Countering The Decline of Civic Knowledge | Justin Dyer

On this episode of Anchored, Soren is joined by Justin Dyer, Dean of the School of Civic Leadership and professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin. They discuss some of the benefits and resources that come with big, public universities like UT. They dive into the development and purpose of UT’s new civic honors major and School of Civic Leadership. They conclude by discussing the decline of general civic knowledge and some of the educational reasons for it. 

Transcript

Soren Schwab - CLT (00:00.76)
Welcome back to the Anchored Podcast, the official podcast of the Classic Learning Test. My name is Soren Schwab, VP of Partnerships here at CLT, and today we're joined by Justin Dyer. Justin Dyer is Dean of the School of Civic Leadership, Professor of Government, and Jack G. Taylor Regents Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Dyer writes and teaches in the field of American political thought, jurisprudence, and constitutionalism with an emphasis on the perennial philosophical tradition of natural law.

He is the author or editor of eight books and numerous articles, essays, and book reviews. His most recent book with Cody Cooper is called The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics, Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding. Previously, he was professor of political science at the University of Missouri, where he served as the founding director of the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, a signature academic center for the study of American political thought and history.

After attending the University of Oklahoma on a wrestling scholarship, he completed his MA and PhD in government at the University of Texas at Austin, and I'm so delighted to have him on the show today. Good morning, Dr. Dyer.

Justin Dyer (01:09.095)
Good morning, thanks for having me.

Soren Schwab - CLT (01:10.772)
Absolutely. We always start the Anchored podcast by talking about our guests own educational formation, their journey. So talk to us a little bit about your K -12 experience and beyond.

Justin Dyer (01:21.211)
I grew up, I was a public school kid all the way through and grew up going to public schools just south of Kansas City and really didn't have a strong interest in academics. They were important enough, but for strictly utilitarian reasons, know, parents wanted me to get a good job someday. And so I had not really been thinking about education in a kind of intellectual formation way until I was an undergraduate in college. And I chose the University of Oklahoma to

be on the wrestling team there. And when I was looking at schools, that was the one consideration. Where could I go to wrestle and who had the best team? And I ended up at the University of Oklahoma. Had a great experience. I'm glad I did that. But really just fell into this academic vocation through a class I had as an undergrad. And a lot of people in my situation, university professors, end up here because they had a professor who they really loved the class.

somebody mentored them and spent some time and attention helping them to think about their academic vocation. And that was true for me. I was a business major when I first arrived. I was taking business classes. And then just for fun, I took this class called Foundations of American Politics. And in that class, we read political sermons of the founding era and the constitutional debates and the Federalist Papers, Anti -Federalist Papers, the Lincoln -Douglas debates, Tocqueville, Frederick Douglass.

those kinds of sources. And I loved it. I thought that's what political science was. And this teacher had encouraged me to think about graduate school. And so I switched my major and ended up majoring in political science. And I had a lot of great teachers actually at the University of Oklahoma and had courses on foreign policy and constitutional law and political theory and American political thought. Ended up then at the arch rival University of Texas for graduate school and did a PhD in the government department here.

And in that program, you could specialize in political theory as one subfield and public law as another. And so my areas of interest were in American constitutional law, legal philosophy, natural law theory in particular, and then also on political philosophy and the history of political thought. So I was able to combine all those interests together in a PhD program and writing a dissertation on natural law and the antislavery constitutional tradition. all of the

Justin Dyer (03:45.007)
arguments that you get in the 19th century in the US about whether the Constitution is pro -slavery or anti -slavery. My dissertation looks at how the animation or the animating principle of the anti -slavery argument, the argument that the Constitution is anti -slavery, really hinged on principles of natural law. And so that was what I did in graduate school and then shortly after that started a position at the University of Missouri.

Soren Schwab - CLT (04:09.112)
Yeah, fascinating. you mentioned while at the University of Oklahoma, you kind of stumbled into this class. So you're still young. Were there a lot of core classes that you had to take at the University of Oklahoma? Was that something that you were exposed to? it really just you ended up taking that class and in a way that changed everything?

Justin Dyer (04:29.573)
In a way that changed everything, and I'm not sure even why I ended up taking that class other than it sounded and looked interesting and probably fulfilled a credit. We had general education requirements. so freshman year, like a lot of places at big state universities, you're satisfying distribution requirements. And so I took a English composition class, microeconomics, macroeconomics, intro to US history, all of those kinds of general courses. And so I did take those. It wasn't a coherent core curriculum.

you know, it was a distribution. But among those, I ended up taking this class on a kind of introduction to American political thought. And that really did reorient my relationship with academics. I changed my major, loved my classes and spent a lot of time and attention in the classroom while I was at the University of Oklahoma. Had I not done that, I probably would have been a business major and gone to law school.

Soren Schwab - CLT (05:21.708)
Yeah, interesting. mean, what when you think about that professor impacting you and now you're impacting so many, mean, that is just fascinating to think about when you you describe the class. mean, to our listeners, it probably sounds like, wow, that could be a class at like a classical or liberal arts college. At that point, were you aware of this liberal arts tradition, classical movement, or was it really just

You were exposed to it, but you weren't really aware of it.

Justin Dyer (05:53.213)
not aware of it, exposed to it. I, you know, thinking back on it, had I not taken that class, there really would have been no reason for me to read those texts. And I could have gone through K to 12 and gone through college and got into law school and gone out and done some work in the world without ever having really been exposed to the Federalist Papers and Tocqueville's Democracy in America and the constitutional debates in any serious kind of way.

And so that was real gift to me. And I think it's important. One of the things I took away from that was how important it would be for students, whatever their vocations, if they go on to business or law or engineering or medicine, to be able to be exposed to those ideas and those texts and just to better appreciate their own civilization and constitutional heritage.

Soren Schwab - CLT (06:38.956)
Yeah, I'm wondering, did that in any way shape either your perception or your approach to different fields as well? obviously, we're in political thought, but that did that change your perception of literature or music? Or did that come come later?

Justin Dyer (06:54.811)
I don't know that it had that kind of orienting effect just because you end up specializing and taking a major. So I changed my major to political science. And in retrospect, I probably would have done things differently because I was wrestling and I had eligibility left. I did a master's degree in public administration also when I was going through the program and thinking back on it, actually, if I could do it again, I would have double majored in classics or this program that Oklahoma has called letters. It's a major that is a blant.

It's a liberal arts major, but it blends philosophy and literature and history and political science together into one major. And I remember hearing about that as a freshman. A couple of students told me they were lettering and major in majoring in letters. And I thought, what kind of degree is that? That sounds very odd, very elementary, right? They're learning their letters. I really had no, no real concept of what a classical liberal education looked like and still feel like I'm playing catch up, but had had a kind of

Soren Schwab - CLT (07:53.164)
Yeah, that's fun. I remember the first time I was exposed to in high school, the humane letters class and I had the same. What are you mean? Inhumane letters? What are you mean letters? Well, I have to ask Dr. Dyer, as you probably know, know, at CLT, we've we've you know, we've been doing it for nine years now and we've been championing kind of the smaller liberal arts, many of the Christian colleges, I think partly right. Like some of them don't have the same marketing budget.

Justin Dyer (07:53.828)
Introduction by proxy.

Justin Dyer (08:04.659)
huh.

Soren Schwab - CLT (08:23.094)
at probably a UT Austin or Michigan, right? And they don't have the same brand recognition. But also, and I think the perception of many families is that public universities have changed. And I'm sure some of it is absolutely overblown that everything you read on Twitter is reality. But there's probably some truth to it as well. Now, you are at one of the flagship public universities in the country, along with maybe University of Michigan University, Florida.

University of Texas at Austin is a flagship university. Can you talk to our listeners a little bit about what would draw you to the university? And of course, you're employed there still. What makes it a special place?

Justin Dyer (09:04.925)
Yeah, public university is all I know. Public education is all I know. So was public through K -12. I came to UT for grad school, went to the University of Missouri, and then recently came back to UT. And so these big state schools, that's the world that I inhabit. UT is a special place. I had a great experience in graduate school here. I loved the government department, loved my professors and the cohort that I went through with. I love Austin, love being back here.

The flagship university of the state of Texas, think Texas is extremely important right now culturally and economically for the future of the United States. And I think the university of Texas being the flagship has a unique place of influence in our state and in our nation. And so I think that's an important place. And it's also the side of some important educational reform efforts going on right now. And I think we're part of that trying to build something new. And so I came here to start an Institute called the Civitas Institute.

