The 2025 Advance Ohio Higher Education Act (SB1) mandates an American civics course for all undergraduates in public colleges and universities and requires reading several historic documents for this course. Timothy Messer-Kruse, Professor of Cultural Studies at Bowling Green State University, has self-published Unpatriotic Civics: An Exploration of Founding Texts That Fulfills the Requirements of Ohio’s Collegiate Civics Law. It shows the difficulty citizens and lawmakers face in giving young Americans an accurate picture of their heritage.

Early on, Messer-Kruse claims “abundant and overwhelming evidence that Americans feared the British were plotting to free their slaves” as a major motive for the Revolution (18). But respected historians overwhelmingly reject that claim. Even the New York Times, which published the claim in the 1619 Project, later partially retracted it. (See Peter W. Wood’s 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project). But students using this text have no way of knowing that.

Messer-Kruse further criticizes the founding because only a limited number of white men could vote (8). This is but one example of the text’s pervasive presentism. Although the charge is true, the elimination of monarchy was radical, and no nation had broader voting rights than the American colonies in 1776. And the franchise expanded quickly in the early republic; by 1828 most states had universal white male suffrage. If Messer-Kruse criticized the Wright Brothers for not building a supersonic jet, students would immediately see the absurdity, but most won’t realize that early America was far ahead of the rest of the world in spreading democracy.

Unpatriotic Civics treats the strengthening of the federal government by the adoption of the Constitution as a class warfare victory of the rich over the poor (138-144). It says almost nothing about the problems with the Articles of Confederation. It’s strange to see a leftist tacitly championing states’ rights. Apparently, vilification of America trumps consistency.

The text also omits that under the Constitution not only did America’s economy grow rapidly, but wages grew and surpassed England’s as the highest in the world by the 1890s. Of course, this does not mean that our government was the best possible for working people; one could argue that wealth could have been more equal without impairing economic growth. But students deserve to know that working people became better off here than anywhere else.

Despite all this, Messer-Kruse has the gall to say the classroom should be a marketplace of ideas (11). He must mean a socialist marketplace in which there is only one brand of anything.

Messer-Kruse cites SB 1’s ban on teaching “divisive concepts” such as that “the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist” or that “an individual, by virtue of his race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive.” He then says that these provisions “ban the ideas expressed in [Martin Luther] King’s letter,” from Birmingham Jail (205), one of the course’s required texts. But King never says that people are inherently racist. Indeed, by appealing to white moderates, he acknowledged that they weren’t racists but just didn’t want the unpleasant burden of taking on those who were. Actually, civil disobedience is by design an appeal to the goodness in a culture. Truly oppressive regimes simply kill demonstrators, as China did at Tiananmen Square.

In 1991, eminent black scholar Orlando Patterson called America the least racist major country in the world. It remains so today; black people are freer, richer, and have accomplished more in America than in any other country in the world. This doesn’t mean we should be complacent; there’s plenty of room for debate about the reasons for persisting racial inequality and how best to deal with it. But that debate would require a background far different from the unrelievedly bleak picture presented in Unpatriotic Civics.

Messer-Kruse’s treatment of Benjamin Franklin is typical of the gross anti-American distortions of the entire volume. He notes that Franklin owned a few slaves and received help getting started from a few people. He therefore rejects the characterization of Franklin as “self-made” (230-231). He doesn’t mention that in mid-life Franklin became a leading public opponent of slavery. Franklin did, like any successful person, get some help from others, but Messer-Kruse omits that Franklin was a prolific inventor, publisher, and writer, America’s first postmaster-general, and founder of the University of Pennsylvania, among many other accomplishments. Franklin is justly viewed here and abroad as an American hero, an archetype of America’s innumerable innovators and entrepreneurs, but students with this text see him as nothing better than an idle recipient of great wealth.

Messer-Kruse expresses concern about the increasing percentage of wealth at the top in America, and that “at least a majority of [this] wealth . . . was transferred by inheritance rather than earned” (231). These are legitimate concerns, although the percentage of wealth that is inherited is actually between 35 percent and 45 percent. More generally, while charging that American government has always unfairly favored the rich, he gives no inkling that, within a century after George Washington left the White House, America had become the richest and greatest industrial power in the world, giving economic success not only to a few trust-fund babies, but to millions.

And he gives no clue that, despite growing inequality, America retains the most dynamic economy in the world. America has not just more modern high-tech companies than any other country but more than the rest of the world combined. Again, his concerns are legitimate and warrant serious classroom discussion, but this grossly one-sided and misleading text denies students the resources to partake in such a discussion.

The existence of this text shows the difficulty of creating college curricula that equip students to participate knowledgeably in our civic life. One can almost hear Messer-Kruse sneering, You’ll never stop us from indoctrinating in the classroom. It would be difficult for a legislature to go further than Ohio already has in dictating course contents. University administrations might do so, but hitherto they’ve been at the heart of the problem, not the solution.

Perhaps publicity would cause most students to avoid courses using dishonest texts like this one. More important, the Ohio legislature, which has created Centers for Civics, Culture, and Society at five state universities, should create one at every state four-year college, and adjust the funding for those centers and for universities’ general budgets to provide plenty of sections of the required civics course that present a more accurate picture of the American heritage.

Editor’s Note: A version of this article will also appear in the upcoming fall issue of Academic Questions. Become a member of the National Association of Scholars to receive a copy of the journal.