University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill student Juliana Lewis took a course on public discourse in 2024 that was housed within the university’s School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL). Though the course focused more on political theory and the foundations of democracy than she expected, she enjoyed it.

But when another student told her that SCiLL was “a school for conservative belief,” she had a hard time wrapping her head around that.

“I was a little bit confused by that because on the outside, it doesn’t look like that,” she said.

The school claims to foster a “free speech culture,” but critics say it’s part of a movement to promote a conservative agenda for students. While SCiLL was first announced in 2023, the campaign to amplify conservative thought at the university began a decade ago. The Nation reported in 2015 that wealthy conservative donors funded think tanks to promote courses on campus dedicated to “liberty, capitalism, and traditional perspectives.”

Now, SCiLL is part of a growing trend of campus centers, often called “civics centers” or “schools of intellectual freedom.” Some, like the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, were founded through donors. Others, such as the Hamilton School at the University of Florida, were created through the state legislature. The curricula at these centers emphasize Western civilization and often combine American history with the classics. For some academics, the limited scope of this civic education is concerning.

The centers are at the forefront of campus culture wars about “viewpoint diversity,” a term used by Republicans and the Trump administration to decry higher education’s perceived lack of conservative voices. Some of the same supposed pro-free speech groups, donors, and legislators championing these centers simultaneously cheer on the end of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and rail against critical race theory.

In an article for the American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP) Journal of Academic Freedom, Florida International University visiting professor of sociology Katie Rainwater and University of Central Florida associate history professor Robert Cassanello wrote that these centers “should be understood as one prong of an effort to minimize students’ exposure to ideas antithetical to the libertarian political agenda and to insert in their place ideas pursuant to the agenda.”

Despite their heated political origins, the centers are expanding. In addition to Florida, North Carolina, and Texas, civics centers now also exist at public universities in Tennessee, Arizona, Ohio, and — soon — Iowa.

Money From Little-Known Groups

Research shows a weakened understanding of civics in America. A survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that the number of people who could name the three branches of government decreased from 56% to 47% between 2021 and 2022. While 2020 saw historic youth voter turnout, young people’s increased civic participation is far from secure. The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement reported a 3% dip in youth turnout in the 2024 election, down from 50% in 2020. Asked why they didn’t vote, 20% of survey respondents said voting was not important to them, and 14% said they lacked information about either the candidates or how to vote.

Proponents of civics education argue that it’s essential to preserve American democracy. However, in a polarized political climate, American identity has become a partisan battlefield. In 2021, the Senate introduced a bipartisan bill, the Civics Secures Democracy Act, that would have provided funding to civics education in middle and high schools. The bill ultimately died after conservative figures, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, claimed it would be used to fund critical race theory.

Florida’s conservative lawmakers have undertaken an unprecedented campaign to reshape public higher education in a conservative image, and these efforts set a precedent for the creation of the Hamilton School (formerly known as the Hamilton Center) at the University of Florida. The center was created after Adrian Lukis, a lobbyist at the well-known conservative lobbying group Ballard Partners, met with then-state Sen. Keith Perry on behalf of the Council on Public University Reform, a political nonprofit that does not publicize its donors. Not long after, the Florida Legislature approved $3 million in funding for the center in June 2022, and the center began offering courses in spring 2023.

University of Florida history professor Jeffrey Adler told Prism that it’s hard to judge the Hamilton School outside of its political context, given the lack of transparency behind the council’s donors. While Adler’s engagement with the Hamilton School has been limited, he said he did look over its course offerings.

“Things like Christianity and Western civilization and the Enlightenment and American greatness come up more than makes me comfortable,” he said. “It’s difficult to separate that from the way it was founded with this secret money from a conservative group and listening to people — in the wider political world in particular — saying exactly that the purpose of history is to teach patriotism.”

Little is known about the specifics of the group that helped create the Hamilton School. Even Perry, who brought the funding request to the state legislature, told The Miami Herald that he was unfamiliar with the Council on Public University Reform.

Adler said that when universities want to get a major project off the ground, there is a lengthy, complicated process that requires multiple reviews and certifications. The process for the Hamilton School was decidedly different, he told Prism.

