Red States' Reform of General Education Requirements Restores Real Education Over Politicized Curriculum
Source: Mark Bauerlein. "Red States Are Replacing Woke Colleges With Real Education." September 14, 2026. thefederalist.com
The Gist
The author argues that red states like Iowa and Indiana have found a clever way to fix politically biased college curricula: instead of just complaining about it, they're changing the technical rules about which courses count toward graduation requirements. By requiring real U.S. history and government courses and cutting funding formulas that let identity-studies departments survive on general education enrollments, these states are quietly restoring a more traditional, foundational education while defunding what the author sees as ideological courses.
Conclusion
Red state legislative reforms mandating broad U.S. history/government courses (and eliminating gen-ed credit for niche identity-politics courses) represent a superior and more effective strategy for reversing ideological bias in higher education than previous conservative approaches.
Premises
- General education traditionally existed to give all graduates a shared foundation of knowledge regardless of major, covering seminal historical, scientific, and cultural developments.
- Current gen-ed systems at universities like Iowa State and University of Iowa have ballooned into hundreds of niche, boutique course options (e.g., 'Racism in American Popular Media,' 'Black Television Culture') that no longer serve this foundational purpose.
- This proliferation of niche courses allows students to graduate without ever encountering core American history and civics content like the Bill of Rights or the Civil War.
- Many identity-focused academic departments (e.g., African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana) have very few actual majors but survive by having their courses count toward gen-ed requirements, effectively coercing enrollment.
- Iowa's new law requiring dedicated U.S. history and government courses, run by a neutral center rather than politicized departments, directly restores foundational content and displaces niche ideological courses.
- Indiana's policy of evaluating departments by number of majors rather than gen-ed enrollment numbers exposes and pressures low-major departments that previously relied on gen-ed captive audiences.
- Enrollment data (e.g., only ~700 of hundreds of thousands of degrees nationally going to African American studies) show that students don't choose these programs when not coerced via gen-ed requirements, and public protest against cuts has been weak.
- Previous conservative strategies (books, exposés of bias) have failed to slow the spread of politically correct curricula, whereas structural gen-ed reform is producing measurable change.
Assumptions
- Courses on topics like race, diversity, and identity are inherently less 'foundational' or legitimate than traditional history/civics courses rather than being equally valid additions to a broad education.
- Low enrollment in a major (as opposed to course-taking generally) is a valid proxy for a department's overall value or legitimacy.
- The content of courses like 'Racism in American Popular Media' or diversity-focused requirements is ideologically driven ('political slant') rather than substantively educational.
- A 'neutral' or non-political center (like the Center for Intellectual Freedom) can teach U.S. history/government in a way that is not itself ideologically inflected.
- Restoring a traditional canon-based gen-ed model is objectively equivalent to 'real education' rather than one contestable pedagogical philosophy among several.
- Weak public protest against program cuts is evidence of lack of merit/popularity rather than, e.g., political intimidation, lack of resources to organize, or other factors.