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February 23, 2026

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Stanford Needs More Rigorous General Education Requirements

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“‘The requirements serve as the nucleus around which students build their four years at Stanford.’

 

“This is how Stanford passionately describes the Undergraduate General Educational Requirements (Gen-Ed) on their official website, but has any student ever actually thought of them this way? The answer from this year’s frosh class is no....

 

“When designing Gen-Ed requirements, one must consider both the factual knowledge students must learn and the ways in which they engage with and pass on that information after graduating from Stanford. Across the board, there seems to be a lack of understanding that, just like STEM subjects, the humanities are cumulative. In the same way that one cannot hope to understand calculus without first learning arithmetic and algebra, one cannot understand, for instance, the current rise of populism without understanding the historical and political forces in preceding centuries. Without this perspective, learning about new developments lacks crucial context. The same is true for the new ethical frontiers we confront today. You might draw solutions to AI’s ethical problems with no historical context, but you would be neglecting thousands of years of moral philosophy and historical lessons on new technology that could point you in the right direction. Even if faced with novel ethical or societal problems, going back to past thinkers gives you the frameworks or tools to approach the issue.

 

“This all sounds great in theory, but how should Gen-Ed requirements be structured to give students both a consistent set of factual knowledge and a broad set of intellectual skills? I propose three guiding principles: prioritization, standardization and rigor. First, prioritization and standardization. For many students, Gen-Ed classes are the only time they will be required to learn about subjects outside of their field of study. This begs the question: what are the essential topics that a Stanford student must know to be an educated member of society? Currently, students select courses that fulfill the different WAYS based on their interests, or more likely, what will require the least work. Instead, I propose that students be required to take a set of standardized courses that will expose them to the most fundamental subjects in the humanities and sciences. I am certainly not an expert, but a few classes that should be required are: introductory courses in philosophy, English literature, religious studies, U.S. history and civics. In STEM, students should be required to take an introductory course in statistics and a fundamental science such as physics or chemistry. The remaining units could be completed through a tailored list of courses designed to dive deeper into the subjects above or explore other foundational disciplines.” ... 

 

Full op-ed by recent Stanford alum and current master's degree student Alexander Mescher at Stanford Daily (February 16, 2026).

 

We Must Do Better Than COLLEGE

 

Excerpts (link in the original):

 

“It has been almost five years since the Faculty Senate approved the COLLEGE program in May 2020, and I believe I speak for most Stanford students when I say it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

 

“The COLLEGE program (a loose abbreviation of Civic, Liberal, and Global Education) is the latest in a long series of attempts to design a first-year general education curriculum for students at Stanford University....

 

“The feeling among my fellow freshmen is that the COLLEGE program amounts to, at best, a waste of time and, at worst, a direct contributor to the climate of anti-intellectualism on campus. The curriculum is discontinuous and, at times, just plain nonsensical -- why, for example, are we assigned a brief excerpt from Plato's Allegory of the Cave one week and the entirety of Open, a ghost-written celebrity memoir about a tennis player, the next? Seemingly, the readings were selected to check boxes: one from the right, four from the left, and racial and gender diversity throughout. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with diversity unless it comes at the expense of substance. In my view, asking the esteemed faculty of this university to lead freshmen in discussions on a miscellany of magazine articles, blog posts, and news stories on broad themes like ‘Education and the Good Life’ and Citizenship in the 21st Century’ is an insult not only to their intelligence but to ours....

 

“My message to the university is this:

 

“Please do not coddle us in the hope of coaxing us out of our shells.... We want to write essays and receive detailed feedback on how our writing can be improved. We appreciate profound ideas no matter who they come from, and we are not offended by the prospect of reading two texts written by white males in a row. We want to imbibe the sophistication we admire so much in our professors, and we want to learn what they have to teach us. Above all, we don’t want to be told how valuable a liberal education can be, we want to experience its value first-hand. And if we can’t experience it first-hand at Stanford, I’m afraid there’s nowhere on planet Earth where we can.”

 

Full op-ed by Stanford undergraduate Ben Botvinick at Stanford Review (February 5, 2025).

 

Beyond Big Science, a Reform Agenda for American Science

 

Excerpt (link in the original):

 

“The academic sciences need to be rescued. 

 

“This is the premise of the National Association of Scholars' (NAS) latest report, Rescuing Science. Recovering Science as Civic Virtue, authored by NAS’s Director of Science Programs J. Scott Turner. In this report, Turner reassesses America’s 75‑year experiment with federally funded ‘Big Science,’ arguing that the system built to spark discovery has instead smothered it under bureaucracy, politics, and perverse incentives.” ...

 

Full article at National Association of Scholars. A PDF copy of the full report can be downloaded here including a detailed analysis of the growth of indirect costs (capped at 8% prior to 1956 and now running between 50% and 90%), a return to grants based solely on scientific merit, the need to fund research separately from facilities and administration, better methods of funding, reforms in graduate student education and related issues. See also our Stanford Concerns webpage showing, among other things, the significant increases in Stanford’s own administrative staffing and costs..

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Other Articles of Interest

 

James Madison U Wants Students to Learn How to Deliberate Respectfully

Full article at College Fix.

 

More Than Half of College Students Are Lonely, and Social Media Is Making It Worse

Full article at EDU Ledger (formerly known as Diverse Issues in Higher Education).

 

Oklahoma Is Phasing Out Tenure; Will the Idea Catch On?

Full article at Chronicle of Higher Education.

 

Why We Care -- Samples of Current Teaching, Research and Other Activities at Stanford

 

Click on each article for direct access; selections are from Stanford Report and other Stanford websites.

 

New Tool Opens Up Access to Stanford’s Vast Collections

 

AI Sovereignty’s Definitional Dilemma

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Reading-specific Region Differs in the Dyslexic Brain

“A brain region specialized for recognizing text is smaller or absent in kids with dyslexia. Tutoring that improves their reading partly closes the gap, a Stanford-led study found.” ​

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