In Higher Ed, the Constitution Is Optional.
DEI Is Not.

• 19.4%of surveyed universities require a U.S. Government or History course to graduate — ACTA What Will They Learn?® 2026
• 67%of major universities mandate a DEI course as a graduation requirement — Goldwater Institute / ACTA 2026
• 500+DEI staff positions at University of Michigan — payroll exceeding $30.68 million annually — The College Fix, 2024
• 31%of college students can name James Madison as the Father of the Constitution — ACTA survey of 3,026 undergraduates, June 2024
• 59%of ASU courses approved for the state's civics requirement do not actually meet that standard — Goldwater Institute, April 2026

Here is a fact that would have seemed absurd on any American campus fifty years ago: a student can graduate from most of the country’s flagship public universities without ever taking a single course on the U.S. Constitution, American history, or the mechanics of democratic government — but at two out of three of those same universities, she cannot graduate without completing a course organized around the conceptual vocabulary of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

This is not an accident of bureaucratic drift or a minor curricular footnote. It is the deliberate outcome of decades of administrative expansion, faculty capture, and ideological prioritization — documented in institutional catalogs, graduation checklists, and state board of regents records. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), which has reviewed graduation requirements at more than 1,100 colleges and universities for its annual What Will They Learn?® report, found in its May 2026 edition that only 19.4 percent of surveyed institutions require U.S. Government or History to graduate. The Goldwater Institute found that 67 percent require a DEI course.

The arithmetic is self-evident. If you want a degree from most of America’s major universities, learning about the document that governs your country is optional. Learning the official ideology of your institution’s human-resources apparatus is not. The question is not whether universities have an ideological agenda — they do, and that agenda has now been formalized in graduation requirements. The question is whether American taxpayers and tuition-paying families understand what they are funding.

One in Five Schools Requires Civics. Two in Three Require DEI.

ACTA’s What Will They Learn?® initiative evaluates whether colleges require students to study seven foundational subject areas: Composition, Literature, Foreign Language, U.S. Government or History, Mathematics, Natural Science, and Economics. In 2026, only 1.7 percent of schools earned an “A” or “A+” — meaning nearly no American university requires mastery of all seven. A full 43.4 percent received a “D” or “F.” Literature requirements dropped to 22.2 percent from 30.6 percent in 2021.

None of those numbers are as stark as the civics gap. ACTA’s June 2024 survey of 3,026 undergraduates asked basic questions about the Constitution, American history, and government structure. The results: only 31 percent of college students could identify James Madison as the Father of the Constitution — 44 percent incorrectly named Thomas Jefferson. Only 28 percent knew that the 13th Amendment abolished slavery. 60 percent could not correctly identify the term lengths of members of the House and Senate. 48 percent incorrectly believe the president has the power to declare war.

This is the knowledge baseline of students who have spent four years at American universities. It is, in ACTA’s assessment, a civic illiteracy crisis. It is also a predictable outcome when constitutional literacy has been deprioritized in favor of mandatory DEI coursework.

Arizona, Michigan, Virginia: The Paper Trail.

The gap between DEI mandates and civic education requirements is most sharply documented in Arizona, where the Goldwater Institute released a detailed 2026 report, Civic Decline: Arizona’s Public Universities Smuggle DEI into Required American Civics Courses. Arizona law requires students at the state’s public universities to complete an American Institutions civics requirement. In practice, the law’s meaning has been quietly hollowed out.

At Arizona State University, the Goldwater Institute found that 59 percent of approved American Institutions courses do not actually meet the stated civics standard. Students can satisfy their civic education requirement by taking “Social Welfare, Work, and Justice in the US” or “Anthropology of American Democracy” — a course that, per its syllabus, focuses on “the claim that American society oppresses certain groups.” Neither teaches the Constitutional text, separation of powers, federalism, or the bill of rights in any substantive way.

At Northern Arizona University, students can fulfill the civics requirement by taking “Sociology of Chicanx and Latinx Communities.” At the University of Arizona, the board’s civics requirements had not been implemented at all as of the Goldwater report. The University of Arizona subsequently announced it would implement a civic requirement in fall 2026 — but Goldwater obtained syllabi for the planned courses and found them “completely inadequate,” dominated by identity politics rather than foundational principles.

