American history has become a gloomy narrative about race, gender and class struggles in introductory college courses, according to a commission report from Arizona State University.
A yearlong study of universities’ introductory U.S. history syllabi found that “identity-focused terms” such as “White supremacy” dominated their content, according to the Jan. 19 report by the National Commission on the Teaching of American History in Our Classrooms.
By contrast, the commission said the materials overlooked events such as America’s founding, the Civil War and World War II. Classes also ignored the role of religion in spurring movements for racial and gender equality, the researchers noted.
“The report recommends more inclusion of topics such as the Constitution, federalism, economic expansion, and democratization that allows students to understand not only compromises but the progress that has been made in achieving American ideals,” Donald Critchlow, director of the ASU Center for American Institutions, which conducted the study, told The Washington Times. “Moreover, the report recommends educational transparency by requiring history departments to list on their websites syllabi and class enrollments.”
Mr. Critchlow, an American history professor, noted that ASU researchers could locate syllabi for only 75 of the nation’s top 150 programs online. That included 70 posted by students to the resource-sharing website CourseHero and five published on history department websites.
The commission is chaired by former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and includes ex-Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin and former House speaker Newt Gingrich, all Republicans.
Some historians reached for comment welcomed the report’s findings, but others criticized its characterization of the courses, which the report left anonymous.
“White supremacy is not an ‘identity-focused’ term,” said James Grossman, director of the American Historical Association. “It is a term that describes a set of legal and social structures that framed the American South for decades. It was inscribed in the law and social practice.”
The report comes as recent statistics have painted a bleak picture of U.S. history and civics knowledge.
In September, an annual survey from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center found just 40% of adults knew the First Amendment protects freedom of religion and only 28% recognized it guarantees freedom of the press.
Among teens, only 13% of 8th graders scored proficient in American history on the most recent National Assessment for Educational Progress, a standardized exam overseen by the Department of Education.
Several right-leaning groups have promoted alternative history materials emphasizing primary sources to address such knowledge gaps. They include conservative media company PragerU, private Hillsdale College’s 1776 Curriculum and the free market Tuttle Twins franchise.
Connor Boyack, creator of the Tuttle Twins and author of a U.S. history book for children, said the Arizona State University study suggests “intellectual mediocrity” has flourished at every level of education.
“A nation cannot long survive the progressive dumbing down of its historically illiterate citizenry,” said Mr. Boyack, president of the free-market Libertas Institute in Utah.
But Omékongo Dibinga, a professor of intercultural communication affiliated with the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, blamed efforts to whitewash history for the crisis in civic education.
He challenged the ASU report’s claim that “college students are not receiving in their introductory courses the information and knowledge necessary for good citizenship in our nation.”
“Their idea of bad citizenship is anything that disrupts the narrative of wealthy, White, cis-gendered, slave-owning, so-called Christian men,” Mr. Dibinga said.
According to the ASU study, 60% of introductory U.S. history syllabi dating back to 2010 used at least one “identity-focused” term, including “toxic masculinity” and “oppression.”
More than 40% did not mention any variation of the words “freedom,” “prosperity” or “religion.”
The report found one professor at a large state university in the South assigned his students to read socialist historian Howard Zinn for an American history to 1877 class.
Elsewhere, a professor teaching the same course at a private Midwest campus described its primary goal as teaching students to see how “racism is snarled in every part of U.S. history.”
Attributing these findings to a strong bias toward hiring liberal academics, the commission called for greater intellectual diversity within history faculties.
Some historians challenged this language, however.
“In the same breath that the report calls for ‘intellectual diversity’ and claims to support academic freedom, it recommends higher education do away with … diversity, equity and inclusion statements in their hiring, promotion and tenure processes,” said Malachi Crawford, a professor of African American history at Prairie View A&M University, a historically Black public campus in Texas.
Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a conservative Protestant think tank, said the absence of religion and emphasis on racism in the syllabi suggests history professors have nevertheless minimized the nation’s “incomparable virtues.”
“Perhaps the problem is ultimately theological,” said Mr. Tooley, an amateur historian. “Secular academia doesn’t see humanity as universally fallen. It instead pretends that America and Western Civilization are the unique oppressors of the rest of innocent victimized humanity.”