The views expressed in this article represent the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce, its staff, or its board of directors.
On the morning of September 15, 1886, seven faculty members and 118 students gathered in a new building on McCallie Avenue for the opening exercises of Chattanooga University. The founders in that room are long gone. They built the university for people they would never meet.
This September 15, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga turns 140. That same evening, the Center for Reflective Citizenship, now housed under the Probasco Chair, will host the Dr. Richard Gruetzemacher Constitution Day Lecture. Yuval Levin, one of the country’s leading scholars of the Constitution and its institutions, will speak on how the Constitution can unify a divided society. The calendar did us a favor. The anniversaries belong together.
Two Foundings
Thirty-nine delegates signed the Constitution on September 17, 1787. At roughly 4,500 words, it is the oldest written national constitution still in force. The men who signed it wrote for posterity, and they knew it. A century later, a group of Chattanooga ministers, trustees, and benefactors made the same kind of wager at a smaller scale. Write the rules well, tend the institution faithfully, and it will outlast everyone who built it.
The university has kept that wager through every change the decades brought. Chattanooga University joined Grant Memorial University in 1889, took the name University of Chattanooga in 1907, and merged into the University of Tennessee system in 1969. Four names, one institution. The buildings changed, the charters changed, and the promise underneath did not.
As I wrote in June, the framers’ deepest insight was that the rules constraining power matter more than the people holding it. But a constitution cannot do everything. It parcels out power and guards our rights. Forming the citizens who can live under it, and keep it, is the work of families, churches, businesses, newspapers, and universities.
Unity Without Agreement
Levin directs constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute and edits the journal National Affairs. His most recent book, American Covenant, makes an argument our politics badly needs. Unity does not mean agreement. Americans have never agreed with one another, not in 1787 and not now. The Constitution’s genius is that it does not ask us to. It offers a way to act together while disagreeing, turning rivals into fellow citizens with a shared stake in the same rules. The framers assumed disagreement would be permanent, and they built for it.
Levin argues the framers’ most underrated tool for the job is federalism. A continental country cannot agree on everything, and the Constitution never asked it to. It leaves most of life to states, cities, and communities, which is why Chattanooga does not need Washington’s permission for the Chattanooga way. National unity survives precisely because difference is allowed to flourish below it.
In a season when each election is treated as an apocalypse, that is a hopeful message. The system was built for disagreement. It has held through worse than us.
Molds, Not Platforms
An earlier Levin book, A Time to Build, offers a distinction worth carrying into the lecture hall. An institution can be a mold or a platform. A mold forms the people inside it, imposing duties, teaching habits, shaping character. A platform is something to stand on while performing for an audience. Levin argues that much of what ails American life is institutions drifting from the first kind to the second. Congress full of members who perform for cameras rather than legislate. Universities that serve as stages for controversy rather than workshops for citizens.
A university that takes the mold seriously does quiet, patient work. It teaches students to weigh evidence before opinion, to argue without contempt, and to understand the institutions they will inherit. That is the work I try to do, inside the classroom and beyond it. On campus, our Phillips Scholars in Free Enterprise, a scholarship program I manage through the generous support of John and Carolyn Phillips, spend a year attending the Chair’s lectures and taking a course with me. They meet weekly to discuss timely and contentious topics, learning to engage one another while disagreeing. Civil discourse at work.
Beyond the classroom, the Center for Economic Education carries the same work into the community. Hundreds of Tennessee teachers pass through our civics and economics academies each year and take the material back to classrooms across the state. And on September 15, before the evening lecture, the Center will host a lunch and learn where local teachers and students get an hour with Levin himself. The wager of 1886 compounds this way, one formed person at a time.
The Wager at 140
Chattanooga runs on the same wager. A city is more than its riverfront and its balance sheets. It is its institutions, the schools and churches and civic bodies that form the people who show up for everything else. When those institutions do their work, self-government stays possible, in the country and on McCallie Avenue. When they drift into performance, no constitutional text can compensate. That is why a university’s 140th birthday deserves more than a cake. It is the city’s longest-running proof that rules written for strangers can pay off for generations.
Constitution Day at UTC is itself proof of the thesis. The Center for Reflective Citizenship, which hosts the lecture, was founded by the late Lucien Ellington, a UC Foundation Professor of Education who built the center and hosted Constitution Day for many years. His wife, Charlotte, continues that work with the steadfast partnership of her dear friend and colleague, Dean Valerie Rutledge, whose leadership and support have been instrumental in carrying the Center and Constitution Day forward.
The lecture carries the name of Dr. Richard Gruetzemacher, who served this university for 26 years and cared deeply about civic and history education. An endowment in his memory funds it now. Founders pass. What they build keeps holding, when people choose to hold it. This year the center came under the Probasco Chair, and I intend to hold it well.
September 15 will be a full day on campus. The chancellor delivers the State of the University address at 2 p.m. in the University Center Auditorium, followed by a campus-wide birthday celebration on Terrell Owens Way from 3 to 5. Then, at 5 p.m. in the same auditorium, Yuval Levin will deliver “How the Constitution Can Unify a Divided Society,” with audience questions to follow. Come for the birthday. Stay for the Constitution. The lecture is free and open to the public, and registration is available here.
The people who gathered in Old Main could not have imagined this September’s campus, and the delegates in Philadelphia could not have imagined Chattanooga at all. That was the point. Institutions are promises made to people not yet born. The founders of 1787 and 1886 kept theirs. We keep ours by showing up. A seat in a lecture hall on a Tuesday evening in September is a small way to start.
Claudia Williamson Kramer is the Scott L. Probasco, Jr., Distinguished Chair of Free Enterprise, Professor of Economics, and Executive Director of the Center for Economic Education at UTC.
To hear more from Dr. Kramer, listen to her latest conversation on WUTC here: https://shorturl.at/CyWM0
