Iván Marinovic is the Jonsson Family Professor and professor of accounting at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
The Stanford Faculty Senate voted last week to extend COLLEGE, a program of three general-education courses — Why College?, Citizenship in the 21st Century, and a Global Perspectives menu — that all undergraduates take in their first year. The vote was nearly unanimous. I voted no.
I did not take the vote lightly. Many colleagues have worked on this program for years, and I acknowledge these efforts. But I cannot support a program I believe will be detrimental to the education we offer our students.
My objection is not to general ed requirements. The humanities are indispensable to an undergraduate education, and a Stanford degree is incomplete without some exposure to the best of them.
My objection to COLLEGE is, first and foremost, about rigor and quality and, second, about balance. These are not the courses one expects from one of the world’s best universities. If these courses were electives, I would not recommend them; I would tell students to seek out the best courses Stanford offers in the humanities instead.
Take Why College?, the course meant to introduce students to the idea of liberal education and the good life. The syllabus assigns six required books — by Du Bois, Paulo Freire, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Tara Westover, Brian Lowery, Robert Sapolsky and Mary Shelley — and roughly two dozen shorter readings. With the partial exception of “Frankenstein,” none of the books is a classic of the Western tradition of liberal education. The list is mostly contemporary and largely progressive.
The syllabus is not entirely without canonical authors. Students read about eight pages of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” in Week 2, a short selection from Epicurus and Seneca and a single aphorism from Nietzsche’s “Gay Science” in Week 8. By my count, the syllabus assigns roughly 45 pages of canonical Western philosophical writing across the entire quarter, against more than 500 pages of contemporary work organized around identity, oppression and indigenous ways of knowing — Freire, Dangarembga, Westover and Kimmerer. The ratio is 11:1. There is no Aristotle, no Augustine, no Aquinas, no Montaigne, no Locke, no Mill, no Newman, no Steiner, no Bloom — none of the writers who built the case for liberal education that the course claims to defend. A course advertised as a defense of liberal education has been built without the thinkers who defined it.
The intellectual frame the course offers in their place is narrow. Students are introduced to two flavors of determinism — biological (Sapolsky argues free will is an illusion) and social (Lowery argues the self is a social construction) — and to a sustained critique of Western education as an instrument of power (Freire, Dangarembga). Is this the first philosophical orientation we want to offer 18-year-olds arriving at Stanford? Should we not also tell them about virtue, agency, freedom and responsibility? That case has been made by serious thinkers from Aristotle to Kant to Mill to MacIntyre. It is not made in this course.
The pattern extends beyond philosophy of education to philosophy of knowledge itself. Week 7 of Why College? assigns three pieces by Robin Wall Kimmerer, an indigenous botanist who argues that Western scientific epistemology should be supplemented or corrected by indigenous ways of knowing. Stanford is the university of the linear accelerator, the recombinant-DNA revolution and a quarter of the Nobel Prizes in physics awarded to American institutions in the last 50 years. Whatever one thinks of Kimmerer’s critique, it is striking that a course introducing Stanford freshmen to the life of the mind assigns 50 pages of a contemporary critique of Western science and not a single page of a contemporary defense of it. The students arriving at this university — many of them on their way to becoming the scientists who will extend the tradition Kimmerer is questioning — are introduced to that tradition primarily through its critics. This is not balance. It is not even pedagogy.
A colleague argued during the Senate debate that a Burkean conservative should be inclined to preserve what has worked. That is precisely what is wrong with this program. The Why College? reading list is not a preservation of our intellectual tradition; it is closer to a repudiation of it. The course discusses social and biological determinism but assigns nothing from the tradition that took the opposite view — no Aristotle on the virtues, no Aquinas on natural law, no Kant on autonomy, no Mill on liberty. Students are offered several varieties of contemporary materialism by authors few outside the academy have read, in place of the writers whose arguments have shaped Western thought for 2,000 years.
Quality is my primary concern, but one cannot avoid the question of tendentiousness. The Why College?syllabus is organized around the power-and-identity framework that has done so much to divide our campuses and our country. Selecting Freire, Du Bois and Dangarembga in the same course, without including a defender of a more classic universalist view of the human condition, is tendentious. The choice of Tara Westover’s “Educated” fits the same pattern: the only book in the course that depicts a religious, conservative family in any detail presents it as a horror story of right-wing fundamentalism from which the protagonist must escape in order to be educated at all. The fixation of universities on identity politics is one of the reasons they have lost the confidence of the public, and COLLEGE does nothing to address this. It doubles down.
The Global Perspectives menu has a different but related defect: it is not, in any recognizable sense, general education. The menu is a list of narrow electives — on the ethics of eating meat, on avoiding human extinction, on the global history of queer life, and so on. Some of these may be fine electives. But no coherent argument places any of them at the foundation of a Stanford education, alongside the works and questions that every educated person should encounter. They are general only in the sense that they are required.
It has been suggested that the program’s defects can be ironed out over time. I would agree if the starting point were high and the intellectual lodestar were clear. Neither is true. The deeper problem with COLLEGE is that it has no intellectual anchor, and I suspect this is by design. In the absence of any commitment to an intellectual tradition, the program will drift wherever the prevailing ideological winds push it, and the direction of those winds on American campuses is not in doubt.
What makes this a particularly missed opportunity is that COLLEGE comes at a moment when Stanford’s broader curriculum has already drifted further from the Western tradition than that of any peer institution I have been able to measure. Working with a colleague on a systematic text analysis of 15 research-university course catalogs (similar to one conducted for the University of Chicago), I find that the share of Stanford courses whose titles or descriptions are organized around progressive identity themes — race, gender, sexuality, decolonization and similar categories — has risen from 4.3% in 1999–2000 to 18% in 2025–2026. Over the same period, the share of courses engaging the canonical Western tradition — Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Kant, the Enlightenment, classical antiquity — has barely moved, from 3.9% to 5.7%. In other words, the ratio of progressive to canonical course content at Stanford has tripled, from 1.1 to 3.1.
The same pattern appears in the cross-university comparison. In 2024–2025, Stanford’s progressive-to canonical ratio is 3.3, higher than Harvard’s 1.6, Yale’s 1.8, Princeton’s 1.0, Columbia’s 1.6, Berkeley’s 2.5 and the University of Chicago’s 2.4. In other words, Stanford is not merely participating in a national curricular drift; it is leading it. Among the peer institutions for which same-year comparisons are available, Stanford seems to have moved further from the Western tradition while retaining less canonical content to counterbalance that movement. COLLEGE was an obvious place to begin correcting this imbalance. Instead, it entrenches it.
Stanford deserves better. Our students deserve better. I voted against this program because I believe a great university can still teach the works that have made our civilization worth defending, and that it should. The question is whether we still have the confidence to do so.