Prestige no longer ensures substance at Ivy League schools; students must navigate a maze of shallow, politicized courses to uncover the rare gems of a classical education, exposing the need for academic renewal.
"This book is a banquet of the absurdities that Ivy League universities serve up to their students under the rubric of general education. Anyone who wonders how the graduates of America’s elite institutions come by their jaundiced view of our country should start here. The few who refuse to “slack” are limited to the hard sciences and the few remaining excellent courses in the humanities."
—Peter Wood, President, National Association of Scholars
Ivy League universities can no longer be trusted to produce well-educated students. Even a cursory review of the course titles at top schools shows that these $320,000-plus diplomas may confer legacy prestige to graduates, but not necessarily knowledge or wisdom.
At Cornell, for example, students can take Queer Girlhood, Beyoncé Nation, and Intersectional Disability Studies. The course list at Yale includes Pop Sapphism and Comparative Settler Geographies. At Princeton: Shoes. Penn offers Reality TV and Gender and Decolonizing French Food. Even worse, these courses actually fulfill general education requirements. It is still possible to earn a great education at Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, or Dartmouth, but doing so requires prudence and persistence.
In Slacking, Adam Kissel, Rachel Alexander Cambre, and Madison Marino Doan dedicate one chapter to each Ivy League college, providing specific information about the coursework that serious students should pursue to extract a real education from these decaying institutions. Every chapter concludes with two course lists, both of which meet the school’s general education requirements. One displays the worst collection of courses that an inveterate “slacker” could take to skate through the requirements for entertainment, reinforcement of political biases, and narrow specialization. The other lists the best choice of courses a dedicated striver could take to acquire a well rounded, content-rich liberal education.
The contrast between the two sounds a rousing alarm bell for curriculum reform at America’s best-known colleges.
ADAM KISSEL is a visiting fellow for higher education reform in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation. He is a board member of the University of West Florida, Southern Wesleyan University, and the National Association of Scholars. He also serves on the America250 Civics, History, and America’s Future Advisory Council. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Harvard, he served in the first Trump administration as deputy assistant secretary for higher education programs. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.
MADISON MARINO DOAN is a senior research associate in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation. Her work focuses on affordability and accountability reform in higher education and K-12 education choice initiatives. Doan is also a visiting fellow with the Maryland Family Institute. Her work may be found in Washington Examiner, The Washington Times, The Daily Signal, the Educational Freedom Institute, and on foxnews.com. She graduated summa cum laude from Lamar University in economics and finance.
RACHEL ALEXANDER CAMBRE teaches for Belmont Abbey College’s new Master of Arts in Classical and Liberal Education program. A visiting fellow in the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Politics and Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation from 2022 to 2024, she researches and writes on liberal arts education and American political thought. She holds degrees from Washington and Lee University and Baylor University and has held teaching and research postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton University and the University of Virginia.
