Something is happening in state legislatures that may prove more effective at battling ideological bias and decay on college campuses than anything conservatives have tried before. The focus is general education; the action is a set of rules laying out what students must study.

Here’s what has happened so far:

In 2021, South Carolina passed the REACH Act, which decreed that all undergrads in public institutions take a course that assigns the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, five essays from the Federalist Papers, the Emancipation Proclamation, and one document in “the African American struggle.”

In 2023, Florida legislators mandated that public colleges “provide instruction on the historical background and philosophical foundation of Western civilization and this nation’s historical documents.”

In 2025, Arkansas passed the Strengthening Arkansas Education Act, which laid out one course in U.S. history and one in government that imparts “the essentials of the United States Constitution.”  

Also in 2025, Utah lawmakers appointed the Center for Civic Excellence at Utah State to be the home of general education at the school, where, the bill says, viewpoint diversity will be respected and the primary texts of Western civilization taught (it mentions Homer, Cicero, Christianity, Shakespeare, and more).

And in Ohio a 2025 law similar to the REACH Act added to the Founding documents sections of The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith.

Finally, in Iowa, Governor Kim Reynolds recently signed a bill mandating a broad course in U.S. history and one in U.S. civics for all undergrads in the three main schools in the state, adding that the courses be mounted only by those schools’ civic centers.

This is a remarkable development. In the past, Republican lawmakers shied away from higher ed curricula, letting the colleges drift ever more to the left. The aggressions of wokeness changed their minds, especially after the riots of 2020 and scenes on campus after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack. Finally, they have met their responsibility to voters in the states and restored instruction that makes for informed and sturdy citizens. From now on, college students shall be acquainted with the foundations of our republic, the First Amendment, separation of powers, the Civil War and Progressive Era, the Depression and New Deal, the Cold War and Ronald Reagan.

Of course, professors regard these curriculum laws as political seizure of the Ivory Tower, an infringement on academic freedom. They’ve had total control over the curriculum for so long that they’ve forgotten that general education regulations at public institutions are in the hands of the people’s representatives, not the faculty. That’s the way the laws are written, though the power to mandate certain materials wasn’t wielded in state capitols. The control the professors enjoyed made them lazy and careless, as when they allowed courses on pop culture and trendy social phenomena to count, or when they turned gen ed to ideological aims (for example, the creation of multiculturalist requirements such as University of Oregon’s “Difference, Inequality, Agency” category). Action had to be taken.

Indeed, general education at most schools today is an administrative mess as much as a political one, where hundreds of courses, many of them exotic or tendentious offerings on boutique topics or within activist frameworks, amount to a cafeteria line from which each student emerges with a unique tray of dishes: a course on the Beatles to meet a humanities requirement, one on black militance for civics. The reforms bring general education back where it belongs: to a core of principles and masterpieces, historic events and influential personages.

There is another impact as well, one that addresses the politicization that has bedeviled conservatives for so long. It is this: as students meet civics/history requirements with broad, un-politicized courses in U.S. history from the Puritans forward, the Constitution, etc., they will not do so with courses in identity politics, current events, and left-wing critique. This will threaten the most hardline leftist parts of the campus, the “studies” departments—cultural studies, gender studies, African American studies, et cetera. The reason is that, for all their visibility, those units are highly unpopular with students. According to the U.S. Department of Education, less than one in 300 graduates of four-year colleges major in “area, ethnic, cultural, gender, and group studies” combined. Identitarian passions run high among faculty in the humanities and social sciences, but hardly any undergrads are interested.

An example: at Indiana University in 2023-24, only six bachelor’s degrees were granted in all of these studies fields—yes, six, in a school with 38,000 undergraduates. And yet, the Department of Gender Studies alone has 14 professors listed as “core faculty,” several of whom make more than $100,000 a year. How is this possible with so few majors and so little interest from the students? Answer: Gender Studies will mount 61 classes this fall that meet a general education requirement in the Social and Historical Studies (SH) category. Freshmen and sophomores will take one and clear a hurdle, then move on to other subjects, not to more gender study.

A premed student who faces organic chemistry and physics and needs to get the “SH” category out of the way can take G205, “Tattoos, Gender, Culture,” which will address “topics from the history of tattoo to sexism and colorism in the tattoo industry,” knowing that the intellectual demand will be light (a field trip to a tattoo parlor is included). He wouldn’t waste his time with it if it didn’t count, but it does. He crosses a low hurdle and the department is happy. It can tally him and others as enrollments and present them to the dean as justification for the unit’s existence. The system ensures the survival of these unpopular fields; without it, professors would be staring at empty classrooms.

The new laws will crowd those courses out. In fact, what should happen in every state in the country is that schools drop requirements such as Indiana’s “Diversity in the United States” and Illinois’ “Non-Western” and “US Minority Cultures” so that focus remains on the foundations of our republic. We can’t control how those courses will be taught, but at least students will read Thomas Jefferson and James Madison first and foremost, not Ibram X. Kendi and Judith Butler. It’s a practical move in the ideological war that conservatives have been losing for a long time. Republicans in other states need to feel pressure to follow the example of Florida and the rest. General education is a wonderful lever of higher education reform, and legislators in red states have the power to implement it.