Bard and Johns Hopkins Advance Competing Models of Civic Education

Universities can approach civic education from two directions. One is to provide every undergraduate with a common foundation for citizenship: the habits of discussion, judgment, historical understanding, and reflection needed for self-government. The other is to educate people who will work directly inside governing institutions and equip them to reform those institutions so they can solve public problems.

The difference is not merely one of curriculum or institutional branding. It raises a harder question about civic competence: what capacities can higher education realistically cultivate, for whom, and toward what ends?

Jenna Storey framed the current expansion of civic programs against that question. The Alliance for Civics in the Academy, founded in 2024 and formally launched in January 2025, began with three propositions: colleges have a responsibility to offer civic education; faculty should intentionally engage competing arguments on contested political questions; and civic education should be a shared intellectual activity organized around texts and conversation.

The institutional growth is substantial. Storey cited new programs launching in 2026 at Denison University, the University of Cincinnati, and NYU, alongside expanding schools of civic thought at public universities. The Alliance itself grew from roughly 20 members to more than 200, while the Institute for Citizens and Scholars’ presidents coalition grew from 15 institutions to 125 across 36 states over two years.

But the expansion does not resolve what civic education should be. At Bard College, Roosevelt Montás is trying to revive a common, liberal education for undergraduates. At Johns Hopkins, William Howell is building a professional School of Government and Policy intended to produce people capable of improving institutions under conditions of disagreement, uncertainty, and public distrust.

Both reject the view that civic life can be improved by technical expertise alone. Their difference lies in the scope of the educational task. Montás wants a baseline for citizenship available to every student. Howell is building a school for people who will enter government and policy work, while insisting that professional training itself must include the habits of judgment usually associated with liberal education.

The shared question underneath those models is not whether students should learn useful skills. It is whether an education directed toward action can avoid asking what kinds of action, institutions, and outcomes are worth pursuing.

Howell describes the Johns Hopkins project in deliberately practical terms. Its purpose is to help build more effective institutions that solve public problems. The school will judge institutions not primarily by procedure, he said, but by whether they actually deliver what they claim to deliver. If outcomes fall short, the inquiry turns to institutional design: how governing arrangements shape governing performance.

That orientation can sound like a straightforward commitment to problem-solving. But Howell does not treat public problems as technical puzzles with politically neutral answers. Policies and institutions carry normative content. They reflect judgments about whose interests count, which harms warrant intervention, which risks are acceptable, and what a public institution is for.

Montás put the distinction sharply. Results-oriented education generally begins with an assumed account of a good and asks how to achieve it. Liberal education keeps the prior question open: what is the good, and which goods deserve pursuit?

For Montás, that inquiry is “anterior” to action-oriented education, not an alternative to it. A society cannot choose between thinking about ends and acting on them. It must do both. The danger is that a professional education can inherit its ends without examining them, treating effectiveness as sufficient even where the desired outcome remains disputed.

Howell agreed that graduate students should not regard reflection on political theory, moral commitments, or institutional ends as something completed in undergraduate courses and then set aside. People working in government will need to keep reading, questioning, and revising their judgments. The purpose is not to produce perpetual seminar participants unable to act. It is to prepare people to see more deeply into the decisions they must make: not only the immediate policy choice, but the people affected by it, the institutional precedents it creates, and the later disputes it may shape.

That is why Howell rejected a simple opposition between first principles and pragmatism. Johns Hopkins will not begin by identifying a fixed set of correct principles from the American founding and deriving all institutional conclusions from them. But it will not embrace “raw pragmatism,” either: a model that sees a failure or harm and offers the quickest available remedy.

Its pragmatic orientation is a commitment to taking consequences seriously. Institutions materially affect people’s lives, and a school of government should ask whether policies work as claimed. Yet assessing consequences properly requires more than attention to the immediate transaction. First principles may come from the American founding, democratic theory, republican political theory, law, philosophy, or disagreement among people working from different disciplines. The task is to put those sources into conversation with institutional performance.

Howell’s example was artificial intelligence. Questions about how to govern AI, or govern with it, cannot be settled by expertise in algorithms alone. They involve uncertainty about the technology’s capacities, harms, opportunities, and threats. They also concern power, normative evaluation, institutional design, law, sociology, political theory, and philosophy. A school preparing people to decide which institutions should regulate AI, or how existing institutions should use it, needs computer scientists. It also needs thinkers who can identify the political and moral stakes that technical expertise by itself cannot resolve.

Montás’s Chang Chavkin Center for Liberal Education and Civic Life begins from a criticism of what general education often means in undergraduate curricula. Students are commonly required to take courses outside their intended major, usually introductory courses in established disciplines. Faculty teach within their specialties; students choose courses they expect to find interesting or manageable.

The arrangement may be administratively convenient, Montás said, but it often lacks a guiding account of what general education is supposed to form. It does not necessarily ask what an educated student in a free democratic society should know, be able to do, or be prepared to contribute to collective self-government.

The center’s mission is to help institutions reorganize general education around a more intentional model. Montás identifies four features.

First, courses should be small and discussion-based. Liberal education and civic education are not simply bodies of information that students can absorb in lecture halls. They are “dialogic” and conversational practices requiring close interaction among students and teachers.

Second, students should study primary texts of major cultural significance. Such texts offer a route into the historical grounding of public arguments and the enduring questions people confront about how to live.

Third, general education should create a common intellectual experience. Faculty should decide together which texts, debates, and prompts belong at the center of every student’s education. That decision requires professors to think beyond disciplinary ownership and ask what a student needs as a citizen and human being, not merely as a future specialist.

Finally, the courses should not be disciplinary courses repackaged as a core. They should cross history, literature, philosophy, political theory, and other fields in order to address the questions from which those fields emerge.

