Dr. Thomas K. Lindsay Lecture Transcript (Edited)
West Texas A&M University, Civil Discourse and Civics Education Symposium
Mar. 31, 2026
Well, thank you for that very kind introduction, and good morning, everyone.
It's great to see the size of this crowd, and especially it's great to see how many students there are here because I'm going to be addressing my remarks to you students.
You’ve just heard about my work researching higher education. The bad news is that much of what I’ve found over the last couple of decades hasn’t been so great.
That's part of the reason we're having this conference. But having said that, over the years of my work, I've gotten to know West Texas A&M University, and I really regard it as a shining beacon of excellence and of unwavering patriotism right here in the heart of the Panhandle.
I was here at the launch of The Hill Institute, which was made possible by an extraordinarily generous $20 million gift from Alex Fairly, and it gives me hope for the future of higher education because it's a powerful testament to the enduring West Texas values that we all cherish. trust, personal responsibility, grit, and a deep, thoughtful love of country.
I've also gotten to know President Walter Wendler, and his courageous and visionary leadership has helped to bring this dream to life, ensuring that you, young people, will truly understand the moral and intellectual principles that make this Republic worth defending.
And I think that Alex Fairly’s selfless patriotism through his major support of The Hill Institute should serve as an inspiration to us all. So for all these reasons, it's an honor to speak before you today.
Now, as I said, I want to address you, college students, in the audience. You, students, are really standing at one of the most decisive moments in your lives. The world you live in has opened up to you extraordinary freedom to question, to explore, and to choose your life path. But that very freedom brings some dangers that we may not be fully aware of. And by that I mean this. You students are surrounded by voices. Your friends, your professors, your peers, social media—much social media—and popular culture. And all of these sources often speak as if absolute truth doesn't exist. They speak as if truth is negotiable, as if justice is only what the strongest group declares it to be. They tell you that the great questions of human existence have been settled by the latest hashtag or opinion poll.
So today I'm speaking to you about a matter that directly touches the soul of the American Republic that you've inherited and whose future you will shape. You know, we talk about education policy all the time, and sometimes it seems abstract, complex, and confusing, but the best way to understand education when we talk about it is this: when we talk about education, what we're talking about is our future.
Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said that the philosophy taught in the classroom in this generation will be the philosophy practiced in the legislature in the next generation. Which is why we're here to talk about the impact of the core curriculum on civil discourse and civics education. This is not an abstract academic topic, even though the title may sound that way. What it's about is whether the education that you're receiving will equip you to think, to speak, and to act as free, self-governing citizens, or whether your education will leave you intellectually disarmed. Disarmed in a time of profound moral confusion.
So, let's begin with the heart of the matter.
The American Republic was founded on a proposition so radical and so simple that it continues to astonish the world. And that simply is this: That all human beings are created equal, that they're endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that governments exist to protect those rights with the consent of the governed. Now this proposition is not a mere historical curiosity. It is instead a claim about human nature itself. What it asserts is that there is a moral order in the universe, which is accessible to reason. It is confirmed by revelation. And it is therefore binding on every generation.
Our founders understood that a free people can't remain free unless they're educated in freedom, not merely in its procedures, but in its moral and intellectual foundations. Well, don't take my word for it. Thomas Jefferson said, "Any nation that expects to be both ignorant and free... expects what never was and never will be." That's why our founders passed the Northwest Ordinance in 1797, which declared, "Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and human happiness, schools must be encouraged." There's the connection.
Our founders knew that self-government demands self-restraint. They knew that majority rule must be tempered by justice. And they knew that liberty without virtue becomes license. Liberty means choosing freely to do the right thing. License means if it feels good, do it.
Look at what passes for a core curriculum at most universities around the country today, and you'll see that they are not following the founders' vision of the relationship between education and democracy. Too often, core curricula across the country have been dismantled or diluted beyond recognition. What's left is a collection of what are called distribution requirements, which means students take a little of this, and a little of that, but with no real unifying vision, no guidance by a model of what the good life is, which had always animated university education in the past. No asking of the hard questions, perhaps a few ideological electives, and that's it.
Meanwhile, the great books of Western civilization, which made possible the freedom with which we're speaking right now, the great books of Western civilization, which force us to confront the permanent problems of human existence: What is justice? What is virtue? What is the best political order? What is the relationship between reason and faith? All of these issues that the great books teach us about are treated by most universities today as optional, or as we call it in universities, “elective.”
