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These actions have evoked a flood of censure from the education establishment not seen since the days of Bill Bennett and Allan Bloom. Thirty-three scholarly guilds, including the Modern Language Association, the American Historical Association, and the College Art Association, denounced the DeSantis administration and its campus operatives as “would-be indoctrinators of views that undermine the purpose of higher education in a democracy.” The American Association of University Professors conducted an investigation whose write-up began with a faculty quote: “What we are witnessing in Florida is an intellectual reign of terror.” PEN America released a report calling Florida’s efforts “the country’s most intensive rollback of Americans’ right to freely express themselves.”
We have tracked the criticisms from the start. One of us has advised the DeSantis administration on education matters (Yenor), the other is a trustee at New College (Bauerlein). We are professors, too, with long experience in teaching and research, so we understand the value of faculty prerogative. Over the years we’ve witnessed administrative meddling in academic affairs and resisted the rise of the “corporate university” that casts professors as content providers and students as customers. When word spread of the trustees at New College terminating the gender-studies concentration, we were not surprised at the natural reaction: “Who the hell do they think they are?!”
We agree: It is one thing for politicians and their appointees to decide on funding, capital improvements, tuition, land use, and the like. When they mess with curriculum, hiring and promotion, and class discussion, academic freedom is indeed on the line. It is also the case, however, that systemic corruption can spread inside a scholarly guild, and that the very people charged with upholding professional norms flout or distort them, doing so under the guise of progress. Indeed, it was part of our academic training to recognize that any group can slide into power politics — hence the necessity of ideals that aren’t subject to majority whim. Academic freedom, peer review, etc., are not whatever professors say they are at any given time. They have an independent existence, which can be threatened from within as well as without.
Specific incidents and practices are easy to cite. Critics of education reform in Florida would have more credibility if they’d spoken up for the many individuals who’d been shouted down, shunned, or suspended because they opposed current dogmas. The MLA, AHA, and other professional associations have commended dissent while endorsing such expressions of orthodoxy as diversity statements. The AAUP investigative team interviewed the victims of our putative villainy, but not us, which is like detectives questioning witnesses to a crime but never interrogating the prime suspects.
To them, politics is all on the other side. They don’t accept that Florida’s reforms may have a salient academic rationale, one that produces a better curriculum and more informed and prepared graduates. The state of Florida is making decisions customarily handled by professors, yes, which strikes many of them as a violation of academic freedom. But academic freedom is more than just faculty power — it is power exerted in the pursuance of academic values and quality. When the faculty exert power for other purposes — for instance, the cause of racial equity in hiring and promotion — they themselves have given up on academic freedom. Our critics speak of a hostile conservative takeover; we judge it a reform whose canons are pedagogical, not ideological. Our quarrel is not with the politics of political correctness; it is with the anti-intellectualism of it. What we’ve seen in higher education over three decades is politicization, deterioration of standards, and disintegration of the curriculum, accomplished under the direction of professors and often justified on identitarian grounds. We take this judgment as inarguable.
When the people charged with maintaining quality and intellectual freedom support or blink at the breakdowns, it is the duty of college presidents, trustees, board members, and state politicians to step in and fix the system.
This is a false construction. It assumes that general education is whatever the current college catalog says it is. But general education has specific and essential characteristics. At most colleges in the United States, including those in Florida before the changes, those characteristics come up missing. A quick survey of college websites shows that the requirements all students must meet regardless of their major are a mishmash of courses with no coherence or “generality.”
In other words, the contest in Florida isn’t between the faculty’s version of general education and a conservative version. The reforms in Florida are a correction of the faculty’s decision to have no general education at all.
The old model is a conservative one, yes. General education presumes a body of knowledge that all students should absorb, a core of great works, historic persons and events, momentous inquiries, prized ideas and sacred truths. Together, the courses embody the consensus on what an educated American should know. Student choice is limited, and so are the number of courses students may take. When they declare a major, sophomores and juniors specialize and go their own way. Before that, they study more or less the same things. It is a common, unifying experience. No advanced courses or special-topics seminars, no syllabi that look like an instructor’s hobbyhorse. Each course addresses specific material — for instance, the rise of modern science from Copernicus to Einstein — but with enough coverage to count as general. And the materials must contribute to what E.D. Hirsch famously termed “cultural literacy,” the knowledge that marks one as an informed, discerning citizen.
Here is how Stanford described one such requirement 65 years ago:
The course in the History of Western Civilization, which surveys the development of the Western world from its earliest times to the present, is required by the university of all students as a necessary part of a liberal education and supplies a foundation for the other work in the department.
The course lasted a full year (three quarters in the Stanford system). A three-part sequence in English on writing and literature complemented it. No substitutions, no exemptions. “History of Western Civ” was “necessary” and “foundational.”
