like i teach adrian with other people. we have time i'm afraid. it ends with the constitution. let's think our panelists. [applause]

all right, everybody. let's get started. welcome back. the american enterprise institute wants to thank you very much, all of you for being here. i know it's quite a ways to go over a lot of people. getting a sense of the community thinking about these questions we are enormously grateful for it. i also do, getting started just want to say thanks for getting this together showing extraordinary leadership and i do want to give another hand for the work that they are doing.

[applause] there's simply enough to do i think and in some ways it is related to the technical subject of the session that is also convenient because i think a lot of the questions that have been in some respect opened up and maybe less open has to do with the fit between the university and civics education and if thereare questions to think thrh whether and how this project of civics education and 21st education america fits in higher education and what it means to think about it in the context of the modern university and all that it is. we are going to do that through

conversation. we are grateful to have them here and we will enter into a conversation. peter for a lot of us when you think about civics and higher education this has been the case for decades. that's only halfway how, i mean, it. he is the lincoln professor at the college of civic life at the university and he teaches political science and philosophy. he spent an entire career to bring scholarly work to bear on ways of strengthening american civic life. but more than anything on civics education and helping us to

think about the various ways that it could be part of what higher education means. the author of many books including most recently what should we do with serious civic life 2022 and it's a book worth your while. the ut austin school of leadership and professor of government that is of course one of the new civic schools that popped up in the universities at a number of states so the question of how civics fit into the life of every university is for him if day-to-day question a variety of questions related to the subject with national law thinking and the political tradition and many other questions that have to do with the way in which the creative questions we think about in higher education bear on our

civic life. both of them lately have been thinking and writing a lot about. i was thinking when we were all naïve and hopeful, which, i mean, 9:00 this morning, and the story give a lovely introduction of the day and said if there is a case that can be made for a new discipline and he looked over at me and i give you a thumbs up because i know my job and i'm not going to talk as much about the tactics within

it's good to create a new department. i will talk about it in two ways. it's a tangible program that gives you something to think about concretely and it's also a nascent and not very big but meaningful intellectual movement that is mostly very international with some offshoots in the u.s. it is a reform movement and a kind of gap where the other

disciplines are not doing what we need and the diagnosis is they are primarily asking why do people act in the ways that they do and the kind of generalized sense and how might their behavior change if things about their world change? i'm going to say all this stuff and you can disagree but i'm going to just plow through my claims so it's about human behavior, why people behave the way they do. it's much more about meaning and what is meant by the products of human mind.

the primary question and political philosophy is how should things be, good question. all these are good questions. it's focused on either the human life and what makes a person good or what should i do and how should i lie to the secret service, secret police at my door, this kind of question. public policy ends up being the question of what should be done and that can translate into the question of what the government should do which is included in public policy but not with the e government should or shouldn't do.

i'm going to take a few minutes to talk about each one in turn. the question is what should we do because it's not to change it, the good things about the world is also action. sometimes choosing not to act is a good thing but the ultimate purpose of a citizen in the civic community is to act or refrain from acting and there's a kind of intellectual discipline involved in acting for the question is what should we do because it has a great tendency to slip away in different directions. it slips away into the abstract

and what should we do is a question at all scales for the very concrete group but also at the scale i'm interested where there's an actual we like the people in this room if we took that seriously we would have to do things like figure out how to organize ourselves to make a decision otherwise it doesn't really we. the question is what should we do. the questions are serious citizens even in an abstract way when they get into an actual decision they become very

convinced and i know that this is a bit of a stretch but it's my hope for saying the facts matter, inclination matters to decide what we should do how much things cost and what the probability and success would be and in some ways hope for the humanities. why do we always think about what we should do and what if somebody else got their food on the back of our neck what if somebody else called the problem and have the resources to solve the problem and i think my basic answers are twofold even if the people because the problem they are not going to change unless somebody tries to get them to

change and if somebody compels them to change and you make a request or demand and its effect of doing but also because there's something not just something that intrinsically and deeply rewarding no matter how you are situated so it's not just a means but it's also living a better life to be part of communities that asked what should we do. you find it connected to a lot of other questions so for example, who am i is inescapable because you do come in as a person or redefine that person is a slippery concept and also the groups hope constitutive you are so you end up thinking about who i am to think about what should we do. it can be quite a complex matter and as you can be complicit members of the group you don't

