Conservative Civic Centers Are Spreading Across Public Universities

As the 250th anniversary of the U.S.’s founding approaches, Florida Republicans are using public universities to help build conservative civics and public policy centers that reimagine U.S. history. Across the state, these taxpayer-funded centers are expanding their reach, drawing public money, influencing degree programs and extending into K-12 classrooms under the banner of civics renewals. Critics say the effort is part of a broader project to reshape higher education from the inside out, as Florida leaders attack diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and remake university governance.

Supporters say the centers are addressing civics illiteracy and polarization. In September, the U.S. Department of Education launched the America 250 Civics Education Coalition with the America First Policy Institute, Turning Point USA, Hillsdale College, and more than 40 other partner groups. The department said the initiative would “renew patriotism,” strengthen civics knowledge, and advance “a shared understanding of America’s founding principles.”

However, faculty critics, student organizers, and academic freedom advocates say the initiative is using the machinery of public higher education to normalize a right-wing version of U.S. history and political life.

Florida is not alone in this effort. Civic centers have emerged at public universities in Arizona, Ohio, Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina, Iowa, and elsewhere. The Education Department’s America 250 civics grant program has accelerated that national network, awarding more than $153 million for history and civics seminars, with priority given to institutions that already house independent civics units. Arizona’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership was an early pioneer, while Ohio is considered a national model, with five centers currently open at public universities.

But, the Florida model is unusually integrated into higher-ed governance. At the University of Florida (UF), state law directs university leaders to move the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education toward permanent college status and ensure that it can hire faculty and create certificate programs. Florida has also required public colleges and universities to assess “intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity,” through a mandatory annual survey while the DeSantis administration’s overhaul of New College of Florida offers an adjacent example of the same project at institutional scale: attempting to remake a public college from the top down. At Miami Dade College, the country’s largest community college, the Institute for Freedom in the Americas was created under Senate Bill 1264 “to preserve the ideals of a free society and promote democracy.” Together, Florida has turned the rhetoric of civics education and viewpoint diversity into a governing strategy.

In the 2025-26 state allocation summary, Florida lawmakers appropriated recurring funds in the amounts of $10 million to UF’s Hamilton School and $15 million to Florida International University (FIU)’s Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom. Separate UF board documents show the Hamilton School project budget reflected $60 million in state appropriation and UF funding as of late 2024.

The Adam Smith Center and the Hamilton School did not respond to Prism’s requests for comment.

“At FIU, I do know that they are offering their own degrees,” said Tania Cepero López, an associate teaching professor of English at FIU. “They are getting a lot of funding at the same time that our funding is restricted.”

Cepero López said she recently declined to present at a major conference because travel support provided by the English department would not cover her costs. Meanwhile, she said, the Adam Smith Center appeared well-funded enough to advertise degree programs on local radio.

“I am truly scared for the future of our higher education system, because I see how much political influence is being exerted at FIU from the state,” Cepero López said.

She said faculty members are contending with a wider erosion of academic freedom, including the removal of sociology from the core curriculum after faculty rejected a state-backed textbook in March.

“It’s become impossible to ignore,” Cepero López said of the political cloud hanging over public higher education in Florida. “It’s interfering with my ability to be an effective educator.”

Civics Centers Move Into The Classroom

In a Journal of Academic Freedom article published last year, scholars Katie Rainwater and Robert Cassanello argue that these centers operate as conservative “intellectual centers” embedded in public universities, often with more political protection and material support than traditional academic departments.

Cassanello, a historian at the University of Central Florida, told Prism that the rise of these centers fits into a much longer political lineage. He traces modern civics education to Cold War efforts to embed anti-communism, free-market ideology, and patriotism into public education.

“This civics curriculum is really just propaganda,” Cassanello said.

He argued that the conservative civic centers cropping up on university campuses function as parallel academic structures that duplicate existing departments, while avoiding the scrutiny those departments face.

“Their reason for existing is to proselytize young people and K-12 teachers on conservative ideas and values,” he said.

Ryan Owens, director of the Institute for Governance and Civics at Florida State University, rejected the claim that his center is an ideological project. In written responses, Owens said the institute’s approach is “a renewed civic pragmatism” that combines “constitutional thought, free speech, political philosophy, and Great Books” with empirical social science and data literacy.

“The goal of education is not agreement or uniformity,” Owens said. “It’s the ability to reason, through disagreement, in pursuit of the truth.”

Civics centers like these teach subjects that overlap with history, political science, philosophy, economics, law, and education. At UF, the Hamilton School’s course catalog includes classes such as “(Un)Common Reads: Despair in Communist Manifesto,” “What is Statecraft?” and “Capitalism and its Critics.”

Cassanello pointed out that these centers don’t operate within humanities departments that already exist on campus. “They need a separate thing because they don’t want to integrate what they’re doing into academia, because then they’ll be challenged,” he said.

