Curricular Reform at Elite Universities

By Solveig Lucia Gold and Joshua T. Katz
June 2, 2026

This essay was originally published as a chapter titled “Can We Reform Our Elite Universities?” in Kevin D. Roberts, ed., Higher Education in America: It’s Worse than You Think (New York: Encounter Books, 2026), pp. 181–192, with notes on 273–276. Reprinted with permission.

The first time we knew there was something seriously afoul in the Princeton Department of Classics was when, in January 2018, the then-chair circulated to the faculty a draft of a mission statement emphasizing the historical complicity of classics in perpetuating race-, class-, and gender-based inequality and promising a new era of inclusivity. The draft itself was not especially interesting—such things rarely are—but one of us (Joshua, then a professor in the department) was bothered by the absence of “academic excellence” from its stated goals. And he worried that by leading with self-criticism, the department would alienate more traditionally minded students—the students who had long been the department’s bread and butter. When he pointed this out to his colleagues in a mild email, his words were met with incredulity and derision.

Wrote one: “I’m confused about what it means to say we value excellence. If this isn’t code for elitism, what are we honestly trying to say?” She continued: “On turning away students: I have no problem at all with losing neocon majors who would use their pedigree from us to promote a pernicious view of classics.” (She was referring to majors such as Solveig, who had graduated the previous year and soon thereafter published a widely read defense of traditional classics.¹) Wrote another, the then-chair: “Valuing excellence seems to go without saying. For that reason, when we do say it, this seems to me to invite interpretation along many lines that I find, well, abhorrent.”

Valuing excellence did not go without saying. The years since have seen a litany of assaults—some public, others not—on academic standards in the department. Princeton’s graduate students revolted to prevent anyone from failing out of the program, with the result that exams, which had been made steadily easier over Joshua’s nearly quarter century on the faculty, were dumbed down further still and passing grades were awarded to future professors who would have stood no chance of even being admitted to the program a generation ago. A highly successful spoken-Latin class was discontinued after it received criticism for attracting too many white men,² while a graduate seminar was used to launch a “lab” for classics-based activism.³ And, most infamously, the department voted in the spring of 2021 to eliminate its language requirement for undergraduate majors: Students can now graduate with a degree in classics without ever having taken a single class in either Latin or Ancient Greek.⁴

We have been charged with writing about the Ivy League, a consortium of what have long been considered America’s most excellent universities. These days, though, the Ivies might better be called the Poison Ivies for their embrace of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) and antisemitism and for their all-around disdain for meritocracy. When the president of Harvard is exposed as a serial plagiarist with only a handful of publications to her name, it’s hard to speak of excellence with a straight face. And that’s to say nothing of the rampant grade inflation, about which we have written elsewhere.⁵

Yet somehow the myth of excellence persists. Every year, many of America’s brightest young people still choose to attend the Ivies, despite the headlines, because reputations built over centuries are not easily dismantled.

Now, some people we respect are working hard to further this dismantling—the “Burn It All Down” crowd. But this is not our way, and (God help us) we still love these institutions, or at least the idea of them. We want them to be reformed so that they can once again live up to their reputation. For all their many flaws, the Ivies (and a few other elite institutions) have unparalleled resources, from laboratories to libraries, that can and should be harnessed to drive American innovation.⁶

And, so, we offer here a modest proposal to improve undergraduate education, especially in the humanities, in the Ivy League and beyond.

A Twofold Problem

The American system of higher education—not just in the Ivy League—is rooted in two principles: breadth and depth. That is, America’s colleges and universities offer both a general liberal-arts education and specialized training in one or more specific subjects, or majors. The norm for undergraduates is, roughly speaking, to spend the first two years fulfilling general-education requirements while figuring out what their major will be, and the next two years fulfilling the requirements for that major. This is in contrast to, for instance, the system in England, where students apply to “uni” for a specific major (“course”)—a degree that generally takes only three years.

In spite of the crazy cost of a four-year degree (a subject for another day), we like the American system. We believe in both breadth and depth. The trouble is that the country’s universities are failing on both counts, largely because their requirements—both general-education requirements and departmental requirements—have become so flimsy as to be meaningless.

The fight over how to use requirements to cultivate breadth has been happening publicly in the United States for at least 150 years: from 1872, when Charles William Eliot began replacing Harvard’s set curriculum with an “elective system,” to the 1960s, when students rejected all claims to authority, academic and otherwise, to 1987, when Jesse Jackson led some 500 protestors on Stanford’s campus in the chant, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!” But there has also been an ongoing (and in some ways more egregious) erosion of requirements at the departmental level—behind the closed doors of faculty meetings, without any fanfare or public notice.

The result is that Ivy League universities are graduating students who possess neither scholarly breadth nor scholarly depth but, instead, a haphazard collection of facts, factoids, and ideas. In this chapter, we propose a way to better cultivate depth, but before we turn to our proposal, we think it worthwhile to examine the problems of both breadth and depth in some detail.

Breadth. Aside from a handful of exceptions (the two most famous examples are Columbia and the University of Chicago), universities long ago stopped requiring students to take specific “core” classes, preferring instead to offer “distribution requirements”: broad requirements such as (at Princeton) “Social Analysis” or “Quantitative and Computational Reasoning” that can be fulfilled through a variety of classes.

In principle, we like the idea of a core curriculum. For one thing, there are certain fundamental texts and ideas that every highly educated American ought to know (though good luck getting anyone to agree what those texts and ideas are). For another, when an entire student body is acquainted with the same texts and ideas, professors of more-advanced classes can assume a certain base knowledge and build on that knowledge accordingly. (It would be nice to think that shared knowledge provides social cohesion as well, but recent events at Columbia suggest otherwise.⁷)

That said, America’s most elite universities are supposed to cater to America’s most exceptional students, and exceptional students—especially those who are fortunate enough to have received a good high-school education—may find the core unnecessary. Why force a cello prodigy to sit through a general introduction to music history?

Distribution requirements are intended to be a good alternative. They expose students to the range of subjects on offer at the university, providing a framework within which students are then given the autonomy to move freely. Instead of taking an introduction to music history, the cello prodigy can fulfill the same requirement with an upper-level seminar on Shostakovich.

But as everyone knows (and as Adam Kissel, Rachel Alexander Cambre, and Madison Marino Doan have recently documented in their book on “Ivy League miseducation”⁸), the requirements are deliberately vague, with the result that a myriad of courses can meet them, from the sublime to the ridiculous. A personal anecdote: A decade ago, Solveig fulfilled her “Quantitative Reasoning” requirement at Princeton with a course titled “Environmental Decision Making.” On the first day, her professor announced that he would be teaching the students how to lobby Congress persuasively, adding that, when it came to the quantitative parts of their reports, the students’ job was simply to “make up the numbers.” (To be fair, he was a fabulous lecturer, and it was an interesting course.)

And now? A Princeton student can fulfill the Social Analysis requirement with, for example, “Introduction to Macroeconomics” (ECO 101) or, alternatively, with “Get Your Kicks” (FRS 101), a seminar that explores shoes as “a window into our personal and collective history and future.” The syllabus advertises readings from Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike and Our Shoes Our Selves: 40 Women, 40 Stories; the course requirements are “two short papers and a final group project where students will create an on-campus ‘shoe drive.’”⁹

Yet even as the requirements have become meaninglessly thin, a battle continues over what the array of requirements itself should be. For instance, the careful reader may have noted that what was in Solveig’s time at Princeton the Quantitative Reasoning requirement is now Quantitative and Computational Reasoning, adjusted to account for the tremendous rise of computer science. More strikingly, though, Princeton faculty voted in 2019 to add a “Culture and Difference” requirement—a belated response to student demands in 2015 for the creation of a requirement on the “history of marginalized peoples.”¹⁰ (Student protestors around the country made similar academic demands, with mixed results: Those at Vanderbilt, for instance, were successful; those at Yale were not.)

Depth. When it comes to requirements at the departmental level, there is a clear divide between, on the one hand, the sciences and harder social sciences and, on the other, the humanities and softer social sciences. The former (at every Ivy League university) have strict curricula consisting of specific classes that everyone in the major must pass; the latter (at every Ivy League university) have vague distribution requirements that can be fulfilled in any number of ways.

For example: Prospective physics majors at Princeton must have already taken five specific math and physics prerequisites. Thereafter, in addition to departmental electives, they must take a specific class in quantum mechanics, a specific class in thermodynamics, a specific class in experimental physics, and one of a series of classes on complex analysis or differential equations.

