- BIG STORY: USC launches new civics center amid national debate
- MORE NEWS: Forest deal could lead to new S.C. state park
- LOWCOUNTRY, Ariail: Precarious septic tanks
- BRACK: Two views of S.C. more than 100 years apart
- MYSTERY PHOTO: Memorial
- FEEDBACK: Send us your thoughts
USC launches new civics center amid national debate
By Jack O’Toole, Capitol bureau | A roiling national debate over the political and intellectual culture of American college campuses reached the University of South Carolina this week, as school officials announced plans for a new academic center focused on civics and civility.
And depending on who you talk to, it’s either a meaningful step toward restoring rigor and comity in American scholarly life — or part of a well-financed national conservative effort to reshape the academy in its own image.
Nevertheless, school leaders are strongly backing the initiative, dubbed the Center for American Civic Leadership and Public Discourse.
“Studying the American civic order and teaching our students to be good citizens should be a core function of higher education in America,” said Thad Westbrook, chair of the USC Board of Trustees in a release. “Over the past few years, we have strengthened our policies supporting free speech on campus, and we believe this center will elevate that work with a renewed focus on civil discourse.”
USC President Michael Amiridis added the center would help the school meet its mission of molding graduates who can succeed and lead in their communities.
“The value this new academic center brings is its focus on equipping students with the knowledge, perspectives, and reasoning skills for meaningful interactions as citizens and community leaders,” he said.
A USC spokesman confirmed the center is being funded through the president’s office in its first year, but that fundraising will be a major goal going forward.
A national trend with a political agenda?
The new USC program is one of more than a dozen civics centers that have sprung up at American universities over the past decade, many in red states and all modeled on the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton.
Founded in 2000 by widely-respected conservative scholar Robert P. George, the Madison program sponsors nonpartisan conferences, lectures and fellowships, while managing a track of courses dedicated to American civic order, according to its website. In interviews, George has said the program models a classical mode of scholarship based on “reason, evidence and arguments.”
Early funders of the Madison program reportedly included well-known conservative benefactors like Steve Forbes, the John M. Olin Foundation and the Bradley Foundation.
But the debate over civics centers like USC’s is about more than funding or partisan affiliation. It’s a clash of frameworks — one rooted in traditional civic ideals, the other in concerns about equity and representation. Supporters describe spaces for reasoned debate and intellectual diversity. Critics see structures shaped by imbalances of power and influence.
That tension leads scholars like Lauren Lassabe Shepherd — a historian at Indiana University and author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America — to question not just the funders but the larger project itself.
“The centers have a political agenda, no matter their claims to neutrality,” she said in a July 24 email interview with Statehouse Report. “Who is funding their projects? What other projects do those benefactors fund? Who is accepting the invitations for these events?”
Shepherd places the trend in a longer conservative tradition of shaping higher education — one, she argues, that has often worked to limit academic freedom.
“The right has long intervened in higher education to prop up its social and economic goals,” she said. “That’s come in several forms: anticommunist purges of faculty, requiring loyalty oaths from students, funding research to deny climate change or promote race science, and a host of other intrusions to academic freedom.”
As for the centers’ claims that they support ideological diversity on overwhelmingly progressive college campuses, Shepherd is dismissive.
“We should remember ‘ideological diversity’ is not a form of actual diversity — look at the racial, gender and religious makeup of the people involved with the centers — but a code phrase that actually means forcing a platform for conservative ideas that have been discredited,” she said.
A ‘model’ for free speech and mutual respect
Christopher Tollifsen is a professor of philosophy at USC and interim executive director of the new center.
He describes it as a response to several national trends, including an increase in partisan polarization, a loss of trust in critical mediating institutions including universities, and a decline in civic engagement.
“We’ve started this new center,” he told Statehouse Report on July 25, “as a way to address those issues.”
To do that, he said, the center’s scholars will model a form of academic inquiry and debate rooted in free speech and mutual respect, beginning with the program’s first public offering — a discussion featuring board members Robert P. George of the Madison Program and Cornel West, a longtime public intellectual on the American left and former professor at Harvard and Yale.
As for the charge that the center is conservative, he argues that any civics center dedicated to preserving the founders’ vision of America — a liberal democracy rooted in unalienable rights, ordered liberty and the rule of law — could be given that name.
That said, he notes that “conservative means a wide variety of different things” — among them, the preservation of American civil and democratic rights that historians associate with the term “classical liberalism.”
“We think it’s important to maintain a grip on that tradition of liberalism, and come to understand it and maintain that understanding,” he said. “So we’re about conserving in that sense.”
