GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Students in both classrooms were considering historic events. In Introduction to Sociology, the discussion was about globalization. Three buildings over, a Civil Discourse class was debating 1798 America and the federal government’s battle with the states for supremacy.
Both courses fall within the broad field of study known as the humanities. But at the University of Florida, the class on early America is part of a growing and well-funded effort to counter what the state considers “woke” liberal indoctrination, while the sociology class is considered a prime example of the problem.
One of these classes is being nurtured; the other strangled.
The Civil Discourse class is offered by the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, which in just a few years has grown from an idea into a full-fledged school with nearly 50 professors, four majors, 69 classes this spring and tens of millions of dollars appropriated directly by the Florida legislature.
Not so for Introduction to Sociology. Beginning this fall, the class, which covers issues of class, inequality, race and gender, will no longer count as one of the general education courses required for graduation. Enrollment is expected to plummet.
The dichotomy stems from a conservative backlash to the liberalism that prevails on many campuses, something a growing number of schools have acknowledged. In response, red states are installing a new breed of civics centers like the Hamilton School at public universities, focused on America’s founding and Western civilization — the history, culture and politics centered in Europe that laid the groundwork for American institutions.
And in states such as Florida, new mandates are downgrading courses that offer more diverse perspectives.
“There has been in recent decades a lack of attention to Western civilization and sometimes a disdain for Western civilization,” said Charles T. Canady, a noted conservative who directs the Hamilton School. Too often, he said, history is filtered through questions of identity such as race and gender or negative lenses like colonialism. “We’re here to do something different.”
In Florida, the civics movement has been accompanied by a new law that targets classes deemed too liberal. The 2023 statute bars state schools from giving general education credit to classes that teach “identity politics” or are based on “theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States.” The law also requiresthat general education courses “promote and preserve the constitutional republic.”
As civics centers surge and so-called woke classes are purged, critics say universities are being pulled backward to a time when society mandated that the views of White European men be valued above all others.
“It seems to me to be a selective viewpoint diversity,” said Jon Sensbach, former chair of the History Department at the University of Florida, who retired last year. He said there’s much to be said for studying Western thinking. “But if that’s all you have — if your understanding stops at the great books and you don’t begin to understand other cultures, other perspectives, other ways of looking at the world — you’re limiting yourself, your own education.”
The state considers the Introduction to Sociology class to be a prime example of the sort of left-wing indoctrination that has caused Americans to lose confidence in higher education, Ray Rodrigues, chancellor of Florida’s State University System, said in an interview. While a faculty working group produced a new sociology textbook that watered down discussion of race, gender and other topics, he said, he did not trust faculty to stick to it. The state’s Board of Governors said in March that sociology classes can be offered but would not count toward general education credits.
And Rodrigues said the Board of Governors will continue to monitor courses to make sure they are in compliance with state law. In addition, syllabi must be posted to a public database, and he said the board will evaluate outside tips on violations.
To comply with the same state law, the University of Florida, the state’s flagship school, in 2024 reviewed more than 1,200 general education classes and stripped nearly 500 active courses from the list, records show. That included every class offered by the Women’s Studies and African American Studies departments and most history and literature offerings. Another purge underway this spring targeted interdisciplinary courses that fulfill a university requirement known as Quest.
The interim dean at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences alerted department chairs that the new round of cuts would be disruptive. But the new Hamilton School stood to benefit.
“We are confident that all Hamilton Quest courses comply with state law,” Canady said. He said those general education enrollments are critical. “We view it as a gateway to our program.”
Of the 26 courses that the university added to the general education course list this year, 20 were from the Hamilton School. During the 2025-26 school year, Hamilton enrolled more than 1,800 students in one of its general education courses.
In 2025, Hamilton launched two majors — Philosophy, Politics, Economics and Law; and Great Books and Ideas — and it will add two more this fall: American Government, History, Literature and Law; and War, Statecraft and Strategy. Classes taught this spring centered on, among other topics, freedom and equality, romanticism, capitalism, the “crisis of liberalism” and Jewish thought.
So far, 259 students have declared a Hamilton major and another 57, a minor.
Nine GOP-led states have created 14 civics centers since 2017, when the first one was established in Arizona, focusing on topics such as America’s founding and Western civilization. In Ohio, there are centers at five public universities, and in Utah, state law now mandates that all general education classes required for graduation be crafted by the new Center for Civic Excellence. The new rules, which are being piloted at Utah State, also mandate that humanities courses required for graduation teach texts predominantly from Western civilization.
Ben Sasse, former president of the University of Florida and one of Hamilton’s chief champions, said last month that his strategy for the humanities was to build “a better college of liberal arts, which is functionally what Hamilton is.”
The official line from the Hamilton School is that its offerings complement those in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. But one Hamilton faculty member who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution described it differently: “If I were a history department, I would be worried.”
A tense debut
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation in 2022 establishing Hamilton, advancing a project explicitly pitched as a way to counter liberalism on campus. Lawmakers provided $3 million in funding to start the center and, every year since, $10 million as a line item in the budget, meaning it does not have to compete with other priorities in the university budget. The state is adding another $55 million to renovate a historic building for Hamilton.
