Protecting the Liberal Arts and Humanities in American Higher Education

The liberal arts,[1] particularly the humanities,[2] are far from thriving on most college and university campuses. Shifting market demands, financially wary stakeholders, and rampant politicization pose an immediate threat to the humanities. This is bad news for everyone concerned about the health of academia. The liberal arts are not a frivolous detour in students’ education; they provide coherence and substance to a university education and are integral to molding students to be wise and serious thinkers prepared to live their civic responsibilities. The health of the liberal arts is indicative of the health of higher learning itself.

This report explores the importance of the humanities and why they have been valued for centuries, including by our country’s founding fathers. It then examines the external causes of the humanities’ decline and shines a light on the underexamined—but possibly more egregious—internal threats that originate from within the ivory tower.

The remainder of the report argues that reviving the liberal arts will require meaningful reform of general education curricula. General education programs designed to give students a coherent and meaningful introduction to the most foundational and essential knowledge will largely consist of a rejuvenated program in the liberal arts. Unfortunately, most programs today allow students to choose from a myriad of options to fulfill their humanities requirements. Many of those options are often narrow in scope and highly politicized. A reformed curriculum would ensure that students gain the valuable knowledge that a broad overview of Western philosophy or American history would provide. Moreover, constraining students’ options would funnel large numbers of students into these courses, supporting faculty positions and preserving worthy liberal arts departments.

Governing boards that attempt serious changes to general education, such as those described in this report, will be met with resistance. Yet they must remember that it is their duty to protect the academic integrity of their institutions and to ensure that the education they offer is congruent with the university’s true mission and values. This responsibility does not vary with market demand; it is an enduring hallmark of wise governance.

The liberal arts were once the crown jewel of higher education. For centuries, the liberal arts transmitted an integrated vision of learning that taught students not only to ask, “How?” but “Why?” They encompassed the formation of the whole person—intellectual, moral, and civic—and were considered indispensable in fostering a responsible citizenry. But despite their intrinsic value, the liberal arts are in severe decline at modern universities.

Many involved in higher education look to external causes for the decline. They point to drops in enrollment and sometimes drastic budget cuts to academic programs and faculty positions. Similar observers highlight that the liberal arts are not attractive to students who, in a time of increased costs and student debt, are seeking career-aligned education. These external pressures offer a partial explanation for the decline in the liberal arts.

But internal reasons cannot be ignored. The most serious threat to the humanities is not the scarcity of awarded majors or trimmed-down departments. Rather, it is that the content of students’ humanities education is too often impoverished due to politicization and an over-professionalization that reduces education to skills training. A revival of the humanities will require combating these influences, in addition to addressing the low demand for these disciplines.

One promising path to reform is centering the liberal arts in well-designed general education programs, a set of requirements from a broad range of the major areas of human knowledge that all students at an institution must complete, regardless of major. Doing so solves two pressing problems. The first is the enrollment problem. Students who otherwise would not take a course in Western philosophy, for example, will be required to do so, if it is prescribed in the core curriculum. The same is true of a course in American government or in the Great Works of literature. These subjects are the heart of a liberal arts education but are rarely required in current general education programs. The second problem is content, and prescribing such courses also addresses that issue. A required course in American history will prosper, while a non-required course such as “Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in the Premodern World”[3] may naturally fade away since it will not enable students to fulfill a requirement.

The liberal arts are integral to higher education’s mission, and governing boards must prioritize their protection and renewal. Reforming general education along a traditional liberal arts model provides a way to accomplish that goal.

Higher education, properly conceived, has a mission to cultivate intellectual, human, and civic excellence. It may also advance knowledge and train students for vocations, but such cultivation of higher thought requires more than professional or scientific training; it requires a serious study of the humanities. For most of American higher-education history, the humanities were recognized as fundamental in forming the wise and conscientious citizens this country needs. This section discusses the centuries-old appreciation for the humanities and why today’s students, taxpayers, and higher-education leaders have a vested interest in restoring the humane disciplines to full health.