By contrast, there is only one specific class that Princeton history majors must take: a junior seminar that has no set content but that introduces them to the methods of historical research (examples the department itself highlights include “International History” and “Surveillance”).¹¹ Otherwise, they are free to choose their nine required history electives, as long as they take at least one in each of four “thematic areas” (Knowledge & Belief, Power & Conflict, Pre-Modern (pre-1700), and Race & Difference) and at least two that are “principally focused on Africa, Asia, Latin America, or the Middle East.”¹²

In short, if you have an undergraduate degree in mathematics from any Ivy League university, there are certain things that anyone can assume you have studied: calculus, linear algebra, and basic analysis. If you have an undergraduate degree in chemistry from any Ivy League university, ditto: some calculus as well as organic, inorganic, and physical chemistry. And if you have an undergraduate degree in economics from any Ivy League university, ditto again: some calculus, econometrics, and both micro- and macroeconomics to a reasonably advanced level.

But if you have an undergraduate degree in history from any Ivy League university, there is no time or place with which anyone can assume you have any familiarity. Not one Ivy League history department has even a single distribution requirement in U.S. history¹³—or requires the study of anything before the Enlightenment. At Yale, remarkably, majors need only take “two preindustrial courses, covering material before the mid-nineteenth century (and no later than 1900).”¹⁴ Likewise, if you have an undergraduate degree in English from any Ivy League university, there is no single book or author anyone can assume you have read—with, interestingly, the exception of Harvard, which requires English majors to take a course titled “Literary Forms,” all variations of which at least include Beowulf (though not in Old English), The Winter’s Tale, Persuasion, The Souls of Black Folk, and poetry by Elizabeth Bishop.¹⁵ (An exception, yes, but pretty minimal.) And if you have an undergraduate degree in religion or religious studies from any Ivy League university, it cannot even be assumed that you have ever opened the Bible.

This is not because humanities degrees are inherently less rigorous than STEM degrees—though that is, of course, the perception. There was a time when humanities departments had serious curricular requirements. But these were abandoned because so many humanists in today’s globalist, relativist, and oikophobic society have themselves abandoned the notion that some things (ideas, works, people, places, time periods) are more important to study than others.¹⁶

It didn’t have to be this way. There are four ways humanities departments could have adapted to meet the needs of an increasingly heterogenous America. Let’s take the typical English department as example. (1) It could have stood strong and maintained its required curriculum, offering a full-throated defense of why all students majoring in English ought to have studied Shakespeare, Austen, and Faulkner. (2) It could have revised its curriculum, replacing a few “dead white men” with, say, Morrison and Ishiguro. (3) It could have expanded its curriculum, maintaining the traditional core while adding additional required classes on not(-yet)-canonical authors. (4) It could even have wholly replaced the traditional curriculum with a new and “diverse” curriculum.

But instead, Ivy League departments chose (5): to do away with required classes altogether.

Fortunately, there is more to higher education in America than the Ivy League. At Hillsdale College, for instance, every English major is required to take six specific courses: “Old and Middle English Literature: 600–1500,” “Renaissance British Literature: 1500–1660,” “Restoration and Romantic British Literature: 1660–1830,” “Victorian and Modern British Literature: 1830–Present,” “American Literature: Colonial Era to the Civil War,” and “American Literature: Civil War to the Present.”¹⁷

Now Hillsdale has not traditionally been considered an “elite” institution, and, as we said in the previous section, there is an argument to be made for allowing the most extraordinary students—the students who are supposed to populate the Ivy League—a little more freedom: freedom to cultivate breadth through distribution requirements instead of a core curriculum. But there is no such argument for cultivating depth. Depth cannot be acquired piecemeal; it requires coherence.

In the United Kingdom, at least, elite humanities departments still recognize this. All Cambridge undergraduates in English, for example, are required to take “Shakespeare,” “English Literature and Its Contexts 1300 to 1550,” “Tragedy,” and “Practical Criticism and Critical Practice I and II.”¹⁸ And Solveig likes to compare her Princeton education in classics to the undergraduate curriculum she observed at Cambridge as a graduate student. In their first year, Cambridge undergraduates take a series of required classes that expose them, quite deliberately, to the various courses of study within the discipline (Greek and Latin literature, philosophy, history, art and archaeology, and linguistics) and that ensure that everyone has read a particular set of foundational texts. Electives come later, once the students have mastered the basics.

By contrast, at Princeton, apart from the standard sequence of language instruction in Ancient Greek (she already had a strong command of Latin), the rest of Solveig’s classics electives had no obvious structure: “Making Roman Law” as a freshman; “Roman Elegy from Catullus to Ovid” as a sophomore; the required junior methods seminar, “Cynicism,” “Euripides’ Medea,” “Hesiod,” “The Other Side of Rome,” “Religion and Philosophy in the Roman Empire,” and “Sex and Salvation in Early Christian Literature” as a junior; and “Epicureanism and Stoicism” and “The Lyric Age of Greece” as a senior (plus two cross-listed graduate seminars in religion and philosophy).

