How much do you remember from your American history classes? If you’re like the average citizen, probably not much. Did you even take a U.S. history class in college?
The Ohio Legislature got involved in the debate over our collective civic illiteracy by approving Senate Bill 1 last year, requiring all students pursuing bachelor’s degrees at public state universities to take and pass a class covering specific aspects of American history and civics. Politicians being politicians, the bill also included a number of unrelated directives: university DEI departments must be dissolved, along with diversity statements; faculty strikes are prohibited over unfair practices; academic programs with small graduating class numbers over a three-year period must be eliminated; and safeguards must be enacted against the interference and influence of the People’s Republic of China.
Spearheaded by Ohio State Senator Jerry Cirino, a Republican from the Cleveland area, SB1 was framed as a way to preserve free expression on college campuses. The bill claims to enhance both speech and academic freedom, not limit them, “with a requirement that diversity of thought be promoted,” according to his January 2025 news release introducing the bill.
SB1 meticulously outlines what an American civic literacy course should entail at the university level, including specific readings. Universities are not given any funding to meet the mandate—to cover a new professor’s salary, for example—and must implement the course by fall 2026 for the graduating class of 2030 and beyond.
“There are aspects of [SB 1] that I think are wrong-headed,” says David Stradling, professor of urban history at the University of Cincinnati. “But in general I was supportive of this legislation [regarding American civic literacy] from the very beginning.”
Stradling, who’s taught at UC for 25 years, is one of the key faculty members who helped shape the university’s response. UC has launched a new history course, Democracy and the American Tradition, alongside an updated political science offering from the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) to fulfill the requirement.
“There was already a political science course at UC that did much of what the legislation asked for,” says Stradling. “We worked in parallel and in communication with each other. SPIA transformed their course to meet the legislation’s specific needs, and the history department created a brand-new class that includes all of the required documents.”
The political science class, American Political Thought, has been reconfigured from a more major-specific course to meet the wider student base it’s now also serving. “The course focuses on the political philosophy behind the founding of the United States and then traces forward how political thought has changed up until the present,” says Steve Mockabee, SPIA director and professor. “We’ve redesigned that course to now be offered at the 1000 level instead of as an upper-level course.”
Miami University is also adding multiple versions of the course in different departments and units. At least four versions will be taught on Miami’s main campus: a new history course taught by history faculty, a redesigned political science class that will replace an introductory American government survey, and two courses through Miami’s Center for Civics, Culture, and Society, which will cover the same set of texts but with slightly different objectives. There may be other versions released in the future as well. Regional campuses in Hamilton, Middletown, and West Chester will have their own version of the course.
The percentage of college students who take an American history class has plummeted, says Stradling, a depressing thought as the country gets ready to celebrate its 250th birthday. “I used to teach 200 students each quarter in the American survey, and essentially every American history professor did that,” he says. “So we were teaching thousands of students American history, and others were teaching other kinds of history. I think it’s important to study American history, but it’s important to study history period. And that really wasn’t happening anymore.”
Spencer Kiesel was hired by the University of Cincinnati to teach the new American Political Thought course in the School of Public and International Affairs.
Photograph by Devyn Glista
The class of 2030 starts college this fall. Exact enrollment numbers aren’t out yet, but UC projected that nearly 9,000 first-time undergraduates began their studies across all of its campuses in fall 2025. Students who began five-year programs in 2025 are among the first required to take the new American civic literacy course.
“We want to make our courses at UC the best in the state, with really high quality,” says Mockabee. “I think a lot of us as faculty feel that the state legislature designing courses and mandating them is not necessarily good public policy. But given the fact that this legislation has happened, we said, OK, we’re going to pivot and do the best job we can to make this high quality, not just a course that everybody has to take.”
To teach the American Political Thought course, SPIA hired assistant professor Spencer Kiesel, formerly a lecturer at the University of California Davis. “We wanted to make sure that this wasn’t a box-ticking exercise,” says Kiesel. “They wanted to hire a full-time dedicated faculty member, someone who can oversee the whole process and develop a really sharp course that doesn’t just take what the legislature wanted us to do and do it on the cheap as fast as possible. Someone who would give students something that’s actually going to be valuable.”
