In December, Heterodox Academy released our report, The New Landscape of “Civics Centers” in Higher Education, examining their structures, governance models, and approaches to viewpoint diversity. While many centers operate as academic units offering majors, minors, or programming alongside existing curricula, a smaller number are attempting something more ambitious: reshaping the educational core of the university itself.

Utah State University’s Center for Civic Excellence, directed by HxA member Matt Sanders, represents one of the most sweeping examples of that approach. Rather than adding another program to campus, USU is redesigning its entire general education curriculum around civic excellence, durable skills, and viewpoint diversity — creating a common intellectual foundation for every undergraduate. 

In the conversation below, Sanders explains why they chose to “divorce” gen ed from introductory major courses, how the center is governed, and what it will take to prepare students for civic and professional life beyond campus.

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Nicole Barbaro Simovski: USU’s center is unique by developing “a new curricular approach to general education requirements and making USU a national leader in general education reform.” Can you explain USU’s approach here, and how the center is collaborating across university departments?

Matt Sanders: When large, public colleges and universities engage in general education reform, they invest significant amounts of time and resources and basically arrive at the same place they started — a model of general education that uses introductory major courses across dozens of departments to meet general education requirements and learning outcomes. And students continue to have to choose from long lists of major courses that all satisfy the same requirement. These reforms offer different names and framings, but the model and structure remain largely the same because using major content as the general education curriculum is so engrained in university structures, department curricula, and operational incentives that trying to innovate and separate introductory major content from general education feels impossible. That’s why many institutions don’t even attempt it.

However, USU is doing just that. We are divorcing introductory major classes and content from general education and scrapping our distributed curriculum model to create a core, foundational, highly coherent general education program that focuses on civic excellence, diversity of thought, and durable skills. And we are doing it for every student. The general education curriculum will no longer be a list of boxes to check off and get out of the way. It will be their academic foundation and prepare them for 21st century civic and professional excellence. No large public university that we know of has made this kind of shift and completely redesigned general education into a single, coherent academic program of study that views students rather than academic disciplines as the primary stakeholder in curricular and programmatic decisions.

Simovski: What do you see as the core benefits of a common, centrally designed general education curriculum for civic education, and what shortcomings of a more discipline-specific or decentralized gen-ed model is this approach trying to address?

Sanders: A decentralized, distributed general education curriculum is by its structure incoherent because there is little to hold all of the courses together as a coherent and connected program of study.  As a result, it often feels meaningless to many students. Choosing from long lists of introductory major courses to satisfy a series of requirements is often very confusing and frustrating for students. And that incoherence, lack of meaning, and frustration have a significantly outsized negative impact on our students who are least likely to come back after the first year of college and persist to graduation. This kind of model can be helpful to academic programs (e.g., enrollment) and convenient for university administrators (e.g., funding support), but it doesn’t hold student learning and student retention as the primary driver of curriculum.

Students are increasingly hungry for meaning and purpose in their education. They want to think carefully about important questions central to their lives and be prepared to succeed and contribute in the short and long term. The primary benefit of a centrally designed common general education curriculum is that we can meet the moment by providing a curriculum that is centered on 21st century learning outcomes instead of disciplinary outcomes. Courses will be centered on skills, questions, and the broad intellectual virtues of a classical liberal education.

Currently, most large public universities are offering a 1970’s general education (when these models really took hold) for the challenges that students will face in public and professional life in 2040. We need a coherent general education curriculum that is centered on this kind of learning with every faculty member pulling toward the same outcomes and connecting each class so that students see general education as the development of their intellectual foundation rather than checking off a list of to-dos before pursuing a major.

Simovski: One criticism of civics centers is that by concentrating these programs within specific centers, they could inadvertently create silos on campus. Can you explain how USU’s center is different and the extent to which all students will be exposed to the center’s programing?

Sanders: Programmatic siloing is a real concern for many civic centers who run academic programs parallel to the rest of a university’s programs. USU’s Center for Civic Excellence is doing the opposite. Our Center governs the 27-credit general education curriculum that every student will take before they complete their majors and graduate. All courses are interdisciplinary, have the same course prefix, and focus on important civic/human questions and durable skills. Faculty from across the university are building and will teach these interdisciplinary courses to meet students’ needs. 

