The School of Civic Leadership appointed Justin Dyer as its inaugural dean on March 25.

Dyer previously taught political science at the University of Missouri and was a founding director of the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, which aims to provide an interdisciplinary study of the Constitution according to its website. He earned his master’s and doctorate in government at the University of Texas at Austin. 

“If people are to govern themselves, they have to be educated, and the set of political institutions that we have as a society are ones that require knowledge for people to maintain them over time,” Dyer said.  

This marks the next step in the school’s timeline to welcome its first undergraduate cohort by August 2025. The School of Civic Leadership launched in May 2023. The school selected Dyer, founding director of the Civitas Institute, as interim dean in July 2023. According to its website, the school hopes to “prepare the next generation of civic leaders for the task of securing what the U.S. Constitution refers to as the ‘blessings of liberty.’” 

“The dictionary definition of civics is the study of the rights and duties of citizenship,” Dyer said. “We want to provide students with an education that equips them to be citizens and leaders in the 21st century and do that by giving them knowledge of the American Constitution, the Western intellectual tradition and the skills that they’ll need to be leaders in the future.” 

The College of Liberal Arts and the School of Civic Leadership are set to launch the Philosophy, Politics and Economics minor in August 2024. Under pending approval, the School of Civic Leadership is also scheduled to launch a bachelor’s degree and minor in Civics in August 2025. 

“It’s a unique experience to build something from the ground up,” Dyer said. “Our immediate goals are to hire faculty to develop a degree program to admit a first class of students into the new School of Civic Leadership. And then beyond that … we want to provide an education focused on civics for students.”