Paul Carrese
Senior Fellow for Civic Thought and Leadership and Jack Miller Center Academic Advisory Council Member
Paul Carrese serves as the Jack Miller Center’s Senior Fellow for Civic Thought and Leadership. In this position, he provides strategic direction and consultation to the JMC’s efforts to reform liberal arts and civics education on college campuses.
Carrese, a professor at Arizona State University, has just stepped down as founding director of the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL) at ASU, the first of the new civics institutes at public universities. Widely considered to be a pioneer of the movement to reform civics education at the college level, he is a sought-after adviser for a number of initiatives including the K-12 study Educating for American Democracy, the Civitas Institute at University of Texas at Austin, and the Program on Public Discourse at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
The national reform movement launched by SCETL at ASU has spread to 8 states; with 10 new departments being built, in Arizona, Tennessee, Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio; 2 programs underway, in Utah and Mississippi; and at UT Austin a new college, the School of Civic Leadership, to house the Civitas Institute. While on research leave from ASU in 2024, Carrese will advise the JMC’s support for this national reform movement in higher education and be drafting a book on the theory and practice of American civic education.
Prior to founding SCETL, he was a professor of political science at the U.S. Air Force Academy for nearly two decades, where he developed an innovative honors program combining liberal arts education and leadership training.
Only fellow American patriots, sharing a basic civic friendship, can blend gratitude for America and its ideals with perpetual yet civil argument about what those ideals mean, how they fit together, and how to live up to them.
– Prof. Paul Carrese
He was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, a Fulbright fellow at the University of Delhi, and has held fellowships at Harvard University and Princeton University. Carrese holds a Ph.D. in political science from Boston College, and is the author or editor of several books including Democracy in Moderation: Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Sustainable Liberalism and The Cloaking of Power: Montesquieu, Blackstone, and the Rise of Judicial Activism.
