April 29, 2026

Introduction

In 2025, the Iowa legislature enacted House File 437, directing the University of Iowa to establish a Center for Intellectual Freedom (CIF) to strengthen civic education, promote intellectual diversity, and advance the study of American history, civil government, and the ideas that sustain free societies. The legislation requires the center’s director to conduct a market assessment to determine course demand and the number of faculty needed. Pursuant to the law, interim director of the Center for Intellectual Freedom, Luciano De Castro, PhD, delegated the task of completing the demand assessment to CSI and its fellows, Quentin Chediak and Andy Nguyen. The fellows conducted the research and analysis for and drafted the section of this report entitled “University Requirements Drive Student Demand” and methodology subsection entitled “Analysis of the Effects of University Requirements on Student Demand.” The full report fulfills the requirements for the legislatively mandated demand assessment for Iowa’s Center for Intellectual Freedom.

Key Findings

• Student demand for CIF offerings could range from less than a dozen students to more than 1,000, depending on a broad range of factors. Depending on student enrollment and desired student-to-teacher ratios, faculty requirements could range from one to around three dozen.
• Centers do not start with demand; they create it. If legislators, the university, and the center wish to see student demand for the center, they must create it. Their approach will ultimately determine student enrollment. They can learn from dozens of existing successful centers at prestigious universities across the nation.
•  Interviewing directors of comparable established civics centers at public universities across the nation, CSI found broad agreement on the leading factors that drive student demand:
  • #1 Demand Factor: Center directors agreed offering courses that fulfill core curriculum requirements of the university is the number one driver of student demand for civics center courses, especially if the center offers the only course that fulfills a state civics requirement.
  • #2 Demand Factor: Every civics center CSI interviewed said students are more likely to take a center’s civics courses if they contribute to credentials like majors, minors, and certificates. They saw little enrollment in elective-only offerings.
• In its research and first-hand accounts from directors of established civics centers across the nation, CSI found three common attributes across successful centers:
  • Support from University Leadership. Center directors stressed the importance of centers having full programming, curricular, and faculty hiring authority and a shared desire from university leadership for the center to succeed.
  • Reliable Funding. Centers with robust, recurring funding from the state or university system saw the most enrollment and growth.
  • Centers hired faculty first to develop curriculum, then offered courses and attracted students. Center directors called this concept a “chicken-or-egg” issue. Legislators and university leadership often want to see evidence of demand before committing the resources to hire faculty. However, students enroll in courses primarily because they fulfill requirements for the core curriculum, majors, minors, or certificates. Without sufficient faculty to develop courses, curricula, and programs, the center cannot generate the offerings that attract students.
• Through statistical modeling of University of Iowa enrollment data, researchers found—
  • Requirement strictness greatly affects the strength of enrollment correlation. The number of students for whom a course fulfills a requirement (e.g., “hard count,” “medium count,” “soft count”) predicts the level of demand for a course. Courses with no requirement statistically show lower student demand. Researchers call this “requirement status.”
  • Requirement status is the dominant driver of course enrollment. Among all predictors examined—including time conflicts, past GPA, course frequency, time of day, and modality—requirement status explained the largest portion of variance in course enrollment across both aggregation methods.
  • Hard course requirements exhibit the strongest explanatory power. Pairwise correlation analysis revealed that hard requirements—those with no alternatives to fulfill the requirement—showed the highest correlation coefficient with enrollment.
  • Traditional enrollment factors show minimal impact relative to requirements. Time of day, modality, cumulative GPA, time conflicts, and course frequency all contributed less than 5% of the explanatory power for enrollment variance, demonstrating far less significance for determining student demand than course requirement variables.
• Using three comparable established civics centers at public universities as a model—and assuming CIF replicates the characteristics and factors present with those centers and achieves proportional results—CSI projected the following possible student enrollment and faculty requirements:
  • Chase Center – The Ohio State University: Following this model, CSI estimates that after offering no courses and doing preparatory work for its first two years, CIF could enroll 82 students with 11 faculty by its third year, 2027-28. On a relative basis, these results would require CIF to receive $2.8 million in funding the first two years and $4.8 million in year three (see table 2).
  • Institute for American Civics – University of Tennessee, Knoxville: Following this model, CSI estimates that after starting with zero enrollees in its first year, CIF could enroll 91 students with one faculty member in the 2026-27 school year and build to 612 students with six faculty by its fourth year. On a relative basis, these results would require CIF to receive $3.8 million in funding in year two and $4.7 million annually thereafter (see table 3).
  • Hamilton School – University of Florida: Following this model, CSI estimates CIF could enroll 35 students in its first year (2025-26) with two faculty and could build to over 1,800 students by year four (2028-29) with 35 faculty. On a relative basis, these results would require CIF to receive $2.3 million in funding the first year and $7.6 million annually thereafter (see table 4).