Most of these were wonderful, rigorous classes that taught serious material. But, taken as a whole, they did not provide Solveig with a coherent picture of her chosen subject—she got a little bit of this, a little bit of that. She picked the topics that were most interesting to her in the course catalogue, but picking other courses in any given semester would not have made the picture less blurry. A coherent set of fundamental courses wasn’t on offer—in large part because professors, when given the option, tend to be less interested in offering fundamental courses for their students’ benefit and more interested in teaching the niche topics that constitute their research.

Reformers of higher education need to take away the option. Or at least sharply limit it.

A Twofold Solution

The cost of an elite four-year degree cannot be justified unless universities cultivate both breadth and depth. To that end, we propose that accreditors withhold accreditation from institutions that fail to do so.¹⁹

When it comes to breadth, we do not believe that accreditors should insist on a one-size-fits-all approach. We appreciate heterogeneity in the higher-education landscape and think it good that students can choose between, say, a core curriculum at Columbia and distribution requirements at Harvard. The goal for reformers should be to strengthen distribution requirements by reducing the quantity²⁰ and increasing the quality of the electives that can fulfill each requirement—and, for that matter, to ensure that a core curriculum, wherever it still exists, remain both core and curricular.

But when it comes to depth, a heavier hand is called for. And a heavy hand is likely to be effective since individual departments are, for better and for worse, relatively easy to change—unlike universities. Moreover, heterogeneity is less important: the foundations of an undergraduate degree in history at Yale should not look all that different from those at Harvard. Or at Hillsdale, for that matter.

So here is what accreditors should demand from colleges and universities where students major (or “concentrate”) in a specific department or departments: Each department must (1) require its majors to take at least four specific content-rich classes in a set curriculum²¹ and/or (2) require its majors to pass a serious comprehensive exam that covers the foundational material of the discipline.

Departmental Curricula. The justification for the first part of this twofold proposal should by now be evident. A curriculum-free degree in a subject is hardly a degree in that subject at all. This used to be widely understood, and there’s no reason why it cannot be widely understood again.

To be clear: We believe in academic freedom. We do not want accreditors or other outside influences to dictate the content of a given department’s required curriculum. Our focus here is form, not content—the existence of required classes, not the material studied in them.

That said, when faced with the challenge of creating a curriculum, professors will, we like to imagine, be forced to choose serious material. Of course, the crazies will lobby for crazy things, but if they want to make, say, “Video Game Storytelling”²² a required course for all English majors, they will at least have to persuade a sufficient number of their colleagues. We also like to imagine that forcing departments to teach required classes will have the effect of limiting the number of silly or ideologically motivated electives on offer.

Comprehensive Exams. Mathematics majors are required to take particular courses, but if they can demonstrate mastery of the material, they place out of these requirements and go directly into higher-level courses. The same is true in departments that require knowledge of a foreign language.

But what about an extraordinary student in the English department who has read all of Shakespeare’s plays and interned at the Globe Theatre? An extraordinary student in the history department who worked as a Civil War reenactor at Gettysburg? Or our cello prodigy, who has been performing Beethoven at Carnegie Hall since the age of ten? Should the English major have to take a required course on Shakespeare? The historian, a required course on the Civil War? The musician, on Beethoven?

The primary aim of most humanities classes is interpretation rather than knowledge acquisition, so we believe that these extraordinary students would still have much to gain from core courses on the material they know well, especially since an Ivy League professor’s presentation of the material ought to be deeper and more sophisticated than what they are likely to have encountered so far.

That said, the argument can be made that these students would gain more from taking other or higher-level classes instead: rather than an introduction to Shakespeare, an upper-level seminar on The Winter’s Tale or an introduction to Milton. And for that reason, we propose an alternative to a strict departmental curriculum: a serious comprehensive exam.

The exam—whose content would, again, be determined by the faculty of the department—would come at the end of senior year and test majors on all the factual knowledge and methodological skills that they might have been expected to acquire from a core departmental curriculum, if such a curriculum existed: names, dates, places; identification of important concepts and works. Alternatively (and perhaps preferably), departments could offer a sequence of comprehensive exams: one at the end of each year of study, say, to ensure that students know the material necessary to advance to a higher level. Under either rubric, the extraordinary English major may arrive at college and never take another class on Shakespeare, but she would eventually still need to demonstrate an in-depth knowledge of the Bard and his works.

