The Ohio State University motto is “education for citizenship.” It’s not a forgotten relic, either. On the contrary, OSU’s administration makes frequent mention of that motto. But what exactly does it mean?

To the average listener, it sounds like Buckeyes are required to take great courses in U.S. history, American civics, Western civilization, and such. Well, OSU may hope its motto sounds that way, but that’s not what it means anymore. In fact, the motto may now mean something like the opposite of what most Ohioans assume when they hear it.

According to OSU’s course requirements (i.e., system of “general education”), every student has to take a course from a category called “Citizenship for a Just and Diverse World.” Huh? Is American citizenship even in there? Not much, I’d say. According to the university, its entire general education program is “designed to emphasize education for global citizenship and the cultural and diversity issues it encompasses.” Students, says OSU, must become “interculturally competent global citizens.”

Global citizens? You’ve got to be kidding me. There is no globe-sized state on this earth to be a citizen of — and if there were it would be a bad idea. To the extent that we can affect either our nation or the world at large, we must do so as citizens of the United States of America. If anything, cultivating a nonexistent “global citizenship” actually weakens students’ sense of belonging to this country. Education for American citizenship must come first.

That’s not the way it is at OSU today, unfortunately. In fact, the more you look into it, the more “Citizenship for a Just and Diverse World” begins to seem like a DEI requirement. Could it be that OSU’s constant bragging about its “education for citizenship” motto is a diversion, even a deception? Is touting its “educating for citizenship” motto a way of keeping Ohio’s parents and voters complacent? Is OSU turning a phrase that used to signal good old-fashioned American civics into a cover for globalism, DEI, and general leftist  political indoctrination?

Bingo.

Sadly, there is nothing unusual here. Most university general education programs have long since downplayed or tossed out American civics and replaced it with globalism and leftist indoctrination. Happily, however, what does make Ohio unusual is that it could soon become one of the first states to reverse this widespread problem. Ohio’s legislature has already taken important steps in that direction.

Above all, if the legislature passes Ohio Senate Bill 461, it will have hit upon a real solution to the debasement of general education at OSU and at Ohio’s other public universities. To understand why Ohio SB 461 is so important, we first must understand just how much of a mess OSU’s general education program is.

General education used to mean that every student at a given university had to take certain very specific courses: say, a yearlong survey course in U.S. history, or a one-year survey in Western civilization. Although professors had some flexibility in the design of their specific sections, university-wide syllabi for these courses were largely the same. In the middle of the 20th century, everyone at a given school, for example, might read the same Great Books in a given year in their required Western civilization course. Those common readings bound the student body together over long late-night discussions in the dorms.

Nowadays, this commonality has been lost. Instead of requiring specific courses, schools mark out scores — even hundreds — of courses to fulfill very broad distribution requirements in areas such as natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Frequently, those courses are hyper-specialized, reflecting whatever publication plans a particular professor has. Not only does that kill off readings in common, it has students ignoring the fundamentals for super-specialized topics instead. In effect, university general education programs cater to professors’ needs, at the expense of students. And on top of that, nowadays students are often forced to choose courses from highly politicized lists.

We can see all of this at Ohio State. OSU’s general education program consists of three parts. Part 1 requires two “bookend” courses — one at the beginning and one at the end of the general education program — geared toward helping students determine their personal course of study. Part 2, called “foundations,” consists of requirements for supposedly foundational courses in categories like natural sciences, math, arts, social science, writing, and historical/cultural studies.

