General Education Could Be Getting A Makeover at Public Universities

MUSIC Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters.

Many of us recognize that something has gone wrong in higher education, when differing opinions aren't used as teaching moments, but shouted down and called hate speech. Well, Jenna Robinson is president of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. She is one of a group of thought leaders who are hoping to change that problematic reality through legislation. She joins us today to discuss the Model General Education Act that she co-authored with Stanley Kurtz and David Randall. Jenna Robinson, welcome to Family Policy Matters. It's great to be here.

All right. So first of all, who is this group of thought leaders that we referenced in the introduction? And how did it come about that you all decided to put your heads together and facilitate some kind of change? The three of us, Stanley Kurtz, David Randall, and I are all members of the Civics Alliance, which is a project of the National Association of Scholars.

David Randall works at the National Association of Scholars and Stanley Kurtz works at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. And so we've all known each other and talked about these various issues for a while. And it turned out that separately, we were all interested in general education. My colleague Shannon Watkins just wrote a report about general education. And this just seemed like it was a shared concern and interest of all of us.

And so we decided to put it into legislation. So when you say general education, what do you mean by that? We mean the 40-ish course credits that every student who is getting an undergraduate degree at a university is required to take. And so this is your first few semesters at a college or university where you are learning kind of the basics, the foundation that will set you up for success as you go into your major. Those of us who don't spend our time studying academia, you know, we get snippets here and there about things that are happening. But give us a little bit of a comprehensive overview of what you see has gone wrong.

So a lot has gone wrong, but I'll talk specifically about what has gone wrong academically. And I think that what we've seen is that students are getting fed or offered kind of shallow, trendy courses, popular courses, instead of the meat and potatoes of what they really need to be prepared for citizenship, for leadership, and for participation in the marketplace. They just don't have what they need to do that.

They don't have what they need to engage across differences, to be part of our pluralistic democratic republic, to be citizens. I think what they're getting in their majors for their profession is something that's easily measurable. You know, we know if someone is being prepared properly to be an engineer, right. But in terms of these bigger ideas, universities have just really dropped the ball. Why did this come about?

You've got some theories on exactly how this happened. So I think part of it is the way that universities decide what the general education is going to look like. And right now, that's usually done by faculty committees. And frankly, the incentives for faculty are just all wrong to get a good general education curriculum. We know that faculty are rewarded for publications.

They're rewarded for their research, which means that they're incentivized to spend their time on niche subjects that they can eventually publish articles or books on. And it also means that they have a tendency to want to teach those subjects. So you get people who all have their little niche concerns in a committee meeting to decide what is general education going to look like. And what it ends up as is all the faculty from the different disciplines want to maximize the number of courses they can teach in their departments and in their niche specialties. And so you get a general education curriculum that is thousands of courses long with many, many choices over every subject. So it's really they end up giving the students a smorgasbord instead of a comprehensive, directed program. Why legislation?

Why do you think that's the first place to start? Well, as I mentioned, the incentives for the faculty to do it themselves are just not there. If you put a faculty committee together at a typical public institution, this is not going to happen. And I think that boards have historically just shown a lot of deference to their campuses. And so boards don't seem to have at this point the political will or the political motivation to take something like this on. But we have seen an appetite from legislators who are responding to the public to do something like this. We know that the public have lost trust in higher education. And I think a lot of that is because higher education is not delivering citizens ready to engage in the wider country in the wider world. And so legislators just seemed like the ones who are ready to do this have an appetite to do this and are in a position because they are in charge of university systems writ large to figure out at which universities will this best work and let's try it there.

And so they can pick, say, the flagship and do it at that one school. OK, so you are specifically targeting state legislators right now. We're not talking federal legislation right now. Absolutely. Because, as I mentioned, we are not all experts on education and academia.

And of course, our lawmakers are not. You guys have gotten together and done this model general education act that you are proposing as a good starting place. Right.

Talk to us about what that looks like. Sure. So there are two parts of the act. One part suggests creating a new school of general education. And the purpose of that is so that the faculty in that school will have general education first and foremost on their mind.

You know, they won't be slaves to publication in their niche topic. They'll be devoted to general education. And then you make that school responsible for the delivery of all the general education courses in the university.

And then the second part of the bill lays out which courses we think are the most important for students to take. And it was very difficult to decide because traditionally general education is about 40 to 42 hours. We know that students want to graduate on time. We want students to graduate on time. So we did not want to make it too many courses. So within that restricted 40, 42 hours and we ended up with 42, it was very hard to decide what was in and what was out. We landed on a lot of history, humanities, economics, philosophy and less STEM.

