This summer, America turns 250. Flags and fireworks will fly, and we will celebrate the genius of the Founding Fathers — the launching of the greatest act of self-governance in history. At the opening of his presidential center in Chicago, Barack Obama acknowledged that genius while insisting the Founders’ work remains incomplete, a process of perpetual democratic expansion still unfinished.Obama is not wrong that the work continues. But he has misidentified which work is still incomplete. The real task before us is not the completion of the founding. It is the forming of citizens capable of understanding and embodying its principles so that, as Benjamin Franklin warned, we may keep the republic.
Higher education is one of America’s chief institutions responsible for that formation. And it has too often betrayed this public responsibility. Over many decades, American colleges and universities have grown ashamed, if not disgusted, with the exceptional principles underlying the American founding. Nowhere is this more evident than in the collapse of coherent core curricula. The days of requiring undergraduates to engage with America’s founding are over. The evidence is overwhelming, documented in “The Vanishing West” from the National Association of Scholars and most recently visible in Stanford University’s diminution of America in its newest Civic, Liberal, and Global Education core curriculum. Students now graduate credentialed but historically blind — or convinced that America is not exceptional, or certain that it is a blight on human history. Our colleges and universities are deforming students, engraving within them either ignorance of or revulsion toward our nation’s founding. A country whose citizens neither know the richness of their origins nor prize what they have inherited cannot endure.This fall, Cornerstone University is choosing a different and distinct way forward.An American flag flies outside the Department of Justice in Washington, March 22, 2019. (Andrew Harnik/AP Photo, File)