To this relatively conventional division, however, OSU has added a new category called “Race, Ethnicity, and Gender Diversity.” The greatest number of courses that fulfill the “Race, Ethnicity, and Gender Diversity” requirement come from African-American and African Studies, English, and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Examples of such supposedly foundational courses illustrate the nature of this new category: “Introduction to the Black World” (using an “intersectional lens”), “Hip Hop Music, History, and Culture,” “Introduction to Black Popular Culture,” “Shakespeare, Race, and Gender,” “Introduction to Popular Cultures,” “Introduction to Queer Studies,” “Queer Ecologies: Gender, Sexuality, and the Environment” (FYI, Queer ecologies “seek to disrupt the gendered and heterosexual assumptions embedded in how we understand the environment, nature, and bodies—human and animal.”), “Si Se Puede: Latinx Gender Studies,” and “A World of Genders and Sexualities” (“gender and sexuality in transnational and cross-cultural perspective”).

Keep in mind that we haven’t even gotten to OSU’s DEI-ified citizenship category yet (Citizenship for a Just and Diverse World). The courses listed above are part of a requirement for allegedly “foundational” courses in an area (Race, Ethnicity, and Gender Diversity) purportedly on a par in importance with the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. That makes no sense, because the courses listed above are actually part of the humanities and the social sciences. But by carving out what is in effect an identity-politics-based division of knowledge, OSU simultaneously manages to indoctrinate its students and to increase enrollments in politicized “studies” programs that might otherwise fail to attract students.

Only now do we arrive at the third part of OSU’s General Education program. Part 3 is called “themes courses” and includes eight approved categories: (1) Citizenship for a Diverse and Just World; (2) Lived Environments; (3) Sustainability; (4) Health and Well-Being; (5) Migration, Mobility, and Immobility; (6) Number, Nature, Mind; (7) Origins and Evolution; (8) Traditions, Cultures, and Transformation.

Every student at OSU must take a course from the “Citizenship for a Diverse and Just World” theme, as well as a course in one of the other seven themes. Notice how  political some of those other themes are. “Sustainability” is typically not a neutral term for environmental stewardship, but a decidedly leftist and highly politicized approach to environmental issues. A cynic might suspect that the new category of Migration, Mobility, and Immobility had been added as a way of pushing back against the Trump administration’s immigration policy. Although it’s hard to tell anything definitive without syllabi, scrolling through the courses under these two themes certainly seems consistent with these suspicions.

But let’s concentrate on the universally required theme of “Citizenship for a Diverse and Just World.” Here is where OSU’s “education for citizenship” motto is put to the test.

Out of the approximately 150 courses that have been offered in this category over time, a number look quite nice. Classics courses like “Citizenship in Democratic Athens” and “Law, Citizenship, and Empire in Later Rome” certainly explore the Western tradition that so deeply shaped American civic life, as does a history course on “Ancient Greece and Rome.” But even classes like these, helpful as they are, can’t quite substitute for basic coursework in U.S. history, American civics, or a full-on Western civilization survey course. Those are the genuinely “foundational” courses.

In any case, most of the courses offered under the thematic category of “Citizenship for a Diverse and Just World” at OSU are either ideologically tendentious, over-specialized, not pertinent to American citizenship, directed toward leftist political activism, or some combination of the above.

Here are some examples: “Citizens Behind Bars: Black Leadership and the  Politics of Liberation In African-American History,” “Social (In)Justice and the Black Experience,” “Applied Anthropology for Social Change,” “Gender and Citizenship in Modern Arabic Literature,” “Native American Identity,” “Equity and Diversity in Education” (literally, a DEI course), “Writing for Social Change,” “Digital Activism,” “Exploring Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in Engineering Contexts” (another literal DEI course), “Intercultural Competence for Global Citizenship,” “Muslims in America and Europe: Citizenship and Living Between Worlds,” “Musical Citizenship: Activism, Advocacy and Engagement in Sound,” “Understanding Bollywood, Knowing India: Hindi Cinema Since 1960,” “Queer Comrades: Sexual Citizenship and LGBTQ Lives in Eastern Europe,” “Bolivia: Cultures and Identities,” “Contemporary Issues in Turkey,” “Gender & Law” (“gender, sexuality, and race, framed through diverse feminist perspectives on justice”), “Gender, Race & Leadership” (“using both activist and scholarly perspectives”).”