This little-known right-wing group “ponied up money, and suddenly there was an institution there,” Adler said.

University of Florida spokesperson Steve Orlando told Prism that claims that the Hamilton School pushes a conservative agenda on campus are “false.”

“The Hamilton School aims to become the national leader in classical and civic education with no ideological agenda,” he wrote. “At the Hamilton School, world-class faculty teach how to engage new ideas and are inspired in this work by timeless classics, with the goal of training the next generation of American leaders. The Hamilton School’s commitment to intellectual diversity stems from a belief in rigorous scholarship.”

Legal documents filed with the state show that the group behind the Hamilton School, the Council on Public University Reform, was incorporated in Delaware in 2021 and is headquartered in St. Petersburg, Florida, at the office of Liberty Consultants. The financial consulting firm, which managed the council’s finances, is run by Cherie Velez, a former CFO at Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group backed by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch.

The council’s 990 tax forms in 2023 detail how the group intended to expand “opportunities for civic education and core curricula at public universities.” The form lists only one employee: president and treasurer Joshua Holdenried, who also sits on the board of directors at Speech First, a conservative campus free speech group. According to lobbying disclosures, the group used Ballard Partners to lobby the legislative and executive branches in Florida from 2022 to 2023. Disclosures also reveal that the head of Ballard Partners, Brian Ballard, lobbied in the Florida House for the bill that funded the Hamilton School. The council also lobbied in Tennessee around the time the University of Tennessee-Knoxville developed its own civics center.

Though it’s unclear who is financially supporting the council, in 2023, it gave $68,000 to another little-known group: the Seventeen Eighty-Five Coalition. A Delaware-incorporated nonprofit, the coalition’s tax forms say its purpose is “to educate policymakers and the public regarding the need for reform within the state university system.” The coalition also uses Liberty Consultants for its accounting and hired Ballard Partners to lobby the Florida Legislature and executive branch in 2023. Its president and treasurer, Jonathan Pidluzny, worked at the conservative nonprofit American Council of Trustees and Alumni and America First Policy Institute. As of this year, he works as deputy chief of staff for policy and programs in the Trump administration’s Department of Education.

As of April 2024, the Council on Public University Reform was dissolved, according to legal documents. The group left its remaining $4,133 in assets to a third group, Higher Education Reform Coalition, whose location is also listed at the office of Liberty Consultants and helmed by Gillum Ferguson, a former staffer for Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee and Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who has faced widespread criticism over racist remarks. Like the Council on Public University Reform, the coalition also lobbied in Florida in 2022 and 2023, as well as in Tennessee, using the same lobbyists as the council. According to its 2022 990 tax form, the coalition gave $50,000 to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, an adviser on Project 2025 and one of several prominent conservative organizations — along with the National Association of Scholars — that have publicly supported civic centers.

Gabrielle Anglin, a spokesperson for the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, told Prism that the coalition’s donation was part of a matching program to fund the group’s Campus Freedom Initiative, part of a three-year grant funded in large part by the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation. The initiative encourages schools to follow the group’s Gold Standard for Freedom of Expression, which includes adopting institutional neutrality, “disband bias response teams,” and “support academic centers dedicated to free inquiry and intellectual diversity.”

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, founded in 1995 by Lynne Cheney, wife of former Vice President Dick Cheney, pushes trustees and donors to play a more active role in their universities. The group’s 2023 annual report noted it worked “behind the scenes” to promote civic centers and “informed patriotism.” The report also said the group connected legislators and leaders at universities and “encouraged” the creation of the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, as well as the five civic centers in Ohio. Notably, the council said it led a November 2022 retreat for UNC-Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees, which it claimed helped inspire the board to create SCiLL.

For years, the National Association of Scholars has openly campaigned for civic centers through the Civics Alliance. Launched in 2020, the coalition describes itself as “dedicated to preserving and improving America’s civics education.” Its supporters are a who’s-who of modern conservatism, including right-wing activist Christopher Rufo and the president of the Claremont Institute, “the leading intellectual center for the pro-Trump right,” The New York Times reported.