Simovski: The Center for Civic Excellence at USU was established through state legislation. What role will the state play, if any, moving forward with regard to faculty hiring, student curriculum, and program evaluation? What role does USU itself play, if any, independently in these areas?

Sanders: The state legislation in SB334 provides USU with a civic-focused vision of general education and a framework for general education reform and governance. It also provides a very clear vision for ensuring that students learn all sides of important human and civic questions. We were grateful to be able to work with our stakeholders in the legislature to shape that vision. The state has not had, and will not have, any role in hiring faculty, developing curriculum, or evaluating courses and the program. That work is faculty led through appropriate administrative and faculty governance processes. We are grateful that the legislation trusts us to carry out that vision independently.

Therefore, the Center for Civic Excellence is an independent administrative unit within USU that centrally governs the general education curriculum that every student will take. It operates in the same way as any other academic program. We will, of course, provide our program evaluation data to the Utah System of Higher Education and make it available to anyone who wishes to see it.

Simovski: How will the impact of the center toward its stated aims of the “cultivation of civic mindedness,” “preparing USU graduates to contribute to a pluralistic and free society,” and “helping students rise above ideological lenses, immediate reactions, and echo chambers, with a focus on teaching them how to think rather than what to think” be evaluated?

Sanders: We are in the early stage of operationalizing this kind of assessment, focusing substantial effort on working with faculty to create learning goals that incorporate program-level aims across disciplinary areas. While there is much to build, our assessment will incorporate three important components to help us ensure that we are meeting our goal of teaching students how — but not what — to think.

First, learning outcomes in every course will be assessed using a final assignment that asks students to demonstrate this learning by connecting course content to a real-world question and consider that issue from multiple perspectives. Second, we will also collect student feedback on courses, asking them to report their impressions of their own learning in the program’s aims and how well the courses fulfill those ends. These results will be compared to instructor ratings on the signature assignments to determine where student perception and performance align and where they do not. Third, we will facilitate program-wide annual discussions with instructors, assessment experts, and administrators to review all assessment data and teaching experiences so we can continue to improve our courses.

Simovski: With its explicit commitment to viewpoint diversity, how do you envision the center’s role in broadening viewpoint diversity at Utah State? Do you see the establishment of the center as necessary for achieving greater viewpoint diversity across the university? 

Sanders: When our students complete their foundational studies in our general education curriculum, they will have developed the ability to ask good, insightful questions and investigate all sides of an issue. They will understand that civic challenges and human questions are complex and require nuanced understanding. They will be able to think about and effectively communicate that knowledge and learning effectively. Students will carry that intellectual foundation into every class they take in the majors they pursue. 

In addition, the faculty teaching general education classes will also be teaching in their own programs across the university. We are developing a very intentional learning community of faculty who are committed to developing these kinds of classes and teaching this way. I know that will improve my own teaching, and I am confident it will improve so much of the already great teaching that is happening across our campus.

Simovski: How do you see the future of the Center as it grows and matures? Will the center hire new faculty or rely only on faculty affiliated with other departments? Will the center stay largely a home for gen-ed on campus, or might it ever offer its own majors?

Sanders: We have no plans for offering any majors. A very important mentor taught me that the academic majors are the first consumers of the generally educated student. Our mandate is to create the most intentional, meaningful, and transformative civic-focused general education program anywhere. That intellectual foundation will then inform how every student thinks about and engages in other academic programs.

The scale of the Center for Civic Excellence is significant. We will be teaching thousands of students each semester. As we grow to full capacity over the next several years, we will seek the necessary funding to grow our faculty to meet instructional needs. However, our Center is an administrative unit only and doesn’t have any of its own faculty. All faculty teaching general education courses in the Center will be housed in academic departments and teach as affiliate faculty in the Center. We will collaborate with departments in hiring and evaluating faculty.

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To learn more about how Heterodox Academy is tracking the proliferation of "civics centers" at colleges and universities in the United States to assess their impact on viewpoint diversity, see our website.