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Yahoo
24-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
USU professors brace for change as legislature imposes western civilization courses
Utah State University's Old Main is pictured on Oct. 8, 2024. (Photo by Kelly Winter for Utah News Dispatch) What will it take to incorporate mandatory classes on western civilization, American institutions, and the rise of Christianity into general education tracks? Professors from the English Department at Utah State University are trying to grasp the logistics of quickly implementing the requirements into new curriculums while attempting to mitigate worries of potential cuts to the classes they have traditionally taught. During the last two weeks of the Utah legislative session, SB334, a bill sponsored by Sen. John Johnson, R-Ogden, comfortably passed both the Senate and House, signing Utah State University to establish the Center for Civic Excellence, a pilot program to require its students to complete general education courses focused on western tradition. While the program starts at USU, SB334 directs the center to provide recommendations to the Utah Board of Higher Education to consider expanding the pilot to the public higher education system statewide before 2029. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX The program would require all students to earn up to 30 credits studying books 'from figures with lasting literacy, philosophical, and historical influence, such as Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Lao Tzu, Cicero, Maimonides, Boethius, Shakespeare, Mill, Woolf, and Achebe,' according to the bill. 'Some people say 'that's conservative.' No, it's classic liberal education,' Johnson said. 'It has nothing to do with the right or the left. It was the foundational education that was set up in the country when these (Ivy League) schools were first founded.' For Shane Graham, an English professor at USU, not only does the concept of the bill seem 'very ideological,' but it makes him question whether they'll be the best choice for higher education students. 'The thing a lot of us are most upset about is what this does to writing studies, two of the three classes that are being replaced with these great books of the western tradition classes. They're replacing first-year writing classes,' Graham said. 'These are the classes that introduce students to the work of the university, to how writing in the academy works. They're such crucial and important classes.' Many of the current general education English faculty don't have a strong background in the specific subjects and great books tradition mentioned in the bill, Graham said, which raises questions on their job security. Another concern on the list of questions about the Center for Civic Excellence as it prepares to go live in fall 2026 — how will this align with HB265, which mandates colleges to reallocate funding from 'underperforming' programs to highly desired degrees? Budget bills targeting 'underperforming' university programs press forward In a way, said Rylish Moeller, another professor in the USU English department, both bills put more pressure on faculty to prove the worth of their curriculum to avoid cuts. 'I can see how it would seem like a path to not just changing three courses in a general education sequence, but changing the shape of the humanities college and the labor force in the humanities college in significant ways,' Moeller said. As the bill is poised to become law, many faculty members aren't happy, but they hope they are included in the conversations moving forward to incorporate writing studies in the design of a curriculum that serves students well, Keri Holt, associate head of the English department at USU said. 'This has put a lot of constraints on our ability to do that well. It has created some challenges, whereas this could have been an internal process that USU had started to do, to work on how do we make gen ed better,' Holt said. 'We always want to be looking for ways to improve things. And if there are problems, we want to fix them. But it got taken out of the faculty's hands to do that process and taken over by the legislature.' Under the bill, USU is required to appoint a vice-provost to lead the center, as well. Professors hope that's a role directed to someone with a background in writing studies, they said. Regarding the faculty's concerns, Matthew Sanders, a communication studies professor at USU, said the bill had input from USU to incorporate its values and principles 'including faculty governance, viewpoint diversity, and civil discourse.' 'The school's experts on general education as a program of study (rather than in individual subject areas) had a voice in that conversation,' Sanders wrote in a statement. While the change is challenging and has upset many people, there were also many expressions of support and willingness to jump in and do the work, Sanders said. 'Reading primary sources from across time that have informed the great debates of society and the world's current self-understanding is the heart of a liberal education. It is what many elite colleges do,' he wrote. 'It is the foundation of critical thinking and problem solving. To study the most impactful ideas, and the opposing points of view around them, will be a valuable foundation for students in every major. We need to teach our students 'old' ideas and new ideas and everything in between.' The bill was drafted after a model legislation by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington, D.C. conservative think tank that, according to its website, works 'to apply the riches of the Jewish and Christian traditions to contemporary questions of law, culture, and politics.' While a similar model was applied in Florida, Utah's legislation is the first of its kind in the country because it takes it a step further, requiring all students at the university to take core classes. 'It moves away from that cafeteria model, where every department controls a couple of classes, and they basically can teach anything they want,' said Johnson, which he believes doesn't provide students with a common body of knowledge of classic liberal education. As Johnson sees it, this is 'a rescue mission of traditional liberal education,' taking Utah institutions back to the foundation of the university system, since, he said, public universities are risking to become irrelevant. 'I think that students are questioning the value of their education. They look at what they do in general ed, and they leave and they say, 'I don't know what the unifying principles were,'' Johnson said. 'They're questioning the values that are top. Taxpayers are sick of paying for what I would term are anti-American indoctrination camps, worthless degrees.' During a Senate Education Committee hearing on the bill in late February, Harrison Kleiner, associate vice provost for general education at USU, said there had been internal discussions to determine how to overcome the challenges witnessed in the school's general education program. A general education program that produces 1,200 courses is 'broken,' Kleiner said, and the program itself didn't have enough authority to make substantial changes. While a bill sponsored by Johnson last year, which proposed a much more prescriptive approach for the University of Utah, was met with a lot of disagreement and ultimately failed in committee, Kleiner said he saw some factors he agreed with. 