From the start, faculty in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences were skeptical if not outright opposed. Some resented the suggestion that their teaching was overly liberal. Others accused Hamilton of trying to rush through approval procedures for its majors and courses. In a 2023 report, a faculty task force reported that some professors “fear that the Hamilton Center has been set up as a ‘shadow college,’ intended to replace many of [Arts and Sciences’] functions, without faculty input.”
Hamilton leaders complained that Arts and Sciences professors were bad-mouthing Hamilton to students, and protested to Sasse, the university’s president. Sasse then pressured the college to get in line, which was first reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education and confirmed by several people familiar with the discussions. At one meeting with faculty leaders, Sasse suggested that Arts and Sciences could be folded into Hamilton if cooperation didn’t improve, Danaya Wright, a law professor who chaired the Faculty Senate at the time, told The Washington Post.
In early 2024, seven Arts and Sciences department chairs were told to sign letters pledging their support for Hamilton, according to documents and interviews with people involved. The university launched investigations into six leaders in the English, History and Anthropology departments who were suspected of interfering with Hamilton, documents show. And under pressure, the Faculty Senate rushed the approval of Hamilton’s new majors.
Ultimately the investigations were dropped, but tension remained while Hamilton went on a hiring spree as traditional humanities departments were shrinking.
“All of a sudden, the humanities are great if they’re the right kind of humanities,” said Sensbach, who as chairman of the History Department was investigated and told to sign a letter of support for Hamilton.
Since then, the overt tension has dissipated, but resentment lingers.
“In our minds, the Hamilton School looms large,” said Benjamin Wise, a history professor at the university. “It’s natural to feel worried that this thing is going to keep growing and we’re going to keep shrinking.”
Inside Hamilton
The building promised to Hamilton is being renovated, so for the moment the school’s offices and classrooms line stark hallways that look more like underappreciated office space than an institution concerned with something as weighty as Western civilization.
But inside Room 453 one recent day, Professor Jeremy Bailey was working to bring America circa 1798 to life in the course titled Civil Discourse and the American Political Order, Hamilton’s most popular class. He wanted students to grapple with a contradiction: The same leaders who wrote the First Amendment, guaranteeing a right to free speech, also wrote the Alien and Sedition Acts, punishing those who criticize the government.
“How could these men think this was compatible with the First Amendment?” he asked.
Indeed, all the players in this drama were men — White men, something of a given considering who held the power during this time. Of the 343 readings authored by individuals and assigned across eight sections of this course this spring, 83 percent were written by White men, a Post analysis of the course syllabi found. In a Great Books of the Modern World class, the syllabus lists 13 required or recommended authors; 12 are White men.
Bailey did not push any particular point of view, other than the notion that it was worthwhile and even exciting to study the nation’s origins and documents.
“What do you notice? What is important, strange, confusing, reassuring, shocking?” he asked the class. “What makes sense with respect to the other things we have read?”
Several Hamilton students said they appreciated the school’s small class sizes, the quality of the teaching and that the class checked certain boxes needed for graduation. That includes Leah Kendal, who said she took the class because it met the university civics requirement but also found herself loving it.
“I feel like I walk out of class smarter,” she said.
A broader view of the world was on display in Introduction to Sociology, the class that will no longer meet general education requirements in Florida. Topics covered over the course of the semester included class, poverty and social mobility; sex, gender and the family; race and ethnicity; and, on one recent day, globalization.
In less than an hour, the instructor touched on the spread of American culture across the globe, the role of international organizations like the United Nations, the clash of civilizations as exhibited by the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the resurgence of nationalism and religious politics. The students were asked to consider inequities across the globe, where some countries are dense with population and poverty.
“How does this happen?” the instructor asked. “To see how these things came to be, we need to go back and see how nations started developing or not developing.”
Other departments in the College of Arts and Sciences pride themselves on looking beyond Western civilization. This fall, for instance, the university’s English Department will offer courses on Latinx Feminist Fiction, Hip Hop and Young Adult Literature on the Gulf Coast, and Black Diasporic Thought, according to the online course catalogue.
“Traditional approaches don’t represent the world we live in anymore,” said Sid Dobrin, who chaired the department for about a decade. “There’s a vast expanse of other great books, a vast expanse of what constitutes literature.”
Some students say that Hamilton’s approach leads to its own kind of bias.
Sasha Morel, who declared a Hamilton major this year, described Hamilton as offering “a curriculum of exclusion.” The bias is not in how any one subject is taught, he said, but in the fact that “certain alternative ways of thinking are overshadowed.”
“Professors have so much room to talk about whatever they want,” said Morel, who describes himself as politically progressive. “They are experts. That’s awesome. But … a lot of them are experts in a very narrow field or very conservative field of philosophy.”
But some more-conservative students welcome that kind of expertise. Paul Briere, who describes his politics as center-right, arrived at the University of Florida last year planning to study philosophy in the liberal arts college. Before his freshman orientation was over, he had been introduced to the Hamilton School.
In the spring, Briere took all five of his courses at Hamilton, and he has declared a Hamilton major. Briere still plans to take certain courses in the university’s philosophy department, but only if needed.
“In full honesty,” he said, “I expect those classes will come to Hamilton.”
Chris Hacker contributed to this report.
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