Background: The Center for Intellectual Freedom

Signed into law in June 2025, Iowa House File 437 established the Center for Intellectual Freedom (CIF) as an independent academic unit at University of Iowa.[1] The legislation places the center directly under the authority of the Iowa Board of Regents rather than under the authority of the university president, a dean, or other university administrators.[2] With a series of “shall” and “may” statements found in section 4 of the bill, the legislation directly requires and empowers the center to operate.[3] These explicit legislative directives establish the core purposes, functions, and powers of the center, superseding other authorities including university leadership and the Board of Regents.

Listing the subject matter the center must cover, the first requirement relates to the type of education the center must provide. It says, “The center shall provide scholarship” on—

1.    The texts and major debates that form the intellectual foundation of free societies, especially that of the United States.

2.    The principles, ideals, and institutions of the American constitutional order.

3.    The foundations of responsible leadership and informed citizenship.[4]

This list mirrors the language in section 3 of the bill: “The center shall conduct teaching and research in the historical ideas, traditions, and texts that have shaped the American constitutional order and society.”[5] The center unmistakably exists first and foremost to provide teaching, education, scholarship, and research related to American civics education. Importantly, the legislation unambiguously describes traditional civics education.[6] This detail matters for determining demand for the center’s offerings.

The next two “shall” statements found in section 4 define the manner of educating the center must employ. Subsection 2 says the center’s programming shall relate “to the values of speech and civic discourse.”[7] While the legislation does not include subsection 3 as a subject of the demand assessment, its language helps communicate the full intent of the bill’s authors. It says the center’s work must “expand intellectual diversity” and “foster civic engagement” at the university. Together, subsections 2 and 3 describe an educational approach reflective of the liberal arts tradition—or what many call a “classical liberal” education.[8] Taken as a whole, section 4 of the Center for Intellectual Freedom Act mandates the center provide a classical liberal education in American civics.[9]

To know whether students will want what the center offers, one must first define what the center offers. In describing the functions of the center, subsections 1 and 2 of section 4 mark the starting point for assessing potential demand. Section 10, which mandates the market demand assessment, refers to these sections, saying, “A market assessment shall include the subjects described in section 263C.3, subsections 1 and 2.”[10] As discussed at the start of this background, subsection 1 of section 4 describes the subject area the center must focus on. Subsection 2 empowers the center to provide subject-relevant “university-wide programming.”[11] Working from that starting point, the principal task of this study is to determine how many students at the University of Iowa might enroll in courses that provide a liberal education in American civics. Specifically, it must forecast potential demand from undergraduate students at the University of Iowa for such courses offered by the center, and it must assess the number of faculty required to meet that demand.

Researchers considered three approaches to assessing demand: surveying students, evaluating demand at existing comparable academic centers at peer universities, and analyzing enrollment in other departments at the University of Iowa. This assessment relies on the latter two approaches, ruling out the survey method for this initial study. Until the center begins to offer courses, majors, minors, certificates, scholarships, degrees, etc., it would be difficult to avoid measurement errors in a survey. The following section of this report provides the findings from conversations with directors of peer centers across the country.

