Why Conservatives Want to Revamp College Graduation Requirements

In February, the University of North Carolina System issued a memo that suspended all general education and major-specific requirements that mandated “completion of course credits related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.” In the days that followed, multiple universities axed graduation requirements.

The UNC System pointed to one of President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting DEI as the reason for immediate changes. But the move also comes as the American public increasingly questions the value of a college degree and amid a broader debate about what students should take away from their education.

Some critics of general education curriculum argue that course offerings have become too wide-ranging, straying from a focus on traditional liberal arts and humanities. Among those critics is Jenna Robinson, the president of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, a conservative higher education policy organization that advocates for changes in North Carolina and elsewhere.

The Martin Center and two other conservative advocacy groups drafted model legislation that encourages states to assert more power over graduation requirements, which are largely set by universities and faculty. Utah’s governor recently signed a bill into law based on the model legislation, creating an independent center dedicated to setting graduation requirements for public universities statewide with a focus on subjects like Western civilization and U.S. history.

A GOP proposal in the N.C. legislature would require all UNC System and community college students to complete at least three credit hours of instruction that “provide a comprehensive overview of the major events and turning points of American history and government.”

Robinson spoke with The Assembly about graduation requirements and the changes she hopes North Carolina’s public universities will adopt.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

In 2023, you and two co-authors wrote the General Education Act model legislation. What were your motivations?

We all have a love for the humanities, and we were thinking [about] what can be done, 1) to resuscitate the humanities, and 2), to refocus general education. Because one of our complaints that we all have is that general education is just very scattered. It’s a smorgasbord. Unless you went to an institution that had a very focused general education program, you probably had distribution requirements where you kind of pick one [course] from a bunch of different buckets, and everybody’s general education looks different. So there’s really not much that’s general about it.

Out of that conversation, we started to think, “Well, what can we do?” And we decided that model legislation is something that is focused. … The model legislation is really going back to what general education was in the early 20th century. If you look at the course catalogs of Harvard, of UNC, of any of the institutions that were operating in the early 20th century, you would see something more like this.

One key general education question is whether colleges should focus on the history of Western civilization and the U.S. or be more encompassing of diverse viewpoints. What are your thoughts on that debate?

I think it’s a debate worth having. The way that my co-authors and I looked at this is anything that is recent is still being debated, even among the experts in their fields. So, the only way to know, for example, if a book is going to become a classic is to wait. And the only way to know if an idea from a particular field is going to become a permanent part of that field—rather than a flash in the pan—is to wait. 

So our take on it is that it’s not all classical. It’s certainly not all Greek and Roman, but you won’t see anything in our curriculum that is from the 21st century, because those ideas are still playing out. We don’t know which ones of those will stick, which ones of those will continue to kind of inform our culture long-term, rather than just being something that’s very of the moment.

Some critics argue that Western civilization courses contain conservative-coded ideals and push aside ideas from more diverse groups of people. How do you respond to those sorts of critiques?

There are all these debates within the Western tradition that I think are underappreciated. People just lump it all together and say that it’s a monolith, but it certainly isn’t. Even the way people look at knowledge within different fields has been debated for a long time. I think that that would be my first response to that, is to dig deeper. Western tradition is a debate. It’s a conversation. And I think it’s been called that a lot, the “Great Conversation,” rather than all pushing in one direction that is conservative.

The other thing I would say is that it isn’t exclusionary because a lot of the best works from the Western tradition are talking about the human condition, which is not limited to people of a certain race or a certain gender. Yes, if you look at a book list from the past 2000 years of Western tradition, there will be more men, there will be more white people, because the Western tradition excluded women and it excluded minorities for a long time. But I do support, as time goes on, that we will add to the Western tradition. … They will have more women, [and] it will have more minorities. And I think that’s how the conversation continues.

After Utah passed its legislation, you said that you hoped it would be a model nationwide. Are there any talks about bringing it to North Carolina or elsewhere?

There are no other states where it’s been filed right now. We have shared it far and wide, and so we hope that other states are considering it there. In North Carolina, obviously, it hasn’t been filed here. I would like to see a school do this in general education in North Carolina because all of our schools do have distribution requirements, rather than giving students something that is more of a “Great Books”-type general education. I do think that students should have that option.

There is one bill in the legislature, the NC REACH Act, that proposes general education changes. Many of that bill’s provisions are already included in the UNC System’s Foundations in American Democracy curriculum that will go into effect this summer. What are your thoughts on those changes?

So I would like to see more civic education and more civic knowledge amongst college graduates. College graduates go on to be future leaders in government, in the private sector, in civil society. I think having civic knowledge is just so important to that leadership. And so I do think that both the REACH Act and the Foundations for American Democracy is going to be a good thing for North Carolina students.

(Editor’s note: A few days after speaking with The Assembly, the Martin Center published model legislation based on the REACH Act.)

What are your thoughts on the UNC System’s suspension of graduation requirements related to DEI?

The Martin Center has always recommended not having mandatory DEI courses as part of the general education curriculum, so I think that we are supportive of the idea in that memo. In fact, one of my colleagues just wrote about the implementation, and it looks like there’s a mix of implementation that’s going on at universities right now. … UNC-Chapel Hill was the one that we focused on in our article. They said we don’t think we have to make any changes.

And yet, they have their [requirement] called the “power, difference, and inequality” capacity. In the learning outcomes for that capacity, you will see that the language is all about looking critically at how power affects different groups based on identity. The memo is pretty clear that if you don’t call it DEI, but it’s still clearly DEI, that counts. And so I do think that UNC-Chapel Hill should take a closer look at that “power, difference, and inequality” capacity and see what changes need to be made.

(Editor’s note: UNC-Chapel Hill eliminated one graduation requirement from its outgoing curriculum and said it would examine its new requirements with the “power, difference, and inequality” capacity.)

Especially with the major-specific requirements, I’ve heard concerns from faculty about a chilling effect on courses and certain departments since “DEI” means different things to different groups. What is your response to those concerns?

I think in some departments it’s pretty easy to see which courses have DEI embedded in a different discipline. We found in a couple of the schools of education that students had to take a course that was like equity in education, or even diversity and equity in education. So like very overtly named DEI in education. At both UNC and NC State, we found those in the schools of education.

In some of these other areas, I think it will be somewhat harder. But I think that area studies or studies of particular people do not have to be done through the lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Learning the past, learning the history, or learning the culture of a particular people can be done through an empirical lens, or even just a qualitative lens, where you’re learning things in an informational way, rather than an ideologically loaded way. I agree it’s hard to tell from course descriptions, but I think that those courses can be taught in a way that doesn’t violate the ideas in the memo. I understand that universities will probably take longer looking at those.

Erin Gretzinger is a higher education reporter at The Assembly. She was previously a reporting fellow at The Chronicle of Higher Education and is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. You can reach her at erin@theassemblync.com.