Commentary | The General Education Act Renews Liberal Education in America – By Peter Berkowitz (Real Clear Politics) / Nov 12, 2023
On Nov. 16, the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal in North Carolina, and the National Association of Scholars in New York City (I serve on the board) will host online, Recentering our Universities, to release to the public The General Education Act. The GEA is a detailed model bill directing the establishment of Schools of General Education at public universities. Written by EPPC’s Stanley Kurtz, the Martin Center’s Jenna Robinson, and NAS’s David Randall, the model legislation sets forth guiding principles, basic courses, institutional structure, funding exigencies, and a timetable for implementation of centers of true liberal education.
The GEA contains the most ambitious legislative proposal for higher education reform in living memory. It could not be timelier.
It has long been evident that higher education in America has lost its way. Colleges and universities have largely cleansed the curriculum of requirements that students study the essential ideas and events of America’s great experiment in ordered liberty, Western civilization more broadly, and, despite multiculturalist zeal, other civilizations. Colleges and universities have entrenched the censorious spirit that spawned trigger warnings, microaggressions, safe spaces, and bias response teams – all aimed at protecting students from exposure to non-progressive opinions and at shielding them from facts that clash with left-wing narratives and fashionable campus causes. And colleges and universities have incorporated diversity, equity, and inclusion training and anti-racism instruction into university bureaucracies and classrooms. These inculcate – in faculty as well as in students – allegiance to the dogmas that America is racist to the core, and citizens, private institutions, and government must transform social and political life by classifying individuals, and redistributing benefits and burdens, based on race.