'We want a general education program whose job is not to tell students what to think, but to teach them how to think,' Kleiner said. 'And that's what classically liberal education has always been about, and those are our core values, and we were delighted to find common ground in those values with Sen. Johnson.' What's so important in this change, Kleiner said, is that no other institution the size of USU has undone 'the distribution model of general education that's been the default model of gen ed in America for about the last 40-plus years.' In an email sent to faculty, Kleiner said the school chose to get involved in the drafting process of the bill despite having an about three-week window available to do so, which prevented broad engagement with professors. 'USU, like all USHE institutions, will continue to be required to offer breadth social science, life and physical science, creative arts, and quantitative literacy,' Kleiner wrote in the email. 'The bill has more to say about humanities, composition, and American institutions; however, across all general education areas, it is left to the faculty to build the curriculum. Interpretations of the bill otherwise are inaccurate.' SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Yahoo
03-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The search for new university presidents may become secret in Utah
Utah State University's Old Main is pictured on Oct. 8, 2024. (Photo by Kelly Winter for Utah News Dispatch) Should top candidates in the search for university presidents be kept from the public eye? A bill advancing in the Utah Legislature says yes. Currently, a search committee tasked with selecting finalists to lead the state's higher education institutions makes public a short list of three to five candidates for the Board of Higher Education's consideration. Up until that point, the process is confidential. But, with SB282, Senate Majority Whip Chris Wilson, R-Logan, would like to change to be a more secretive process in which only the top candidate would be made public, after a selection has been made. The goal, he said, is to avoid repercussions for the candidates that aren't selected and potentially expand the pool of applicants. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX 'Job applicants should have privacy throughout the hiring process, ensuring their personal information and application materials are handled with confidentiality,' Wilson told the House Education Committee on Friday. 'This is especially important if an applicant is not selected for the position, as they should not face unnecessary disclosure or discussion of their personal data.' The bill had a smooth path in the Senate, passing almost unanimously every time it was put up to a vote. Now, after the House Education Committee voted unanimously to recommend the bill, it advances to the House floor for its consideration. Transparency is essential to the state and government, Wilson said. But, he described the timing of sharing information as 'equally vital.' By protecting candidates' privacy, the state would ensure highly qualified individuals aren't discouraged from applying, he said. The Board of Higher Education has taken a neutral position on the bill, Commissioner of Higher Education Geoff Landward said in a February Senate Education Committee hearing. 'I can confidently say that we have not had a single search wherein we were talking to very high quality candidates who essentially said that they would be interested and willing to apply, were it not for the fact that the final three candidates would have to be public,' he said, 'because that would put their current employment in peril unnecessarily.' The Utah Media Coalition disputes the claim that Utah hasn't been attracting the top-tier candidates to the candidate pool, citing an article from the American Association of University Professors which attributes short-lived presidencies to 'inadequate searches.' Jeff Hunt, an attorney with Parr Brown Gee & Loveless speaking on behalf of the Utah Media Coalition, of which Utah News Dispatch is a member, said that his main concerns about the bill include the elimination of public scrutiny of the finalists. 'I understand there are stakeholders on the search committee, but the most important stakeholder is the public,' Hunt said. 'This current model allows the public to weigh in with information that the search committee may have overlooked.' But, the bill has bipartisan support, Wilson said. A demonstration that a change is needed, he argued, is in the last presidential search of Utah State University, which he described as 'a failure.' 'I think a lot of that was because of the public,' he told the committee. 'We did not have the candidate pool we should have had with sitting current presidents that would apply for that position.' USU President Elizabeth Cantwell resigned early February after a two-year embattled tenure, according to The Salt Lake Tribune, to assume the presidency of Washington State University next April. This prompted a new search that, if SB282 passes, would become confidential. 'It is likely we would see more candidates apply as a result of the changes,' Landward said in a statement about the process. 'We'd also likely attract candidates in higher-level positions who previously hesitated to apply for similar roles.' Joel Campbell, an associate professor in communication studies at Brigham Young University — a private school that wouldn't be affected by the legislation — said a bill like this wouldn't benefit the public, but would boost firms that specialize in presidential searches. The process of posting three top candidates was a compromise established in the '90s, following a search for a University of Utah leader that was particularly murky as a board met behind closed doors to appoint Bernard Machen as president. Other states have even more transparency requirements in place, holding public interviews throughout the whole process. 'Looking at the history of this will show that we've come to a compromise. We went too far, (with) secrecy the other way,' Campbell said. 'I vehemently disagree that we are not getting good candidates, from both my academic perspective and from an open government perspective.' Ultimately, there are some factors that should be discussed in a public forum in a state like Utah, he said, including whether there's enough attention to candidates who are women, of diverse religious affiliations, or other diverse backgrounds. 'I think that one of the goals of transparency is, you get people involved in the process. So if you have an open forum with these finalists, and people know who they are, and they get to know them, I think you're going to have a better process and more people involved,' Campbell said. Contributing: Katie McKellar SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