The University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors — in March 2025 — voted unanimously to dissolve UVA’s central DEI office and related programs after years of documented spending: roughly $20 million annually on 235 DEI employees, with some administrators earning upward of $580,000 per year. As with Michigan, UVA’s departure from DEI bureaucracy came only after federal pressure from the Trump administration’s executive orders and the Department of Education’s February 2025 “Dear Colleague” letter threatening loss of federal funding.

“Significant numbers of college students graduate without even a rudimentary grasp of America's history and political system.”

American Council of Trustees and Alumni — Civic Illiteracy Survey, June 2024

Billions Spent. Civics Not Included.

The administrative expansion of DEI offices is not merely a curricular story — it is a resource-allocation story. When University of Michigan employs 500 people in DEI roles at a cost of $30 million per year, those are dollars not spent on instruction, research infrastructure, or financial aid. Florida and Texas alone incurred $23.6 million in severance costs for terminated DEI staff in 2024 — the price of unwinding a bureaucracy that had grown without a corresponding accountability structure.

Speech First’s April 2024 report, No Graduation Without Indoctrination: The DEI Course Mandate, examined mandatory DEI graduation requirements across more than 200 colleges and universities and found that 67 percent impose a DEI course as a graduation requirement— a figure that tracks the Goldwater Institute’s independent analysis. Fewer than one in three public universities makes U.S. government and history classes necessary for graduation, even in states with legislative mandates requiring exactly that.

ACTA’s April 2026 report called directly for a course correction: To Counter America’s Civic Illiteracy Crisis, ACTA Urges Universities to Require Foundational Coursework in U.S. History and Government. The organization launched a National Commission on American History and Civic Education in August 2024 and has been pressing institutions and state legislatures to close the gap. As of the 2026 report, only two additional colleges and universities added a U.S. Government or History requirement in the prior year — a slow-motion correction measured in single digits against a backdrop of thousands of institutions.

A Law on the Books. Courses That Subvert It.

Arizona is an instructive case because the state actually tried to fix this. Arizona law mandates a civics requirement at public universities. The Arizona Board of Regents issued guidance. University administrators agreed to comply. And yet a detailed 2026 Goldwater Institute audit found that the courses approved to satisfy the “American Institutions” requirement at Arizona’s three flagship universities bear little resemblance to civic education.

At ASU, courses on the approved list include “Social Services Perspective of Government” — a social work elective — and “Anthropology of American Democracy,” whose syllabus centers the thesis that the American political system functions primarily as a mechanism of group oppression. Neither course assigns primary Constitutional texts, nor requires students to demonstrate understanding of the amendment process, separation of powers, or federalist structure.

The Arizona Legislature responded by advancing House Concurrent Resolution 2044 — a proposed constitutional amendment that, if approved by voters in November, would prohibit public universities from mandating DEI coursework in general education programs while strengthening the actual civics requirement. Whether the legislature can close a loophole that universities have spent years engineering is an open question.

Civic Ignorance Is Not Politically Neutral.

There is a temptation to treat the civics gap as an academic abstraction — a curricular shortcoming with no real-world consequences. That framing collapses the moment you look at what civic ignorance actually enables. A citizenry that does not know which branch declares war cannot hold Congress accountable for authorizing conflicts. A voter who does not know how the amendment process works cannot evaluate claims about what the Constitution “really means.” A graduate who has never read the First Amendment cannot distinguish a viewpoint restriction from a campus safety policy.

The FIRE data makes the institutional stakes concrete: 166 of 257 surveyed universities received an “F” for their free speech climate in the 2026 rankings. The report’s authors note a direct relationship between ideological uniformity in the curriculum — including mandatory DEI frameworks — and the suppression of dissenting viewpoints in campus culture. When the institution’s official ideology is embedded in graduation requirements, disagreement with that ideology carries an academic cost. That is not a speech climate that produces citizens capable of self-governance.

ACTA’s National Commission on American History and Civic Education, launched in August 2024, has recommended that every accredited institution require a foundational course in U.S. History and Government before conferring any degree. That recommendation has been endorsed by scholars and trustees across the political spectrum. As of May 2026, fewer than one in five universities has acted on it.

“67 percent of more than 200 colleges and universities investigated impose a DEI course as a graduation requirement. Fewer than one in three public universities makes U.S. government and history classes necessary for graduation.”

Goldwater Institute / Speech First — No Graduation Without Indoctrination, 2024