According to its website, the Civics Alliance convened to oppose “action civics” or “new civics,” which the group claims emphasizes “political commitment, protest, and vocational training in progressive activism.” This style of civics education, promoted by organizations such as Generation Citizen, takes a practical approach, encouraging students to bring issues they care about to local legislatures. Stanley Kurtz, an alliance supporter who works as a senior fellow at another Project 2025 adviser, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is credited with leading the backlash against action civics. He has claimed that “action civics” “irrevocably” cemented “the partisan Left’s hold upon our culture.”

Civics Alliance’s efforts to reshape civics education span K-12 and higher education, with two dozen pieces of model legislation available on its website. Among them is the School of Intellectual Freedom (SIF) Act, which outlines the process for establishing and running centers such as the Hamilton School and SCiLL. The group had a major win when Iowa passed House File 437 in June to establish “a center for intellectual freedom” at the University of Iowa. According to the alliance, the bill drew heavily from its model legislation.

The alliance’s model legislation gives broad authority to the board of trustees when it comes to a center’s creation. Along with the university president, it selects a director for the center from a shortlist provided by a board-approved faculty council. The director has complete control over staffing and reports directly to the president, not a dean. Each year, the director must submit a report to the board of trustees and the state government. The alliance states on its website that this report will allow personnel “to report if the activist establishment has attempted to abrogate their autonomy or subvert their mission.”

The alliance emphasizes that the center remain an “independent academic unit” untethered to the rest of the university, and that the school of intellectual freedom model legislation is a cornerstone for its other proposed policies promoting Western civilization courses.

“The Core Curriculum Act, the American History Act, and the Heritage Certificates Act all direct students to take in the Western and the American heritages, but the intent of these Acts can be subverted if the activist establishment is allowed to govern their operation,” the introduction to the model bill reads. “An autonomous SIF can guarantee that these three acts to reform university curriculum work as intended.”

The alliance also said that a center would require $5 to $6 million annually in public money for about a decade, and claimed that the centers will ultimately be able to rely entirely on private donations.

“Our colleges and universities are devoid of the type of diversity — intellectual diversity — that ought to be found in a place dedicated to seeking truth and dispersing knowledge,” wrote Chance Layton, director of communications for the National Association of Scholars, in a statement to Prism. “These centers offer a place for students and faculty to find that diversity. Moreover, universities have spent the last two decades excising their faculty of any sort of wrongthink, typically perpetrated by conservative-leaning professors, through a variety of measures such as diversity statements (partisan loyalty oaths), weaponization of student evals and complaints, racial hiring quotas, and more.”

Overreach

Civic centers have faced backlash in many college communities, including North Carolina, which has a long and controversial history of politicians and donors exerting influence over education.

UNC-Chapel Hill student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, has noted that Chancellor Lee Roberts has financial ties to conservative donor and university Board of Governors member Art Pope. More broadly, the Board of Governors became increasingly politicized after Republicans took over the state legislature in 2010. Since then, university leadership has made controversial decisions, such as closing the school’s Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity in 2015. In 2021, the board denied tenure to acclaimed journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. Hannah-Jones is the author of “The 1619 Project,” a New York Times Magazine initiative that reframed American history by focusing entirely on slavery, which set off a maelstrom in conservative circles.

SCiLL generated backlash since it was announced in a shock decision by the Board of Trustees in early 2023. The Faculty Council, the professor-led body that represents educators’ interests, responded that they did not know the school was in the works until the board announced it. Later that year, almost 700 faculty signed a letter accusing the board and state legislature of overreach. Trustee Perrin Jones claimed in an op-ed that SCiLL was merely an outgrowth of the Program for Public Discourse, established in 2019 with faculty approval. Now-retired UNC professor emeritus of history Lloyd Kramer approved of the original program, which he said consisted of a speaker series and some classes.

“I was the chair of the faculty when that program was developed, and I did not understand it to be leading toward a school,” Kramer told Prism.

