American Institutions at ASU
ABOR course requirement
Especially as we prepare to celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, SCETL is proud to be a leader in helping Arizona State University fulfill the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR) requirement for a course on American Institutions (AMIT).
Here is how SCETL AMIT class(es) meet these requirements, focusing on the following themes, blending formative ideas and American constitutional institutions:
- Declaration of Independence
- Constitution
- Antecedents (e.g. Mayflower Compact, John Locke, the 1774 Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress, the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights drafted by George Mason)
- Founding debates about them (especially the Federalist and interlocutors like Mercy Otis Warren and “Brutus”)
- Federalism: limited federal government of enumerated powers and dual sovereignty with the states’ reserved powers
- Separation of powers (and legislative design, political parties, etc)
- Judicial Review
- Slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement (emphasis on Abraham Lincoln and his interlocutors, Civil Rights Acts)
- Court Cases: e.g. Dred Scott, Plessy v Ferguson, Brown v. Board, SFFA v. Harvard
- John Locke, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Friedrich Hayek, etc
- Judicial Doctrine of the Commerce Clause
Our introduction to American ideals and institutions, CEL 200: Great Debates in American Politics includes all of these (and more, such as freedom of speech, the effort to secure women’s legal equality, basics of the Arizona Constitution, America’s role in the world through texts like the farewell addresses of George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower and the Monroe Doctrine, and, in the spirit of America at 250, Calvin Coolidge’s address reflecting on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
We are currently working to secure a permanent number for what we hope will become an upper division AMIT class, CEL 441 American Constitutionalism I: Structures and Powers, which will place a slightly heavier focus on institutions than ideas (and thus, for example, will include discussion of the treaty and warmaking powers of the Constitution, rather than say the Monroe Doctrine, and leave some topics related to civil liberties and rights, such as free speech and equal protection, for CEL 442: American Constitutionalism II: Civil Liberties).