That was launched in the summer of 2022. And then just about a year into that project, the Board of Regents here asked us to create a new school called the School of Civic Leadership. And those two things now are part of this broader effort. The School of Civic Leadership houses the Civitas Institute, and we're admitting students into the school for the first time in fall 25. We'll offer a civics honors major for students who come to the University of Texas.

And it is a unique curriculum that walks them through the Western intellectual tradition, the principles of American constitutionalism, and equips them with the kind of quantitative skills that they'll need to interpret and use data in the modern world. And so we think it's a unique blend of different aspects of what kind of education would be helpful for somebody in a leadership position in our society.

Soren Schwab - CLT (10:42.419)
Mm

Soren Schwab - CLT (10:49.166)
It's absolutely fascinating when I first heard about it. I remember Jeremy and I were just, yes, yes, it is so needed. So talk to us a little bit about the timeline. So you were asked to be the founding director of the Civitas Institute. At that point, you did not know that this will turn into something even larger. Was it initially supposed to be kind of a university think tank, so to speak, that kind of institute without students per se that take classes there?

Justin Dyer (11:18.631)
Yeah, it was a little bit ambiguous. It was a university -based research organization. And a lot of what we were doing were the kinds of things that centers and institutes on campus often do. And so we were building research projects, collaborations with faculty, convening conferences, housing a speaker series and seminar series, but then also trying to provide educational opportunities for students. And so we were

the lead partner on a minor in politics, philosophy and economics. And we were partnering with departments on campus to hire faculty. But there's a limit to that model and how far you can go without the ability to hire your own faculty and house your own degree program and admit your own students. And so I think that was the new innovation was the creation of a new school within UT. We have now 19 schools or colleges at the University of Texas. We are the 19th. It's not.

very often that a new school is created at the university. And so it's a big moment and a lot of responsibility and lot of expectations for what we'll be able to do. And we're excited to be able to take on that role.

Soren Schwab - CLT (12:19.63)
I mean, just to emphasize the gravity of this, mean, starting new schools is where, starting new school in the humanities, in particular, when a lot of universities are gutting their humanities, their English departments, their philosophy departments, their government departments, even more so. And so that gives us hope. And so talk to us, you mentioned first class will be fall of 2025. They will be students of the University of Texas at Austin, but then they will be taking

classes or even up to a major in civics at the school.

Justin Dyer (12:53.597)
When you apply to the University of Texas, when you're in high school, you select one of the schools or colleges to apply to. And so you're admitted not just to the university, but to one of the schools or colleges. And so students now can apply to the School of Civic Leadership and be admitted for Fall 25 admissions as majors within the school. And the major that we'll offer is a civics honors major. And so small honors program oriented around the question of

civics, which is the study of the rights and duties of citizenship. And so broadly that encompasses what we are offering for our students. In addition to that, we'll have a civics minor and we already have the philosophy, politics and economics minor. And there are a lot of opportunities for students across the university to take courses with us, to do a minor with us and to be involved in the intellectual life of the school, even if they're not one of our majors.

Soren Schwab - CLT (13:48.206)
So maybe for a lot of our listeners are either homeschool families or classical Christian school. So probably kind of a smaller school setting. And I went to a large research university before I transferred to Hillsdale and it's a different experience. I think what I felt at the University of Saarland in Germany was that I sometimes felt lost. I didn't feel like I had a community. What you're describing though seems like it's a school within a school, obviously of the larger university.

And so it will have kind of this communal feel and aspect for the students that maybe are worried a little bit of going to the big school.

Justin Dyer (14:25.117)
Yeah, I think so. We've got 40 ,000 undergraduate students and another over 14 ,000 graduate students at UT. And so it's a big place, a lot of students. What goes with having a big place with a lot of students are there are a lot of opportunities and more opportunities at a place like the University of Texas than other places. The trick, I think, or the key is being able to carve out a community within that larger university and then also have a strategy for which classes you take and which professors you connect with.

But there are some great professors on campus. There are some great classes to take all around the university. And a lot of our departments, because of how large of a university we are, are much, much bigger than departments as you get in other places. And so you have a wide range of interesting people with different areas of expertise. And so it's really being deliberate and strategic about how you engage with the university and how you find a community within it. The School of Civic Leadership offers that.