Lessons from Civics Centers across the Nation

In launching a civics center styled in the traditions of western liberal education, the Iowa legislature and the University of Iowa follow in the footsteps of prestigious universities across the United States. Over the last decade, at least a dozen public and private universities have opened civics centers with similar missions, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Florida, the University of Texas at Austin, The Ohio State University, Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, and Stanford University.[12] These institutions and others join the national civics education movement as the latest in the ranks of dozens of similar civics centers, initiatives, schools, and programs across the country.[a] Longer-standing examples exist at the University of Virginia, University of Colorado Boulder, Boston College, and Princeton University, among others.[13] The Jack Miller Center, one of the nation’s leading organizations for promoting American civics education, has called it “the renaissance of civics education.”[14]

Table 1. Comparison of Key Attributes, Civics Centers Consulted for CIF Demand Assessment

In conducting this assessment, CSI considered comparisons from more than three dozen centers with a similar approach to civics education as that described in Iowa’s Center for Intellectual Freedom Act. While akin in their general educational approach and goals, researchers determined not all these centers served as useful analogs for the CIF market demand assessment. Researchers identified 14 centers most suitable for comparison and requested meetings with each. Of those contacted, 11 scheduled meetings and agreed to contribute to CSI’s research. Table 1 lists those centers and compares key attributes between them and the CIF.

The experience of each of these centers offers important lessons for the new center at the University of Iowa. In a meeting with the director of the Institute of American Constitutional Thought and Leadership at the University of Toledo, Jonathan Culp, PhD, told CSI, “When you’re offering something that’s novel, there’s no straightforward way to figure out what demand is.”[15] In meetings with civics center across the country, researchers drew one overarching conclusion: the amount of student demand for a civics center’s offerings depends on a wide range of factors. Common Sense Institute took record of the factors directors described as key contributors to demand. Institutions consistently cited many of the same key factors that drove demand.

Core curriculum requirements are the number one driver of student demand

Offering courses that fulfill core curriculum or general education requirements was named more than any other factor by center directors and the biggest driver of student demand. Lee Strang, PhD, executive director of the Chace Center at The Ohio State University, told CSI, “[General education] tagging means you have students in your seats.”[16] Of the 11 directors interviewed, eight said getting courses into the university’s core curriculum drives demand. Not offering such courses, the others did not mention this factor. While all centers offering courses that fulfilled a core curriculum requirement saw a significant amount of student demand coming through those courses, the precise type of requirement also mattered.

When a center offered one of many courses across the university that could fulfill a core or general education requirement, directors generally reported these courses were a useful vehicle for driving interest in the center’s other offerings like majors and minors. For example, more than 1,000 different courses can count toward the “VolCore” general education curriculum at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK). The director of the Institute for American Civics (IAC) at UTK told CSI that offering VolCore courses introduced more students to their center. Some students enrolled in one of the institute’s VolCore courses and then pursued more of its programming such as a minor after taking the course.

For other centers, taking their civics course was one of the only options for fulfilling a specific core curriculum requirement. These centers’ demand increased dramatically with the introduction of the requirement. The Florida legislature passed legislation requiring all public university students meet a state civics requirement beginning in the 2024-25 academic year. Only the history department, the political science department, and the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education (Hamilton School) offered a course that could fulfill the state mandate. Total student enrollment in the center’s courses nearly doubled when the requirement went into effect, from 671 students to 1,205. While the center offered two majors this year, most of the 2,800 students enrolled in its courses this year came from offerings that met this civics requirement or other University of Florida general education, or “Quest,” requirements. The subsection of this report entitled “Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education – University of Florida” investigates the Hamilton School in more depth. Starting in the upcoming academic year, Ohio will require students to meet a similar state civics requirement, though not necessarily exclusively through the civics centers the legislature created through House Bill 33 (2023-24).[17]

Through statistical analysis, the section of this report entitled “University Requirements Drive Student Demand” demonstrates the correlation between university requirements and student demand using enrollment data from the University of Iowa.

Majors, minors, and certificates attract students

Every center CSI engaged with in its research said students take courses that contribute to gaining credentials like majors, minors, and certificates. Of the centers, five offer at least one degree program directly through the center, two plan to offer majors next year, one has a major in collaboration with another department at the university, and two offer courses that count toward a major offered by another department. Every center offers a minor and nearly all offer a certificate. Directors noted elective-only courses have much lower student enrollment than courses that meet a requirement either for the core curriculum or toward a major, minor, or certificate. The section of this report entitled “University Requirements Drive Student Demand” provides a quantitative analysis of how enrollment factors, especially course requirement status, affect student demand for courses.