Undergraduate comprehensive exams were a fixture of many humanities departments until a few years ago. They varied in degree of difficulty, and we, the authors, know anecdotally that most had been dramatically dumbed down over time, before being eliminated altogether. Still, they always managed to strike fear into graduating seniors, who spent their final weeks cramming in the library. The Princeton English department’s comprehensive exam, eliminated after 2021, was infamous: Students had to identify and analyze passages on sight, selected from the entire range of English literature from the Pearl Poet to the present.²³

Ideally, under our proposal, seniors wouldn’t need to cram: They would have taken classes that prepared them for an exam this difficult. Indeed, ideally departments would require both core classes and a comprehensive exam—as most graduate programs do.

But seniors should be afraid: This difficult exam would matter. A student would not be allowed to graduate without passing it. With the great freedom to choose classes comes the great responsibility to demonstrate knowledge of core material. That is, the responsibility to demonstrate excellence.

---

1. Solveig Lucia Gold, “The Colorblind Bard,” The New Criterion, July 13, 2017, https://newcriterion.com/dispatch/the-colorblind-bard-8761/ (accessed October 28, 2025). See also, subsequently, Dan-el Padilla Peralta and Solveig Lucia Gold, “The Colorblind Bard: An Exchange,” The New Criterion, August 31, 2017, https://newcriterion.com/dispatch/colorblind-bard-exchange/ (accessed October 28, 2025). ↩︎
2. In the fall of 2018, Joseph Conlon taught “Latin Fluency through Immersion and Extensive Reading.” Princeton was initially excited by the buzz: The then-chair of the classics department (the same one as in the previous paragraphs) was “impressed” (thus John Byron Kuhner, “The Past Speaks,” In Medias Res, January 24, 2019, https://medium.com/in-medias-res/the-past-speaks-ea4a0b51e270 (accessed October 28, 2025)), and a professionally produced video was promulgated. But other classicists quickly began to criticize the course on what was then Twitter, its existence had to be memory-holed, and it has never been offered again. ↩︎
3. According to an August 2020 article on an official Princeton website, “The unique structure of the course”— titled “Rupturing Tradition: Ancient Past, Contemporary Praxis” and taught by two classics professors together with the two co-founders of the so-called Activist Graduate School—“opens the door to thinking of communities fluidly. Students from Princeton and nearby institutions will share the course with students—primarily activists and non-academic knowledge practitioners—enrolled in the Activist Graduate School. In moving between these different communities, the course aims to uncover ideas that emerge when we cross-contaminate academic knowledge with activism, and vice versa”: Princeton University Humanities Council, “The Classics and Activism,” August 21, 2020, https://humanities.princeton.edu/2020/08/21/the-classics-and-activism/ (accessed October 28, 2025). ↩︎
4. The best article about Princeton’s ill-advised decision at the time was John McWhorter, “The Problem with Dropping Standards in the Name of Racial Equity,” The Atlantic, June 7, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/princeton-classics-major-latin-greek/619110/ (accessed October 28, 2025). See also, now, Solveig Lucia Gold and Joshua T. Katz, “An Apology for Philology,” in Lawrence M. Krauss, ed., The War on Science: Thirty-Nine Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak Out about Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process (New York: Post Hill Press, 2025), pp. 192–200 (reprinted in Antigone, September 6, 2025, https://antigonejournal.com/2025/09/apology-for-philology/ (accessed October 28, 2025)). ↩︎
5. Solveig Lucia Gold and Joshua T. Katz, “America Needs Tough Grading,” The Wall Street Journal, September 1, 2025, https://www.wsj.com/opinion/america-needs-tough-grading-educaiton-learning-students-98fa87d5 (accessed October 28, 2025). ↩︎
6. Compare Joshua Katz, “Don’t Burn Down the Ivory Towers,” The Free Press, November 19, 2023, https://www.thefp.com/p/dont-burn-down-the-ivory-towers (accessed October 28, 2025). ↩︎
7. For a brief perspective on how Columbia, with its core curriculum, “could…be the site of such antisemitism and lawlessness following the Hamas attack in Fall 2023,” see Adam Kissel, Rachel Alexander Cambre, and Madison Marino Doan, Slacking: A Guide to Ivy League Miseducation (New York: Encounter Books, 2025), p. 145. ↩︎
8. Kissel, Cambre, and Doan, Slacking. ↩︎
9. Princeton University Office of the Registrar, “Course Details: Get Your Kicks,” 2025–2026 Fall, https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/course-details?term=1262&courseid=016965 (accessed October 28, 2025). ↩︎