admit you are part of and also think you are part of a group but nobody pays attention to you and you are not really part of the group so what groups or un is an ongoing question answer those questions act and i think they are perennial. but if we focus on the moment of what should we do a specific moment with three large three lf questions were topics, the group destroying to decide what to do in fact is going to think about the problems in private. taxes are too high or schools need to be saved that's what they are going to talk about but there's another layer of problems which are perennial and intrinsic in the group so one set of questions is how to create a group that functions. there will be quite a challenge of turning the community or network into a group and that

will involve things like the leaders in creating a budget and getting a stream of money and those are a set of questions and they are not easy and you don't learn them automatically. i have a much more complex version but a simple one would be you have to think through the kind of norms and rules to make any kind of group function and that is differentiated depending on the group. shorthand for the very positive affects if it is invaluable we are going to disagree about the means and ends and people today have been terribly polite so how do we think about that at the

level of talking and listening to other people so what is the appropriate kind of thing to say and how to reorganize institutions for discourse. u.s. congress is another and a newspaper is another. how do we organize and structure the institutions. there are these other people in our group and don't want to become a pretty much devoted to civic education and higher ed. in terms of curriculum we think about the study and appreciative moments as those things that organize against opposition and

especially the nonviolent strain in the social movements about nonviolence where you are in a functioning civil society and the nonviolent tradition they gifted resources about the topics so what would you emphasize civil rights movement would be at the very top of the list. we have a major teaching the courses left which connects to

the entrepreneurship. a number of students and they are all majors and civic studies. i'm also inviting the international movement not tremendously widespread but dozens of institutes of the studies for professors and civil society leaders.

a lot of thinking about this has come out of other countries and about and in interaction with il society leaders. mcmaster in canada. there's a lot of evidence about infiltrating other disciplines. that activity is underway. i also think it's going to stand

with interesting contrast. [applause] >> i didn't really know what i was going to study or do. when i took the class we read political sermons and pamphlets and the notes on the constitutions. i changed my major and i was

thinking about that and it introduced me to a lot of the questions that i was introduced to it in these texts thinking about who are we in who are we in the community with about the principles and what's right and just and how we live together as a community and how we constitute. it was my introduction and i'm grateful for having had that introduction. and i would not have been exposed to it had i not enrolled in that class it was by accident that i did that. one of the things i was introduced to ms. james wilson one of the forgotten american

founders. they served in the continental congress and was a delegate to the convention credited with the structure of article two he was one of only six men assigned both to the declaration of independence of constitution to get a good resume. george washington appointed him to the court and then in 1790 while he was on the supreme court the trustees at the college of philadelphia appointed him as the first professor of law. one of the contemporaneous newspaper accounts as the first lecture and a number of ladies

and gentlemen. they would be for american law and he understood it very broadly the constitutionalism and politics that it would be something like what had been for a generation of colonial lawyers but also didn't happen for wilson he died of malaria in 1977 at that time he had lost money and land speculation and spend time in prison while he was on the supreme court and he lived out his remaining days evading creditors. there's a broadway musical waiting to be written about wilson's life. [laughter] and i think we could ask who lives and dies and tells your

story. scholars are starting to tell us now and are interested in the idea that he had particularly in his lectures on law and of those lectures that wilson gave show a deep appreciation. in his inaugural lecture wilson made to claims to help guide the conversation next. it cannot become the object of love and lust they become the object of our knowledge and a second he said of law and liberty that they should in some measure and in some degree the study of every free citizen and every free man. every free citizen has duties to perform and rights to claim. in less than some measure and degree he knows he can never act

at just an independent part that was until 1885 that henry and of wendell claimed the term civics to describe the civics duties and citizenship for this will will higher education going back to the american experiment as george thomas has written a book about. the national university to educate the public's leaders and unite people from different parts of the country. george washington took up this idea in the inaugural message to congress. what do the more pressing on its legislator than to patronize the plan for communicating it to

