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.

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.”

Gov. Spencer Cox signed the bill on Monday afternoon describing it as one of the most important bills of the year, along with HB381, which adds an American constitutional government and citizenship studies graduation requirement for public high school students.

“This center will be tasked with building out a general education curriculum focused on viewpoint diversity, civil discourse and helping our students develop the analytical skills necessary to contribute in the public square,” Cox wrote in a statement about SB334. This curriculum will be a model for all our public institutions in Utah and nationally.”

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?

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 becomes 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.”

A first in a national movement

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.

Utah News Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.