The founding fathers firmly believed that the welfare of the nascent nation depended on a virtuous citizenry united by a common set of ideas and ideals. They recognized that the wisdom contained in a liberal arts education was conducive to these goals. George Washington advocated for the wide dissemination of a liberal arts education at the university level. Teaching civic knowledge was of particular importance to him.“In a republic what species of knowledge can be equally important and what duty more pressing on its legislature than to patronize a plan for communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country?”[4] he asked. He and his peers recognized that a country filled with a civically ignorant populace was doomed to wander off course and fail.

Washington would be dismayed at the level of civic ignorance today: 70% of college graduates surveyed by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni in 2019 believed that Thomas Jefferson was the “Father of the Constitution”[5] (as opposed to James Madison). And 39% responded that the president has constitutional authority to declare war (that’s Congress). Institutions of higher education are clearly failing to uphold the founders’ vision for education.

As the framers of our nation wisely recognized, our uniquely American ideals, institutions, and way of life will not endure if the upcoming generations of leaders, entrepreneurs, lawyers, doctors, and everyday citizens are ignorant of what America means and why it is worth safeguarding. It is of direct and immediate consequence to students, taxpayers, and society that concrete steps are taken to remedy this lack of civic knowledge.

The societal value of a liberal arts education in American universities is not strictly limited to knowledge of U.S. history and government. Both Washington and John Adams were convinced that a rich liberal arts education that steeped students in the great ideas of literature, philosophy, and science produced a real and necessary public good. In the 1779 Massachusetts Constitution, Adams urged lawmakers to “cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them; especially the university at Cambridge.”[6] He believed that widely diffused wisdom and knowledge among Americans were “necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties” and helped inculcate “the principles of humanity and general benevolence.”

Adams’s reasoning rings true. Students whose morals have been formed by wrestling with civilization’s most perennial and influential ideas are uniquely positioned to make wise decisions and lead lives governed by reason and experience rather than fads or emotional impulses. Such qualities are indispensable for a healthy nation.

The liberal arts are invaluable in forming the kinds of citizens needed for the country’s welfare, but they also are critical for social unity itself. For the social fabric to remain strong, it must be animated by a robust common culture: a citizenry with a shared baseline of cultural knowledge. Americans should not be atomized individuals pursuing their own isolated destinies but a people living, working, and communicating with one another toward a common good. Otherwise, society breaks apart and becomes a cluster of competing factions. They cannot communicate with one another if they do not understand one another as fellow Americans; this understanding can be perpetuated only by a shared set of ideas rooted in their common cultural heritage: the Western liberal arts tradition.

The liberal arts have been negatively affected by recent trends, including waning enrollment, an increased focus on professional training, and creeping politicization. A great deal of attention is paid to the shrinking demand for the humanities and their increasing inability to prepare students for prosperous careers. But many fail to recognize that even if demand for the humanities were booming, other serious underlying issues must be remedied. The chief threat to the humanities is that the content taught under that label is too often impoverished by an overemphasis on skills-focused career training and ideologically infused curricula.

Enrollment

It is popular to point to the pandemic to account for drops in enrollment. According to the National Center for Education Statistics: “Overall, undergraduate enrollment was 15 percent lower in fall 2021 than in fall 2010, with 42 percent of this decline occurring during the pandemic.”[7] This disruption notably affected the humanities. According to a data analysis by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Humanities Indicators project, “the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded by every field except the humanities increased through the end of the 2021 academic year.”[8]

But the humanities’ numbers problems predate 2020. Over the last decade, interest in the liberal arts as a major field of study has steadily declined. Robert B. Townsend and Norman Bradburn, co-principal investigators of the Humanities Indicators project, note: “From 2012 to 2020, the annual number of humanities bachelor’s degrees awarded fell almost 16 percent, with some of the larger disciplines, such as history, losing almost one-third of their majors.”[9] The story is different for degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. During the same period, the number of awarded STEM degrees skyrocketed.“For instance,” Townsend and Bradburn state, “the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in engineering and in the health and medical sciences increased by more than 56 percent over the same period.”

