CounterCurrent: Week of 03/09/2026
For many years, colleges and universities have been whittling down liberal arts classes and cutting degree programs.
Jennifer Frey, the inaugural dean of the University of Tulsa’s Honors College, wrote of her success building and teaching a liberal arts program at the university, drawing in “a quarter of each freshman class to this reading-heavy, humanities-focused curriculum.” Last year, however, the college’s new provost upended the Honors College, saying it “must go in a different direction.” Frey explained, “That meant eliminating the entire dean’s office and associated staff positions as well as many of our distinctive programs and — through increased class sizes — effectively ending our small seminars.” She went on to say,
An unpleasant truth has emerged in Tulsa over the years. It’s not that traditional liberal learning is out of step with student demand. Instead, it’s out of step with the priorities, values and desires of a powerful board of trustees with no apparent commitment to liberal education, and an administrative class that won’t fight for the liberal arts even when it attracts both students and major financial gifts. The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power.
The University of Tulsa’s Honors College is not the only program to face liberal arts cuts and closures. Since 2023, nearly 50 nonprofit institutions have closed their doors, with at least 40 merging with other institutions since 2020. This comes at a time when trust in higher education remains fragile, enrollments are down, and perceptions of a college education are at a low point.
This shift is not purely internal. It is also being shaped by forces outside higher education.
Political pressure from both sides of the aisle has hastened the decline of the liberal arts. The left has hollowed out traditional curricula, replacing the liberal arts with ideology-driven “grievance studies.” The right, meanwhile, increasingly judges degrees by a single metric: whether they lead directly to a high-paying job—a standard that consigns most of the humanities to irrelevance.
Together, these pressures are pushing the liberal arts toward extinction. When classical instruction is displaced by vocational training or ideological rot, institutions lose their intellectual core and society loses a vital source of civic and cultural formation. These are, of course, broad generalizations, but they capture a real problem in American higher education today. The question for us, then, is what can be done to keep the liberal arts alive.
Some institutions have set themselves apart by championing the liberal arts in their core curricula—think Hillsdale, or my alma mater, Patrick Henry College, among others. But on the whole, these institutions are small compared to the vast majority of colleges and universities in America. As for struggling nonprofit private institutions, perhaps there are options to merge, reinvent, or restructure. Administrative bloat and high tuition should be the first stop for a cost-slashing Freddy Krueger.
Next, general education requirements at both the K-12 and undergraduate levels need serious examination. Courses in Western civilization must be strengthened, along with English and languages, while ideology-driven courses must go. Ian Oxnevad, the National Association of Scholars (NAS) Senior Fellow for Foreign Affairs and Security Studies, writes for Minding the Campus how the reform and restoration of language instruction is vital to the West’s civilizational continuation. With only 35 percent of American high school seniors reading at or above proficiency, now more than ever, revitalizing English instruction (Make Phonics Great Again!) and reinstating Latin and Greek as educational building blocks will pave the way for deeper interaction with modern languages and cultures. Oxnevad notes, “You cannot fully understand Western civilization without its classical and modern languages.”
Lastly, schools must not equate “studies” or “grievance” programs with standard liberal arts courses. These programs often degrade education, radicalizing students by simply keeping them at arm's length from studying the fruits of their civilization. Very few students want to sign up for a program that teaches them to despise their way of life. No English literature graduate should leave their program believing that the English in their degree name ought to be struck out of existence after a four-year program of postcolonial theory, gender studies, queer theory, critical race theory, intersectional feminism, and fat studies.
The liberal arts are necessary to the health and vitality of our culture. A liberal arts education forms students into wise and thoughtful leaders with a deep understanding of the Western mores needed for society to flourish. Such education instills a never-ending hunger for not only the “hows” but also the “whys,” lending to continual growth and improvement, personally and then society as a whole. The liberal arts mold the whole person, ideally into a virtuous citizen. This is why it is our mission at the NAS to uphold the standards of a liberal arts education that fosters intellectual freedom, searches for the truth, and promotes virtuous citizenship.
Until next week.
CounterCurrent is the National Association of Scholars’ weekly newsletter, written by the NAS Staff. To subscribe, update your email preferences here.
Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash
