Latest news with #SB334
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Perspective: The renaissance that American universities need
Years ago, as a young academic, I found myself seated in an antebellum inn in Oxford, Mississippi. A fire crackled quietly in the hearth, and across from me sat William F. Buckley Jr. — founder of National Review, author of 'God and Man at Yale,' and one of the great minds of our time. As we spoke at length about the decay of higher education, Buckley lamented that Yale had abandoned its soul. 'They've kept the Latin,' he said with a wry smile, 'but they've lost the light.' He was, of course, speaking of Yale's motto: Lux et Veritas — Light and Truth. I would add this: Yale's seal doesn't only include Latin. It also bears Hebrew script—Urim and Thummim— symbols drawn from biblical tradition, meaning 'lights and perfections.' When a university abandons Lux et Veritas, it doesn't just lose tradition. It forfeits transcendence. Buckley told me that universities were drifting not only from faith, but from intellectual seriousness, from moral purpose, from the courage to say some things are true and others are not. That night shaped me. It reminded me that ideas are not abstractions — they are anchors. And liberty requires more than license. It requires character. This is one reason that, earlier this year, I sponsored a bill that seeks to restore civic education to our universities. This was not a nostalgic gesture, but a necessary course correction. Why? Because I spent years in the classroom, and I've seen what's been lost. Students arrive equipped with slogans, not substance; credentials, but not conviction. They can quote grievance, but not Lincoln. They can deconstruct, but they cannot defend. One critic asked me, 'Why fix something when you can reinvent a whole other concept?' Here's why: Because what's broken is not just policy — it's purpose. And sometimes, reinvention is the most responsible form of repair. My bill, SB334, doesn't dictate doctrine. It doesn't ban ideas. It revives balance, it renews foundations, and it reminds us all that our republic cannot endure if it forgets its roots. And yet, for daring to suggest that students should engage with the Constitution, The Federalist Papers, and the great thinkers of our tradition — from Augustine to Du Bois — I have been accused of censorship, of cowardice, of control. When I wrote earlier this year that Americans are sick of the 'neo-Marxist, nihilistic narcissism of the hard left,' it wasn't a rhetorical flourish. It was a cultural diagnosis — a warning drawn not from ideology, but from experience. Neo-Marxism has infiltrated too many corners of the academy — not as one voice among many, but as a dominating lens through which all of history, literature, and society must be interpreted. It teaches that everything is about power — race, gender, class —forever locked in a binary of oppressor and oppressed. Nihilism soon follows, replacing wonder with suspicion, and turning the quest for truth into a campaign of endless deconstruction. If nothing is true, then everything is permissible — and everything is politicized. Narcissism completes the triangle, elevating personal identity above shared reality, feelings above facts, grievance above gratitude. It replaces moral formation with moral performance —and turns education into a pageant of self-righteousness. This is not education. This is theater, not thought. True education derives from virtue, and from liberty rooted in reason. It prizes self-rule, not mob rule. It knows that happiness is found not in the hedonism of the moment, but in a life anchored to virtue, ordered liberty, and moral purpose. 'Pleasure,' said Epicurus, 'is rather sober reasoning… banishing those beliefs that lead to the tumult of the soul.' Justice Anthony Kennedy reminded us that to the Founders, 'Happiness meant that feeling of self-worth and dignity you acquire by contributing to your community and to its civic life.' And then there is Alexis de Tocqueville, who saw far ahead— into our very moment: 'Tyranny in democratic republics does not proceed in the same way, however. It ignores the body and goes straight for the soul… You will remain among men, but you will forfeit your rights to humanity… Go in peace, I will not take your life, but the life I leave you with is worse than death.' That is the tyranny that awaits when liberty is divorced from moral clarity, when freedom is severed from formation, when truth is replaced by technocracy and virtue by virtual applause. Not long ago, I sat down with sculptor Sabin Howard, whose work on the National World War I Memorial has been called nothing short of a modern marvel. His bronzes don't just commemorate; they communicate. They teach. They remind us that art, at its best, does not flatter our vanities but elevates our virtues. Howard and I spoke about something bigger than a statue —something deeper than nostalgia. We spoke about the need for a renaissance— not just of art, but of ideas. A revival of beauty, meaning and moral imagination. A return to excellence. He told me about his next great vision: The Grand Liberty Arch, a monumental sculpture installation coming to Salt Lake City — a tribute to freedom, courage, sacrifice, and the enduring American spirit. Not just metal and stone, but a declaration in form: Liberty still lives here. It is up to all of us to ensure that this remains true. John D. Johnson is a Utah state senator and professor emeritus at Utah State University. This essay was adapted from a speech he delivered at the 2025 commencement ceremonies for Mount Liberty College.