Much of the professoriate now rejects this model of general education. First, it curtails student preference, which to progressives denies students the opportunity to “take ownership” of their learning. It identifies a core knowledge, too, which multiculturalists assailed in the ’80s and ’90s on Dead White Male grounds and which professors eschew today out of discomfort with prescribing any particular content. It doesn’t broach pressing social problems, either, instead sinking young minds in old stuff of no direct cultural relevance. And it labels certain content foundational, which implies that other content is derivative, a hierarchy that troubles many professors.
To be sure, there are serious arguments to be made against this model of general education — Richard Rorty on “foundationalism,” Jean-François Lyotard on “grand narratives,” etc. But as evidence mounts of limited learning, student delinquency, and low levels of college readiness, we find the benefits of general education in the old sense incontrovertible. A freshman year of structured historic content, shared with peers, inducts them into higher learning better than does a smattering of more or less interesting classes that never assemble into a meaningful whole. It gives young Americans a coherent vision of the past, a plot of major developments, a Big Picture of the world they’re about to enter, an ennobling heritage.
Florida is trying to remedy the problems. Up to now, the University of Florida has allowed some 500 courses to fulfill one requirement or another. Florida State University allowed 900 before the Board of Trustees acted last month. The same general-education creep has afflicted the Florida College System (FCS). This year, Miami Dade College, the system’s biggest, listed 235 courses in its general-education portfolio. Valencia College listed 163; Broward College, 152; Hillsborough Community College, 134. Among these courses are many that hardly belong in general education — for instance, “Sociology of Gender” and “Myth, Ritual, and Mysticism” at Florida International University (both have been disqualified). Florida State University’s board removed 432 courses from the general-education curriculum this November, including “Theories of African American Studies” and “Feminism and Globalization.” Miami Dade’s general education has “History of Women in the United States” and “History of the Holocaust,” both of which are appropriate as upper-division electives, not as foundational choices. Philosophy at Miami Dade offered “Artificial Intelligence and Ethics"; Hillsborough offers “African Humanities” and “Ethics and Business”— those are gone, too.
The principle of exclusion is simple. When the possibilities extend beyond a certain number and include special topics and tendentious approaches, general education becomes an elective sprawl enabling 19-year-olds to choose their own adventure. To ensure a common experience, courses must be consistent from semester to semester. For example, “Myth, Ritual, and Mysticism” covers important subjects, but its contents could change completely with each term. This is not a sound formation, but it does satisfy local interests. Professors like sprawls because they don’t have to “privilege” any content (such as Western Civ); plus they can submit courses on pet themes with expectation of approval. Departments like it because they can run lots of gen-ed courses and pile up enrollments that will help them when they meet the dean at the end of the year to make budget requests. Administrators like sprawls because they can show efforts at “continuous improvement” to accreditors. Which is to say, professors, departments, and administrators are unlikely to self-correct.
Hence, Florida lawmakers and higher-education administrators have asked universities and colleges to submit lists of general-education courses to conform to Florida’s new regulations. Most colleges cut many courses themselves before submission, according to documents obtained through a public-records request. The process continues, as state administrators are sending lists of excluded courses back to the provosts. The Board of Education will finalize its gen-ed-reform work in January.
Their actions will ensure a seriousness in first-year coursework that has been lacking. Humanities courses, for instance, will include primary sources and “selections from the Western canon” — the regulations demand it. Curricula based on “unproven, speculative, or exploratory content” are “best suited” to electives or program-specific credit, the law says, which ensures that what students study early will prepare them for what they study in later years. No trendy approaches and exotic materials that they get once and never encounter again. One important step in creating an informed citizenry is, like Texas, requiring students to take six credits in American history. The Hamilton Center at the University of Florida is developing a course that will meet a statewide requirement in civil discourse at public colleges.
These changes will drive hiring and guide course design, drawing faculty away from overspecialization and back to the foundations of their fields, at least in part of their work. The best department leaders will measure whether graduates have acquired foundational knowledge proper to their fields, though there is no current demand that they do so. Also, in the new system, a department can offer a maximum of five general-education courses, a restriction encouraging them to choose what is most important and enduring in their disciplines. Departments such as anthropology or communication (which have presented dozens of courses in the past) must come to an agreement about what is truly foundational. If they don’t do it, administrators in Tallahassee will.
We are confident of improvements to come. Already, niche courses are being dropped at the Board of Trustee level. Advanced courses are relocated to where they belong. In the coming years, students will encounter the best that each discipline has to offer — and determine the desirability of that area of study when the time comes to choose a major.
Faculty are upset that these decisions have been made with insufficient input. We understand, but public higher education is not a faculty-only enterprise, as state law proves. When faculty let gen ed decay into an elective mess, they took the entire issue of faculty prerogative and academic freedom off the table. If colleges had policies in place that adhered to authentic principles of general education, no actions would have been taken. The current sprawling, incoherent, ineffectual system is the result of leaving general education a faculty-only decision. What has ensued was predictable: Local interests prevail; general education suffers. Ultimately, Governor DeSantis is doing Florida colleges a favor, forcing order and unity on the first-year curriculum and producing more knowledgeable and astute graduates.