those who want to be the guardians of the liberty of the country. some took up the idea of a public university at the state level. at the university of texas at austin which is chartered much earlier but americans after the civil war are talking about civics is a new discipline and the reason they are talking about civics combining this word for citizen and the greek suffix there's a reason why it is happening in that postwar period into the university of texas motto with apologies if he's

here we study at the guardian of the city. it's a rules translation from the first message in 1838 where he said the cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy and he went on to ask in a way that echoed how should we protect our rights if we do not comprehend them and the habit of enlightened reflection. william battle was a classical scholar and former resident tasked with designing the university of texas in the part of the 20th century and he put the motto and that emphasized sincerity and truth seeking in the mission and then in the top

field symbolizes study of the past that's accumulated wisdom and lessons and that is to discipline free and fair societies in the future. the reason it mirrors the state of texas the political community for which the university exists and after designing this for the flagship public university the motto incorporated in the field had once the justification of the university's existence in an ideal of its future so a question reflecting back on this is how we carry out this task and what do we envision and carry this forward. the answer we should reflect on

the moment and opportunity in a moment we should face head on, confidence in higher education is at historic lows in the spring of protests that we had i think that number is arguably lower and still declining. some of this is related to the perception that higher education has become an ideological monoculture closed to the full range of perspectives represented in our pluralistic society. whether or not you think that's

true that perception poses a challenge. for the voices in higher education over time there was an article for the national affairs a while back called the disappearing conservative professor and his research they found that conservatives make up only 4% of historians and literature professors in many departments that effectively mean that there are none and the disconnect between the public and universities with a very blue faculty on campus the disconnect has not been good for either one and at the same time these academic disciplines while they've become more ideologically homogenous have also become more and more

specialist. this is not necessarily bad. many of the disciplines of sophisticated methods. the body of knowledge is deeper with the questions they ask are more sophisticated but part of what constituted the broad civic education have been separated from each other into different disciplinary units or they've just dropped out altogether and not always for the various motives. there's just no one asking these questions were doing this work anymore. for the core tasks of civic education this is what our system board of regents asks our campus to do when they adopted a resolution directing the president to take steps to implement the new school of civic leadership. the resolution for the

comprehensive interdisciplinary program of research and equipping students and then in theknowledge and aptitudes necessary to lead a free society and it goes on to say providing foundational knowledge and critical thinking skills steep in the western tradition in the constitutional history and educating students in the values and principles of the society equipping them to be the next generation of leadership for the states and nation. this work is attractive to not only conservatives but conserving what is best and worth preserving and the political institutions with foundational knowledge to our students so that they can take responsibility for their world

and improve those for the next generation but it isn't that ties itself to the partisan mass. it must transcend that polarization not by being moderate or value free but by being something else altogether. for lack of a better word i started calling this partisan. before the partisan disagreements, we must be united by some common objects. this is a common object of love into something that james wilson picked up on in his first lecture on law if law and liberty is the object of our love they must first be objects of our knowledge.

it is to wield the good of the other and we must not deconstructed but make it better. but it can be made better resumes that it's open to critique. civic education must be committed in the pursuit of truth and not because we are neutral on the question of truth but because we actually put a stake in the question that these norms flow about the lost tools of learning.

they get to study all sorts of subjects into something that would continue long after the formal education and she concluded that the primary and the purpose of education would be to teach students how to think not what to think so it is i think with civic education we can turn to models of the past that to think about the foundations of our civic life and learn how to think about the foundations of our civic life and how to think about the responsibilities that fall on us as citizens but on the details we will disagree. that is a sign that we are free and thinking independently and that must be true of the new schools and institutes of thought so that's our moment, one of our opportunities. we've been given an opportunity and i think we have a responsibility now to build the schools and institutes in a way

that will be meaningful and lasting and be able to look back in 20, 25 years and longer and see this moment is a moment that was significant for higher education and of course this isn't happening in a vacuum. the universities in particular that have been busy on this front we have new schools and institutes in various states of development in arizona, florida, north carolina, utah, ohio and soon elsewhere so for broad thoughts about success and we can think through some of the details of that but the four major elements first we need to build within the structures and according to its norms and procedures we want to build within it. a second as

