Center for Civics, Culture, and Society
Inhabit great minds to meet our moment.
How should we pursue justice together? What should we do? These are questions that orient us as citizens. The quality of our civic life depends upon a citizenry that has both the knowledge and the disposition to answer them—and answer them eagerly, forthrightly, and deeply.
About the Center
In 2023, the Ohio General Assembly enacted legislation establishing a new academic entity at Miami University called the Center for Civics, Culture, and Society. The law designates the Center as an independent academic unit and the Miami University Board of Trustees unanimously voted in support of that designation. The Center has a specific mission to conduct teaching and research on the historical ideas, traditions, and texts that have shaped the American constitutional order and society.
Flagg Taylor was selected as the inaugural Executive Director of the Center and immediately began building the curriculum and the team to deliver it. Beyond its academic offerings, the Center will serve as a statewide convener for thoughtful dialogue. It will host lectures, symposia, and community partnerships that model principled debate and respectful engagement. Through these efforts, the Center aims to strengthen Ohio’s civic culture by fostering informed citizenship, cultivating intellectual humility, and ensuring that diverse viewpoints are explored with rigor, openness, and mutual respect.
Civic Thought Minor
Add a minor in Civic Thought and gain deep, substantive knowledge of the American constitutional tradition and its intellectual background, with mentorship from talented teachers and first-rate scholars along the way. Completing four additional CIV courses lets you turn your civics requirement into a full minor. Doing so also makes you eligible for a $5,000 scholarship: $2,500 after completing CIV 105 or CIV 205, and the remaining $2,500 upon finishing the minor.
Center for Civics, Culture, and Society Events
Courses in Civics, Culture, and Society
The Center for Civics, Culture, and Society is dedicated to an education grounded in the philosophy, history, and practice of self-government. The promise of self-rule has held the attention of many peoples, including the Founders of the United States of America. Through a deep engagement with authors from Aristotle to Alexis de Tocqueville, and from James Madison to Frederick Douglass, we elevate our own capacity to grasp the true nature of human liberty and the political architecture and practices required to secure it.
Fall 2026
CIV 105: The American Political Tradition: Its Background, Founding, and Development
This course will study the theoretical ideas that informed the creation and development of America’s political system and consider some of the major contemporary challenges to the maintenance of American democracy. Topics to be treated include the claims for American independence, the nature of written constitutions, the problems presented by slavery, the core political institutions of our republic, the emergence of American progressivism and conservatism, and the role of America in the world. Emphasis is placed on direct engagement with the authors who have shaped our political tradition. Readings will feature core primary documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and include other works of political philosophy (e.g., Aristotle and John Locke) and the letters and speeches of key political figures. Students will be conversant with the defining debates of the American political tradition and the various parties and perspectives at work in those debates.
CIV 201: Civic Thought: An Introduction
Is governing ourselves worth the trouble? Should we try to wrap our minds around our country’s complex problems, its checkered history, and its creaky political machinery? Should we strive to negotiate with people who seem to see everything differently? Why bother, given that every effort at self-government eventually seems to dissolve into civil war or despotism? What makes civic life difficult, however, also makes it valuable. Civic argument and effort can summon forth immense creative energies that enable genuine deliberation and common action and beget unprecedented improvements in our common life. This course investigates the human capacity for living civically, constituting communities of citizens who share power and responsibility for common action. It will introduce you to ways the human potential to think and act as a citizen has been realized in different historical forms. Because civic life is always developing in response to new challenges and opportunities, this course aims to cultivate the civic habits of thought that will help you better play your own, unprecedented role in this distinctively human undertaking.
CIV 205: Dimensions of American Civic Thought
This course is devoted to the understanding of American civic life through the study of the central documents and key authors of our political tradition. American authors have been quite self-conscious in addressing themselves to perennial questions of justice and the common good. They joined long-standing debates about the relation between rights and duties, the nature of revolution, the possibility of republican self-government, the role of commerce in a free society, and the nature and extent of religious freedom. Students will join these authors and enter these debates to recover the logic of the various arguments made therein. Students will come away from the course with an understanding of: (1) the idea of natural rights; (2) the architecture of the Constitution and the ground of republican self-government; (3) the benefits of and challenges presented by commerce in a free society; (4) the roles played by slavery and race in the history of our republic; and (5) how our political tradition has met the challenge of religious freedom.
CIV 212: Constitutionalism: Ancient and Modern
Students will confront how different thinkers have articulated the variety of political regimes available to human beings, from the ancient world to today. Students will consider the relationship between the arrangement of political institutions and how that arrangement tends to promote a particular way of life for citizens. The course will conclude with a consideration of the idea of constitutionalism in the United States and how its constitution shapes and structures the pursuit of happiness for its citizens.
Spring 2027
CIV 320: Free and Civil Speech
Americans today live in a time of deep political polarization, cultural tribalism, and self-segregation. Those with whom we have deep disagreements, assuming we interact with them at all, are often viewed as not just wrong but as irrational, immoral, even contemptible. What are the causes and costs of these trends? What remedies might exist? Are there habits of mind that we might cultivate to build better citizens and a healthier democracy? The course consists of four parts.
- We will consider the challenges and trends facing us today with respect to speech, deliberation, and inquiry.
- We will examine some of the philosophic and political texts that have grappled with questions of free and civil speech, including thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, James Madison, Frederick Douglass, and Herbert Marcuse. We’ll consider the problem from many different perspectives, from the most strident proponents of freedom of speech to its most vociferous critics.
- We will examine how the cultivation of particular virtues might affect our capacity for deliberation and community.
- We will engage in a series of debates on topics of public interest.
CIV 405: Core Texts in Civic Thought
This course is devoted to the intensive study of a single text that reflects on themes central to civic life. Students will increase their capacity for sustained attention, concentration, and imagination by reading and living with a single author over the course of a semester. They will learn to navigate complex, sustained arguments that unwind gradually and at great length. Students will develop the patience and courage to follow such arguments and adapt themselves to see the world through the mind of the author. Possible texts include Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, and Melville’s Moby Dick.
