Serious flaws in SUNY’S new general education proposal

A college curriculum, including a general education program, should direct the attention of students to what is important. Unhappily, however, the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York approved, on November 9, a new general education framework that misdirects attention and confuses rather than clarifies.

This new framework obligates students to take a course in four designated areas (communication, mathematics, natural sciences, and diversity) and from within three of six additional categories (humanities, social

Eugene Heath of New Paltz is a professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at New Paltz. sciences, arts, U.S. history and civic engagement, world languages, and world history and global awareness). This educational minimalism masquerades as “foundational,” but it is scarcely so since courses concerned with human purpose and meaning, those in the humanities, are treated as options that one may disregard.

The proposed general eduction program suffers two additional and significant problems.

First, the category of “diversity” carries a subtitle — “equity, inclusion, and social justice” — fixed to orient students to favored views: equity, not opportunity; social justice, not justice. One “learning objective” attached to this category demands that students acquire knowledge of “individual and group identity involving race, class, and gender,” as if these must be foundational features of self or society. Another objective calls for students to “apply ... principles ... to past, current, or future social justice action,” thereby licensing activism.

No doubt an open, sensitive, and rigorous examination of issues of racial and ethnic diversity and inequality could be foundational, but it is not clear that intellectual rigor is the aim

here: The category of diversity, alone, contains this alert: “SUNY System Administration will work with campuses to ensure that faculty have the training and resources” to assist their teaching. One may wonder why “training” is necessary for SUNY faculty and, if the tutoring is academic, whether it will mention scholarship of independent thinkers such as Thomas Sowell.

A second problem: The requirements sweep aside the category of Western civilization, which up to now has enjoyed a designated place within SUNY general education. At the November 9 trustees meeting, there was no mention of the elimination of this category. All quiet on the Western front. In their compliant embrace of the new general education, the trustees have cancelled the West, thereby leaving no general education category devoted to the thematic or sequential study of the ideas, art, literature, and philosophical or religious outlooks of the civilization that created the institution to which these trustees bear responsibility. Students will henceforth be guided by a new, amorphous category, “world history and global awareness.” Even if courses devoted to Western civilization find their way into this hodgepodge category, its nebulous orientation will hardly guide students.

A good SUNY general education program should introduce students to the history and culture of the civilization — its triumphs and failures — in which their university is embedded. It should require students to know the history and governing principles of the democracy in which SUNY operates and whose citizens (taxpayers and donors) help fund it. To do so does not privilege a point of view; it recognizes an inheritance while encouraging the interplay and contestation of ideas.

This newly approved general education framework seems detached from such concerns. This program appears to have been concocted rather quietly, overseen by a committee composed almost wholly of SUNY administrators and community college faculty. Only late this past spring did most faculty even learn of this proposal. Since there had been few prior rumblings about the general education program already in place, one is left to wonder whether this new framework was devised to meet the demands of a centralized university system more attentive to being “woke” than to educating young people, many of whom are the first in their families to enjoy higher education.

What we attend to, we become; what we ignore, we forget. The SUNY Board of Trustees, with scarcely a critical comment, has approved a new general education curriculum that hardly guides the attention of students. They deserve better.