That will be, I think at steady state, we're hoping for a few hundred majors within the university and then hopefully many more students taking classes and being involved in our minor. But it creates a very small school feel within the larger university. The other thing I might say for parents and students who are thinking about a big state university as opposed to say a small liberal arts college, I don't have the experience to compare it to. But my own sense of things is that there's no real silver bullet.

that you can carve out a very great experience at either place. And you can also have a really negative experience for whatever reason at either place. But we do have students at UT who come from classical Christian high schools or classical charter high schools, have a great experience at UT. have, there's a Christian fraternity, there are Christian sorority groups, Christian study houses. Not that all of our students are Christians, but for those kinds of students who are looking for a small

Soren Schwab - CLT (16:03.352)
Okay.

Justin Dyer (16:23.387)
community of like -minded people, they can find it at a place like UT and have a great educational experience.

Soren Schwab - CLT (16:29.806)
Yeah, and one of my good friends, mutual friend Dan Peterson from the Regent School of Austin, the headmaster there. I mean, he speaks so highly of the university and of you and the program and it sounds like they're probably going to be sending some students your way in the next few

Justin Dyer (16:43.517)
I think so, yeah, I hope so. And I've got three kids who are all at Regents. so, know, my wife and I are Republic school kids all the way through, but we chose a classical Christian K -12 experience for our kids. And I think that's important. And you had mentioned universities changing. I think K -12 has changed quite a bit over the last 20, 30 years. And so, you know, we were looking for that, that kind of experience for our kids, but I'd be delighted if they ended up at UT or a place like it.

Soren Schwab - CLT (17:09.774)
Yeah, yeah. Well, this is not news to you. There seems to be an alarming trend, of a decline of students, historical civic knowledge. Just to reach you a couple, and you've probably seen some of these surveys, the Annenberg Public Policy Center's annual survey said that one third of American adults cannot name the three branches of government. 17 % can name any branch at all. Likewise, only 5 % of Americans could name all five freedoms guaranteed under the First Amendment.

And then one US Chamber of Commerce survey found that more than 70 % of Americans failed a basic test of civic literacy on, the basic functions of our democracy. Alarming, certainly. Could you point to, is there a certain point in time, a change in education, educational policy and ideology that has led to this decline or has it kind of gradually been happening over the last decades?

Justin Dyer (18:06.461)
It's a great question. I don't know the answer to it actually in terms of trend lines. There's a cottage industry of people bemoaning the state of education that goes back 150 years. This has been a long time where we're worried about education. Dorothy Sayers was worried about education in England in the 1940s. And of course, Alan Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind in 1980s. And we've been talking about this for a long time. The studies that you show though are real. These surveys.

Soren Schwab - CLT (18:10.402)
Mm

Justin Dyer (18:35.261)
demonstrate a profound lack of knowledge among the American public with respect to just really basic civic questions. And my sense of things, I don't know the timeline on this, but my sense of things is that this is very much a K to 12 problem and issue is not exclusively something that higher education has neglected. Although I think higher education has neglected it as well. At the higher education level, our students already come in with a profound ignorance about American institutions.

in our history. In terms of what we could be doing and I think what we ought to be doing was this movement I had mentioned that civics is the study of the rights and duties of citizenship. The actual word civics is an American innovation and it comes in the 1880s in the United States. And so it combines this Latin word that means citizen and a Greek suffix meaning field of study and comes into usage after the Civil War. And I think it's a moment in which people are very much

alert to the challenges of sustaining Republican government and the need for education to sustain Republican government. And so this new field of civics emerges and you have really prominent people in the United States who are part of it. Joseph Wharton, when he gave his gift to create the Wharton School at Penn, wanted it to be a civics education for business leaders. And it was originally focused not exclusively on K -12, but also on higher education. And so one of the questions we've asked is how can we get back to that?

primary purpose of public higher education. When a lot of these public universities were started, including at the very beginning of the Republic at places like the University of Virginia, the core mission of the university was to train people for positions of leadership in a self -governing republic. And so they were very attentive to the need for public higher education for just that reason. And we've been thinking about how we've gotten away from that mission at our universities.

Not all for nefarious reasons. Some of it is just hyper specialization. Some of it is government funding of research. Some of it is just mission creep and mission drift from the university's perspective. But I think there's a real role here to come back and really focus on some core and basic ideas and courses on American constitutionalism, Western civilization, the ammiting principles of our Republic and the history of self -government in the United States. So that's what we're trying to do.