Not only are they treated as merely optional, but they’re also treated too often as antiquated. In fact, they're treated too often as oppressive. In their place, we find moral and cultural relativism, which is presented as intellectual sophistication. By moral and cultural relativism, I simply mean the notion that all values are equal because none can be proven to be superior to any other. That truth is subjective; moral principles are merely cultural constructs.
A good number of scholars have identified moral and cultural relativism as constituting what they call the crisis of Western civilization. The founders believed that a good, open, and tolerant society requires adherence to the self-evident truths found in the Declaration of Independence. “Self-evident truths” means absolute truths. But today, we're taught that a free, open, and tolerant society requires the rejection of the notion of absolute truth.
Now, part of the reason for that is because relativism offered itself as a way out of the tyranny that we saw under Hitler. Hitler was no relativist, right? He thought there was higher and lower, right? And we saw what happened. So, the argument was that if we embrace relativism, no one will tyrannize over anybody else anymore. But here's the problem with that, both logical and morally: Relativism holds that there is no objective truth. When you ask the question, “Is that true?”, then their answer has to be, “Well, yeah, because that's why I said it.” Well, in that case, the absolute truth is that there is no absolute truth, which is a logical contradiction.
It's easy to see that problem. But the reason the West has embraced relativism is because we thought it would create a more open and tolerant society. But think about that. If all values are truly equal, if all “truths” are relative and subjective, then we have to say that the principles of justice articulated by the Reverend Martin Luther King are no better, no worse, than those articulated by Adolf Hitler. Is that what we paid to get a college education for, to learn that? What relativism does is to dissolve the foundation that makes rational conversation possible. Because when there's no shared standard of right and wrong, the ability of free citizens to reason together about the common good becomes impossible.
What we see instead on too many campuses and in public life, and as Walter Cronkite said, on the 6:00 news, is the substitution of power for persuasion; shouting down speakers, canceling dissent, and reducing complex moral questions to slogans and identity categories.
You students, you faculty, you know all these scenes. You've witnessed them or watched them on TV. They're not accidents. The fact that this is happening right now is not an accident. It's the natural fruit of an education that teaches you young people to regard every claim to truth as simply a subjective preference, and ultimately as an assertion of domination. By domination, I simply mean this. It sounds great to tell me that I can do whatever I want, because there are no standards to evaluate me. But then I have a disagreement with, say, Mike Tyson.
Now, in order for Mike and me to compromise, there has to be a principle that we both identify as superior to us, on the basis of which we compromise. But if there are no shared principles, if there is no right and wrong, then ultimately it just becomes a power struggle. And that's where we are today. And the same distortion afflicts civics education. I'm a political science professor, as was mentioned. And I know that too many courses today in political science present the Constitution as really just a neutral set of rules, a kind of procedural machine that can be endlessly reinterpreted to fit our contemporary preferences. The Declaration of Independence, the heart and soul of the American Republic, is treated as a mere historical document rather than a philosophic statement of natural right.
Now, what's been the result of this kind of education? Let's take a look at the U.S. citizenship test. First, the good news: We all know about the U.S. citizenship test, which immigrants must pass to become a citizen. It's their last step. The good news is 90% of immigrants to this country pass the citizenship test the first time. The bad news is that only 23% of native-born Texans under the age of 45 can pass the test. The even worse news, it's only 20 questions. Still worse, you only have to get 12 out of 20 questions right. That's the state of civics education in America today.
We're producing a generation that may know a little bit about how government works, but you students are not taught why government ought to be limited. You're not taught why consent must be informed by virtue. You're not taught why the doctrine of human equality found in the Declaration of Independence simultaneously forbids slavery and, at the same time, forbids government-enforced sameness. Without this moral formation, civics either becomes empty formalism—"How a bill becomes law,” or ideological advocacy. Neither of those two approaches prepares you to be self-governing citizens.
Let me talk about something still deeper, and that's the way the Declaration and the Constitution reconcile faith and freedom. And that reconciliation really lies at the heart of why this Republic has endured and why your education must recover it. The Declaration doesn't merely assert that we have inalienable rights. It doesn't merely assert that we are by nature equal. Instead, it grounds these claims in what it calls the “laws of nature and of nature's God.” It declares that human beings are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights. Here, reason and revelation meet.