The civic literacy class taught at every public university in Ohio must be a minimum of three credit hours and include a study of the American economic system and a study of capitalism. Readings must include the entire Constitution of the United States, the entire Declaration of Independence, a minimum of five essays in their entirety from the Federalist Papers, the entire Emancipation Proclamation, the entire Gettysburg Address, the entire Letter from Birmingham Jail, and the writings of Adam Smith, including a study of the principles written in The Wealth of Nations.
“There’s a bunch of stuff on that list that any reasonable professor would have included,” says Kiesel. “I don’t know how to teach U.S. political thought without including the Constitution, some Federalist Papers, and the Declaration of Independence. So it’s sort of weird being required to do that. There is a natural discomfort with being ordered to do things. It puts us in a space where it starts to look more like a state indoctrination type of deal.”
Several organizations made the argument that requiring universities to teach what the government mandates creates a slippery slope. The American Historical Association, the largest membership association of historians in the world, submitted testimony opposing SB1, saying the legislation would undermine public education in Ohio by undercutting the free exchange of ideas and overruling the professional judgment of qualified academics.
Kiesel says he’s more concerned about the issue of redundancy. “I would be much happier with just the course being required and then allowing us to determine whatever we want to include, though I would pick most of the same things,” he says. “So functionally it makes very little difference, probably aside from the Adam Smith bit. He’s a British writer, and so in American Political Thought it’s a bit of a curveball.”
Smith was the progenitor of free trade and strongly opposed to tariffs (especially retaliatory tariffs, like those recently imposed by the U.S.). He was a great thinker of the 18th century, someone the founding fathers would have known about and almost certainly read. The Wealth of Nations was published in March 1776, just months before America established its independence.
“Smith’s economic ideas are terribly influential,” says Kiesel. “A lot of them did get adopted by the U.S. government and early U.S. policymakers. You can see how this book got included as part of U.S. political thought, but you could have picked an American.”
Kiesel says he would have selected Alexander Hamilton instead.
Topics covered by the UC class (and all such classes at Ohio public universities) include the Declaration of Independence.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
Engaging with works written centuries ago can be dry, so professors teaching this history and civics class are free to supplement the required texts with other readings, media, and secondary sources that can help contextualize the messages presented. It also helps to consider the historical figures in context with the standards and reality of their own time period. Woodrow Wilson, for example, was a progressive in certain ways, but also a vehement racist. The progressive movement of the early 20th century, Kiesel notes, is not analogous to modern definitions of progress.
“These are people,” he says. “They’re human beings, not TV characters. They’re complex and weird. They can disagree with themselves. Who they are at age 20 isn’t necessarily who they are at 40, right? Humanizing a lot of these figures for the students really helps them sort of get out of the ideological trench.”
American Political Thought runs chronologically, from the concepts the country was founded on through major historical events. To be in compliance with the new legislature, UC had to submit its plan and sample syllabus to the Ohio Department of Education for approval.
“It’s an affirmation that our approach of emphasizing quality is the right one,” says Mockabee. “We’re currently offering the class, and we’re anticipating enrollment will grow in the fall.”
Students must contribute and participate in the class throughout the semester. Much like other courses, they take part in small group discussions and report back to the full class. They must submit questions online and then discus them in class, too. Students also participate in a mock Constitutional Convention, where they propose and debate new amendments.
“What surprised me so far was how little I have to do to get them to talk about things,” says Kiesel. “I generally relax constraints and rules until it’s as free and open for them as much as possible, and I have to do almost no prompting. They’re happy to bring stuff up, happy to talk. They disagree all the time, but nobody ever gets mad or yells at each other.”
These discussions can bring up uncomfortable topics such as slavery, wars, violence, prejudice, and wealth inequality. The idea of a university education, though, is that the classroom is where these conversations can be had and critical thinking can be undertaken. “In college, we’re working with adults,” says Stradling. “They come from different backgrounds and have different experiences and ideas, and that makes for much more fertile ground for discussions about how the past still echoes in the present.”
