Questions & Answers About the Washington Center

‍1. What is the Washington Center?

The Washington Center for Civics, Culture, and Statesmanship is a teaching and research unit at West Virginia University established by the West Virginia Legislature in 2025. The law requires the Center to advance the study of Western civilization and American constitutional thought and to prepare future leaders through teaching, scholarship, and mentorship. It also directs the Center to strengthen open inquiry, civil discourse, and intellectual diversity at WVU.

Our day-to-day work will include creating and teaching undergraduate courses, establishing a Statesmanship minor and (in time) major, mentoring students, publishing research, and hosting visiting speakers and debates.

2. Why was the Center created by the Legislature?

It’s impossible to know the motives of the 114 state legislators who voted for the Center: no law is ever passed for just one reason, since different legislators have different aims. But broadly speaking, public universities require the trust of the citizens who support them. If the people of a state feel there is too much of a gap between their values and those of their universities, they will take action through their representatives to course-correct. The Washington Center’s story is part of a nationwide “Civics Centers” movement doing just that.

Even so, the West Virginia Legislature plays no role in creating the courses the Washington Center offers or dictating what’s taught in them. Except for the Director, the faculty are not selected by any legislator. Once hired, Washington Center faculty enjoy all the curricular, pedagogical, and scholarly independence required for and expected by a world-class university.

3. Why does the Center have unusual administrative independence?

While some civics centers are established by universities themselves, others are founded just as the Washington Center was. The Washington Center’s origin is comparable to peers established by state legislatures at the University of Iowa, the University of Tennessee, Ohio State University, and other universities. Insofar as centers are meant to offer something distinctive, it’s prudent to give them the independence of a standalone academic unit, especially with regard to the selection of faculty.

None of this is to suggest the Washington Center is unaccountable to WVU. The Director reports directly to WVU’s president and provost, much as a dean must. Center faculty need to satisfy WVU’s qualification standards, our courses must be approved via regular university procedures, and our spending is overseen by the typical university reporting and auditing requirements.

4. Doesn’t WVU already offer courses on the topics you’ll teach?

Universities routinely contain different departments whose interests overlap. At WVU, for example, environmental questions are studied in Anthropology (ANTH 458, Environmental Anthropology), Biology (BIOL 105, Environmental Biology), Agricultural and Resource Economics (ARE 220, Introductory Environmental and Resource Economics), English (ENGL 338, Environmental Criticism), Environmental Engineering (ENVE 446, Air Pollution and Climate Change), and Public Health (PUBH 337, Climate Change and Public Health).

The same is true of colonialism. At WVU, colonialism is studied in Anthropology (ANTH 350, Latin American Culture), English (ENGL 374, Global Anglophone Literature), Exercise Physiology (EXPH 235, Introduction to Global Issues in Exercise Physiology), History (HIST 321, Colonial Africa and Independence), and Spanish (SPAN 331, Early Spanish American Literature).

Why does this happen? First, because anything important has many aspects to it deserving study, and different disciplines and perspectives reveal those aspects. Second, because different disciplines or professors may have different views about the goodness or badness of the subject being studied. For instance, you can find courses at WVU that are broadly critical of capitalism and courses that are broadly supportive. Sometimes different professors in the same department, with the same disciplinary training, disagree wildly about the same phenomenon in question. If you took both courses by these professors, you’d quickly learn that what could seem from the outside like a redundancy is anything but.

With that background, Washington Center courses will be distinctive on both dimensions.

First, we will take subjects that are often dispersed across departments and organize them into an integrated program focused on the Western intellectual tradition, the American constitutional order, statesmanship, and free inquiry. There really is a golden thread reaching back from West Virginia to Britain, Medieval Europe, Rome, and Athens, and we want to trace it with our students.

Second, like most other civics centers, the Washington Center has something akin to a disciplinary perspective on the value of America and the American people, the West and the Western tradition, and free inquiry: namely, we are for them.

5. Is the Washington Center partisan?

Partisanship means promoting a particular political party. The Washington Center is nonpartisan in its teaching and other capacities. Of course, like any professors, the Center’s faculty have political opinions and may advocate for partisan causes in their private lives. And of course, just as academic units here and elsewhere routinely invite political figures to be speakers or faculty, our nonpartisanship doesn’t require disengagement with politicians or political operatives when it serves a pedagogical purpose or the professional aims of our students.

There is also an important difference between partisanship and political values. Like any faculty who teach courses pertaining to political values past and present, Washington Center faculty may offer their views on political values or argue for them in their scholarship. Indeed, many times students take a class from a professor because they want to know his or her views on such matters. This happens in all relevant fields and disciplines: as anyone who has taken a competently taught course in (say) political philosophy or ethics knows, values can be studied, debated, and reasonably assessed.

6. Will students be taught what to think?

Students and professors know there is a difference between indoctrination and education, between sharing rationales and browbeating students into silent submission. One of the criteria for becoming a Washington Center faculty member is understanding that difference and being repelled by the latter.