Yahoo
01-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
A superficial overhaul of general education is underway in Utah, and it's too late
Historic Old Main at Utah State University campus in Logan, Utah. (Photo by raclro via Getty Images) The American republic is lost according to both sides of the political debate, and now Utah is talking about civics education? There is no part of Utah society that has not contributed significantly to our secular sector decline since World War II, but now Utah is talking about civics education to tame our rag-tag citizens and give them a reason to be a better people? Gov. Spencer Cox recently signed two bills intended to get civics education back on track in Utah public schools and public universities, HB381 and SB334. Both these efforts, while in part well intentioned, are thoroughly cosmetic, as one might expect. Materialistic priorities will always reign supreme in a state that believes that building programs are the measure of its success. In the first place, the governor says a 'foundational civic education in our high schools will aid our students with a better understanding of our government institutions and their critical role in American society.' While a better understanding of anything is a good thing, understanding our 'government institutions' is problematic since on the national level we virtually don't have two of our three original branches of government any longer — a functioning Congress and an independent judiciary. Both these institutions have been taken over by an anti-civic movement whose current autocratic and oligarchic interests likely will be programmed into the new Utah curriculum rendering it virtually a dead letter from the get-go. The business and banking sector in Utah has led the charge into our current social and economic oblivion by focusing on the financial rapine of the middle and working classes, environmental and water supply exploitation and degradation, and a building program focused on luxury living for the well-off. And now Utah is talking about civics education? The family system has fallen into ruin due to divorce, legalized pornography, sports gambling, loss of physical fecundity in marriage, and huge declines in physical and mental health. And now Utah has decided to talk about the morals and ethics and habits of the ancestors? The churches have long been withdrawn from civic engagement and scholastic achievement, but now it's time to mend those tattered fences? Education has fallen into such a cloud of disrepair at all levels that lifelong learning is a relic of antiquity, and the entire society believes there is nothing to be gained at school any longer because school doesn't prepare youth for skilled employment in the technology sector. And now we think it is time to recover a modicum of the reason public education came into being in America in the first place? Even if Congress and the courts still had some kind of job to do in the new authoritarian scheme of things, the focus of the new civics program would still skirt the most important facet of government fundamentals, which is not the physical structure of government and the buildings and places they are housed, but the law governing the operation of the branches. Those who will be programming the new curriculum do not know nor do they care about what the written law of this country says about the operation of government. In every pronouncement of theirs in defense of the new program, they studiously ignore what the written document boldly asserts. Our Founding Fathers and Mothers will not be heard in the new curriculum. They will be silenced as they have been for generations in Utah. While one of the 'primary source documents' in the high school curriculum is 'The United States Constitution,' both our major political parties today are perfectly satisfied to just have people glance at them sideways without an ounce of explanation about how far we have departed from them today, or why, or how we can return to them. Reading the foundational documents will do some good but is not nearly enough to do substantial good for students. Reading them is like reading the scripture. After you read a passage of the scripture in English, you know what the text says, but you don't know what it means. A perfect example is a passage like, 'Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.' Everybody knows, even our smart theologians who write books about the Ten Commandments, that that verse means, 'Don't swear (out loud).' However, that is not even close to the original and authentic meaning of the passage. One needs to know the historical context of the passage — its political, economic, social, and legal context. Where, oh where are Utah students going to get into the deep history and secular basis of either scripture or of democracy? Certainly not from Utah politicians, or politically motivated curriculum sponsors who care not for the reality of life, but only for the shiny presentation of it. Students need to not only read the constitutional law, but the history of how those laws were developed and applied across the great democracies of the past. The words 'Rome' and 'Athens' are found in the talk surrounding the passage of the bills, but that likely will be the end of it. The bankers and builders of Utah don't care about Rome or Athens, and they don't even know that the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament is a sophisticated civics education text in and of itself, a constitutional history of an ancient democratic republican society. They think it is an encouragement to go to church. Students also need to know what the basic alternative to republican government is — monarchy — what its underlying philosophy is, and how it figures into the past 5,500 years of recorded life on planet earth. Bankers and builders love monarchy, but they prefer to implement it clandestinely rather than openly, so it will never be discussed in the new curriculum. For example, the religious-political philosophy of scripture and of democracy says that all human beings are capable of governing themselves locally by means of elected representatives. They also need to know that monarchy is a system where the blood of a dynasty of rulers is believed to be superior to the blood of common folk, enabling the rich to claim a mandate of heaven to rule forever however they wish to rule. Democracy says everyone has the same blood and the same DNA and everyone has the same capacity to do great things if given the education and the opportunity. Consensual policymaking is of little good without an extremely well-educated citizenry, who bend their discretionary time to life-long learning and regular participation in good citizenship activities. None of that is happening in Utah or any other state of the nation today, so new initiatives such as HB381 and SB334 are destined to be either for show, or to serve as conduits for propaganda efforts by political party leaders.