The equality of human beings is not merely a human invention. It flows from the fact that every human being bears the image of God. This biblical truth gives moral weight to the claim that no majority, no government, and no tyrant may rightfully strip any human being of his or her inherent dignity. At the same time, these rights announced in the Declaration are called natural, meaning they're discoverable by the independent human reason.
And this is the American founding’s profound harmony: Faith supplies the ultimate “why” of human equality while reason provides the “how” of securing this equality and securing these rights in political institutions. So, our Constitution forbids Congress from establishing a national religion or prohibiting the free exercise of religion. It creates a government that's instead limited to protecting rights and to promoting the general welfare while leaving the soul free to seek God as conscience dictates. George Washington understood this perfectly when he said, "Religion and morality are indispensable supports of political prosperity." That was in his farewell address, the first draft of which was written by Alexander Hamilton. (Not a bad speech writer to have if you're the president.)
So, the American regime doesn't coerce faith, but it does presuppose a people capable of moral self-government. It presupposes a people whose consciences are formed by faith and whose liberties are protected by law. This reconciliation is under direct assault today. Relativism treats religious faith as just one “lifestyle choice” among many—no better, no worse, no truer than any other. Relativism treats freedom as the ability and the right to define reality for yourself. What's the result? A false freedom. One that leads to moral chaos. Therefore, a genuine core curriculum has to place this reconciliation at its center.
You should read the Declaration of Independence alongside the book of Genesis. You should read John Locke alongside Thomas Aquinus. You should read the Federalist Papers alongside the Bible. You should see how Abraham Lincoln, our greatest President, invoked both natural right, discoverable by reason, and Divine providence to preserve the Union. You should understand that faith and freedom are not enemies; they're allies. Faith gives liberty its moral direction, and liberty gives faith some room to breathe.
Therefore, a core curriculum that truly enhances civil discourse has to make this reconciliation clear. That must be the starting point for a number of reasons.
First, a genuine core curriculum restores shared premises. I'm old enough to remember that, back in the 60s and 70s, the United States and the old Soviet Union would have their SALT talks, Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, and the people on the news would say, "We just need to send a deal-maker over there. They just need to make a deal.” And it never really happened. And why? Because, as I mentioned earlier, in order to make a deal, in order to compromise peacefully, both sides have to agree on a higher principle, toward which they look and on the basis of which they make their compromises. Without that, all that's left is a power struggle.
So, in a genuine core curriculum, you read Plato's Republic on justice; you read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics on virtue as a mean between extremes; you read the Declaration on self-evident truths; you read Lincoln's speeches on the limits of majority rule. When you do this in a genuine core curriculum, what you find are the same fundamental questions and the same foundational concepts again and again. You learn that the notion that all human beings are created equal is not merely an 18th-century slogan. It's instead a proposition about human nature. And it's one that we can reason about, that we can debate, and that I hope we'll defend.
When you and your classmates share this intellectual patrimony, your disagreements will no longer start from radically different starting points. Of course, you can argue about applications, interpretations, and priorities, but you're arguing within the same moral universe. And that shared framework is the first, and really the most powerful, mechanism by which a core curriculum elevates discourse from mere assertion and toward thoughtful deliberation.
Second, a genuine core curriculum cultivates the intellectual virtues that are necessary for a truly serious conversation—reading difficult texts slowly and carefully. Socratic dialogues, the Federalist Papers, Biblical passages—when you study them with seriousness, it trains you in patience, in precision, and in charity toward opposing views. You learn to distinguish strong arguments from weak ones, to identify unexamined assumptions, to follow logical chains of argument, and to anticipate objections. These aren't abstract skills. They're the habits of mind that directly counteract the impatience, the sloganizing, and the bad faith interpretations that dominate so much of public debate today.
A core curriculum that requires you to write papers defending or critiquing positions that you didn't initially hold serves to build in you intellectual humility and empathy. It creates in you the willingness to see why a reasonable person might disagree without having to label them as evil.