The Center’s purpose is not to replace one orthodoxy with another. Students of all political persuasions are welcome, and student grades are completely independent of their substantive positions on issues. Although our faculty is currently small, we have decades of experience successfully teaching students of all political viewpoints. 

7. Why offer courses with titles such as Woke and The New Right?

It’s the job of professors in fields such as ours to examine relevant social movements or to offer courses that reflect their current scholarship, and wokeness and the new right are two such items. It’s worth remembering that a title only identifies the subject of a course—it doesn’t announce the professor’s position on the topic (if he or she even has one). A class entitled The Great Plagues should not be assumed to be pro-plague, and likewise our The New Right shouldn’t be assumed to be about persuading our students to join the new right (which, as the class will show, is a highly fractured movement full of internal contradictions, just like any other political movement). Nor are we pro-woke by teaching Woke, which will look at the scholarship on wokeness and discuss wokeness’s merits and demerits, just like any other movement.

8. Has the Washington Center spent $3 million?

No. An appropriation means you have the authority and budget to spend a certain amount of money, not that you actually have spent it. Approximately $3 million was appropriated to the Center across its first two fiscal years. As of mid-summer, about one-sixth of that amount had been spent. Much of the early expenditure concerned renovation of the assigned office suite, including substantial asbestos abatement. Collapsing every year of our budget into the phrase “spent 3 million dollars” makes for an attention-grabbing, but misleading, headline.

9. Why should West Virginia spend new money for a center so recently after WVU cutbacks?

Universities are enormous institutions that are constantly scaling back in some ways and expanding in other ways. The same year faculty are cut might see a new sports facility built; the same year a scholarship is terminated, a new program might begin. There is no single pot of money going into WVU, and different donors and funding bodies have different interests. And even in narrower cases where there is one pot of money, administrators of those budgets must make many hard calls on behalf of WVU.

What’s important for those concerned to remember is that WVU funding is not zero-sum. It isn’t as if $1.5 million going to the Washington Center this year means $1.5 million less for other programs. If anything, it’s just the opposite. Nothing can threaten WVU’s long-term financial prospects more than waning support from taxpayers, institutional donors, and alumni. Insofar as the Washington Center reassures these groups that their values have genuine representation at WVU, the Washington Center should be seen as a major fundraising opportunity for the university. Meanwhile, with the support of WVU’s grants offices and Foundation, the Washington Center will be aggressively seeking federal and private funding to support its operations.

10. Why were faculty hired before permanent courses and a minor were approved?

Some universities’ civics centers are pieced together from existing faculty. This strategy has the advantage of making the establishment of a center seamless and less costly. The disadvantage of this approach is that it brings in no new personnel or fresh perspective to those institutions.

Hence many and probably most centers are developed as the Washington Center has been: first a Director is hired, who then must recruit faculty, assemble hiring committees, and onboard the resulting faculty. Only after faculty are hired can the curriculum be fully established: Washington Center faculty are not instructors hired to teach whatever courses the Director has in mind; rather, they are tenure-track teacher-scholars whose strengths, research interests, and vision help determine which courses are offered in the first place.

The Washington Center needed at least one faculty member with expertise in each of its major areas (ancient Greece/Rome, Medieval Europe, the American Founding, and Modern Controversies). It made these hires in May, June, and July of 2026.

11. Why was enrollment in the Center’s first courses low?

As we get approval for our permanent curriculum, the Center will preview some WASH courses in the form of “special topics” classes. This strategy allows the Center to potentially teach WASH courses right away rather than waiting another semester or even year. But special topics courses are particularly difficult to recruit for when they are offered by a new academic unit. Although our special topics courses carry ordinary academic credit, they do not yet count toward an approved Washington Center minor (once our Statesmanship minor is approved, they will be). Students also have limited space for free electives, and students receiving federal or state financial aid must pay particular attention to whether a course advances their official program of study.

The Center also lacks the ordinary recruiting advantages enjoyed by established departments. Special topics courses are often promoted directly by professors to students who already know them. Washington Center faculty had not yet taught at WVU and therefore had no former students to contact. Moreover, the Center began without its own advisors and is unfamiliar to the advisors of other colleges. Advisors reasonably concentrate on helping students complete the requirements of the programs they serve. A temporary WASH elective belonging to no approved program was therefore unlikely to be prominent in their recommendations.

Thus, after considering these factors, enrollment figures in WASH courses are unsurprising, as is the coverage that repeats the same negative talking points at this stage of civics center development. That said, Washington Center faculty will be, in addition to any enrolled WASH courses, teaching for Honors and possibly the CLASS program. This is in addition to our work of program-building, grant-writing, speaking, researching, and writing. Meanwhile, we remain excited to be part of WVU and honored to be of service to the people of West Virginia.