Consequently, the humanities’ share of all undergraduate degrees has diminished significantly. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in the 2010–11 school year, the humanities accounted for 16.8% of all bachelor’s degrees. That number dropped to 12.5% in the 2021–22 school year.[10]

Both public and private institutions have been affected by the drop in demand for the liberal arts. Commonly cited as evidence of the demise of liberal arts are the closures of private liberal arts colleges.[11] These institutions face different challenges from those of publicly funded institutions. The shuttered liberal arts colleges tend to be expensive, tuition-dependent private and religiously affiliated colleges with small endowments. According to U.S. News & World Report, of the 211 ranked national liberal arts colleges, 91% are private.[12] These institutions are the first to feel the impact of a smaller applicant pool.

Even so, public institutions have not remained unscathed. Already suffering from enrollment declines before 2020, Missouri Western State University had to eliminate majors, minors, and concentrations in subjects such as history, English, and philosophy.[13] Career-oriented subjects such as computer science, finance, and health information management, however, were preserved.

In February 2022, the University of Nebraska Board of Regents voted to eliminate the University of Nebraska–Kearney’s philosophy major.[14] And in 2021, Western Oregon University announced plans to cut its philosophy major and minor and half the department’s faculty (two out of four).[15]

After certifying a financial exigency in 2022, Henderson State University in Arkansas made sweeping cuts to its academic programs.[16] Twenty-one filled tenured positions in the arts and humanities were eliminated, while a smaller number of 13 filled tenured positions in the applied professional sciences and technology were cut. The phased-out bachelor’s degrees include history, English, biology, and chemistry.[17]

Notably, the humanities are not the only disciplines to suffer from budget cuts. Missouri Western State University and Henderson State University, for example, are also cutting majors such as biotechnology, applied computer technology, early childhood development, and political science. At West Virginia University, the World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics Department lost 19 faculty, and the Mathematical and Data Sciences Department lost 16 positions. Furthermore, the university discontinued its environmental and community planning major—but retained its philosophy major.[18]

Vocational

Colleges and universities are not merely competing for fewer students. Institutions increasingly have to convince students, parents, and lawmakers that the education they offer provides a return on investment (ROI). Indeed, many of today’s students attend college with the expectation that they will be primed for a successful career after graduation.

According to a 2018 Strada-Gallup poll of 86,000 students of varying degree levels, 55% of four-year degree holders said that improved work outcomes were their main reason for attending college.[19] The CIRP Freshman Survey housed in UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute reveals how financial factors have increased in students’ college decisions. Its February 2016 report summary shows that in 2012, 55.9% of students said that “this college’s graduates get good jobs” was a “very important” factor in selecting their institution.[20] This pattern might be increasing: in 2015, that number increased to 60.1%.

According to a student poll by the consultant Art & Science Group of 758 college-intended high school seniors, 77% of respondents agreed that “a college education that directly prepares you for a job is the best kind of education for you.”[21] Only 31% agreed that “most employers prefer college graduates who received a liberal arts education,” while 76% agreed that “most employers prefer college graduates who received career training.”

Career-conscious students are understandably hesitant to major in a field that lacks a direct career connection and doesn’t promise a reasonable ROI. Such caution is prudent, given that many will assume student loan debt during their studies. Students must be mindful of the amount of debt they accrue, particularly in view of their ability to repay it in the future. In a 2021 Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity study of almost 30,000 bachelor’s degrees, the ROI for programs such as nursing, computer science, and engineering was often $500,000 or more[22] (the author calculates ROI as “estimated earnings minus the sum of counterfactual earnings and college costs”).[23] Conversely, programs in the liberal arts and humanities are often a poor investment: “A majority of programs in philosophy and religious studies leave their students in the red, along with 28% of programs in psychology, English, liberal arts, and humanities,” states the report’s author, Preston Cooper.