Third, a genuine core curriculum habituates you to moral reasoning rather than moral posturing. Relativism encourages you to treat moral claims as expressions of personal identity or group identity. How often in an argument have you heard, “This is my truth,” or “This is our lived experience”? A core curriculum centered on natural right teaches you to treat moral claims as propositions that can be examined, tested against reason and evidence, and judged by standards external to oneself. For example, when you study Lincoln's “Cooper Union Address,” you see him painstakingly reconstructing the founders’ views on slavery, using historical and textual evidence. Lincoln did not use emotional appeals or identity assertions.
The more you study in a core curriculum, the more that method becomes second nature to you. You start to ask the question, “Is this just?”—rather than “Does this offend me?” or “Does this empower my group?” That shift, from subjective feeling to objective standard, constitutes another powerful enhancement to civil discourse that a genuine core curriculum can produce.
Fourth, a genuine core curriculum gives us historical models of elevated discourse. The Lincoln-Douglas Debates are not just an historical curiosity. They are a model for us all. Two men, Abraham Lincoln and Steven Douglas, both deeply serious men, both appealing to the same sacred texts, both willing to reason in public out loud about the most explosive moral issue of their time, slavery. And yet they did it without descending into personal vilification. Their debates teach us what's possible when citizens have been educated in the same moral and intellectual tradition.
A core curriculum immerses you in such models repeatedly. You read the “Lyceum Address,” where Lincoln, at the tender age of 29, warns us against “mobocratic rule” and tells us that the only antidote is reverence for the Constitution and its laws. Now, in my work, I fight in the legislature merely to get the study of the Constitution into the curriculum. Lincoln would tell us, "Well, that's half of it. You have to do better. You have to teach reverence for the Constitution,” because he thought it truly deserved our reverence. When you read “Federalist 10” on controlling factions through enlarging the sphere of democracy, when you read Aristotle on the mean between democracy's excess and oligarchy’s defect, when you do all of this, you train your imagination, and then something wonderful begins to happen: You begin to envision discourse not as a battlefield but as the shared pursuit of truth.
Finally, by reconciling faith and freedom, a genuine core curriculum gives public discourse a moral horizon that prevents it from collapsing into either nihilism or fanaticism. When you understand that your rights are endowed by a Creator, then you start to see the other person across the table as not merely an opponent, but as a bearer of inherent dignity. And that recognition fosters respect even in the midst of disagreement. Faith supplies the humility by which we admit our fallibility. Reason supplies us with the discipline to argue rigorously.
Together, they create the conditions for a conversation that is civil, not because it's merely polite, but because it's serious—because both parties recognize that they are reasoning about issues that transcend their personal preferences.
In sum, a genuine core curriculum doesn't merely inform you about civil discourse. A genuine core curriculum forms you for genuine civil discourse. It rebuilds in your mind and character the intellectual and moral architecture that relativism has dismantled. It turns potential enemies into fellow discussants. It turns slogans into arguments, and it turns shouting matches into the kind of public reasoning that sustains a free republic.
But without such an education, you will leave college vulnerable, because you'll be told that this whole notion of rights is merely a social construct. You'll be told that equality means enforced sameness. You'll be told that the founding of America was merely the product of its time. You'll graduate knowing how to criticize but not how to defend. You'll graduate knowing how to tear down, but not how to build.
The good news is that the remedy is in your hands. Demand a core curriculum that's worthy of the name, one that requires sustained engagement with the great books of Western civilization—Plato on justice, Aristotle on virtue, the Bible on human dignity, the Declaration and the Constitution on natural right, and Lincoln on the recovery of first principles.
Now, I'll warn you ahead of time, these texts are not going to give you ready-made answers. But what they will do is force you to think in a more serious way about the permanent human questions. They will teach you to disagree without hatred, to reason without animosity, to deliberate as citizens rather than to shout as partisans.
You students are young, and the choices before you are momentous. You can either accept the relativism that surrounds you, or you can seek the truth that lies beyond it. You can either settle for an education that flatters your opinions, or you can pursue an education that challenges and elevates you. Our Republic needs you, not merely as consumers of academic credentials, but as citizens capable of sustaining ordered liberty. And remember, while the republic needs you to defend it, you can't be expected to defend that which you don't even understand. Therefore, I advise you, students, to choose the harder path. Read deeply, question honestly, speak courageously. The soul of this nation depends on whether your generation recovers the moral and intellectual foundations that the founders have bequeathed you.