have to educate more systematically in service of that vision, not taking it for granted as inherent or pre-ordained. We will need to continue to broaden inclusion to higher education, not only because of jobs, but also because of the breadth of personal and communal benefits associated with the development and maintenance of free and fair democratic systems where the rule of law is present but not oppressive, coupled with a robust and active civil society.

The resources above are carefully vetted, significantly true, and sometimes in conflict with one another. That is a reality it is our job to hold in a free and fair democracy. The moment our country was founded by individuals preaching the wisdom of permitting multiple accounts of truth was the moment we agreed to live and let live. Truth matters. But universities must also, especially in efforts to encourage citizenship within free and fair democracy, cultivate the wisdom, discernment, and socioemotional dispositions to live among multiple contested truths while respecting the inherent dignity of all. That kind of wisdom is aware of the vast uncertainty of the world’s truths and the related importance of humility. It must be coupled with a strong understanding of our free and fair democratic tradition, its rationales, and its legal and institutional structures. That is a heritage and an emergence we ought to be patriotic about, in the sense that patriotism is like love. It is our job as citizens of this democracy to both do all we can to understand our country and to insist that it strives relentlessly toward its best version of itself.