Utah Gov. Spencer Cox described a bill to overhaul Utah State University’s general education program as “one of the most important bills ever passed in this country.”
But not all faculty are happy about the changes coming their way.
“I feel very strongly that what we're doing in general education is very important, and this feels very much like an attack on that,” said USU English professor Shane Graham. He also described it as an “attack on our academic freedom and our expertise.”
Republican Sen. John Johnson’s bill, SB334, establishes the new Center for Civic Excellence at USU tasked with creating a new general education curriculum for students. Johnson is an emeritus professor at USU.
The program would be grounded in the mission of “engaging students in civil and rigorous intellectual inquiry, across ideological differences, with a commitment to intellectual freedom in the pursuit of truth.” Johnson said he wants this to be “rooted in the foundational text and traditions of Western civilization.” This overhaul will serve as a pilot program that could be replicated in public colleges across the state.
Along with six other faculty members, Graham wrote an editorial that raised concerns about the bill.
Graham, who has been at USU for 20 years, said he was blindsided by the bill. The first he heard of it was at the end of February about a week-and-a-half before the Legislative session ended. The bill was introduced Feb. 25 and cleared the Senate Education Committee the next day. Six days later, the Senate passed it and the House quickly passed it the next day, without a second committee meeting.
Since this is such a big change, Graham thought there should have been more transparency and faculty input.
“We’re still feeling staggered,” Graham said.
Harrison Kleiner, USU’s associate vice provost of general education, vouched for the bill when Johnson first presented it in committee. During the hearing, Kleiner spoke highly of the collaboration he had with Johnson in shaping the bill.
Kleiner told KUER he would have liked more time to work on the bill and discuss it with faculty, but he didn’t have that option. He said he first heard at the end of January that Johnson was working on a bill similar to one he unsuccessfully ran in 2024. That bill, which was killed in committee, would have overhauled general education at the University of Utah. Johnson admitted that the version was “very prescriptive” and heavy-handed. Kleiner said the rumor in higher education circles was Johnson had the votes to pass it this year.
The choice USU had, Kleiner said, was either to have general education reform forced upon them in a way that sharply limited faculty governance or school leaders could have a say in shaping the legislation, “albeit in a non-ideal timeline.” Kleiner doesn’t regret the choice the school made and said there will be faculty input moving forward.
“I think that the bill actually preserves faculty governance of the curriculum in ways that would not have been preserved with other legislative approaches,” he said.
In an email to USU faculty after the legislative session, Kliener wrote there was “about a three-week window available for us to shape the bill.” It also said USU was already working on potential reform of its general education program when school leaders learned of Johnson’s bill.
Johnson told KUER his legislation would have been broader and more prescriptive if Kleiner hadn’t gotten involved and worked on a compromise.
The general education reform is part of a national movement. Johnson’s 2024 bill was heavily inspired by Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center who wrote the model legislation. While Kurtz was involved in discussions about the 2025 bill at the behest of Johnson, Kleiner said he could not find a compromise with Kurtz and stopped working with him.
The bill requires the curriculum to include three 3-credit humanities classes that Johnson calls “great books” classes. These oral and written communication classes are supposed to have “primary texts predominantly from Western civilization, such as the intellectual contributions of ancient Israel, ancient Greece, and Rome; and the rise of Christianity, medieval Europe, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and post-Enlightenment,” according to the bill.
Graham thinks USU students should be studying “our global intellectual heritage,” and not just the West.
“This emphasis on the West, this emphasis on Europe, this emphasis on Christianity, is what makes me think that this is a very ideological bill,” he said.
Kleiner disagrees with that interpretation. He said the word “predominantly” is an important addition that wasn’t in Johnson’s original bill. Right now, many USU students are not exposed to non-Western texts in their general education, according to Kleiner. With the overhaul, Kleiner thinks all students will be exposed to non-Western traditions. Additionally, he said the periods and authors listed in the bill are examples and not prescriptions.
“The actual building out of that curriculum, what's going to be included, what's not going to be included, the kinds of assignments, the structure of this whole thing and its content is left for the faculty,” Kleiner said.
Johnson said part of the goal is to make general education more structured, instead of letting students pick from a wide variety of classes to graduate. Still, Graham defends what Johnson has called the “smorgasbord” model. He said that freedom allows professors to bring their passion and expertise to the first college classes that students encounter.
“I think forcing students to sit through what could very well just become a dry recitation of the great books of Western culture. I think it's going to turn off a lot of students,” Graham said. “I don't think it's going to serve them well in terms of career readiness.”
Graham said USU’s current general education classes, particularly those in the humanities like first-year writing courses, have been shaped over time by experts who have studied the best ways to teach these skills. Now, he said, “I fear that all that expertise is going to be lost because all that this bill emphasizes is inculcating students in Western culture.”
Kleiner predicts the overhaul will lead to students receiving more intensive writing instruction and taking more humanities courses as a part of their general education. He said the goal is to better serve students.
For his part, Johnson said he knew some faculty wouldn’t like his bill. But he believes strongly that students should get a broad, liberal education and wanted to protect that.
“The faculty need to look at this not as an attack, but a rescue mission,” he said. “If you look at the other efforts that were going on in the Legislature, there's a strong push to move to more competency-based instruction, away from traditional liberal arts approaches.”
The bill still needs to be signed by Gov. Spencer Cox, who has indicated his support for it. USU’s new general education program would then start by the fall semester of 2026.
Lawmakers also passed a bill this session to require colleges to reallocate some of their money toward more “high-demand” programs, which means decisions will be made about cuts, or else colleges could lose millions of dollars.
“One of the reasons this bill blindsided us is that we were so focused on the issue of budget cuts and how those were going to play out,” Graham said. “But when you combine the two [bills], it very clearly looks like an attack on the liberal arts, on the humanities, on these disciplines that teach students critical thinking and communication skills.”