question. i'm tempted because i like what justin is doing and would like to be part of it and attempted to smooth over the differences but it's interesting to create a contrast so it's not an argument but it is a contrast. i think in my mind of the american republic it's form and history and traditions do fit into the larger picture because that is one that i for example and part of and also because it is a rich tradition that tells about the more generic issues for example the federalist papers that have a great text

textbook about how to form groups in general. to me it is a puzzle piece. i was involved in the project that they defined as a project about american history and civics. i think that is appropriate because our delete covertly the 50 u.s. states for the kind of puzzle piece of the american republic should be pretty big in the k-12 american curriculum, but i'm interested in example in ukraine. it's not the right puzzle piece for ukraine. this is a bit is situational. i think it's interesting how big of a piece of the puzzle.

a lot of our students are interested so i'm not sure, but one could make an argument that it should be a bigger piece than it is but conceptually i would take it as a super important example that is particularly important for those of us who are americans but not certain of the basic question. but that does get into an interesting question about how we think about traditions which has been talked about all day. i do value traditions a lot but i supposed to make a sharper contrast i am talking about a sort of analytic approach in which one takes on. i'm interested in a curriculum in which certain kinds of questions are treated generic.

there's ways in which there's a tradition but it's a different mindset. there's a bigger dose for social sciences and a cumulative research to figure out how to solve the problems in the coordination and that is different from the curriculum that is based on a bunch of great books and dialogue with each other. >> do you think what justin is describing is a part of that or the other way around

an older term of course civic is something that we know what to t civics as a field of study and it gets into the question for a citizen of commonwealth and within the regime so i think in order to ask, you have to know something about the regime that you are part of and then you get into the history of the principles of that regime and the question of what it means to be a good citizen versus a good man is an ancient question but then what it means to be a good person so you're measuring a critical aspect of that thinking to what extent you can be a good person in this regime as a good citizen that's not going to be true of every regime so it

becomes our history tradition into the story of america but that can take you all sorts of places. that can take you into the past because you have to know about the antecedents of america and studying classical history and classical philosophy along through the modern era into the american founding i think is a legitimate part of that. it then if you take the line forward you get the questions about america's relationship into the world and you've got to think about a global context of the founding. but the emphasis is often more particular than it is general. but there's a way that i think our project leads the civics and leadership in a way that a lot of peace institutes and schools are now putting those two things

together into the leadership component brings in some of what you're doing so if you want a question to begin with is what kind of education we want the leaders to have. but if you asked about the education at least some part of it is going to be thinking through questions on the dimension that you're talking about that won't necessarily be specific historical case studies but actual applied research and social science methods in thinking through all those questions. how do you go from there and then also the relative priority. >> it seems another is the centrality of the nationstate.

for the action in our particular society for the regime that seems not to be part of how your describing what you do. >> that is a good contrast. there are powerful thinkers that we think of in the regime and one of the authors a little stronger than she might she's thought there's no such thing as a state there's many different levels and structures from the micro to the macro.

but it's also a way in which it is for the present moment so we are not embedded in a regime. to me it becomes an example to what extent is it continuous over the 250 years because it sure looks different and not just because of the changes in the constitution or politics but the industrial revolution is at the same regime and that becomes a question but to find that it

has one is going to surprise you. >> is there a knowledge of your own tradition and object of love whether we have to know before we can belong are you assuming it needs to be inculcated before it's fair? >> it's a good question about whether it needs to be inculcated and i accept that, though i hope that would have been earlier. is there knowledge, absolutely, of all kinds. the diagram i showed is a bunch of questions to me those are lifelong learning questions and also a map of the research agenda so how do you create a trust inside of organizations, that is a person that has been studied so these have a huge

literature but it's also not going to be resolved because of changes when the social media collapses into the world changes so the agenda changes. what you need to learn is whatever we know at the present moment about how to solve the problems that are on my list plus the skills, and i'm talking about intellectual skills. but i would put some things most people wouldn't be so interested in. so game theory and the way that it generalizes across the different scales and contexts and collaboration. in your view there is a big we at the center that needs to be known and you emphasize knowledge. is there a way in which that can obstruct our understanding and vision at the end of the day are