A study commissioned by the University of North Carolina System provides ROI data on its 16 public four-year institutions.[24] The study examined 1,364 programs across the system. According to the study’s data dashboard, the field of “Liberal Arts and Sciences/Liberal Studies” has an ROI of $76,201 across all UNC institutions.[25] That number varies significantly at the institutional level. The ROI for “Liberal Arts and Sciences/Liberal Studies” at UNC–Chapel Hill, for example, is $575,143. But the ROI is notably lower at less selective institutions. At UNC–Greensboro, the ROI is $127,184; at Winston-Salem State University, it is $93,819; at UNC–Asheville, it is $25,440. UNC–Asheville recently announced plans to cut several liberal arts programs, including ancient Mediterranean studies, philosophy, and religious studies.[26] The UNC system study has its limitations but is nevertheless a useful tool in assessing the ROI of North Carolina’s public institutions.[27]

Institutions may claim that their humanities degree programs equip students with marketable skills, but such promises ring hollow if their education becomes more of a financial burden than an asset. This is one reason that lawmakers at both the state and federal levels are looking to add transparency by requiring institutions to report on the ROI of their degree programs. Texas and Colorado, for example, mandate minimum required ROI for academic programs, and other states may follow their lead.[28] These efforts could help students make informed choices but might cause some disciplines—the liberal arts and humanities included—to be phased out or consolidated.

Valid concerns over ROI should not be dismissed, but higher-education leaders must be careful not to overcorrect and conflate the entire value of liberal learning with projected yielded earnings. Viewing the whole of a college education through a narrow skills-focused lens diminishes it to mere career training and overlooks the unquantifiable goods of human excellence and civic virtue that the humanities encourage.

Unfortunately, the humanities have fallen prey to this utilitarian focus. A common rationale for studying philosophy is that it teaches critical thinking skills that can help students pass graduate entrance exams or prepare them for successful careers in education or law.[29] That philosophy can help students form sound moral opinions and inform them on how they should live their lives is a less touted claim.

This over-professionalized approach to the humanities affects the quality of what students learn. If the rationale for studying literature is that it merely teaches students to analyze and communicate ideas, then the substance of what students read is less important. According to this reasoning, reading Dante’s Divine Comedy could be just as valuable as reading the latest critically acclaimed novel—as long it requires students to employ the same analytical skills. Consequently, a course of study in literature today is no guarantee that students will be grounded in the works of history’s most notable authors.

Politicization

Even more alarming than the statistics in declining liberal arts majors and poor ROI outcomes is the rampant politicization infecting humanities departments.

The treatment of Shakespeare is just one example of how the humanities have become a vehicle of a shallow and politicized ideology. English departments are often home to scholars investigating Shakespeare’s “queer”[30] themes or how he helped define the concept of “whiteness.”[31] Universities actively seek out scholars who teach classic authors through a progressive lens.[32] Other institutions have gone another route and done away with Shakespeare altogether.[33] He is, to them, a dead white male who is symbolic of an oppressive and male-dominant intellectual tradition.

In some cases, English majors can earn a degree without studying Shakespeare at all. In a 2015 report, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni reported that only 8% of the nation’s top colleges and universities require English majors to take one course focused on William Shakespeare.[34]

The abuse of serious literary figures is one side of the coin of the humanities’ spiritual demise. The other is the invention of highly specialized, ideologically tilted courses. The University of California–Berkeley’s English department offers courses titled “Queer Nature,”[35] “Practical Magic” (a course about witches),[36] and “The Colonized Soul,”[37] which all fulfill general education requirements. The University of California–Los Angeles offers “Introduction to Zen Buddhism,”[38] “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Perspectives in Pop Music,”[39] and “Inequality: History of Mass Imprisonment”[40]—all of which fulfill the “Historical Analysis” general education requirement.

