For decades, Republicans have waged a war against higher education. The humanities, in their view, are hotbeds of left-wing indoctrination—training students to, in the words of one figurehead, “hate our country”—and a socially useless drain on the U.S. taxpayer. When Ann Manov was an undergraduate humanities student at the University of Florida at the beginning of the 2010s, Florida politicians were introducing performance-based funding for the state’s public universities, where job placement was the principle metric for allocating money, trying to get humanities students to subsidize the tuition of STEM students, and condemning the inutility of philosophy BAs. 

Then, suddenly, the GOP strategy changed. Around the time of Trump’s first election, red state legislatures across the country began pouring millions of dollars into the establishment of so-called “civics centers”: Great Books-oriented programs for undergraduates that claim to be reclaiming the study of history, literature, and philosophy from the left. Today there are over fifty such centers around the nation, the most important of which is the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, at the University of Florida in Gainesville. 

The civic centers movement now stands as one of the sole sites of growth—in terms of funding, faculty hiring, and student enrollment—in an otherwise bleak landscape for higher education and for the humanities in particular. And yet, on account of their provenance in GOP-run state governments, they have inspired mostly suspicion within the academy. In our July issue, Manov’s essay “Republican Machines” finds her returning to her alma mater to take stock of these concerns and determine whether these programs might represent the future of the humanities in American life, or whether they’ll help accelerate their decline. In our conversation we discussed what attracted her to the movement, the different forms conservative educational reform can take, and her experience teaching in France.

Maya Perry: A lot of the prior coverage of the civics centers movement has been pretty credulous to their indoctrinating capacities. But the classes you sat in on seem to have been pretty politically lukewarm—conservative mainly in the sense of promulgating a Great Man theory of history, perhaps. Is that a fair characterization? 

Ann Manov: I do wonder if that was a function of the classes I attended being history classes. I do know that there are other classes that are more politics-oriented and modeled on the “grand strategy” style that’s associated with Yale or the Kennedy School. But, yes, in the classes I sat in on, students listened while teachers lectured, and you got the sense that the students were there to fulfill a requirement and move on. 

Perry: I suppose that gets at the difference between what a “conservative” pedagogical overhaul might mean in terms of the content of the curriculum versus the form—the teaching modes and standards that a program might deploy. To what extent did you feel the people at Hamilton were attending to both aspects? 

Manov: What was very disappointing with the Hamilton program, which I’d been very excited about, was that in spite of all this rhetoric about restoring rigor and this emphasis on implementing an expansive Great Books curriculum, it seemed to have really given up on the intellectual capacities of its students. With Columbia University’s Great Books program, or the University of Chicago’s Great Books program—both of which were started by the same guy, Mortimer Adler—those classes aren’t part of your major. They’re something that all students do on top of their chosen area of study. That is pretty ambitious. Even if students today don’t actually do all of the reading, at least there is this standardized, stated expectation that they should. 

When I was a student at the University of Florida ten years ago, they were starting to introduce something that was an imitation of these programs, which was a one semester class called What is the Good Life? It was conservative inasmuch as it used those “conservative” keywords and phrases, such as “the beautiful, the true, and the good.” But all that the work amounted to was reading tiny excerpts of Plato. Likewise, at the Hamilton School your entire major is Great Books, and yet in their classes they were reading things like excerpts from The Fountainhead. And when they were reading full books rather than excerpts, they were still the shortest possible things, like Animal Farm—something commonly assigned to middle schoolers. The Dostoevsky they chose was not Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov but Notes from the Underground.

It was clear to me that the reading loads were quite low when I was looking at individual syllabi. But then I asked someone who was more adept with AI to download all of the Hamilton syllabi that were available online and run the numbers and determine what the average reading load was and how it was changing each semester. And that’s partly how we confirmed some of those shocking numbers showing that reading expectations were much lower than those in other humanities classes, and were also declining over time. It was very disappointing, because like I said I was initially attracted to this movement. The people at the helm kept talking about restoring rigor to college. That hypocrisy was very disheartening. 

The people at Hamilton say they are committed to this conservative intellectual tradition, they say they’re really Straussian. But Leo Strauss was a translator of Greek. You’d think they’d want to make students learn Greek, or learn Latin, or at least learn French or German. But instead it was a race to the bottom of student expectations. There was no foreign language component at all. In the end, it basically seemed much less rigorous than what’s going on in the humanities departments they were pillorying. 

Perry: You mention the education systems of France and the U.S.S.R. at the end of your piece, but running beneath the surface of those comparisons is the fact that such systems rely on significant state subsidies to defray the costs. Many of the issues you wrestle with seem downstream from the fact that getting a humanities degree can often be extremely expensive, and thus attitudes toward it become very transactional.

