ACTA believes that this can be achieved through clear general education requirements. We work with colleges and universities to promote rigorous liberal arts programs that prepare students for the modern workplace and community participation and equip them with a thorough understanding of the rights and responsibilities of American citizenship.
Download 2022–23 Survey of Core RequirementsOur What Will They Learn?® project shines a light on the core requirements at America’s institutions and makes the information easily available to college-bound students, parents, high school counselors, and higher education policymakers.
These 88 programs share a commitment to educating students for informed citizenship in a free society by maintaining the highest academic standards, introducing students to the best of the foundational arts and sciences, teaching American heritage, and ensuring free inquiry into a range of intellectual viewpoints.
Democracies require citizens who know the nature and history of their institutions, who value these institutions, and wish for them to survive. Our education system should prepare each generation of citizens to participate in this democratic republic and fully understand its struggles and glories.
Hidden Gems are honors programs, major degree programs, minor degree programs, and certificate programs that guide students through a high-quality and coherent interdisciplinary education across the liberal arts. Philosophy, literature, politics, history, and the Great Books of Western Civilization are topics that are often a focal point.
For too long, colleges and universities have neglected teaching the American story to undergraduates, with fewer than one in five institutions requiring a course in U.S. government or history for graduation. ACTA has taken a significant step to address this crisis by convening a national commission comprised of esteemed historians, political scientists, and education leaders.
Arizona Republic | January 19, 2025 by Michael B. Poliakoff and Karrin Taylor Robson
“There is little that is more important for an American citizen to know than the history and traditions of his country. Without such knowledge, he stands uncertain and defenseless before the world, knowing neither where he has come from nor where he is going.”
January 17, 2025
Focusing on the role of higher education in preparing young Americans for citizenship, ACTA’s president Michael Poliakoff speaks with Mitch Daniels.
January 10, 2025
ACTA’s president Michael Poliakoff speaks with the distinguished scholar and education leader, Joshua Dunn, who took on leadership of the recently established Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville in June, 2023.
ACTA’s What Will They Learn? study and website do fill a gap so that parents and students can make better choices. As a consequence, colleges and universities may be forced to examine their own responsibility in molding an educated, well-informed citizenry.
Kathleen Parker, Washington Post
ACTA carefully surveys students on issues of academic freedom and intellectual diversity using nationally recognized polling organizations. These studies, on both a national and state level, show an alarmingly high percentage of students who believe they must agree with their professors to get a good grade and who find the classroom a place of political indoctrination.
Strong policies that protect free expression create a ripple effect across the entire campus. And fortunately for trustees and other university leaders, forming and implementing these polices is not uncharted territory. ACTA has been a leader in advocating for the adoption of the Chicago Principles on Freedom of Expression or similar policies on college campuses. Written in the 2014-15 academic year by the University of Chicago, the Chicago Principles represent the gold standard for an institutional commitment to free speech. To date, over 72 institutions of higher learning have followed Chicago’s lead.
ACTA provides trustees with the tools they need to understand academic freedom and to take positive actions to protect and foster it. Our original research, including Guarding the Freedom to Speak, Freedom to Hear and Building a Culture of Free Expression on the American College Campus, educates trustees and university officials on today’s most prominent threats to academic freedom and provides tried-and-tested methods that have enabled colleges and universities to protect free speech on their campuses. Our landmark publication, Free to Teach, Free to Learn, Understanding and Maintaining Academic Freedom in Higher Education, reports on the dangerous decline of intellectual diversity on college campuses and features key documents that shaped the modern concept of academic freedom, coupled with commentary from a wide and bipartisan roster of distinguished educators, attorneys, and policymakers.
ACTA believes that the most powerful lines of defense standing between the preservation of academic freedom and the proliferation of ideological homogeneity on campus are faculty and administrators who challenge students with new ideas and urge them to offer contrasting views. Our Heroes of Intellectual Freedom initiative celebrates the courageous university personnel who refuse to toe the line of speech codes and safe spaces. The stand these leaders make matters. They show students how to engage in robust dialogue with civility but without fear.
Despite reports of angry campus protests that make headlines, ACTA knows that the majority of students are hungry for close collaboration with each other and to understand the motivations of those who hold contrasting viewpoints. Through our partnership with the grassroots organization, Braver Angels, ACTA empowers university student groups to hold parliamentary style debates so that every member of the campus community can experience this type of passionate exchange. With ACTA’s assistance, students learn how to hold a civil discussion with each other by listening and asking genuine questions and cultivate the virtues of patience, self-awareness, and empathy that result from forming a friendship across political and ideological divides.
Launched in 1995, we are the only organization that works with alumni, donors, trustees, and education leaders across the United States to support liberal arts education, uphold high academic standards, safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus, and ensure that the next generation receives an intellectually rich, high-quality college education at an affordable price.
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