Since it launched, SCiLL has been plagued with issues. All but one of the inaugural faculty have left due to concerns about management and hiring processes under director Jed Atkins. In an interview with The Daily Tar Heel, professor Inger S. Brodey said after her resignation, “I can see that there is no point in my trying to help build SCiLL any longer, and that decisions have been made, a direction has been set, over which I can have no input.” Amid the faculty turmoil, in September, the university launched an investigation into the school’s hiring and firing practices.

SCiLL’s presence on campus also doesn’t sit well with some students, according to UNC-Chapel Hill student Juliana Lewis.

“I’ve definitely talked to some people on the other side of it where they’re like, ‘I just don’t even want to go near that with a 10-foot pole because of the lack of transparency and that fear that there’s going to be an agenda that’s pushed,’” she said.

UNC-Chapel Hill did not respond to Prism’s request for comment.

SCiLL is not the only center to receive pushback. In January, Ohio State University’s senate voted 64-57 against the new civics center opening in the fall, which was established by the state legislature to prevent the spread of “leftist ideology.”

Isaac Kamola, an assistant professor of political science at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, co-wrote the book Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War, which argues that a manufactured free speech crisis on campus is funded by conservative political operatives and designed to achieve right-wing political outcomes.

In an interview with Prism, Kamola said he takes issue with the overall structure of these centers, which he characterized as an extension of those funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, such as the Center for the Study of Economic Liberty at Arizona State University, which is now incorporated into the school’s civics center. Kamola said donors asserting control over curriculum contrasts with shared governance — an idea promoted by the AAUP that argues faculty should be in charge of the curriculum.

“We know what the most important ideas are, what the most important debates are, and we should be the ones who determine what that curriculum is,” Kamola said. “If you have a business person saying, No, I’d prefer that you not teach that version of American history, but I prefer that you teach the one that I like, you’re going to get teaching that is nothing short of ideology.”

The National Association of Scholars’ Chance Layton said he does not believe additional oversight from donors and state legislatures is an issue.

“If anything, the whole discussion about the need for these centers has helped restore legislative oversight of taxpayer-funded colleges and universities at the expense of obtuse, partisan administrators and faculty.” he wrote to Prism. “Thankfully, we, the taxpayers, finally get a say in redirecting universities away from their tangent into progressive activism and back on track to educating students.”

The right-wing push to reshape civics education in the U.S. has gained considerable momentum under the second Trump administration. In the midst of the Trump administration’s actions targeting universities over pro-Palestine protests and equity efforts, among other issues, the president has extended an olive branch to colleges with GOP-backed civic centers. And while the Trump administration has moved to defund what it views as left-leaning universities and programs, ahead of America’s 250th birthday, the Department of Education announced over the summer that it set aside $14 million for universities to fund seminars for K-12 students about the Declaration of Independence. Applicants who have “independent academic units dedicated to civic thought, constitutional studies, American history, leadership, and economic liberty” will be prioritized for these grant funds.

In September, the Department of Education also announced an initiative led by the America First Policy Institute called the America 250 Civics Education Coalition. The coalition will develop nationwide civics programming, including tours, lectures, competitions, and summits in advance of the semiquincentennial. Forty state and national conservative organizations are participating, including the National Association of Scholars, with the reported goal of “renewing patriotism, strengthening civic knowledge, and advancing a shared understanding of America’s founding principles in schools across the nation.”

When discussing civics, lawmakers and the Trump administration have invoked the phrase “informed patriotism” to describe their ideal curricula. The term, first coined in former President Ronald Reagan’s 1989 farewell address, is the idea that “America is freedom.” In his speech, Reagan harkened back to a time when kids “absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country.” The definition of patriotic education is pitched as at odds with discussions of race and gender in American culture. This particular brand of patriotism in civic education doesn’t sit well with educators.

“The Hamilton Center argues that it is devoted to civic culture and wants to create civics education,” said Adler, the University of Florida professor. “I think that’s terrific. But how do you teach civics without discussing political dissent, without — at least in the U.S. — discussing race? So the fig leaf is that civic education means that you can narrow the lens of your collective education. I don’t think that’s what civics is.”

Prism is an independent and nonprofit newsroom led by journalists of color. We report from the ground up and at the intersections of injustice.