Higher-education governing boards must rein in this politicized approach to the humanities. For many students, the few humanities courses they take in college will be the only in-depth exposure they will have to these valuable disciplines. Their time should be spent on courses that are faithful to the liberal arts mission: the search for truth through the exploration of perennial questions of human concern. Courses that aim to mold students’ minds to accord with narrow political dogma, instead of freeing them to shape their own worldview based on reason, is not a liberal—or liberating—education. Such an approach is designed to produce ideological conformists, not enlighten minds. It is a perversion of the liberal arts and not the liberal arts as they ought to be taught and studied.

Summary

If the liberal arts are to be reformed, higher-education leaders must set the right goals. Efforts to increase enrollment will be pointless if the more fundamental issues of politicization and over-professionalization are ignored. The task before governing boards is to find a solution that both shields the liberal arts from these corrupting forces and ensures that all students, regardless of their specialization, receive a baseline liberal arts education.

Institutions of higher education face a true dilemma. On the one hand, pressure from many directions—employers, government officials, parents, and the students themselves—pushes them to focus on preparing students for lucrative careers. On the other hand, they should not view education as purely professional preparation. Rather, they should pay considerable attention to creating free thinkers and informed citizens through personal intellectual and character development.

These latter goals are best accomplished through the study of the liberal arts, and the university general education curriculum is an ideal medium to restore the liberal arts and transmit shared cultural knowledge to the greatest number of students. This is because all students at most colleges and universities must take general education courses, which constitute about 30% of their total coursework. When properly designed, a general education program is primarily a liberal arts education. General education programs exist largely to make students well-rounded thinkers capable of tackling complex moral, social, and technological problems. They need not detract from career preparation; rather, they can support and enhance workplace training.

Unfortunately, general education programs today are poorly designed and fail to live up to their original purpose. After World War I, educators across the country wanted to ensure that college students—amid a fervor for specialization—still received an education that familiarized them with their common cultural inheritance and conveyed a deeper meaning for their lives. This vision of general education was most vibrant in the post–World War II years. Colleges and universities across the country strongly focused on citizenship and common cultural knowledge.[41] This period did not last—two forces dampened this revival of liberal learning: an overemphasis on specialization for career training; and the politicization of the culture wars. Instead of enhancing moral, philosophical, and civic reasoning through exposure to great thinkers that binds students together in a common intellectual culture, the current approach to general education is skills-focused and content-neutral. Ever since the rise of the “canon wars” in the 1980s, such a “neutral” approach to content has proved to be politically safe.

Today, the typical general education program consists of “distribution requirements”—broad categories of knowledge such as science, history, and the humanities. Each distribution requirement often has a list of courses from which students may choose to fulfill their requirement. Students at the University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign, for example, may choose to take a course called “Gender & Sexuality in Greco-Roman Antiquity” or “Introduction to Fashion” to partially satisfy their “Humanities & the Arts” distribution requirement.[42] Most universities follow the distribution model of general education, although the categories might be labeled slightly differently (UNC–Chapel Hill’s history requirement is labeled “Engagement with the Human Past”).[43]

As a consequence of the distribution requirement model, the specific content of students’ studies—American history vs. 18th-century Latin American sexuality, for example—is not a primary concern for most university administrators. As long as students develop generic skills such as “critical thinking” and take a potpourri of courses from broad subject areas, university administrators are mostly satisfied. The distribution model can be described as a “smorgasbord” or “cafeteria-style” model of general education due to the excessive latitude that it grants students in selecting their courses. UNC–Chapel Hill allows students to choose from more than 300 course options, many of them narrow or frivolous, in order to fulfill a single history requirement.[44] This lack of order and direction does a disservice to students.

But general education also presents an opportunity. The liberal arts and general education programs can help save each other because of their overlapping goals. General education programs ought to teach content that will give students a wide-spanning map and timeline of their civilization’s key events and the development of its central ideas. They should also acquaint students with the most influential writers, philosophers, and scientists over the millennia. Such exposure to a history filled with tension and debates over fundamental questions enables students to form their own coherent worldviews. This is not only needed to add meaning and organization to today’s smorgasbord general education model; it is also what a traditional liberal arts education looks like. Not only will such an approach improve general education; it will also help preserve worthy disciplines from being eliminated (and, perhaps, cause less worthy disciplines to wither away).