At Bard, the centerpiece is a required, year-long First-Year Seminar. Classes are capped at 16 students and taught by faculty from across departments and divisions. Students read common texts at the same time across disciplines and genres. The fall term is anchored by Plato’s Republic. Montás described teaching the text to first-year students during their first weeks at college as a particular privilege.

The curriculum is not a straightforward chronological survey. Its design instead embodies the center’s model: common reading, close discussion, major texts, and inquiry not reducible to a single discipline. Although the center is based at Bard, Montás’s project is broader. He wants to support other colleges and universities that seek to make liberal education central to the undergraduate experience.

He grounds that effort in the older meaning of liberal education: education suited to a free person rather than education narrowly tailored to a productive function. In ancient Athens, he said, citizens of a direct democracy were expected to legislate, sit on juries, serve in the military, and hold office. They needed skills of listening, speaking, debating, persuasion, and nuanced judgment. They also needed concrete knowledge: how taxation, sanitation, or military organization worked.

Modern representative democracy does not eliminate this need. It broadens it. If government rests on the equal standing and consent of the governed, then civic education cannot be confined to a small professional class.

Montás does not mean that liberal education should manufacture a predetermined political outcome, nor that it should be pursued only because democracy needs it. Liberal education includes the pursuit of knowledge and cultivation for their own sake. Someone shaped by it might choose a contemplative life or withdraw from public life altogether. That remains, in his account, a legitimate outcome.

But democracy depends on citizens capable of developing the knowledge, dispositions, and judgment required for collective self-government. Liberal education is not exhausted by civic utility, yet democratic life cannot proceed well without a population able to deliberate, evaluate competing claims, and take part in common rule.

Howell’s School of Government and Policy is being built from the ground up at Johns Hopkins. It will be the university’s tenth major school, located at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., a few blocks from Capitol Hill. The school is hiring faculty and building its leadership team, with plans to admit students to its inaugural flagship master’s degree a year before they matriculate in fall 2028.

For Howell, the opportunity was not simply to add another public-policy program. It was to rethink what such a school can do in a period when governing institutions face distrust and contempt, and when higher education itself has often struggled to establish meaningful partnerships beyond the university.

The school’s focus on institutional performance does not reduce its educational program to program evaluation, public administration, or economics, though those fields will be represented. Howell also named philosophy, sociology, law, and political theory. The rebuilding of institutions requires people who can work with those who disagree with them profoundly, rather than merely refine the preferences of their own professional or political group.

Pluralism, in this account, is not an ornamental commitment to intellectual diversity. It is a condition of governing. People who seek to change institutions will work amid polarized conflict, partial information, and uncertainty. They need technical competence, but they also need to recognize that their own understanding of a problem is incomplete and that others may disagree about a policy’s purposes in ways that are legitimate rather than merely obstructive.

Howell qualified Montás’s broadest claim about liberal education and democracy. Looking at the American founding as a political scientist, he noted that the system of separated powers was designed in part around expectations of ignorance, irrationality, self-interest, and imperfect virtue among the public and among officeholders. A constitutional order must be able to govern through those failures. It cannot be premised on universal civic excellence.

That leaves live questions about how much liberal education is required, for whom, and where it has its most direct effects. But Howell argued that liberal formation is indispensable for people who will redesign institutions. They will face hard problems for which information is necessarily incomplete. They will need to reason, exercise judgment, understand the normative content of their choices, and sustain commitment to difficult work even when consensus is unavailable.

The alternative is an impoverished account of professional education: train students to negotiate, evaluate programs, and apply technical tools, then assume they are ready to govern. Howell does not dismiss those skills. He calls them good and necessary. His objection is to treating them as enough.

Politics and government, Montás added, are themselves unusually open-ended forms of specialization. Physics, medicine, chemistry, and architecture are bounded fields in ways that politics is not. Politics may concern military affairs, environmental problems, theology, philosophy, law, or the organization of collective activity. The study of government is therefore inherently broad, calling for intellectual ability, character, reflection, empathy, and psychological attunement as well as technical knowledge.

Montás locates one obstacle to civic renewal in learned cynicism. Young people do not simply arrive at college jaded, he said. They learn cynicism from politicians and often encounter it again from faculty.

The institutional example faculty provide matters. Professors may affirm pluralism, debate, and exposure to different views, Montás said, while refusing to enter a conversation about a common syllabus or a shared judgment about what students should learn. Students see that contradiction. They learn as much from how faculty conduct institutional life as from what faculty say in class.

A common seminar organized around difficult texts can model something different: disagreement without disengagement, inquiry without the assumption that every question has an easy answer, and a shared intellectual task that does not require participants to abandon their convictions.

Montás described reading Socrates’ address to the Athenian jury with Bard first-year students. Socrates asks whether Athenians are ashamed to pursue wealth, reputation, and honor without giving thought to wisdom, truth, and the best possible state of the soul. Montás said students respond to that challenge. They want to hear that the pursuit of wealth, reputation, and honor is not the only available way to organize a life, and that values independent of those pursuits deserve serious attention.

For him, the classroom is therefore not simply a place to communicate information about citizenship. It is a place to unteach habits of jadedness by making a different kind of discourse and inquiry available in practice.

The practical advice Montás and Howell offered to people considering new civic initiatives follows from the same premise. Montás urged them to find like-minded people: academics whose own lives were changed by a teacher, a text, or an intellectual experience, and who retain an appetite for creating that kind of experience for others.

Howell added that some potential collaborators may not recognize their readiness for such a project while they remain in comfortable, well-rewarded positions. A credible opportunity for purpose-driven renewal can reveal a hunger that was not previously visible. The work of building an institution, in that sense, begins by making an alternative imaginable enough that others are willing to help create it.