David S. Awbrey’s recent commentary published in the Kansas Reflector offers a refreshing change from what has become the anthem of ranking wonks: “You are only as good as U.S. News & World Report says you are.”  Awbrey, former editorial page editor of The Wichita Eagle, buys into that mentality, bemoaning the Jayhawks’ national ranking’s fall. But that’s not why we are reproducing his commentary here. We applaud the reason that he asserts for the decline. Awbry decries the way the university has replaced what some would call “a classic core of undergraduate requirements” with a combo of “train for a job” and “grab bag” alternatives. These days, relatively few pundits champion the value of what we would call a liberal-arts-like education. Indeed, some states (e.g., Florida, which we have covered at FutureU) are taking actions to dismantle that possibility at state-supported schools.

Awbrey writes: “A likely cause of KU’s academic demotion came in 2014, when the faculty overhauled KU’s traditional, rigorous core curriculum. Without getting too far into the weeds, the KU faculty deep-sixed what had been a tightly focused general education curriculum that ensured freshmen and sophomores took solid courses that offered exposure to the major academic disciplines, preparing them for more advanced work later. Instead, KU adopted Core34, which basically offers a smorgasbord of hundreds of courses across six categories. Students can choose from scores of classes to fulfill the three-hour U.S. culture requirement, ranging from the Philosophy of Physical Appearance to the German Transatlantic Experience. The deeper failure of the KU faculty’s abandonment of its time-honored role as molder of young minds and transmitter of society’s ideals is the university’s elimination of its Western Civilization requirement as part of the Core34 project. For decades, for an hour a week, for two sophomore semesters, the program enabled young minds to engage with their peers in deep — surprisingly deep, more often than not — discussion and reflection about such diverse figures as Plato, Augustine, Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft, Frederick Douglass, and Simone de Beauvoir on the formative intellectual, moral, and spiritual values of Western society.”