Numerous other factors can also affect civic centers’ success

Based on anecdotal evidence from the civics centers interviewed, CSI found course requirements are the number one predictor of student demand. Nonetheless, directors also cited other factors that increased demand. One or more center directors interviewed named each of these factors as additional catalysts for student demand:

• Scholarships – 7
• Fellowships – 6
• Extracurriculars like lectures and student events – 5
• Working closely with admissions and student advisors – 2
• Professors with good student reviews – 1
• Having classes as part of the honors program – 1
• Study abroad program – 1

The numeral in the list denotes the number of directors who specifically listed the factor as an important contributor to demand. More centers may have had the factor present but did not highlight it specifically in talks with CSI. Directors reported several other factors as contributors to, or inhibitors of, their centers’ overall success. Three stood out across successful centers.

Centers need support from University Leadership.

Nearly every director brought up the vital importance of support of the center from university leadership—not just in word, but in deed and in truth. Several noted the difficulty they faced in making progress because of resistance from university leadership and colleagues while others noted the great benefit of genuine and enthusiastic support from the same. In the same vein, multiple center directors expressed that cultivating a positive working relationship with colleagues in other schools and departments across the university contributed to their success. Several centers cross-listed their courses with other departments and had faculty from other departments teach classes for the center, especially as the center was getting off the ground.

Centers need reliable funding.

Directors of centers under a legislative mandate noted the importance of support from lawmakers and reliable state appropriations. Notably, the director of the civics school at Arizona State University said the school’s annual appropriations do not expire. He recommended the same approach for Iowa. Even directors of centers without state funding echoed the criticality of reliable funding. Taylor Jaworski, PhD, interim director of the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder, runs a center that does not receive state funding. He warned of the danger of building a center on the assumption of state funding, pointing out funding can disappear from one year to the next. Elizabeth Busch, PhD, of the Center for American Studies at Christopher Newport University acknowledged direct state appropriations as a “game changer,” suggesting a center like Iowa’s needs $5 to $7 million “to get started.”[18] However, she recommended working toward self-funding for the long term. Indeed, most centers have received substantial sums from donations or public and private grants outside of state funding.

Hire faculty first to develop curriculum, then offer courses.

Several of the largest and most successful civics centers stressed to CSI the importance of having the vote of confidence from the legislature to provide the funding for a robust roster of faculty before enrolling students. This report explores this idea as it relates to two prominent centers explored in the section “Projections from the Best Center Comparisons.” Both called this concept a “chicken-or-egg” issue; legislators and university leadership often want to see evidence of demand before committing the resources for faculty, the center directors explained, but students enroll in courses primarily because they fulfill requirements for the core curriculum, majors, minors, or certificates. Without sufficient faculty to develop courses, curricula, and programs, the center cannot generate the offerings that will attract students. The Chase Center at The Ohio State University, for example, did not offer courses until its third year in existence. It began hiring staff in their first year and faculty in its second. When it offered its first courses in year three, it had 21 faculty members who taught 28 sections across 15 courses that academic year.

Evaluating Two Exemplary Civics Schools

While testimonies from directors of all the centers CSI interviewed can help researchers understand the factors that drive demand, two schools stand out for providing exceptional examples of what a well-funded, well-supported, and well-run school can accomplish. The School of Civic Leadership (SCL) at the University of Texas at Austin and the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL) at Arizona State University (ASU) have incorporated nearly every major element that all directors identified as the most important factors for increasing student enrollment. Both offer courses that count toward the university’s core curriculum; both offer majors and minors; and both offer scholarships and fellowships. Both also drive engagement and interest through extracurriculars such as speaking series and student events. Their enrollment numbers provide evidence of existing demand for this type of civics education at large public universities, and both offer valuable lessons for building a successful center. However, these schools—shaded red in table 1—do not match the CIF in every key attribute.

School of Civic Leadership – The University of Texas at Austin

The University of Texas System Board of Regents established the School of Civic Leadership (SCL) at the University of Texas at Austin in May 2023. While pending legislation awaited a vote in the state legislature, the board voted to create the center, making the legislation unnecessary.[19] Like the CIF and civics centers at other large public universities, SCL did not offer courses in its first year. However, by year three the equivalent of 7.6% of its undergraduate population enrolled in its courses.[b] Enrollment equaled 3.4% of undergraduates the first year it offered courses, 2024-25. In the current academic year, the school offered 37 sections across 24 courses.[20]

Figure 1. SCL vs. CIF Equivalent Student Enrollment, First Three Years