Florida’s Much-Needed Reform of Gen Ed

Higher education reforms in Florida under Governor Ron DeSantis have sparked criticism from today’s education establishment: tweeting professors, scholarly guilds, the American Association of University Professors and the mainstream press. But a closer look at Florida’s general education revisions reveals why such reforms are very much necessary.

Most college curriculum was prescribed until the elective system developed in the late 1800s. With the rise of electives, however, came new issues: University curriculum lacked coherence, and students were ill prepared for higher-level classes.

From the need for coherence came today’s education system, where students have major fields of study, take general education distribution courses and choose among electives. The new model combined, as Frederick Rudolph reports in his indispensable book Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study Since 1636, “the best from the old English-American college with the best from the modern German university.” General education was a way of preserving an expanded liberal arts education, while majors allowed for supposed deep specialized education.

Complaints about this system are coeval with the system. People have from the beginning asked what counted as “general education,” how big general education should be and what majors should be on campus. Generally, the number of general education course requirements has shrunk (from 55 percent of the total credits for graduation in 1914 to 33 percent of the total in 1993), while the number of classes meeting those requirements has increased. Today, the University of Florida has about 500 courses in its general education program, Florida State University around 900.

As historian Steven Mintz wrote, general education today is “a smorgasbord of disconnected disciplinary classes that does little to ensure that undergraduates obtain the foundational communication, analytical and critical thinking skills, and cultural literacies expected of a college graduate.” As the number of courses that fulfill various general education requirements expands, education resembles the elective system that our current system was supposed to supersede. No coherence, no integrity. Vanishing general or common content.

University committees are often unwilling to lend coherence to general education. Participation in general education is a matter of life and death for many academic departments. Departments and majors want to get into the general education curriculum to recruit students to their majors and expand their resources. Students in seats is the key to maintaining budgets. Representatives from one department are unwilling to say no to requests from other departments, for fear that their future requests will be judged skeptically. Few requests for entry into the general education program are turned down. The result is a ratchet in university curriculum committees toward ever-expanding numbers of courses in general education.

Florida education administrators and boards of trustees are addressing the problem. They seek to disqualify general education courses based on identity politics and to ensure that the remaining ones provide “broad foundational knowledge,” not specialized or experimental approaches better suited for upper-division courses.

Many courses now being cut from general education under the state’s curriculum reform are upper-division courses, which are, by definition, not foundational general education. At Florida International University, for example, Anthropology of Race and Ethnicity was cut from the general education curriculum, presumably because the subject matter is oriented to an upper-division level and because the course syllabi were infused with identity politics. Foundational American history surveys are staying, while History of Women in the United States is gone. Also gone from general education are Sociology of Gender and Introduction to LGBTQ+ Studies—both with upper-division significations. The desire to have more courses in identity politics from departments struggling for enrollment, it seems, induces curriculum committees to include more courses in general education.

There is a Chesterton’s fence quality to general education reform. Some departments have many general education classes due to the needs of other degree programs. UF’s chemistry department sensibly has 11 lower-division classes in general education (including two chemistry classes for engineers and another for honors program students).

Other departments grow general education offerings to survive. UF’s anthropology department has 17 classes in general education, including Race and Racism and the Incas and their Ancestors. Interesting, perhaps, but hardly foundational. Things Your Doctor Never Told You: Intro to Medical Anthropology and Indigenous Values have lower-level designations but appear less than foundational as well. FSU’s anthropology department similarly has 20 classes, more than half of which have course numbers above 3000, including Introduction to Underwater Archeology and Contemporary Native American Cultures—neither is foundational.

FSU’s religion department has 40 courses in general education (not including those designated as fulfilling the state-mandated writing requirement). Hinduism is taught in the introductory Religions of South Asia class, but the department also offers Goddesses, Women and Power in Hinduism as a general education core class—hardly a foundational class. FSU’s history general ed offerings are similarly sprawling, and include specialty courses like the Spanish Civil War and Weimar and Nazi Germany.

Surveys of American history and literature, available at most universities, satisfy the criteria for “broad foundational knowledge” in Florida law, as does the inclusion of American government classes. African American history or literature, however, seems more suited to upper-division classes since it is specialized, not foundational, informed with identity politics and not an appreciation of our constitutional republic.

Florida politicians are duty-bound to lend purpose to the state’s general education. Universities left to their own devices allow general education to expand beyond all reason, compromising the purpose of education. To remedy that, Florida has mandated that general education in Florida create “an informed citizen” who will “promote and preserve the constitutional republic through traditional, historically accurate” and “foundational” coursework. Florida’s lawmakers are doing the work of bringing coherence and purpose to general education that the universities often will not do.