Faculty across the country have noted that general education programs have helped keep their disciplines afloat.[45] For example, when Hiram College, a small liberal arts institution in Ohio, underwent substantial restructuring, an English professor claimed that general education courses saved his department. At the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, a philosophy professor and interim chair claimed that the philosophy major survived elimination because of the need for philosophy faculty to teach general education courses.

Properly designing general education programs would resolve, or at least lessen, the existential problems currently faced by many humanities disciplines. It won’t—and perhaps shouldn’t—guarantee the survival of every degree program, but it will ensure the continued instruction of core courses in philosophy, literature, and history. A university can retain courses in philosophy, for example, without offering the major. Conversely, excluding hyper-specialized and politicized courses from the general education curriculum may be a way to phase out nonessential programs.

A Sample of Current General Education Models

It may be that no public institution currently requires the ideal general education program. Several, however, incorporate desirable elements. One limits the number of core curricular options. Another requires a prolonged study of key ideas and texts through a course sequence or a series of prescribed courses. A third strategy adopted at both the state and university levels mandates that students take a civics course that will give them a foundation in American history, ideals, and institutions. The following examples reflect at least one of these positive elements.

State Level

Several states have long-existing stipulations for general education at their institutions. Texas requires that every public institution design a core curriculum aligned with its 42-credit hour Texas Core Curriculum.[46] The curriculum includes two courses on American history and two on American or Texas government.

Missouri’s CORE 42 stipulates a set of distribution requirements for its institutions.[47] In Florida, 15 of 36 general education requirements must be selected from an approved list of 23 courses spanning five knowledge areas.[48] South Carolina requires a civics course as part of its institutions’ core curricula.[49]

These state regulations do not solve all of general education’s woes, but they demonstrate that state involvement in general education reform is not a novelty.

University-System Level

University of North Carolina System

On April 18, 2024, the UNC System approved a new Foundations of American Democracy requirement.[50] Students must complete this course to receive their bachelor’s degree. Students will evaluate key topics in American founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as well as a selection of the Federalist Papers. They will also review “the arguments and contexts surrounding the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Letter from Birmingham Jail, as well as other texts that reflect the breadth of American experiences.”

While this requirement does not single-handedly resolve the disorder in the general education curriculum, it is one concrete way institutions can ensure that all students receive at least some essential knowledge in common.

Institution Level

Purdue University: “Revitalizing the Role of the Humanities in General Education”

One institution stands out for its efforts to reform general education: Purdue University. Created with support from the Teagle Foundation, Purdue’s Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts certificate program attempts to reform general education by emphasizing great texts and the liberal arts.[51]

Before the program’s launch in 2018, Purdue’s College of the Liberal Arts was facing a dire situation. In 2011, Purdue’s College of Liberal Arts had 4,250 students enrolled. By 2016, that number had plummeted to 2,500.[52] Total enrollments for the university overall, however, kept increasing.“Purdue is the third most STEM-centric university in the nation,” reported history professor Melinda Zook in a 2020 video presentation for the Teagle Foundation.[53] These enrollment numbers not only placed faculty jobs in a precarious position; they also indicated that fewer students were receiving the advantages of a liberal arts education.

According to Zook, STEM professors noticed that their students lacked communication, writing, and interpersonal skills. Students also lacked broader knowledge about the world.[54] Professors “wanted their students to take their gen-ed requirements in some kind of meaningful trajectory, not willy-nilly cafeteria-style,” explained Zook.[55]

The 15-credit hour Cornerstone program addresses these problems. Cornerstone is designed to add direction and coherence to students’ general education studies. The program starts with a first-year gateway sequence in “transformative texts,” which is meant to create “a common intellectual experience” for students. These courses are taught by faculty, not graduate students. The two-course gateway sequence fulfills three general education requirements: written communication, information literacy, and oral communication. Faculty are requested to choose at least 50% of their texts from a common list of about 200 authors. By reading these texts, students grapple with big questions such as “What is truth?” and “Can there be justice and equality?” Students have responded favorably to the gateway courses. A 2021 report by Zook notes that “enrollments in the first-year sequence for the certificate swelled by an astonishing 79 percent from fall 2020 to fall 2021, from 2280 students to 4080 students.”[56] (The program’s success inspired the 2020 roll-out of the Cornerstone: Learning for Living initiative, which aims to help institutions adapt Purdue’s model to their programs. As of August 2023, the initiative had 60 participating institutions.)