And in answer to the allegation that civics centers invite conservatives to speak on campus, he says that’s part of having a productive debate based on reason, evidence and arguments.
“We think it’s important that there be some friction — some creative friction, some productive friction — so that different people who hold different positions can disagree with one another,” he said. “At worst, [they’ll] come to a better understanding of their own views and how they relate to the views of people they disagree with — and at best sometimes result in people changing their views.”
Asked to describe what success for the center would look like in five years, Tollefsen spoke of high-level scholarship and major public events — and of the university’s responsibility to help form good citizens.
“The university is a civic resource, and the students are resources for citizenship within the state,” Tollefsen said. “I don’t think we’ll see the full fruit of those efforts in the next five years, but I hope we’ll have sown the seeds, and begin to see them in the years after that.”
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Forest deal could lead to new S.C. state park
By Jack O’Toole, Capitol bureau | South Carolina nature lovers are celebrating a major win after the Conservation Fund announced its purchase of 8,000 acres of timberland in Georgetown County. It’s a big deal, conservationists say, in a state that’s losing a million acres of working forests every year due to development.
“The Carvers Bay Forest is one of the nation’s most productive working forests,” Jason Johnson, state director of the fund, said in a July 23 release. “When the land went up for sale, we stepped in to ensure that it will continue to support wildlife habitat, clean water, recreation, and economic opportunities for local communities — now, and for generations to come.”
Emily Jo Williams of the American Bird Conservancy, which is currently working with endangered kites in the forest, lauded the purchase.
“We are thrilled that The Conservation Fund has stepped up to protect this important working forest landscape that’s critical to successful nesting by the kites and a host of other migratory birds,” Williams said.
The Conservation Fund says it’s working closely with the state of South Carolina to eventually open the forest to the public as a new state park — adding that “those efforts are just beginning.”
In other recent news
More than 20 sheriffs statewide endorse Wilson for governor. Nearly two dozen sheriffs across South Carolina have joined to endorse Attorney General Alan Wilson for governor in the 2026 election.
Traffic stop leads to largest fentanyl indictment in S.C. history. Alberto Rios-Landeros and Chris Guadalupe Rios-Landeros, both of California, were indicted in U.S. federal court on Tuesday after coordinated traffic stops in the Midlands turned up 156 pounds of fentanyl. “This was enough to kill the state of South Carolina, every citizen here, seven times. That should scare everyone,” U.S. Attorney Bryan Stirling said in an interview.
Almanac: S.C. blends tragedy, coexistence through centuries. Seasoned national political author Louis Jacobson offers a fresh look at influential political and economic history in this updated profile in the soon-to-be-published 2026 edition of the Almanac of American Politics.
SCDOT given another $200M to pay for bridge fixes across the state. The state legislature just gave the South Carolina Department of Transportation another $200 million in this year’s budget for bridge improvements.
Applications open for new S.C. judicial court positions. The next round of judicial elections in South Carolina will add three new judgeships that aim to speed up cases going through the state’s courts that hear family matters — including adoption, child custody, juvenile delinquency and domestic abuse.
S.C. Supreme Court retroactively suspends lawyer’s license after J6 pardon. The State Supreme Court on Wednesday retroactively suspended the law license of Summerville attorney David Charles Johnston, who was pardoned by President Trump after pleading guilty for his role in the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Fate of former Navy ship in limbo after owner’s arrest. South Carolina officials say they are considering two options for a 120 foot former Navy vessel whose owner was arrested Tuesday under the state’s newly-toughened abandoned boats law. After towing it from the Johns Island marsh, they will decide whether to use it as a new artificial reef or destroy it.
S.C. SNAP recipients, food banks brace for food insecurity. The federal funding to SNAP will end at least some of the food assistance that thousands of families in South Carolina receive; that reduction will lead to more of those families turning to food banks; and food banks have little idea how they are going to keep up with demand when Fiscal Year 2027 kicks in.
- Have a comment? Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com
Precarious septic tanks
Award-winning cartoonist Robert Ariail has a special knack for poking a little fun in just the right way. This week, he takes on a ludicrous development proposal that would put up to 208 septic tanks very near the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge.
- Love this week’s cartoon or hate it? Did he go too far, or not far enough? Send your thoughts to feedback@statehousereport.com.
Two views of S.C. more than 100 years apart
By Andy Brack | Just over 103 years ago, a German immigrant who grew up in Charleston published a flowery analysis of South Carolina as part of a two-year, 48-part series by The Nation magazine. The collection showcased “the distinctive colors of life” in a project dubbed “These United States.”