we studying this thing we inherited so that we know it or is this a path toward something more like the real education instead of questions how oppressive are you letting that tradition be in the study that you described? >> it's a good question we've talked about between liberal education and civic education. i do think on the knowledge aspect as we thought through what the curriculum would look like we do want there to be a body of knowledge that the students are introduced to and that anybody that goes through a course of study on civics will be able to say that they were exposed to some core elements of what we think would constitute that body of knowledge and so at a very basic level if you go through and have a bachelors degree from that and you're at a job interview and they ask about the constitution, you should be able to say you read it and

thought about it for all of those kind of things we hoped we would be part of a broad civic education to that extent it also gets you into a liberal education. they all disagreed with each other but being introduced to the argument that had and then you're assuming the reasons they gave for the positions they had so it becomes a kind of liberal education by proxy where you are being introduced to all the things they are thinking about and others questions that end up being pretty weighty reading the

lincoln douglas debates those are big universal questions and embedded in a very particular historical moment so i think it does get you into that and the other aspect of the liberal education is the part about leadership. what kind of education do we want the future leaders to have andy liberal education done well is an education that's appropriate to free people so the idea that it prepares you for freedom and is worthy of your freedom is the kind of study that free people would engage in and it also prepares them for a kind of intellectual freedom and self-government. so to that i don't think civic education or liberal education are at odds were necessarily at odds. civic education in a different regime might be quite at odds with liberal education but i don't think it is in the u.s. >> at this moment in relation to

that challenge liberal education liberates the students from what is suppressing the students and there's certainly times when what oppresses students is an overbearing presence of what is his own. too much knowledge of your own the city is more or less what he was liberating students from and they needed to think through some things. they need to be liberated into kind of a universal understanding but maybe, and i wonder if this is what you are doing or not, they need to be liberated from a set of shared notions that are not familiar enough with the tradition.

students don't know as much as they should know. how much of you will learned in the last few years, we haven't learned that much. to ask an 18-year-old is to much. that's a little bit of the stereotype. i am in favor of more than that. i do like the idea of freedom and i think that one piece of freedom is not the freedom of a

complete individual against the society but rather the collective freedom of people and the freedom to associate and then do things that's the kind of freedom that also referring to de tocqueville is a global thing and that is the kind of freedom that is always at risk from oppression from the top and also their failure to be able to coordinate to do something collectively together so if we imagine it as non-restraint, that's not what i'm interested in. >> you can see how what he's doing would be as natural a fit for them. do you think this is something that everyone who comes into the university of texas often contributes? >> i would hope so. i get that question about

foreign students and to what extent. i do think it's an important thing for us to offer as a state university we have a certain obligation with citizens of the state and first and foremost supported by the state legislature supporting the education of students who would become leaders and those foreign students and i think that they would benefit from studying civics in the american context partly because it gives a broad appreciation for the states but also because it does get you into those questions that are perennial and how it's sorted out in the u.s. and you can apply that to different contractors and that comparative. a student that was in my constitutional law class and asked for a reading list, anything you want me to read, just let me know.

so it's an interesting question and very practical. i want to think about questions we have before we do that one more is what you're doing a critique of the existing disciplines and what is the relationship of this kind of civics education and the university to the educator department, the political science department? >> i think our existence is in a way and an implicit critique of the status quo. you're making the argument that there's something needed and by saying there's something needed, there is something lacking. and i think that we could answer that in multiple ways. one thing i mentioned earlier the specialization of the disciplines that they've gone in different directions but what constitutes a broad civic education has not been fully consumed in any one department,

so as an example of many political science departments are heavily quantitative in orientation and they have not asked some of these questions like i'm talking about the class that i took that i began with probably won't be taught in the future as new faculty come online and research interests take over what's being taught. that's not necessarily a criticism it's saying something is being left out. in economic history as another example you don't have a lot of people doing economic history in the econ departments or history departments or economic thought in political science departments so there's aspects of what would constitute a good civic education and if they are being taught it's isolated in different communities, so the promise of the new interdisciplinary unit is bringing those pieces together. now there is also the component i talked about before which is the perception and reality of the kind of ideological

