Florida administrators are revising general education in universities and colleges. Perverse incentives have diluted and politicized general-education courses at the expense of foundational knowledge. Since universities will not fix themselves, state administrators must safeguard educational vision where faculty and university administrators will not.
How did we get here? Most college curriculum was prescribed in the 1800s. Harvard under legendary president Charles William Eliot swung the pendulum toward a totally elective college experience in the late 1800s. Under a strict elective system, students could make their way through Harvard guided only by their own choices. Schools stampeded to the elective system. The quality of education suffered, however, because a grasp of the Western heritage simply fell by the wayside, and students were ill prepared for higher-level classes.
Perverse incentives have diluted and politicized general-education courses at the expense of foundational knowledge.Today’s system of major concentration, general-education distribution, and electives was born from these swings of the pendulum. Yale adopted it in 1901. Cornell in 1905. Even Harvard abandoned its elective system for the major/general-education approach in 1910.
In theory at least, general education preserved the liberal-arts education from the old American college system, while allowing for supposedly deep university education in the style of the German system. General education builds common experiences for students, based partly on great works and great questions and partly on working toward advanced literacy and numeracy. General-education courses reflect the consensus on what every graduate should know. Syllabi should not reflect an instructor’s hobbies. Advanced courses or special-topic seminars are not appropriate for general education. General education should look roughly the same throughout state systems and across our shared country.
People have from the beginning worried about what counted as “general education” and what majors should be on campus. Few understand the internal mechanisms that lead to the dissolution of undergraduate education.
The Dissolution of General Education: 1914-1993 by Stephen Balch and Rita Zurcher documents how general education changed under the progressive university. The authors studied the structure and size of general education at 50 top colleges at roughly 25-year intervals, starting in 1914. While the size of general education shrank at these 50 schools (from 55 percent of the total credits for graduation in 1914 to 33 percent of the total in 1993), the number of courses at the same 50 schools ballooned from only 15,000 in 1914 (about 300 per institution) to over 70,000 in 1993 (nearly 1,500 per institution). The number of courses in the general-education curriculum also increased as mandatory courses (which made up 98 percent of general education in 1914) were replaced by a smorgasbord approach where only 2.5 courses were mandatory in 1993, on average. Few courses have prerequisites. Foreign-language requirements, ubiquitous in 1914, have nearly vanished.
As the number of courses that fulfill various general-education requirements expands, education comes to resemble the elective system that the major/general-education/elective form was supposed to supersede. Coherence and integrity suffer. The very idea of general or common content disappears. Across the 13 universities in Florida’s university system, over 2,000 different courses in general education were offered when the state began reform efforts in summer 2024. The 28 schools in the college system began with 970 distinct courses.
General-education sprawl has roots in the internal politics of universities. As I illustrate elsewhere, participation in general education is a matter of life and death for academic departments. Departments with fewer majors want to get into the general-education curriculum to recruit students to their majors and expand or maintain their resources. Students in seats maintain budgets. The same incentive puts hyper-political courses in general education. As the university emphasizes political outcomes, leftists control the committees that gatekeep for general education. Log-rolling in university curriculum committees creates an administrative incentive for departments to help one another offer more general-education courses. The result is an ever-leftward ratchet in university curriculum committees and an ever-expanding number of courses in the general-education curriculum.
Florida is seeking to bring order to sprawling general-education curricula.Florida’s boards of trustees, as well as administrators in Florida’s Board of Governors and Department of Education, are seeking to bring order to the sprawling general-education curricula. General-education core courses based on identity politics are being eliminated, as are courses that do not provide “broad foundational knowledge.” Departments can offer “a maximum of five courses” in the general-education curriculum, so faculty will have to hammer out agreement about what is foundational in a discipline. Humanities courses in the university and college systems must include primary sources and “selections from the Western canon.”
With these standards in mind, boards of trustees are first trimming the general-education sprawl. Then, education administrators in Tallahassee are reviewing the trimmed lists for compliance with the law.
