WASHINGTON, D.C. – The American Council of Trustees and Alumni released a report this week that shows most prestigious American universities do not require students to take a course on U.S. history to earn a history degree.

“A democratic republic cannot thrive without well-informed citizens and leaders,” Council president Michael Poliakoff told The Washington Post. “Elite colleges and universities in particular let the nation down when the examples they set devalue the study of United States history.”

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The Council surveyed 76 of the nation’s top colleges and universities and found that nearly 70 percent – or 53 of the schools – do not require that history majors take a U.S. history course. Those that don’t include Harvard, Yale, Stanford, the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Brown, Cornell, Notre Dame, Georgetown, the University of Southern California, the University of Michigan and numerous others.

“Among the 23 that Do have such a requirement were the University of California at Berkeley, the College of William & Mary, Columbia University and – not surprisingly – the U.S. Naval Academy and U.S. Military Academy,” according to the Post.

The “ACTA relied on the US. News & World Report’s ranking of the top 25 liberal arts colleges, the top 25 national universities, and the top 25 public institutions. (These rankings include ties.),” the researchers wrote in the report, titled “NO U.S. HISTORY? How College History Departments Leave the United States out of the Major.”

“Our findings in this report demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of America’s most prestigious institutions do not require event the students who major in history to take a single course on United States history or government.”

According to the researchers:

The consequences of these weak academic standards are clear. ACTA’s surveys of college graduates reveal year after year deep and widespread ignorance of United States history and government. In 2012, 2014, and 2015, ACTA commissioned the research firm GfK to survey college graduates’ knowledge of American history. ACTA sees the same dispiriting results each time:

  • Less than 20% could accurately identify—in a multiple-choice survey—the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation.
  • Less than half could identify George Washington as the American general at Yorktown.
  • Only 42% placed the Battle of the Bulge in the history of World War II.
  • One-third of college graduates were unaware that FDR introduced the New Deal.
  • Nearly half did not know that Teddy Roosevelt played a major role in constructing the Panama Canal.
  • Over one-third of the college graduates surveyed could not place the American Civil War in its correct 20-year time frame.
  • Nearly half of the college graduates could not identify correctly the term lengths of U.S. senators and representatives.

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A total of seven of the top 25 liberal arts colleges, 4 of the top 25 national universities, and 14 of the top 25 public institutions require history majors to take a course in U.S. history.

And, “Of the 23 programs that do list a requirement for United States history, 11 allow courses so narrow in scope – such as ‘History of Sexualities’ or ‘History of the FBI’ – that it takes a leap of the imagination to see these as an adequate fulfillment of an undergraduate history requirement,” the researchers wrote.

Despite the obvious problem, academics like Georgetown’s Bryan McCann, the university’s history department chairman, “haven’t seen a need for a firm requirement,” he told the Post.

“Almost all history majors are taking courses that significantly cover the U.S. in any case,” McCann said.

McCann’s counterpart at Harvard, history professor Daniel Lord Smail, said essentially the same thing.

“From a purely pragmatic point of view, our curriculum committee has not felt the need for such a requirement because virtually all (history) students take at least one U.S. history course without our needing to require it,” he said.

Others, including Duke University’s history chairman John Jeffries Martin, want students to have a more worldly understanding of history, and argue that the ACTA is misguided to suggest otherwise.

“If there is a problem – and I am not sure that there is one – it is perhaps the opposite of what the (report’s) authors imply: that is, that there is too little knowledge in U.S. society about other cultures,” Martin told the Post.

The recent report notes that several schools, including Yale and Rice University, previously required U.S. history courses for history majors but recently made the course optional.

The ACTA report also features a very appropriate 1962 quote from President John F. Kennedy:

There is little that is more important for an American citizen to know than the history and traditions of this country. Without such knowledge, he stands uncertain and defenseless before the world, knowing neither where he has come from nor where he is going.

With such knowledge, he is no longer alone but draws a strength far greater than his own from the cumulative experience of the past and a cumulative vision of the future.