The three remaining courses of Purdue’s Cornerstone program allow students to choose one of five liberal arts pathways.[57] Completing a three-course pathway enables them to complete two-thirds of their general education requirements. The themed pathways: “Conflict Resolution and Justice,” “Management and Organization,” “Healthcare and Medicine,” “Environment and Sustainability,” and “Science and Technology.” These pathways were created to complement Purdue students’ majors. Zook explains that the certificate is a “purposeful pathway through which students can complete most or all of their general education requirements and link the humanities to their professional aspirations.”[58]

The first-year two-course sequence in transformative texts appears to be the program’s strongest feature. A sample syllabus for the first sequence course, “Critical Thinking & Communication I: Antiquity to Modernity,” includes the following required readings: Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen; Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus; “Ash Cake and the Rich Man’s Table,” from My Bondage and My Freedom, by Frederick Douglass; and The Vampyre, by William Polidori.[59] Readings from Plutarch and Percy Bysshe Shelley are also required. The second sequence course requires students to read works such as Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley; A Doll’s House and Other Plays, by Henrik Ibsen; and On the Genealogy of Morality, by Friedrich Nietzsche.[60]

The latter grouping of three courses in themed pathways has its virtues and drawbacks. Its strength lies in its potential to add coherence and organization to the curriculum. Guiding students to take courses that relate to and complement one another is an improvement from the haphazard approach that usually results from the cafeteria model. Students in the Healthcare and Medicine track, for example, may choose courses such as “Cornerstones in Constitutional Law” or “Biomedical Ethics,” coupled with courses such as “The History of Medicine and Public Health” or “Writing for the Health and Human Sciences” from their list of options.

But this system has its downsides. For one, five separate tracks means that students will not all receive the same common knowledge in their general studies. Additionally, the design allows narrow and possibly politicized courses to count toward students’ general education requirements. The Science and Technology track, for example, includes “Detective Fiction” and “Science Fiction and Fantasy” as course options. These and other niche topics arguably do not constitute essential knowledge.

Even so, institutions should consider imitating Purdue’s strongest features, particularly mandating courses in which students study the “greatest of what has been thought and said” across disciplines. Instead of limiting such a study to two courses, boards should consider expanding the number of courses to focus on American and Western history, literature, philosophy, and science more deeply.

The University of Maine Honors College

The honors college at the University of Maine has a core curriculum that includes a four-course “Civilizations Sequence.”[61] The courses follow “a chronological trajectory from earliest recorded times through the present, examining philosophy, history, literature, the arts, and natural, physical, and social sciences.”[62] The sequence is typically completed in students’ first and second years. Students read primary source material, participate in small group discussions, and explore the development and interaction of civilizations and cultures.[63]

Archived syllabi reveal the kinds of texts students read throughout the sequence. In the first course, students have read Homer’s Odyssey; the Old Testament; If Not, Winter, by Sappho; Analects, by Confucius; Plato’s Republic; and “Funeral Oration of Pericles,” by Thucydides.[64] Readings for the second course include Virgil’s Aeneid; the New Testament; City of God, by Augustine; the Qur’an; Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; and Dante’s Inferno.[65] The remaining two courses have required students to read Shakespeare’s Othello; Cervantes’s Don Quixote; Second Treatise on Civil Government, by John Locke; The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin; The Souls of Black Folk, by W. E. B. Du Bois; and Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.”[66]

Proposed Core Curriculum: General Education Act

What does a general education with a strong liberal arts structure look like? While there is room for some variation about what should be included in the curriculum, all programs should prioritize coherence, breadth, and essential knowledge of the American and Western traditions, along with a firm grounding in the scientific method, quantitative reasoning, and advanced writing skills.

