Western History Forgotten?

Patrick Henry College's emphasis on civics and Western history stands apart from top universities.

American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) analyzed history major requirements at 73 top universities. Only eight possess a history major that requires a wide-ranging course in U.S. History. PHC combines high academic rigor with a Biblical worldview and an extensive education in history and civics. 

According to an ACTA survey conducted by GtK in 2015, 9.6% of college graduates believed that Judith Sheindlin, popularly known as “Judge Judy,” serves on the Supreme Court. 4 in 5 college graduates could not identify James Madison as the Father of the Constitution. And it gets worse.

A 2019 survey by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, which surveyed 41,000 citizens, found the following results:

• 13% of Americans knew the year the Constitution was ratified.
• 3 in 5 Americans could not identify the countries the U.S. fought in WWII.
• 57% of Americans did not know the number of justices on the Supreme Court.

The Foundation found that only 36% of Americans can pass a multiple-choice test with questions taken from the U.S. Citizenship Test. Among respondents under 45, that number drops to 19%. 

What has happened?

In 2021, the ACTA analyzed history major requirements at 73 top universities—the top 25 public, national, and liberal arts universities. Only eight possess a history major that requires a wide-ranging course in U.S. History, including three of the 25 liberal arts colleges. (Georgia Tech requires a history course in the core curriculum, but not in the major.)

One reason is practical. Since the development of the journal impact factor, proposed by Eugene Garfield in 1972 and implemented three years later, university and graduate school professors have competed fiercely for financial prizes and international recognition by publishing articles in the most widely cited journals. Twenty years later, the commercialization of academic journals accelerated this trend and led to the Open Access movement of the early 2000s. This commercialization is why many journals today hide their content behind paywalls. It is also the reason why many liberal arts universities no longer have an authentic liberal arts curriculum.

The ACTA authors write: “Today, faculty at leading institutions generally teach (at most) two courses per term. Because of institutional pressure to publish … the courses that faculty do teach are often designed to align with their narrow research specialties.” This results in “sprawling” course curricula and a vast array of survey courses and area studies, with Western history nearly always ignored.

While it remains possible to get a Western history education at some top-tier institutions, such an endeavor requires incoming freshmen to do extensive research in advance. And that’s the best-case scenario. “Today, most history majors do not require all students to complete even one specific course,” the authors write, meaning a specific course in Western history). As of 2020, a few colleges, such as William & Mary, Penn State, and Colorado College had a Western history course in the major, but the ACTA found that major requirements could be fulfilled by courses of “insufficient breadth."

The other reason is ideological. Starting in the 1960s, colleges began to phase out their U.S. history requirements, replacing them with niche foreign history and social history courses. A newfound emphasis on multiculturalism and non-Western perspectives meant the insertion of non-Western history courses as alternate major requirements. This would have been beneficial if the goal was to round out an American understanding of the world with the contributions of other nations and cultures. Trustees would have still needed to preserve the liberal arts, of course. In a previous iteration of this report, the authors wrote, “Good intentions are not a substitute for a curriculum.” But parity was never the intention. Western traditions were tainted, Western achievements overrated, and they were consequently belittled or replaced.

The damage was largely complete by 1976 when the ACTA made its second survey of elite college history requirements. At the top liberal arts and public universities, the number of required Western history courses in the major dropped from 41 to 13. National universities such as Ivy League schools fared much better in this period, but by 2000 only three universities—Rice, Emory, and UC Berkley—still boasted Western history courses.

Despite the alarming knowledge gaps among today’s college graduates, there are still signs of hope. Some conservative states like Arizona, South Carolina, and Florida have begun to implement Western history requirements back into their curricula. Since 2016, at least 13 public universities have created (optional) civic education programs and centers dedicated to sound instruction on America’s founding principles.

But Patrick Henry College stands apart for its extensive civics core, which features required classes on Western civilization, U.S. history, and constitutional law, among others. In fact, Patrick Henry is among the 2% of colleges nationwide that retain a traditional two-semester survey course in Western civilization, according to a 2011 report by the National Association of Scholars. This foundation means PHC students are uniquely equipped to understand and protect American civil institutions. PHC's 63-credit core curriculum means that students can apply a Christian, conservative worldview to a wide variety of fields, from music and science to strategic intelligence and integrated math. This breadth and depth is why the ACTA ranked Patrick Henry College as one of seven “A+” colleges in the nation using their What Will They Learn?® rating system. (By this metric, PHC ranked highest among all Protestant colleges nationwide.) 

This stellar education is how PHC students are equipped to preserve the spirit of the American founding and defend a cohesive biblical worldview in the public square.

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Patrick Henry College challenges the unacceptable status quo in higher education by combining the academic strength and commitment to biblical principles that elite institutions have lost; a commitment to high academic rigor, fidelity to the spirit of the American founding, and an unwavering biblical worldview.