On some campuses, he said, “all the attention, all the funding, all the resources” are flowing to centers that are “either barely academic or quasi-academic.”

Cassanello also said lawmakers and university leaders have structured some of the centers to sit under provost offices rather than inside traditional colleges, allowing them to move outside the curriculum committee review systems that govern most academic programs. In the Hamilton School’s case, Cassanelo and Rainwater write in the journal article, its structure “as a college has insulated it from having to consult existing departments when making hires.”

A Broader National Strategy

Isaac Kamola, a scholar who has studied donor-backed academic centers, sees Florida as part of a broader national strategy. He said his own research looked into Charles Koch-funded centers, which he described as an effort to give academic legitimacy to extreme libertarian economic ideas such as radical deregulation that had struggled to gain standing inside mainstream departments. Those centers, he said, were built “most famously” at George Mason University in Virginia, but also in Arizona and elsewhere.

“What’s going on in the civic centers is scarier,” Kamola said, because “the whole idea is, we want to train a whole generation of Floridians in certain ideas, and we’re going to create a political infrastructure in order to do that.”

Kamola believes the centers are reacting to shifts in scholarship that politically powerful conservatives dislike. Universities, he said, have produced decades of research on race, empire, slavery, and inequality that challenges triumphalist narratives of the U.S.

“The university is producing ideas … that wealthy and well-connected people disagree with on political grounds,” Kamola said. “They misinterpret that as ideological.”

Kamola said the rhetoric of “viewpoint diversity” is central to that project.

“Intellectual diversity is being used as a lever to undermine institutional autonomy,” Kamola said, “and give politicians more levers that they can use to discipline institutions into producing the kinds of knowledge that the politicians would prefer.”

That matters even more now that Florida is trying to extend those politics into accreditation itself. In June, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the launch of the Commission for Public Higher Education (CPHE), calling it a “first-of-its-kind alternative university accreditor.” Florida’s Board of Governors formally approved the new accreditor the next month. According to the CPHE business plan and reporting at the time, the Florida board would incorporate the entity as a nonprofit and use a $4 million state appropriation for startup costs. The commission was pitched as a consortium effort among six public university systems.

Kamola said the significance of the CPHE is hard to overstate.

“Accrediting agencies is really important, because this is the process by which schools become eligible for federal funding,” Kamola said. “And this is basically a way to, at the level of recognition of schools as accredited schools, lock in things like intellectual diversity and other conservative agenda.”

The CPHE’s published accreditation standards explicitly include “intellectual diversity” within academic and co-curricular life as a criterion.

Kamola said if “intellectual diversity” becomes a meaningful accreditation standard, universities may feel pressured to create or expand exactly these kinds of centers to show compliance.

Supporters of the accreditor say it is about reducing bureaucracy and promoting transparency and student outcomes. Florida’s Board of Governors described the CPHE as a new accreditor focused on “student outcomes and academic excellence,” while State University System of Florida Chancellor Ray Rodrigues called it a “transformative moment for public postsecondary education.”

But critics see it as part of the same political infrastructure as the civics centers. The American Association of University Professors has described the CPHE as a project that appears designed to give “partisan political actors a powerful new tool to pressure universities to conform to a narrow ideological agenda.”

A Growing Issue

Owens, of Florida State’s Institute for Governance and Civics, told Prism that the center secured two Education Department grants totaling about $4.6 million. One, a $1.7 million grant, supports “Founding Voices,” a program that will bring live and AI-generated historical interpreters into middle schools. The other, a $2.9 million grant for “FIREWORKS250,” will train fifth grade teachers using literacy strategies and civics content drawn from founding-era primary sources such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Lessons will focus on “unalienable rights” and why the U.S. government was created by the Constitution. Owens said the institute is also planning a 2026 summer symposium for nearly 200 teachers under the theme “We Hold These Truths.”

To critics, those figures underscore the point: These centers are not staying in one corner of campus. They are building pipelines into K-12 education just as America 250 programming ramps up nationwide.

Kamola said the model has already spread. He pointed to Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership as an early model for state-backed civic education centers. He also pointed to Ohio’s Senate Bill 1, which he called “the worst example.”

“Senate Bill 1 did in Ohio what DeSantis took for four-plus years to do in Florida,” Kamola said.

Ohio’s law, signed last year, requires public institutions to offer an American civic literacy course and imposes “intellectual diversity” requirements around controversial issues, such as climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, DEI programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion.

At the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, student group TransparUNCy has organized teach-ins and boycott efforts against the School of Civic Life and Leadership on campus. Kamola said he was “really inspired” by the group’s work educating students about how these centers are built and encouraging them to take comparable courses in traditional academic departments instead.

Ultimately, Kamola said that students and faculty cannot rely on lawmakers or university leaders to respond.

“I think it’s really important for students and faculty to vote with their feet,” Kamola said. “We need to demand that our institutions are transparent.”

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