And we did that for reasons I can go into if you're interested. You're listening to Family Policy Matters, a weekly radio show and podcast of the North Carolina Family Policy Council. This is just one of the many ways NC Family works to educate and inform citizens across North Carolina about policy issues that impact North Carolina families. Our vision is to create a state and nation where God is honored, religious freedom flourishes, families thrive and life is cherished. For more information about NC Family and how you can help us to achieve this incredible vision for our state and nation, visit our website at ncfamily.org. Again, that's ncfamily.org. And be sure to sign up to receive our email updates, action alerts and, of course, our flagship publication, Family North Carolina Magazine.

We'd also love for you to follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Well, one of the things that you do talk about is the importance of teaching Western tradition. So why is that so important for our students to be learning? I think first and foremost is because this is the country we live in.

This is the culture that we're swimming in, all of us. And I think it's very important to understand that here in the United States, we were founded on an idea, right? Individual liberty, free enterprise, federalism, civic republicanism, equality before the law. And all of our traditions in our government come from various places in the West. We get our idea of trial by jury out of England. We have our Senate that came from Rome, our democracy from Athens.

Our motto in God We Trust comes from Israel. And so all of these are coming from places and ideas that you will learn about if you learn from and in the Western tradition. And I think that just to be an educated American, that is the background and the culture that you have to know. And I think also importantly, because America was founded on an idea, we have to understand those ideas all together as a culture, as a nation, in order to have any kind of social unity. You mentioned in the introduction that people seem to not be able to talk to each other anymore. They can't have civil discourse. And I think that's because we're lacking that social cohesion that's so important for a civilization to keep together. Also in your model legislation, you would mandate that the Bible be taught.

Now, that seems pretty provocative. So why do you think that's important, though? The Bible, aside from being a Christian book, is also the best selling book of all time. It's the most translated book of all time. And it's the single most quoted source in the Oxford English Dictionary. And so I think if you do want to be an educated American, you have to know the Bible. Can you imagine someone who is in a leadership position in a very important role who doesn't know what another person means when they mention the Good Samaritan, or know that calling someone Judas is a synonym for being a traitor, or not know what the loaves and fishes are, or who the prodigal son was? I think that those stories are just in our DNA. And the language of the King James Bible is in everything we hear and write.

If someone says that he saw through a glass darkly, that comes from the Bible. And I think that to not know those stories is, you can't function in kind of the highest levels of civic leadership and government and even business if you aren't steeped in that. What kind of reaction have you received so far, I can only imagine, from the leaders of the universities? I think the most public reaction we got has been very split. We had excellent coverage in Real Clear Politics and some other media sources from people who really liked it and thought it was a great idea. And then we had a negative article written by someone who's in the American Association of University Professors saying that this is just legislators telling teachers what to teach.

And so I think it has been very divided based on where a person is coming from and what they think of the current general education. So what kind of response from lawmakers are you hearing so far? We think that we have a couple of states that are possibly interested in this.

I think it's too soon to know for sure. As we just found out here in North Carolina, legislation moves very, very slowly. So we're hopeful and we anticipate that when this does get in the hands of lawmakers, they will adapt it and use the parts of it that they want and kind of make it work for their own states in their own situations. And so we're happy to get it into their hands and to have them use it in ways that make sense for them. What kind of response specifically from North Carolina? Right now, our legislators, as you know, are kind of on their break. And so we haven't really started putting this in their hands yet directly. And so I think that we will see. Right.

Right. So you mentioned STEM and how you would kind of curtail some of the I guess that science, technology, engineering and math. Why would you not make that an emphasis in the general education requirements? So what we ended up doing is exempting STEM majors from three courses in our general education so that they can take more of the classes that they need for their majors, because engineering majors, science majors tend to be extremely prescriptive in the courses that they have the students take. And so in order for them to get the additional science courses they needed, instead of trying to anticipate which ones were needed within the majors, we decided we would just give them a break on a few gen ed courses so they had the flexibility to take additional STEM within their majors.

And so I think by treating people who are going for a BS degree and a BA degree slightly differently, it gives that very necessary flexibility for those science heavy majors. We're just about out of time for this week. Before we go, Jenna Robinson, where can our listeners go to follow your work and to read this model, General Education Act, and just in general, keep up with what you all are doing? You can find the model and see everything else we're doing at jamesgmartin.center and the model is on our homepage. And so we hope you'll check it out.

Great. Thank you so much. Jenna Robinson, president of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, thank you so much for being with us today on Family Policy Matters.

You've been listening to Family Policy Matters. We hope you enjoyed the program and plan to tune in again next week. To listen to this show online and to learn more about NC Family's work to inform, encourage and inspire families across North Carolina, go to our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org. Thanks again for listening and may God bless you and your family.