A model general education curriculum that faithfully incorporates all these elements was released last year and is available online.[67] Coauthored by the James G. Martin Center, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and the National Association of Scholars, the proposed curriculum is a part of model legislation called the General Education Act (GEA) and is designed for lawmakers seeking to implement reform from the state level.

University boards can—and should—take the initiative and put general education back on track themselves. At most institutions, this will require a substantial restructuring of the curriculum and clearly articulating which subject matter is the most essential for students to learn. Such a task may appear daunting, but it is nonetheless necessary for the preservation of the liberal arts and the fulfillment of higher education’s academic mission. Ample resources exist to assist boards in this revision process, the first of which is the above-mentioned model legislation. The proposed 13-course core curriculum outlined in the GEA is as follows:

Implementing a curriculum along these lines would be a significant way to simultaneously protect the liberal arts and strengthen the academic integrity of university curricula.

No institution has adopted the GEA curriculum as of this writing, but at least one state has attempted to introduce it into law. In early 2024, the Utah state legislature introduced Senate Bill 226, based on the GEA.[68] Although the bill was voted down, it may be reintroduced next year—perhaps with better results. This was the scenario with Utah’s recently adopted diversity, equity, and inclusion bill; it, too, failed at the first attempt at passage.

Higher education is in a time of great change. Today’s unique challenges of fewer college applicants, cost-conscious stakeholders, and shifting market demands seem to threaten the extinction or consolidation of some academic disciplines, especially in the humanities. The professions and skills in demand today may not be needed in 10 or 20 years. Specialized programs will need to adapt.

But if institutions of higher education are to remain true to their purpose, some cornerstones must endure. One of those is the liberal arts. Colleges and universities must not forget their responsibility to instruct students in the knowledge and intellectual virtues that will help make them wise and upright members of society. It is the liberal arts that allow colleges and universities to fulfill this serious obligation. If they rot, so will the university’s core purpose.

The disorder and corruption plaguing the liberal arts, therefore, are of direct and immediate concern to higher-education governing boards. They should intervene—not necessarily to preserve every department and program in all their current iterations but to enshrine an authentic liberal arts education in every program of general education.

Properly reforming general education is a bold endeavor but is a measure that must nevertheless be taken to safeguard the soul of the university and mold the next generation of citizens.

To get started, boards should take the following five steps:

1. Be informed about your institution’s general education requirements. Ask to see course descriptions, sample syllabi, and curricular planning documents. Browse your institution’s general education webpage.
2. Ask that specific changes be made to the curriculum if deemed necessary. It is typically up to boards of trustees to approve general education requirements, and it is well within their authority to request changes before approval is given.
3. Pass a university-wide policy adopting a liberal arts–focused general education curriculum. The curriculum should give students a coherent and meaningful education to the history, works, and civic culture of the West, particularly of the United States.
4. Ensure that your university’s provost shares this vision of general education, either by hiring someone new or by cultivating a good relationship with the current provost through regular conversations.
5. Consult the following resources for further reading on general education:
   • “General Education Act,” by Stanley Kurtz, Jenna A. Robinson, and David Randall
   • “Making General Education Meaningful,” by Shannon Watkins[69]
   • How to Educate a Citizen: The Power of Shared Knowledge to Unify a Nation, by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.[70]

Shannon Watkins is a research associate at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. She writes policy briefs, articles, and research reports on a range of higher-education issues, with a focus on general education programs and the liberal arts. She holds a BA in Spanish and linguistics from the University of California—Los Angeles. Her articles have appeared in Townhall, Washington Examiner, Daily Caller, the Carolina Journal, and The Heartland Institute. She lives outside Raleigh, North Carolina, with her husband and four children.

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