About
Our Center
The Center for the Future of the American University was founded in 2025 to bring together a group of scholars interested in developing historically informed, philosophically integral ideas to animate practical projects of academic reform. Our scholars combine considerable experience as university faculty and a reflective appreciation of the university’s place in American life.
Our Perspective
Universities are both great civilizational achievements and indispensable elements of the American constitutional order. Those who wrote our founding documents drew on what they learned in college classrooms, and called for new universities to offer the young nation the intellectual nourishment they knew it would need. The American people have responded by sponsoring institutions of higher education with unparalleled generosity, making our country into a “land of colleges.”
In our own time, however, higher education has lost the public’s confidence. Many Americans question whether university teaching is sufficiently oriented toward the needs of students, whether university research is well structured to advance the quest for deeper understanding or serve the public good, and whether university culture is suited to help young people become thoughtful human beings and responsible citizens. The country suffers when higher education does not fulfill these essential roles.
From AEI’s distinctive place at the intersection of scholarship, politics and philanthropy, we work with faculty, administrators, and trustees to develop ideas and projects that can help universities better play their indispensable roles in our civic and political life. We undertake that work in the hope that the present crisis may mark the beginning of another great era of the American university, and that renewed devotion to higher education may contribute to broader American renewal.
Above photography by Aaron Clamage Photography © American Enterprise Institute
Our WORK
Our work focuses on five key topics:
Liberal Education–our scholars seek to rethink the central aspiration of undergraduate education.
Civic Thought–our scholars seek to contribute to a new academic field dedicated to cultivating the human capacity for thinking and acting as a citizen.
Viewpoint Diversity–our scholars seek to develop intellectually integral strategies to help the academy broaden its ideological tent.
University Governance–our scholars seek to understand and reimagine the structures that shape teaching, research, and campus life.
Science and Society–our scholars seek to renew the social contract between university researchers and the American public.
Our programs model university reform in practice:
The Conservative Intellectual Tradition for University Faculty Workshop introduces college faculty to the ideas of this understudied intellectual tradition, and provides guidance on course design.
The AEI-JHU Fellowship Exchange Program provides an opportunity for AEI scholars and Hopkins faculty to work together on research, teaching, or other projects, and to participate in the intellectual life of each other’s institutions.
The AEI-JHU Civic Thought Project provides a forum for seeking a more capacious university-level civic education by bringing different approaches into conversation.
The Graduate Student Intellectual Diversity Initiative works with faculty and prospective graduate students around the nation to support ideologically heterodox students interested in academic careers.
AEI also studies issues relating to higher education through education policy studies, and engages with campus partners through the Academic Programs outreach team.