Questions & Answers About the Washington Center
Answers to common questions about the Washington Center for Civics, Culture, and Statesmanship: its founding, mission, independence from the Legislature, curriculum, and recent coverage.
What Critics Are Missing About the Washington Center
Recent news coverage has criticized the Washington Center as expensive, partisan, and unpopular, citing low enrollment across its special topics course offerings as evidence of failure. In this response, the Center explains why current enrollment is consistent with the normal, deliberate sequence of building an academic center—faculty hiring, course design, and curricular approval—and addresses the mischaracterization of its budget. More than three dozen comparable civics centers have followed this same path nationally, and none has failed.
Our Center, Our Revolution
This July 4th marks 250 years since independence, and a new chapter for civic education in West Virginia. Drawing on George Washington's own model, Cincinnatus, Patrick Lee Miller makes the case for why universities must return to the pursuit of truth, and how the Washington Center for Civics, Culture, and Statesmanship aims to lead that revival.
Announcing the Washington Scholarships
The Washington Center for Civics, Culture, and Statesmanship is pleased to offer eight Washington Scholarships to students committed to the study of American ideals, Western civilization, and the art of statesmanship. Recipients will pursue a Minor in Statesmanship while engaging with one of the most distinctive undergraduate programs in the country.
What is the Washington Center?
Washington Center Director Patrick Lee Miller addressed the West Virginia University Student Government Association to introduce the Center's mission and invite student participation. Drawing on Plato's allegory of the cave, Dr. Miller outlined the Center's three-part mandate—the pursuit of truth through free inquiry, the study of American ideals, and the study of their roots in Western civilization—and explained how its curriculum of roughly two dozen courses is designed to equip students to engage these questions thoughtfully and without ideological constraint. The Washington Center, one of fourteen such civics centers established by state legislatures across the country, will begin offering courses this fall
Why Am I Here?
Moving from Socrates in his prison cell to Nietzsche's diagnosis of modern civilization, Dr. Patrick Lee Miller argues that the secular West has not escaped religion but merely replaced its old gods with new, impersonal ones: ideals of equality, diversity, and inclusion that command devotion through guilt rather than faith, enforced not by priests but by algorithms, institutions, and the ever-present gaze of social media. Drawing on Plato's Allegory of the Cave, Foucault's Panopticon, and his own experience in academia, Miller offers a searching account of what genuine philosophy demands and costs, before turning the question on himself: what does it mean to found an institute dedicated to free inquiry in an age when the very act of questioning the city's gods remains, as it was for Socrates, a punishable offense?
Gov. Patrick Morrisey Announces Director of Washington Center of Civics, Culture, and Statesmanship
Gov. Patrick Morrisey of West Virginia held a press briefing to announce the director of West Virginia University's Washington Center for Civics, Culture and Statesmanship—a new academic institute committed to ensuring that students are grounded in the Western traditions of civic life, culture, and responsible self-governance.