MULTIPLE U.S. STATES — Republican state lawmakers in several U.S. states have expanded their oversight of public university curricula. College students in these states are now required to read the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. They must also pass American history and government courses to graduate.

State-level governing boards have been granted increased authority over university curricula in jurisdictions where lawmakers enacted these changes. Additionally, civics centers established by state lawmakers at public universities now possess exclusive authority to select and teach courses that fulfill general education requirements in multiple states. Policy changes in these states have also reduced the number of diversity and social justice courses that can satisfy general education graduation requirements.

Barrett Taylor, a professor of higher education at the University of North Texas, said, "Increasingly, policymakers are casting higher education as a partisan good." Roosevelt Montás, director of the Chang Chavkin Center for Liberal Education and Civic Life at Bard College, said, "Now, Republican legislators are using universities' vulnerabilities to push a conservative cultural agenda that is part of a bigger culture war project."

Montás said, "General education is a kind of backwater hodgepodge of things that happen to be in the catalog." He added, "No two students have the same general education, and it varies dramatically from school to school, and it's largely a function of the particular disciplinary expertise of the faculty." Montás also said, "In a very real sense, universities have withdrawn from the task of general education." The Manhattan Institute published a report titled, "Correcting the Core: University General Education Requirements Need State Oversight." Previously, the National Association of Scholars stated that American universities have abandoned traditional general education requirements focused on American and Western history and institutions.