monoculture and one promise of the schools and institutes is that you can help remedy that in a certain way partly because the kind of classes we are talking about and the kind of subjects taught are going to be attractive to right of center students and faculty and not exclusively and it doesn't need to be a right-wing version reacting against i think that is a bad idea but it's a kind of university with institutes of schools and university as a whole. do you worry about this intellectual diversity problem is that part of what you're responding to also? >> i agree with everything justin said. the value distinction is another part of the problem because the citizen is not distinguishing

and they are closely intertwined. it would be implicit both in what you said and in some ways it's been coming up all day the tension between the aspects of civic education and there's different layers to this one of

them is rhetorical we don't like to sound aristocratic or exclusive but at the same time we want to explain why they should send their children to study with us we have to be doing something different. the relationship between the aspect. >> one quick thought. students are going into finance

and consulting so despite whatever you might think about ideology in the classroom at least 7% of students i think a few more will go to law school so there's also enrolling predominantly and then the sort of rhetoric that a lot of students are aware of and we find in interested in talking about that aren't really embodying or working through that so then what we are offering is a civic education where there's a lot of democracies for people that are going to be running powerful

economic institutions in new york city or boston so that's an irony. >> a short essay called democratic education where he thinks through that question and makes the case that the kind of education isn't the kind of education that sustains democracy so it was an argument against democratizing educational standards in terms of the kind of education you offer and you want some people to have a pretty high level education and i think we are already doing that with our university system so a public university with 40,000 undergraduate students at the top 6% of the graduating classes get admission so we are enrolling 40,000 valedictorians and its elite education at the scale that we have a lot of talented students and part of

our premise is that the students will be leaders in their communities in the future. it's a question of what kind of education you want them to have while they are there. we did propose the degree as an honors degree berkeley for this reason we recognize it's going to be attractive to a certain subset of students so we want to recognize that group and some of the students who come and will be highly motivated and require a lot of them so we will pitch that and it also addresses the question to the extent people are thinking about it whether this is something they should have gotten in k-12 and for our students they've discovered if you ask them that they don't know about civics so they don't have the dissociation that it's remedial to some of the other people the answer to that is

worth teaching at the k-12 level than it's worth having serious people doing serious work at the higher education level and there's no other subject that we would think we don't need to bother with that subject because it is somehow beneath us so i think it is the same thing that part of the history of this if you go back when he gave his gift at pennsylvania he thought in terms of civics about the kind of education business leaders should have there's a way in which we can reclaim and recapture that as something that is not a liability but a strength. >> one quick thing that k-12 schools look to the college disciplines for their guidance

so a lot of them would answer that they had to take that has various limitations we've talked about and that's what students are demanding but it's political science. >> thinking about the content of education and the manners of the citizens do either of those demand particular approaches in

the classroom? >> i don't know that they do necessarily. i know that there is a value in having small courses and something beneficial about a seminar setting where students can talk with each other and develop those kind of virtues but i also think there's something that is value about the large lecture class having students listen to and learn from a good lecture that can be valuable. there's all sorts of techniques that can be brought to the subject matter and a mix would be beneficial but at the end of the course of study you do want to students that have developed certain habits and aptitudes and that's going to involve their ability to write and speak and communicate and gets us back into the question of the lost tools of learning so what are the tools they pick up along the way and i think we need to model the courses were the designer

courses. in the way that it's done it depends on what works and it's likely to be a mix. i do think that you made an earlier description in the q-and-a of the seminar of the humanities classroom is a place where the question of the substance and what it's about they might or might not be about anything civic. there is probably something to be learned from the interaction and learning to have introductions about people who disagree with you and it becomes an object for the benefit. this is one of the reasons i

love teaching constitutional law because it will get you into every controversial issue we have in american politics but in a concrete way. it's not hypothetical, we have parties, effects of the case and then students read both opinions. it requires them to think about things in a different kind of way rather than what do you think about xyz, in a very structured way. >> we started the panel by saying we are thinking about the relationship between civic education and the university. and i wanted to follow-up by

asking you to say a little about the concept of expertise. i was struck by. as the particular -- >> every free man and citizen. it reminded me that there's a kind of those in the study of civics and a similarity that i tell my students we are going to be asking questions children asking and answering them in the way that lawyers answer them. that's not how it works in the university. it's institutionalized into there is such a thing as

