While Ohio already requires this by law, universities themselves should require that students also pass a history and government exam. Indeed, such a test would help address one of our country’s greatest dangers.

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That danger, as Abraham Lincoln argued in 1838, is that free governments are inherently fragile. So long as citizens sense that democracy remains vulnerable, they take care not to injure it. But as they begin to take it for granted, they clash recklessly, eventually descending into violence. The Civil War, which Lincoln seemed to forebode, was a particularly severe case. In the aftermath of that war, statesmen developed civic curricula at colleges and universities meant to instill a sense of democracy’s vulnerability.

Priorities changed when the end of the Cold War inaugurated prophecies that liberal democracy inevitably would spread across the world. Amid competition with countries opening their economies, policymakers favored subjects like science and engineering. Data from my organization’s “What Will They Learn?” initiative show that 78% of colleges and universities require a science class, compared to 19% requiring one in American government or history.

Worse, policymakers shifted what remained of civics away from fortifying America’s constitutional order and toward remedying the country’s shortcomings, particularly in how society treated minority groups. This not only detracted resources from teaching about democracy, but also generated hostility by emphasizing the country’s faults while often neglecting its achievements.

While the situation has sparked calls for reform, many risk missing another consequence of the post–Cold War de-emphasis: falling standards. Everyone in college knows a science, engineering, or math class is harder than one in history. And while signs of decreasing rigor have begun to appear in those fields too, their demanding curricula have borne impressive results: Engineers have developed driverless cars, and coders have fit whole libraries into a coat pocket. Yet American history and government have shown much worse results.

In 2024, 48% of college students wrongly thought the president holds the power to declare war. Unsurprisingly, the country stands at the forefront of technology in fields like space and artificial intelligence, but its body politic has begun to fracture.

The trouble is that the current response, with Ohio as the exception, focuses on classes and resources, which cannot alone guarantee that students will be held to a high standard. That is where an exam could help.

Such a test would force students to take the course seriously and ensure that professors did not feel pressured to dumb down their classes for lazy freshmen. Since the exam would not be used to judge professors’ performance but students’, it would escape the pitfall seen in public schools, where teachers teach to the test as a way to keep their jobs. Nor would such an exam restrict academic freedom because it would not affect how faculty teach or grade their own individual classes. And while universities may place the test at the end of class, they also could consider an exam at the end of the bachelor’s degree. After all, England’s Oxford University already requires that students in most fields pass an end exam.

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Responsibility for designing such a test would rest naturally with professors specializing in history and government. Many states have founded centers of civic thought at their flagship campus, whose faculty could design an exam for the whole state university system. A sound exam would pose questions on the basics like the Electoral College and the 19th century’s battles over the Bank of the United States. But it also could include other subjects that bear on the political system, like ancient political systems that influenced the Founders or foreign nationalism that drew the United States into overseas wars.

Without such serious measures to remedy low standards in history and government, the country faces serious dangers. Ignorance begets radicalism — it is not hard to believe that the young Washingtonians, resenting a president for whom they thought they could not vote, might resort to violence. Without a knowledge of democracy’s vulnerability, American youths risk squandering it like many of the ancients, or as our own forebears nearly did in Lincoln’s day.

Jeffrey E. Schulman works as program manager for academic affairs at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.