10. This was among the demands made by the Black Justice League (alongside, for example, purging Woodrow Wilson from campus) when its members staged their now-infamous occupation of Nassau Hall, Princeton’s main administrative building. The protestors were invited to speak to a Task Force on General Education that then went on in October 2016 to recommend a required course on “the intersections of culture, identity, and power”: Princeton University, “Report of the Task Force on General Education,” October 14, 2016, https://www.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/documents/2023/05/task-force-report-on-general-education.pdf (accessed October 28, 2025). ↩︎
11. Princeton University Department of History, “Junior Year,” https://history.princeton.edu/undergraduate/current-majors/junior-year (accessed October 28, 2025). ↩︎
12. Princeton University Department of History, “Prospective Majors,” https://history.princeton.edu/undergraduate/prospective-majors (accessed October 28, 2025). ↩︎
13. It is striking that Dartmouth had required history majors through the Class of 2023 to fulfill a distribution requirement about the United States, as well as one about Europe—both now gone: Dartmouth Department of History, “Major,” https://history.dartmouth.edu/undergraduate/how-declare-major-or-minor-history/major (accessed November 24, 2025). Harvard, meanwhile, has a “North America” distribution requirement that can be fulfilled with such classes as “Writing Histories of Climate Change,” “Race and Public Health Crises: From TB to AIDS to COVID-19,” and “Re-Wilding Harvard”: Harvard University History Department, “Concentration Distribution Requirements,” https://history.fas.harvard.edu/node/1893961 (accessed October 28, 2025). ↩︎
14. Bulletin of Yale University, “Yale College Programs of Study 2025–2026: History,” https://catalog.yale.edu/ycps/subjects-of-instruction/history/ (accessed October 28, 2025). Until a few years ago, the Dartmouth history department had the most robust chronological requirement: “at a minimum, two pre-1700 or three pre-1800 courses.” But this and other requirements (see footnote 13) have been dropped. ↩︎
15. Harvard University Department of English, “English 20. Literary Forms,” https://english.fas.harvard.edu/english-20-literary-forms (accessed October 28, 2025). ↩︎
16. For “oikophobia,” see especially Roger Scruton, England and the Need for Nations (London: Civitas, 2004), pp. 33–38: “the repudiation of inheritance and home” (p. 36). ↩︎
17. Hillsdale College, “English Major and Minor Requirements,” https://www.hillsdale.edu/majors-minors/english/requirements/ (accessed October 28, 2025). ↩︎
18. University of Cambridge Faculty of English, “Undergraduate Admissions: The Cambridge English Course,” https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/course.htm (accessed October 28, 2025). ↩︎
19. We are of course aware of the many problems with the current system of accreditation. See, for example, Lindsey M. Burke, Adam Kissel, Armand Alacbay, and Kyle Beltramini, “It’s Time for Congress to Dismantle the Higher Education Accreditation Cartel,” Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 3774, June 20, 2023, https://www.heritage.org/education/report/its-time-congress-dismantle-the-higher-education-accreditation-cartel (accessed October 28, 2025). ↩︎
20. For a report from a decade ago on “curricular bloat” and its financial consequences, see Elizabeth D. Capaldi Phillips and Michael B. Poliakoff, “The Cost of Chaos in the Curriculum,” American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Institute for Effective Governance, November 9, 2015, https://www.goacta.org/resource/the_cost_of_chaos_in_the_curriculum/ (accessed November 24, 2025). ↩︎
21. We do not include courses, such as required junior seminars, that teach methods and research skills but that differ radically in content from section to section. Moreover, none of these four classes could be replaced with Advanced Placement (AP) credit. ↩︎
22. Harvard University Department of English, “English 189vg. Video Game Storytelling,” https://english.fas.harvard.edu/english-189vg-video-game-storytelling (accessed October 28, 2025). ↩︎
23. As a young faculty member in classics at Princeton, Joshua, who is proud of his knowledge of English literature, sometimes saw the English exam and can attest to its difficulty. In later years, text-passage identification became “NOT essential to your answer”: Princeton University Department of English, “Comprehensive Exam (2021),” https://english.princeton.edu/undergraduate/program/comprehensive-exams/comprehensive-exam-2021 (accessed November 10, 2025). And now it has been replaced by an “800-word reflection statement [that] details your intellectual development”: Princeton University Department of English, “Reflection Paper & Senior Oral Exam,” https://english.princeton.edu/undergraduate/major/comprehensive-exams (accessed November 10, 2025). ↩︎