philosophical expertise. how would you say it is different to are similar to the academic fields of study? >> i think the question connects to the conversation earlier about. it's generalization list in the sense that a citizen has to be able to take on information that can be generated through expertise. for example if you are trying to make decisions about the questions of the pandemic they have an expertise but it's in one area. but in the one area the

knowledge might not be enough to make decisions taking in knowledge that's gained from every area. part of what you're doing is training students in the habit of thinking through bigger questions and sympathizing information. but you are not training them to be in expert of any particular area so the post secondary education when you go to graduate school you can develop your expertise. but for the kind of training that you're talking about, really that has to begin before you get to the university and it should be accomplished so it is a deepening of the education but if this is the province of every free citizen and man in the

community, that's got to take place earlier so this would be the comment about one of the things the universities can do is educate the people who will be going out in the k to 12 world because i think that one of the most important issues right now is what we're doing with k-12 education and that is an area that we need to put time and attention on. >> a classic profession like medicine the future position is its taught a lot of information, skills, content, concepts into kind of way of being. find people that are part of the medical profession but which were specialized. so a phd who's a biochemist and then what you might specialized

you go through a point at which you are a doctor, that's what you are. with that, it's assumed that you're going to be a doctor. what if we step back i think it is somewhat similar. some of the people in the discussion are more expert including the faculty that teach things, so you don't want to study from someone who doesn't know about it. you want to be an expert on wells and or a civil society leaders and state academic you might want to specialize. expertise is part of it and that's part of it, but not to produce a whole bunch of specialists, the point is to produce the general practitioner

and that's the kind of model we think of in the liberal arts. >> one more question in the back. university of america. like you, my life was transformed by a class of political thought and sponsored by none other than jim ceaser, so i'm going to bring up my favorite book is a vehicle for my question. in liberal democracy and political science, jim argues that traditional political science was aimed for at the statesman. the traditional role to cultivate the habits, the skills into the knowledge necessary to

govern. modeled political science is the aberration in this history. so is the modern moment an opportunity for the revival of a sort of long standing tradition rather than the invention of a new discipline? thank you. >> when i was first hired in this role after graduate school, i had a reception where an emeritus professor was attending and he asked what i studied. i told him and he said a throwback. [laughter] i didn't know i was a throwback until that moment. there's something about that first political founding document that says the goal of political science as they create this study of politics so there is a built in interdisciplinary aspect to what the political science originally was about and that was focused on training

future leaders and was a goal when you look at the founding documents at the university of virginia and all these different places they were very self-consciously thinking about what kind of curriculum and education should the future leaders have and the thing that was on the list and they are a little biased for the founders, but it was you're going to read at the washington's farewell address and the declaration of independence and the constitution of the federalist papers, so very similar the kind of curriculum that we have in mind to what they were doing in the past and in that same era of the school of political science is when americans are talking about civics is a serious thing that we need to be doing so i think that there is a big element of coming back to and returning to a discipline that was already there and recovering it. i think the history and

philosophy of law and does little other social sciences and other humanities, all of that becomes part of this discipline that we have in mind, but it is something it's not really we are not inventing something new where we are covering something that's been there and trying to improve it from the future. >> if it's not education, what is it to someone answered his defiance. its value descriptive explaining what is happening. if it's not asking the question of what we should do. that's not a primary level. and a suspicion of some think about what should we do as opposed to science because it is seen as being value laden in a problematic way though i don't agree because i believe in values but also they come back.

for what it's worth it would be millions or thousands of statesman's. the scales of leadership is quite diverse. we are going to close with a few closing remarks. let's first -- [applause] >> the associated press and other outlets are reporting on a video posted to donald trump's social media page monday that included references to a unified riot among hypothetical news

headlines if he wins the election in november. it was removed from the page earlier today. the 32nd video appeared at a time when the presumptive republican nominee for president while seeking to portray president joe biden as soft on anti-semitism has himself repeatedly faced criticism for using language and rhetoric associated with nazi germany. mr. trump's campaign press secretary responded saying in a statement this is not a campaign video. it was created by a random account online and reposted by a staffer who clearly did not see the word while the president was in court.