Celebrate Constitution Day by actually reading the Constitution | Opinion

Constitution Day is Sept. 17, and I think we should make a bigger deal about it. On that day in 1787, 39 white men signed a document whose first words declare, "We the People." No founding document better encapsulates the paradoxes of what it means to be an American.

We live in a country that has the oldest active national constitution, a fact that would have surprised people in the 1790s. Thomas Jefferson famously believed that "Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years." Almost no one at the time viewed it as the nation’s authoritative document. And yet today, in addition to guiding our federalist system of governance, it sparks perhaps more pride, lamentation and fierce political vitriol than any other document.

I teach at a public university in Ohio, where the Senate recently passed legislation that mandates that all public universities establish an independent civics center that will receive $2 million per year to teach "the principles, ideals, and institutions of the American constitutional order." This sounds wonderful and noble, but there’s a political catch. It will be run by a council that will be appointed by the board of trustees and subject to Senate approval. The trustees themselves are appointed by the governor with the advice and consent of the Senate. The aim is to make the center entirely independent from university professors because there exists a political opinion that the majority of professors cannot be trusted to teach United States civics without liberal bias.

I want to highlight just three of many paradoxical features of the Constitution, and then suggest that we acknowledge these paradoxes, rather than trying to legislate their historical reality away in the service of an anti-woke agenda.

The chief architect, James Madison, was adamantly opposed to adding a bill of rights. Until it became politically expedient to do so.

The Constitution contains the word citizen 11 times, but never defines it, leaving wide open the question of whose rights are protected and who gets to vote.

The preamble promises "the People of the United States...the Blessings of Liberty," but the Constitution only contains one reference to the word "free," and that is in regard to representatives and direct taxes, "which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other Persons." Those three-fifths of all other persons were enslaved. And further down, article 4, section 2, mandates that free individuals were constitutionally obligated to turn in any enslaved individual or indentured servant who sought their own freedom.

Why do I draw attention to these aspects of the Constitution? Because they illustrate why it is incompatible with the nature of the document itself to assume that one political perspective has the correct way to teach it. The Constitution represents all that is wonderful and perplexing about our nation’s founding principles and its history as a whole. Any legislation that attempts to ignore this complexity does a disservice to our students and citizens.

Every educational institution that receives federal funding is legally required to hold some sort of program on the U.S. Constitution on or around Sept. 17. But regardless of where you live or what sort of programming you have access to, we should all commit this September to reading the Constitution, the text of which is readily available online. We the People don’t need state legislators telling us how we should understand it, and if some of us (white people) feel uncomfortable that we benefit from the legacies of racialized slavery, we should.

We should also celebrate the fact that the Constitution contains the mechanism for meaningful change.

Lindsay Schakenbach Regele is an associate professor and director of graduate studies in history at Miami University and the author of "Flowers, Guns, and Money: Joel Roberts Poinsett and the Paradoxes of American Patriotism" (Chicago University Press, 2023) and "Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry, 1776-1848" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Celebrate Constitution Day by reading the Constitution | Opinion