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
27-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Opinion: ‘Back to the Future II' — restoring a classical core curriculum to higher education
Last year, I published an opinion piece here in the Deseret News about my proposed bill to restore a classical Western core curriculum to our public universities. The intent was, I wrote, 'a return to the intellectual foundations of American and Western civilization' on campus, 'to produce the leaders and the informed, conscientious citizens of tomorrow.' Though the bill last year was well received by my fellow senators, they felt that the proposed changes required more time and consideration. My bill did not pass committee, though my colleagues strongly encouraged further work on the issue. That process has resulted in this year's SB334. Much has changed in just a year. For one thing, there has been a major shift in the nation's mood. In November, voters expressed a deep dissatisfaction with the direction of the country, and so, elected an 'agent of change' in the form of President Donald Trump. Part of what drove voters to Trump was a rejection of political correctness and the so-called 'woke' agenda. Caterwauling from the legacy media aside, the majority of Americans support a return to 'common sense' and favor a general change in direction. Last year, we pointed out that taxpayers have funded a 40-year, left-leaning academic experiment that has left multiple generations of graduates with little or no understanding of the history and intellectual contributions of, for example, ancient Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. Momentous world developments like the dawning of Christianity, parliamentary democracy and the Industrial Revolution are left unexplored. Many students graduate with little exposure to the tragedies and lessons of the 20th century, such as the rise and fall of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Students are shielded from the real-world consequences of the Marxism so insidiously infused into today's so-called core curriculum. Pervasive postmodern critical theories have also managed to twist and suppress history and thus rob students of crucial lessons and wisdom of the past. This alarming deficit of historical perspective is no accident. Neo-Marxist thought has accrued outsized curricular and governing influence on the modern campus, and for the Marxist, historical illiteracy is a feature, not a bug. If you doubt me, let Marx speak for himself. 'In bourgeois society,' he wrote, 'the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past.' (In other words, Marx preferred that we become 'unburdened by what has been.') SB334 offers the chance for public universities to course correct, restoring a commitment to free thought, free speech and solid citizenship. After decades of leftist dominance on campus, the appetite to revive a classical core liberal arts curriculum that features Western principles of law, liberty and constitutional self-government has grown more acute. The good news is that this year, far from forcefully imposing a classical curriculum on Utah universities, we are enjoying a willing partnership in reestablishing an appreciation of core Western principles on campus. We are actively working with Utah State University, for one, in developing our first 'Center for Civic Excellence.' We are working to iron out the details of reviving the classical core liberal arts curriculum, and other Utah schools are watching with interest. To reference some of our working materials with USU, the plan is to replace the existing distribution model of general education. 'Through engagement with foundational primary texts representing 'the best of what has been thought and said,' this general education program will ensure that all graduates, regardless of their major, engage with the big questions, great debates, and enduring ideas that continue to shape our self-understanding, the American experience, and our world.' The only way to undo the damage done by a directionless core curriculum is to revivify the fundamental philosophical, historical, moral and ethical thinking that forged Western culture and led to our nation's founding. If SB334 passes, graduates will emerge from degree programs with common grounding in the intellectual, artistic, scientific, mathematical and literary traditions that once led us to feel like 'One nation under God.' We can best serve today's students and prepare them to excel, not with rigid ideologies or narrow skill sets, but by preparing them to think critically, to adapt and grow. Taking the university's core curriculum 'back to the future' through the traditional liberal arts will open students' minds, giving them broad appreciation for the foundational literature, art and philosophy of America's birth and the blossoming of Western culture and thought. I believe more strongly than ever that, to maintain its relevance, the university must resume its key role in the generational transfer of the intellectual foundations of American and Western civilization. Yes, graduates must be equipped to meet our future workforce needs, but more importantly, they must be prepared to lead our families, communities and our constitutional republic.