Soren Schwab - CLT (21:00.226)
Yeah, I mean, you mentioned K -12 and I know in some conversations I've had with institutions, higher education, they said, well, there's no demand. And probably true to some extent, right? And if it is also true that many K -12 schools are really not teaching history anymore, let alone civics, it's more of a kind of the social studies, social sciences, right? Also, you know, that's just me personally speaking. think if you're interested in history and then you're

you're getting taught the entire time that your country is fundamentally racist and irredeemable. It also probably doesn't inspire you to want to pursue that in higher education. But what you're doing is probably both in a way of response to an increase in at least an interest in this. And I think it is driven by the classical liberal arts kind of renewal in K -12. But in a way, you're also creating demand, right? If a flagship university like yours is saying, no, no, this is important. And I commend your

Board of Regents and your leadership to say, no, this is important for our country. And maybe it's not going to have the initial demand that maybe the business school has, right? But it is important for our country. I mean, that's encouraging.

Justin Dyer (22:11.205)
Yeah. And students don't know what they don't know. When I was an undergraduate student, I didn't know that I would have this kind of interest in this material. And so some of it is exposing students to these ideas. And the other is thinking about what kind of vocational end there is after this kind of study. And there was a article by the Harvard Business Review now a few years back called The Business Case for Civics. And there has been a renewed interest among people in the private sector and the business community in

civic awareness and knowledge and I think a recognition that there's a profound problem with civic ignorance even at the most elite schools. And so we are remedying a problem that is not just about education for its own sake, although of course it is about that. We want to have students have an appetite for the true and the good and the beautiful, but we also want them to be prepared for their lives after they leave the university and to be able to have respectable vocations and meaningful work and be able to contribute to their communities and their families. And I think this kind of education helps them do that.

Soren Schwab - CLT (23:11.5)
Yeah, yeah. Well, let our listeners know if they want to find out more about the Civitas Institute, about the new school, where they best go, website maybe.

Justin Dyer (23:21.789)
civicleadership .utexas .edu and you can find out about our educational programs. There's a link there to the Civitas Institute as well.

Soren Schwab - CLT (23:29.535)
We'll be sure we drop that in the show notes as well. This has been absolutely fascinating, Dr. Dyer. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with our listeners. I do of course have a final question that we ask everyone in our podcast, the most difficult one of them all. Is there one book or one text that you can point to that has been just impactful in your life? Maybe a text you come back to often.

Justin Dyer (23:52.465)
You know, I didn't mention this in talking about my own educational experience and formative years, but when I was a high school student, I was in an English class and the teacher gave us a very modest assignment, which was to go to the library and pick out any book and reading. He just sent us to the library to read something. And I ended up seeing C .S. Lewis's name on the spine of one of the books and recognized it just from the Chronicles of Narnia, books that we had read when we were younger.

And so I pulled it down and it was mere Christianity. And when I read mere Christianity, for some reason, it just clicked with me. And the introductory part, one of the first lectures, this book for listeners who don't know it comes as a series of BBC radio broadcast talks during World War II. And Lewis is asked to reintroduce the British public to the beliefs of Christians. And he begins, rather than diving into Christian doctrine, he begins with natural law.

and the natural law tradition. so that whole first part about natural law really got my mind interested in that topic. And that was when I was an undergrad and I took this class called Foundations of American Politics. That was the connection that I made between all these sources that I was reading.

at the American founding era and all of the references to things like the laws of nature and nature's God. And then thinking about that book that had originally sparked my interest in natural law, reading C .S. Lewis in high school. So that has really set a whole research agenda for me and a lot of the work that I do in the academy and had an occasion even with a friend to write a book on C .S. Lewis called C .S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law, exploring that in a kind of more detail than probably I should have. that...

was all really set in motion just from that one assignment from an English teacher in high school.

Soren Schwab - CLT (25:42.126)
I might have to pick that one up. As a company, always read a book a quarter. Right now we're reading Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, but I think next up might be Abolition of Man. of course, in that Lewis deals with the Tao and natural law. Fascinating. Well, Dr. Dyer, this has been an absolute delight. Thank you so much for joining. Again, we're here with Justin Dyer, who's the Dean of the School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas at Austin. Thanks for all the great work you're doing,

Justin Dyer (25:54.337)
yeah. Yeah.

Justin Dyer (26:12.359)
Soren, thank you.