Manov: The crisis is really around how to get students to care about their education. Back in my day, most of the students in my humanities classes were just there to fulfill their general education requirements and trying to do so via the path of least resistance. But when I visited this spring, it seemed like the students were more clued into the importance of having a LinkedIn and making yourself marketable than to actually learning. What I also realized is that these civics centers are basically a jobs program; they have a pipeline to places like the Hudson Institute in D.C., which in turn is a pipeline for eventually getting a job on the Hill. This was all very appealing to the students I spoke to, and the administrators kept talking to me about how much of their job is getting students internships. So Hamilton ultimately wasn’t really cultivating a different, more civically-minded attitude, towards one’s education. 

The cost of education is also connected to the problem of standards. I lived in France for one year after I graduated from UF, and it was interesting because they were also having a crisis of standards at the time that wasn’t dissimilar to the way people talk about standards declining in America, though because they have a centralized system you can track it more. But in France, you have an extremely high matriculation rate to the public universities, because the majority of  students will fail out, which is a way of maintaining a certain level of rigor. Whereas you couldn’t really fail 50% of a freshman class in America, because you’d plunge them into a huge debt crisis. 

Also, the vast majority of French people who I knew in humanities programs expected to become teachers, which is a much more respected job there. I wonder if the job of secondary school teaching was more respected in America, whether that would fix the “crisis” of the humanities here, because then you would have something to do that really matters afterwards.

Perry: Another difference is that in the United States, higher education is not so much regarded as a social investment as it is a personal investment. 

Manov: Right. There’s this cliche of how you can talk to, say, a cashier from the former Soviet bloc and they’ll have a few lines of Eugene Onegin memorized and in France there is a general consensus that a basic acquaintance with French literature and culture is a good thing, something to take pride in as a society. Whereas the dominant idea here is that college education is a luxury good that can only be enjoyed by some people in good economic circumstances. That’s why it was initially so interesting seeing a bunch of GOP-run states suddenly turn around and say they’re investing millions of dollars into the humanities at public universities.

Perry: Though Hamilton is, in many ways, suspended from the usual financial constraints of traditional humanities departments, you mention that several professors complained to you that administrators had explicitly asked them to lower the amount of coursework they gave their students in order to increase enrollment. Were they ultimately still beholden to similar pressures as those in the traditional departments? 

Manov: The crisis of enrollment is a big problem in the humanities for all sides. If you go back a few decades, the number of students in a humanities program might be 30% of the undergraduate student body. But now it’s pretty much going to be in the single digits anywhere you go. And academic funding is often tied to student enrollment. 

There are a few things you can do to get enrollment up. One is, as we’ve been talking about, to make the classes really easy. Another is to pay students to come. That was something that was going on at Hamilton: there were many students who were not only getting their full tuition covered, but also full room and board and a stipend to go to Hamilton. I talked to someone who’s teaching at one of these places in Ohio who spoke about how there are posters taped up around the university there telling students they can get paid to study if they attend that civic center. 

Perry: We have managed to skirt this subject so far—and it was a much bigger part of earlier drafts of this piece—which is the problem of AI. It has fundamentally changed everything about teaching within a couple of years, and can make any discussion of the future of the humanities feel totally moot. How much were professors themselves bringing that up in the course of your reporting? 

Manov: I was shocked when I was observing classes at Hamilton. These students had all signed releases to be observed, so they knew that I was there watching them and recording. Despite that, most students were on their computer looking at ChatGPT and Instagram. One student was filling out applications for internships. But the majority were on ChatGPT. 

At the end of my interview with Jon Sensbach, who was one of the UF faculty members investigated for his opposition to Hamilton, I asked if he would encourage someone to still try to be a history professor today. He was retiring at the time, and he said that he feels he retired at the right moment. But it wasn’t because of the political climate or the defunding of the humanities, but because it was getting too depressing, the fact that all his students were using ChatGPT for their assignments. I was hearing from someone at Princeton that students are gaming out what classes to take on the basis of which will be easiest to use AI in. No matter where you go, you cannot avoid the AI problem, there’s total despair over it, and Sensbach’s response is so tragic because I have always thought that being a humanities professor is one of the best lives that you could have.

And one of the reasons I was interested in this topic in the first place is because when I was an undergrad it already seemed like there was this crisis of purpose. My English professors were saying that poetry class was good because it would help us learn to write more concisely, which would help us write better emails in our professional lives. Now with AI replacing that email-writing function, we have to find a new justification for the importance of a humanities education.