What is the Washington Center?
Below is a transcript of a speech delivered by Washington Center Director Patrick Lee Miller to the West Virginia University Student Government Association on March 25, 2026, in which he introduces the Center's mission, explains the origins and national context of civics centers like it, and outlines the three-part curriculum—Western Civilization, American Ideals, and Modern Controversies—that will guide its course offerings beginning this fall.
Greetings to you, members of the Student Government Association, and through the SGA to all students of WVU. This is my first time speaking to a student group on campus; I am grateful for this opportunity to introduce the Washington Center, of which I am the founding director.
My immediate hope is that some of you will consider taking the Center’s courses. If these courses don’t interest you, or your schedule is already full, I hope that you will nevertheless help spread the word about the Center and its courses to those who may be interested.
This fall the Center plans to offer about two dozen courses. As you can see from our flyer, these courses fall into three main categories: Western Civilization, American Ideals, and Modern Controversies. These are roughly the three main concerns of the Washington Center.
Why these three concerns in particular? How are they related? To answer those questions, let me begin by describing how this Center, and others like it, began.
In spring of last year (2025), the West Virginia House of Delegates passed HB 3297, which was soon afterwards passed by the senate and signed into law by Governor Morrissey. This bill established the Washington Center for Civics, Culture, and Statesmanship, empowering him to appoint a director, which for better or worse turned out to be me.
The Washington Center is the 14th such institution across the country. These institutions, usually called “civics centers,” or simply “centers,” are in red states.[1] Why? Why are red-state legislatures planting centers in their land-grant universities?
The faculties of elite US universities are predominantly registered Democrats.[2] Harvard: 99%. Princeton: 98%. Yale: 97%. Berkeley: 97%. And so on. The problem is much worse in fields such as the humanities or social sciences, which must ask political questions. At the top 40 universities, for example, 60% of history and journalism departments have no registered Republicans. Zero.
This is true in red states as well as blue ones. No public data exists for WVU—a very red state, where 91 of the 100 Delegates in Charleston, and 32 of the 34 senators, are Republicans—but the national data are clear enough. Some have told me that this trend has not afflicted WVU as it has other universities. I would be happy to find this to be true, but no one has yet shown me any evidence that it is. In three months here, on the contrary I have found that it is not.
After enduring a decade of various left-wing hysterias germinating in universities and then sweeping out through the media and other NGOs into the rest of the society, the legislatures of 14 red states created civics centers to do something to counteract this bizarre spectacle.
But how could it possibly work? How could little centers reverse a national trend with deep historical roots and the overwhelming majority of professors on its side? That’s a tricky problem, for which there may be no solution. Not surprisingly, different centers have adopted different strategies.
One strategy is to empower these centers to hire conservative professors in order to achieve some balance on campus. This has been ridiculed as “affirmative action for conservatives”. This ridicule is deserved.
First of all, if a Center hires 10, or even 50 conservatives, they remain but a drop in the liberal ocean.
Second, it violates the principle—dear to many conservatives—that people should be hired on merit, not their politics.
Third, and most importantly, it doesn’t solve the problem. Why did this happen—not only in universities, but eventually in all the prestigious professions? What is going on? What is the deeper cause?
You can’t solve a problem until you understand what caused it. You can’t improve anything without first learning the truth about it. This will be fundamental to the strategy of the Washington Center. Indeed, this strategy is in the bill that established it: “The center shall educate students by means of free, open, and rigorous intellectual inquiry to seek the truth.”
That was supposed to be the task of the whole university, and in many fields that do not ask political questions—the hard sciences, presumably, or mathematics—that is still the case. But Charleston decided that it is no longer so in other fields that must ask political questions.
HB 3297 thus prescribes three tasks to the Washington Center: (1) the pursuit of truth with free speech; (2) the study of American ideals such as the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights or the republican system of government required by the US Constitution; and (3) the study of the roots of these ideals in Western Civilization.
These three tasks are linked. It is no coincidence that that in recent years universities have simultaneously: (1) restricted free speech, putting left-wing ideological goals above the pursuit of truth; (2) criticized traditional American ideals such as freedom of association and private property; and (3) disparaged Western civilization (often called “whiteness”) as the equivalent of original sin.
This is all happening at once, I have argued, because universities are now functioning as seminaries of a new religion (Woke) that seeks to transform the USA into an anti-racist, multicultural welfare state, subverting Western civilization and replacing its peoples through mass immigration.
The biggest sin against this new religion is noticing what’s happening, investigating its causes, then naming and criticizing them. This is what the Washington Center will do, in general, and what its many courses, specifically, will train students to do—thoughtfully and without fear.
To leave Plato’s cave, you have to recognize that the images being projected on the wall in front of you are images, that there are puppeteers doing this to enslave you. That’s an important part of education. But it’s only the beginning. After you turn around and see the light, you have to climb toward it.
The Washington Center will also teach you how to do this. The faculty I am now hiring will show you what is so great about Western civilization and the nation that now leads it—the United States of America. Each has its faults, of course, and we will not ignore them. But for all their faults, we will learn that both are being lost, and what a catastrophe this will be if your generation does not preserve them.
Dr. Patrick Lee Miller, Director
The Mountainlair
March 25, 2026