Which Core Education?

Posted on Thursday 17 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

I’m actually guardedly sympathetic to this.

NY Times, 14 Sep 2026: How Conservatives Are Changing College Requirements, subtitled “Politics and other factors are causing universities to reconsider what classes are part of the core required for graduation. In some places, civics and classics are replacing climate change and sociology.”

At some of Texas’ biggest public universities, students could once take courses in women’s studies or climate change to check off graduation requirements. Classes about ethnic studies and literature’s monsters were in the mix, too.

Not anymore.

The range of courses that college students can take to meet general education requirements is narrowing in states that lean rightward, reshaped by ideological warfare over what higher education’s values should be and what students actually need to know.

Core classes are meant to nudge students beyond the bubbles of their chosen majors and leave them more well-rounded. But the question of which courses qualify as core has prompted fierce jockeying among politicians, college presidents and professors, especially in Republican-controlled states where many conservatives are suspicious of academia.

I’m sympathetic to the idea that there should be a fairly small number of genuinely “core” courses that every student should take. Perhaps only a quarter or a third of classes taken in four years of college. Or maybe just a quarter. I’m not familiar with the context of current university requirement.

When I was at UCLA, most classes were in my major, though we were required to take a certain number of “breadth” courses in other fields. Considering the quarter schedule (three quarters a year) and three or four courses per quarter, it might have been half a dozen breadth courses out of nearly 40 courses taken in four years. But there were no single courses required of everyone, e.g. no “history of western civilization.”

Before that, in high school in early 1970s, James Monroe High School was experimenting with half-semester 10-week courses with ranges of options. One result was that I was able to take a course in typing, which probably benefited me as much as any other high school course. And yet instead of getting a general American history course (never mind world history), I got 10 weeks about the civil war. The result was I never have had a full course in American history. Or, as it happens for other reasons, in biology.

Also: I have similar sentiments in compiling data about science fiction awards, and my general impression that most current readers of science fiction are not familiar with the “classics.” This has always been true. But writers, in any field, composers, artists, need to be familiar with the classics in their genre, lest they think they are inventing something new that is already known to the cognescenti. Many don’t care; they are populists. I could go on about this.

The problem in Texas is that change is driven by conservatives, who want to ignore or down-play certain subjects, and prioritize “traditional” subjects and values.

The article goes on with examples of politicians dictating university curricula.

At the University of Texas at Austin, a task force recently proposed a core curriculum of 36 credit hours, down from 42, that would require students to take classes covering matters like “Great Questions of Human Life,” Western civilization and “Great Ideas in Science.”

Although campus officials are still ironing out details, Kevin P. Eltife, a Republican former state senator who chairs the university system’s board, declared that the blueprint was “what this board has been asking for quite a long time: to get back to basics.”

I have no problem with that, in principle. But I suspect their basics would not be mine. (I drafted a universal education in this post back in 2021.)

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Now our destructor-in-chief threatens to tear down the Kennedy Center, like a petulant child, if they won’t let him put his name on it.

ABC News, today: Trump says Kennedy Center could be ‘ripped down’ if he doesn’t get ‘recognition’, subtitled “A federal judge blocked Trump’s name from being added to the building.”

President Donald Trump said on Wednesday the Kennedy Center could “close” or be “ripped down” if his administration doesn’t receive recognition on the performing arts center as tensions over his name being removed mount.

“I think that the Trump administration should certainly have recognition. Because frankly, if we don’t do that, it’s going to close. It’ll end up being ripped down,” the president told reporters on the tarmac in North Carolina.

It was just fine until Trump insisted on adding his name to it, which triggered performer withdrawals and ticket buyers to flee.

Slate, Ian Prasad Philbrick, today: What Did the Kennedy Center Ever Do to Donald Trump?, subtitled “The president is threatening to level an arts venue because the courts won’t let him rename it after himself.”

Is it curtains for the Kennedy Center? Since retaking office, Donald Trump has demanded that the capital city’s chief performing arts venue be remade in his image—and threatened to shutter it if he doesn’t get his way. This week the fight came to a head: A federal judge rejected Trump’s latest efforts to rename the building after himself and demanded advance notice if he tries to knock it down. Whether Trump complies will not only determine the Kennedy Center’s fate. It’s also shaping up to be an unlikely test of whether the rule of law can constrain a rogue president.

The balance of the article is a Q&A about what the center is, what Trump has done, and so on. Ending:

Last question: There’s a war on, gas is $4.43 a gallon, and the midterms are around the corner. Why is Trump so obsessed with the Kennedy Center?

The fight over a performing arts venue might not matter electorally, but it’s of a piece with Trump’s personality and priorities. The president is a pop-culture fanatic; he blasts Broadway showtunes at his rallies and was tweetstorming about Kristen Stewart a few years before becoming the leader of the free world. At times, Trump has seemed more focused on his ballroom than on the war he started with Iran. It’s an object lesson that fits a broader pattern: For more than a decade now, one man’s flights of fancy have inevitably become the country’s pressing concerns. The Kennedy Center might not (yet) bear Trump’s name. But this is his world, and we’re just living in it.

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Briefly.

  • Friendly Atheist, today: Albert Mohler’s blasphemy reversal exposes the cruel logic of Christian Nationalism
  • Subtitled: A government that officially privileges Christianity can’t offer genuine equality or religious freedom to everyone else
  • How they fantasize escaping the US constitution.
  • “Mohler said he wanted the supremacy of Christianity acknowledged in any new Constitution. Not acknowledging it in our current one, he says, was a “historical error.” That also means citizenship “should be deeply grounded in a situation in which you have the acknowledgement of Christianity as as the background truth claim that makes all these things possible.” He added that politicians could come from any religious background… as long as they agreed that Christianity was the basis for their new nation.”

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Clean (no ads) video of Schubert’s 9th, so-called “The Great.” It was bigger than any other symphony at the time. But look at how small the orchestra was, compared to those — a century later — for Bruckner and Mahler.

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