Faculty at Florida International University complained in October when its board of trustees dropped “Anthropology of Race and Ethnicity,” “Sociology of Gender,” and “Introduction to LGBTQ+ Studies” from the general-education core. The same complaints emerged when Florida Gulf Coast’s board removed around 40 courses from its general education to comply with the laws and regulations. Florida State’s board took an amazing 432 courses out of the nearly 600 general-education offerings. Florida Atlantic’s board removed many classes, too, including “Magic, Witchcraft and Religion,” “History of Food and Eating,” and “The Educated Citizen in a Global Context.”
The reform continues, as officials in Tallahassee have evaluated and further trimmed the boards of trustees’ lists of general-education courses and have now sent them to provosts across the systems. These further trimmed lists, official only if they are adopted at the January State Board of Education meeting, are hardly slim. According to documents obtained through a public-records request, the college list of approved classes for general education dropped from 970 to 417, should the State Board adopt the reform in January. That’s still a huge number of unique courses across the system. (More details on the classes cut from the university system’s general education—and those kept—awaits a further public-records request.)
Politico and the New York Times portray general-education reform as a catastrophe for academic freedom. “Republicans Target Social Sciences to Curb Ideas They Don’t Like,” reads the Times headline. Those defending the general-education status quo usually argue about opening students’ eyes to systems of oppression and teaching about social movements that have created potential for people. Yet self-interest lurks within these supposedly academic appeals. When Stanford reduced the number of humanities courses in its more traditional core during the 1990s, the number of humanities majors dropped precipitously. The same might indeed happen when identity politics-laced upper-division courses are dropped from Florida’s general education. As Kevin Grove, an FIU geography professor, argues, Florida’s general-education reform creates “an artificial enrollment crater” with profound “long-term implications, not only for the health of departments, but for the[ir] very existence.”
Perhaps. The general-education status quo creates an artificial supply of ideological and niche courses. Ending that supply may dry up demand for some academic departments, but it also contributes to a better learning experience in general education. The purpose of general education is not to prop up failing ideological geography departments with artificial enrollment boosts!
The general-education status quo creates an artificial supply of ideological and niche courses.Hide-bound critics—focusing on promoting their ideology—refuse to see the problem of a sprawling, incoherent general education. In this anti-intellectual refusal, they undermine the university and deny the purpose of education. Hard-science and math courses have been trimmed in the Florida college system for not being sufficiently foundational (the number of natural-science courses dipped to 177 from 353, and math courses were cut to 37 from 60). Moreover, if, as the New York Times worries, many more social-science courses have been trimmed than hard-science courses, perhaps that reflects a crisis in the social sciences, where disciplines lack a coherent, common understanding of what is important about their fields of study or have allowed ideology to obscure foundational knowledge. Some departments have more than 20 courses in the general education. “Student choice” seems indistinguishable from “no vision” in this circumstance. Departments less clear about what foundational knowledge is will obviously have more courses trimmed as the result of these reforms, just as departments based on identity politics will have more cut.
We could and should revisit the premises of the progressive university. As long as we have such institutions, however, the purpose of general education at its best is to ensure that foundational knowledge drives university education (not self-interested efforts to grow student enrollments and majors or to increase budgets). Florida’s higher-education reform does what universities often do not have the guts to do: ensure that general education serves the purpose of guiding student choice toward a coherent, more compelling vision of education. Critics act as if having more than 600 distinct general-education courses in the university system and more than 400 in the college system is an attack on academic freedom. Quite the contrary. These complaints show that general education is in crisis and that reducing the crisis harms the institutional interests of academics. Since those in the university are more interested in protecting their skins than in providing a real education, administrators and trustees had to step in. Perhaps even more trimming will be necessary to achieve genuine reform.
Scott Yenor is senior director of state coalitions for the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life and a professor of political science at Boise State University.