Opinion: Why Constitution Day?

In May 2005, university administrators were rudely awakened from their civic slumbers by a “notice of implementation” from the U.S. Department of Education. With little advance comment from the academy, Congress had passed and President George W. Bush had signed into law a requirement proposed by Sen. Robert Byrd that “each educational institution that receives Federal funds for a fiscal year shall hold an educational program on the United States Constitution on September 17 of such year for the students served by the educational institution.”
The new requirement met a chilly reception from the higher education establishment represented in Washington by the alphabet of organizations that lobby for legislation, regulations and dollars. Indeed, it is likely that, before the Department of Education’s intervention, few on most campuses knew about the significance of Sept. 17, the date in 1787 on which the delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed our founding document.
A 2002 survey of students at the nation’s 55 best colleges and universities revealed that fully four out of five of their graduating seniors scored a D or an F on test questions drawn from a common high school history curriculum. Many such surveys have followed, all with the same dismal results. Most recently, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni conducted a civic literacy assessment of college students that demonstrated, among other dreary facts, that fewer than one-third of students know when the U.S. Constitution was written.
There is an obvious reason for this lamentable state of civic and historical understanding. Such awareness, once thought relevant to thoughtful citizenship and human understanding, is no longer regarded as part of the mission of the American university.
How did the American academy become indifferent, if not hostile, to civic education as traditionally understood? There was a time in the not so distant past, as described by the late Allan Bloom, when the purpose of the college curriculum was to provide “intellectual clarity about the most important things.”
After World War II, however, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s launching of Sputnik in 1957, both the mission and the structure of the universities were dramatically transformed. Two dominant strains of that change are still with us: fragmentation and specialization in the undergraduate curriculum; and the politicization of academic life, from that of the New Left activists of the 1960s to that of the postmodern identitarian left of today. All coherence and hierarchy in the curricular structure of the university were sacrificed to the principle of mutual tolerance and respect among all disciplines.
The political upheaval that erupted on American campuses during the late 1960s was launched in the awareness that the university had lost its sense of unifying purpose. The questions that are perennial features of the human condition — how should we live, what are the ends of life, what is the best political order — were no longer in evidence in the curriculum of specializations. Nothing much stood in the way of a determined group who wished to reorder university life around new directions and purposes.
Would not a restoration of the study of American constitutional forms and their history provide a realistic path back to a truly humanizing education? Through that study, we could recover the American principles of public right that have guided our civic life for most of our history. A new attention to the American founding, and to the Western philosophical and religious traditions without which the new American nation could not have been imagined, would serve as a powerful antidote to ideologies and practices that have led to their neglect.
And now for the good news: An American renaissance in civic learning is beginning to take shape. Programs like Utah Valley University’s Center for Constitutional Studies and Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions are currently springing up at a multitude of state and private universities.
We have been bequeathed a “political edifice of liberty and equal rights,” said Abraham Lincoln. “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
The reinvigoration of the study of constitutionalism, and in particular the American Constitution, is helping our young citizens rediscover the ground of freedom and political security provided by our democratic republic. By encouraging programs, curricula and yes, Constitution Day celebrations devoted to such learning, we can restore the trust in our institutions whose loss is so widely lamented.
Bradford P. Wilson is the James Wilson Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Civic Thought at the Center for Constitutional Studies at Utah Valley University. He was recently appointed by President Biden to the Board of Trustees of the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation. He is the co-editor of “The Political Writings of Alexander Hamilton” and “The Political Writings of George Washington.”