Mockabee says one of the biggest concerns for historians and political scientists is that history can be used as a political weapon to whitewash certain parts of the American experience or teach only the comfortable parts. “We want to just teach it honestly,” he says. “That will continue to be the guiding principle here at UC. So this isn’t a state law that many faculty would have written, but given that this is where we are, we want to do the best we can to serve our students.”
Similar discussions and planning have been going on at Miami University, which convened an interdisciplinary team last year to design the new courses. The process was facilitated by Nathan French, associate professor of religion and international studies and chair of Miami’s senate executive committee, and led by Elizabeth Hoover, a teaching professor of musicology and interim director of the university’s Office of Liberal Education, and Flagg Taylor, director of the new Center for Civics, Culture, and Society. Faculty from political science, history, economics, media, journalism, film, and the Menard Family Center for Democracy came together to discuss the university’s approach.
The resulting history and political science courses aren’t completely different classes so much as two curricular frameworks tailored to how the different fields approach knowledge and methodology, says French. “If a colleague in political science wanted to teach a version of the course, we have a syllabus with assignments that would fulfill what we’d expect out of a social science,” he says. “If someone in the humanities wanted to teach that course, same idea.”
Miami’s regional campuses will have their own version of the course based on specific student needs for curriculum there. “We have a significantly sized population of high school students who are College Credit Plus students taking courses at the regionals,” says John Forren, associate professor and director of the Menard Family Center for Democracy. “The version at the regional campuses is being designed to meet both the civic course outcomes and requirements as well as the state’s requirements and guidelines for high school government. It meets several goals at once because we’re serving a unique population.”
Two years before SB1 was introduced, SB117 appropriated millions of dollars from the state’s General Revenue Fund to create civics centers as independent academic units at the state’s top public universities, from Ohio State and Cleveland State to UC and Miami. UC, which houses the Portman Center for Policy Solutions, declined to create a new center; the money went to Wright State instead. Miami created the Center for Civics, Culture, and Society.
“These civics units sit outside of the regular academic structure, and it was part of legislators’ reaction against the perception that state colleges were run by leftists, so they couldn’t trust people to hire a diverse faculty and teach a diverse perspective on issues,” says Stradling. “The Portman Center is designed to have bipartisan dialogue around critical issues, so I think UC was well positioned to make the case that we can actually be trusted to have open dialogue. That’s why the actual history department and the actual political science faculty will be leading these classes.”
Miami took a different tack in creating the new classes, says Forren. The Menard Family Center for Democracy might at first glance seem similar to UC’s Portman Center, in that it’s focused on civic matters both on and off campus, but Miami decided to use the state funding to create the Center for Civics, Culture, and Society as a curriculum-focused entity. “They’re focused very heavily on curriculum, on teaching courses and developing new courses,” he says. “We focus much more on student and faculty research and public programming.”
Wherever the course is taught in the Miami system, the mandated readings remain the same. There is no provision at this time for those readings to change as the course matures and student and faculty feedback comes in, but French is optimistic.
“When we think about a mandated course like this with mandated texts, it obviously invites a question of academic freedom,” he says. “I also hope it means that we will revisit what those texts are over time. And when the state chooses to revisit what those texts are, I hope they consult with faculty, especially the faculty who have been teaching this course early in that process.”
When it comes time to review the course’s success, SB1 requires each school’s Chancellor to perform an annual evaluation. At Miami, the course and its instructors will be evaluated as usual according to the school’s regular evaluation guidelines, which French says are also “responsive” to state law.
“One critical note I’m sure that will be reviewed early will of course be, Are students passing the required exam that comes at the end of the course?” he says. “Because they could actually pass the class, but if they fail the exam they won’t get credit for the course. The law explicitly says they must pass the exam. So I think the university will be focusing on that closely, and I’m sure that the Ohio Department of Education will as well.”
The American civic literacy course is carrying a lot of responsibility on its back. Whatever the legislation’s potential intentions were, or are, faculty at the University of Cincinnati and Miami University are approaching the mandate with education at the core.
“We complain that Americans aren’t informed enough about government,” says Kiesel. “Well, here’s an effort to alleviate that—have everyone who gets a college education learn a little bit about the history and the politics of their country and the structures of their government. That sounds great to me.”