Fast forward to the present. In a special two-month issue of the magazine, The Nation has another go in looking at the state of the republic in a report that’s vastly different – “These Dis-United States.”
“50 of our best writers and artists depict local textures, practices, landmarks and institutions everywhere being gutted, steamrolled, defunded, eviscerated. Here we get first hand testimony, from Maine to Hawaii, of the acceleration of a decades-long project to hollow out government at every level – and of the devastating effects of that project on our national life,” contributing editor Richard Kreitner writes in the opening essay of the magazine’s 160th anniversary issue.
While the original essays in the 1920s highlighted what made states distinctive, they seemed to assume the “united” states worked toward the common goal of promoting and advancing democracy. States were places where experiments could occur to achieve overarching goals that knit together Americans who lived in vastly different circumstances. While these essays seemed generally to have a buoyancy and overall hope about the country, the new 2025 essays look at what’s happening across the “bruised and battered land,” ending with a call for the country to give “a new birth of freedom … making an old country anew.”
Both essays about the Palmetto State make interesting reading, mainly because they don’t seem to conform to the overall theme of either project.
A century ago, the magazine’s then-drama critic, Ludwig Lewisohn, essentially bemoaned the divisions in South Carolina between Charleston and the Upstate. His essay wasn’t about unity in South Carolina or hope.
Rather, Lewisohn, not a household name today, described cultural decay in Charleston, once a flourishing home to snobbish elites who he said wrote poetry and studied Greek and Latin. He lamented control of the state by Upstate agrarians with the “mean barbarism of sharp business men and Ku Klux Klansmen.” He complained the state’s new leaders, spurred by “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, “brought neither freedom nor enlightenment” but sentimentalized the old South.
In some ways, Lewisohn’s criticisms of the 1920s “New South” in South Carolina don’t seem all that different from criticisms of the divisions being caused by MAGA acolytes across the nation today.
In the newer essay, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Albert Scardino of Bluffton, a member of The Nation’s editorial board, bemoaned the dangers of living along the coast where more people flock despite increased threats from climate change. While he took a potshot at coastal GOP U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace over her obsession with transgender people, Scardino’s essay mostly focused on the 1.4 million people who live near the water, which he described as akin to “a sandcastle on the beach facing an incoming tide.”
The only “unity” in the piece was the fact that everyone along the coast faces unstable summer weather. Scardino reminded readers that 2,000 people died in an 1893 hurricane when comparatively few people lived in the path. Hilton Head Island, he wrote, had just 300 people in 1950, but 40,000 now with one escape route over the Intracoastal Waterway.
Two essays more than 100 years apart. Both lament change in different ways. Both lack hope.
Andy Brack is editor and publisher of Statehouse Report and the Charleston City Paper. His weekly column on politics has appeared in South Carolina media for more than 20 years. Have a comment? Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com.
Memorial outside building
Here’s a memorial somewhere in South Carolina. Where is it? Bonus points: Tell us a little about it. If you have a good mystery stumper to share with fellow readers, send to: feedback@statehousereport.com.
Readers didn’t flock to guess the identity of last week’s Mystery Photo, “Another stadium.” It was a tough photo to pinpoint. But stalwart sleuth Allan Peel nabbed it and told us a little bit about Erskine College’s Grier Field in Due West.
“Grier Field is named in honor of the many influential Grier family members who have a deep-rooted history associated with Erskine College, including family members who served as college presidents and faculty members, teaching philosophy, ethics and science. … Grier Field is home to the “Flying Fleet” baseball team, or “the Fleet” for short. … Incidentally, one can clearly see, in the top-right of the mystery photo, that there are eight tennis courts. The layout of these courts, relative to the baseball diamond, was instrumental in helping me confirm that this is Grier Field. Without them, it would have been rather difficult to figure out the location of this mystery photo … at least for someone not from South Carolina.”
Only two others – both longtime mystery aficionados, correctly identified the field: Jay Altman of Columbia and George Graf of Palmyra, Va.
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Please send us your thoughts about politics and policy in South Carolina, but make sure to leave phone numbers and hometowns to help us verify them for publication. We publish non-defamatory comments, but unless you provide your contact information – name and hometown, plus a phone number used only by us for verification – we can’t publish your views.
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Statehouse Report, founded in 2001 as a weekly legislative forecast that informs readers about what is going to happen in South Carolina politics and policy, is provided by email to you at no charge every Friday.
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