Only a handful of courses under the “Citizen for a Diverse and Just World” theme have a shot at providing students with the genuinely foundational knowledge of U.S. history and civics they need in order to grow into mature and informed American citizens. In all too many cases, this requirement serves as a stealth DEI mandate. And over and above its ideological function, the requirement serves to keep up enrollments for courses in the ideological “studies” programs. OSU’s motto notwithstanding, this is not “education for citizenship” in any serious sense.

Fortunately, Ohio’s state legislature has already begun to fix things. Beginning with students who will graduate from Ohio’s public universities at the end of the 2029-2030 academic year, all graduates must have taken a course in “American Civic Literacy.” That course must cover classic American history and civics, as well as our free-enterprise system.

At minimum, Ohio’s American Civic Literacy courses must require students to read (1) the entire U.S. Constitution; (2) the entire Declaration of Independence; (3) at least five essays in their entirety from the Federalist Papers; (4) the entire Emancipation Proclamation; (5) the entire Gettysburg Address; (5) the entirety of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail; (6) selected writings from Adam Smith covering core principles of The Wealth of Nations.

Now we’re getting somewhere. How is it that a course like this wasn’t already required at a school whose motto is “education for citizenship”? It’s sad but true that legislatures have to pass this sort of mandate. Public universities won’t do it on their own. Ohio’s legislature has already wisely gone this far, but something vital is missing. That’s where Ohio SB 461 comes in.

The great challenge in implementing Ohio’s excellent new civic literacy requirement is making sure that the courses are designed and taught by faculty members who have the knowledge and commitment to pull it off. We already know from our study of the existing, faculty-designed OSU general education program that OSU’s faculty is likely hostile to traditional civics. So who, exactly, is going to teach Ohio’s new civic literacy course?

SB 461 solves that problem by giving “sole and exclusive authority” over the design and teaching of the course to the various civic centers recently established at five of Ohio’s public universities (including the Salmon P. Chase Center at OSU). It’s also no coincidence that Ohio state senator Jerry Cirino, the power behind the establishment of both the civic centers and the new civic literacy course, is the sponsor of SB 461.

Cirino’s SB 461 also strengthens the financial and administrative autonomy of the new civic centers, turning them into independent colleges within their universities, answerable to the trustees, but otherwise protected from hostile faculty. (Although wisely, SB 461 allows the civic centers to designate allied departments, e.g., history or  political science, or qualified and committed individual faculty in other departments, to teach the new civics literacy course.)

Establishing such independence by law is an all-too-necessary precaution. We’ve already learned that the powerful American Association of University Professors, supported by the Mellon Foundation, has embarked on a systematic campaign to undermine the new schools of civic leadership nationally. This is partly simple hostility to the traditional vision of civic learning.

But we can see another motive for hostility in what we’ve learned about OSU’s general education program. The more the legislature puts general education requirements in the hands of the new civic centers, the more enrollment in the politicized and hyper-specialized offerings elsewhere in the university — especially the “studies” programs — is threatened. (Note that in 2024, out of 11,620 OSU undergraduate degrees conferred, only seven were in African-American/Black Studies and only twelve in Women’s Studies.) In myriad ways, nearly all the new civic centers nationally are under persistent assault by entrenched faculty in other departments. Giving civic centers control over top-quality, classic general education requirements will turbocharge those attacks from outsiders. That’s why it’s so important that SB 461 establish the financial and administrative independence of Ohio’s new civic centers.

Utah and Iowa have now not only mandated classic general education requirements but placed the design and teaching of those courses in the sole control of new civic centers. Ohio is the third state to get with the program, which appears to be the cutting edge of attempts to save our public colleges and universities from their own madness.

Ohio has done a great deal so far. Jerry Cirino’s SB 461 is the final piece of the legislative puzzle. I don’t doubt that OSU will try to block it. Let’s see if Ohio’s legislature can stand strong and pass it anyway.