For thirty years, Minnesota’s public colleges and universities have recognized the importance of Ethical and Civic Responsibility by including it as a required Goal Area in the Minnesota Transfer Curriculum.  When the draft of the revised standards  was released, we were disappointed to see that Civic Engagement had been separated from Ethics and both had been relegated to a set of optional domains alongside Life Skills and Applied Writing.  Many of us made comments to this effect in the feedback we provided to the Redesign Steering Committee.

This letter reaffirms our conviction that all MinnState students should be required to take a course focusing on Ethical and Civic Responsibility.  These classes enable students to think deeply about their values and the obligations we have toward one another, which are essential components of being an engaged citizen and leading a good life.   

We think it’s essential for students to take a class taught by experts which explicitly teaches them how to apply moral principles to issues in society and their own lives.  It’s true that ethics are relevant to a variety of different courses across the disciplines.  However, it’s also the case that writing and other forms of communication are part of every class MinnState offers, but we still require students to take Composition course and a Communications course taught by credentialed instructors.

Nearly seventy percent of MinnState institutions explicitly include ethics among their core competencies and values and another 20% include them implicitly.  The American Association of Colleges and Universities links civic knowledge and engagement with ethical reasoning and action in “Personal and Social Responsibility,” one of the Essential Learning Outcomes of its assessment program (used by more than 2900 colleges and universities throughout the world). Minnesota State’s own accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission, is increasingly recognizing and promoting the importance of personal responsibility and civic engagement through its accreditation Criterion One and its collaboration with the Civic Learning and Democracy Engagement Coalition.

Please restore Ethical and Civic Responsibility to its proper place as a required domain in General Education by requiring students to take a dedicated, stand-alone course taught by content experts.