Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Can We Use Rhetoric to Save Gen Ed?
From Liberation to Remediation: The Rhetoric of General Education by Kelly Ritter (Utah State University Press, 2026)
Reviewed by Sarah Linville
Much has been said about the “crisis of the humanities” and the “enrollment cliff” that higher education has fallen from in recent years. The ever-increasing cost of higher education and rising uncertainty about the future of the workplace under the shadow of AI have caused many to additionally question the purpose of higher ed at all, especially in fields that do not directly correspond to high-paying careers. The liberal arts are especially hard hit. In his essay, “The End of the English Major,” Nathan Heller reports that, “From 2012 to the start of the pandemic, the number of English majors on campus at Arizona State University fell from nine hundred and fifty-three to five hundred and seventy-eight. Records indicate that the number of graduated language and literature majors decreased by roughly half, as did the number of history majors.” Heller interviewed a variety of students who, while they loved reading Don Quixote or studying Italian language, ultimately picked business or STEM degrees because “there’s an emphasis on who is going to hire you.” Thus, traditional degrees in the liberal arts trend towards scarcity.
Typically, students who choose majors in business, finance, or STEM still have access to the liberal arts on campus. Most schools still require students to fulfil some General Education courses to graduate—things like Composition I and II, biology for non-majors, U.S. history, etc. However, with the increasing cost of college and more options to take or test out of those credits, General Education (Gen Ed) is another field in crisis. These courses have become something to “get over with” as quickly and as cheaply as possible, sidelining their value in character formation and producing a well-educated public. It is this crisis that Kelly Ritter addresses in her 2025 book From Liberation to Remediation: The Rhetoric of General Education.
In From Liberation to Remediation, Ritter traces the problems facing General Education from the mid-twentieth century, when states like Georgia sought to standardize General Education courses across their university systems, to now. Now high school students often fulfill these courses off campus, turning the courses offered on campuses into borderline remedial spaces. Ritter emphasizes that “the real problem lies with the accepted equivalency that has emerged between General Education and underpreparedness, secondary to acceleration timelines for college completion and streamlined degree programs” (19).
The angle Ritter takes in discussing these problems is an intriguing one: she analyzes the rhetoric surrounding how General Education has been discussed over the past 75 years and how that rhetoric has influenced the systems and problems within Gen Ed that we face today, including how state-wide institutions, the College Board (the company behind Advanced Placement), and dual enrollment programs have contributed. In doing so, she constructs a fascinating and informative history of these courses and a cogent argument about why Gen Ed should be saved and what people currently working in those spaces can do to achieve it.
Ritter begins her study at the point where the rhetoric surrounding General Education began to change. In Chapter 1, she analyzes a variety of academic journals that discussed the value of General Education in the U.S. in the 1950s and 60s, such as The Journal of General Education and College Composition and Communication. Through her analysis of these sources, Ritter argues that the original guiding principles of required Gen Ed courses were to “democratize” higher education and society as a whole (43). The goal was to educate students for the “greater good” (46) and “liberate” (47) them, allowing all students to participate in this vision of building a better, freer society regardless of their vocational path. While such education could be “scaffolded” in high school, the heart of it must take place at the four-year university, embedded in a student’s chosen course of study, with faculty from that institution (49). She notes that many universities’ move toward outsourcing this teaching to graduate students and adjuncts is one of the factors contributing to Gen Ed’s demise.
Ritter also addresses another way in which universities are turning from the ideals of General Education for the sake of efficiency and cost-effectiveness: standardization and common course numbering systems. In Chapter Two, she analyzes three state-wide university systems: USG (Georgia), Florida, and Texas, chosen because all three “are anchored by a massive university system or systems with multiple campuses or branches” (63). While it would seem that a common curriculum or common course numbering system across university systems would further the aim of “democratizing” higher education by making it easier for students to transfer between institutions and guarantee that their credits would count, in reality, this can be used to sort students. In Georgia, establishing a common course numbering system (and after 1967 a “Common Core” of classes students needed to graduate) allowed students who perhaps did not initially get into the flagship institution in Athens to complete their Gen Ed at a smaller university within the system and then transfer to UGA without losing time. However, such a system was only beneficial for white students, as students of color were not allowed to enroll at UGA before Brown v. Board of Education. Ritter contends that even after Brown v. Board, the Core curriculum was built on this already-segregated institutional landscape, so its transfer provisions continued to function as though students were only moving between white, academic-track campuses (88-89). When students of color did enroll at UGA during this time period, they were often placed in “special studies” courses, which were essentially remedial Gen Ed programs (89). Such practices diminished the liberating aspect of Gen Ed and perpetuated the idea that these courses are something to “get through” before the real learning begins. Ritter’s overview of Texas and Florida’s systems is more condensed than her discussion of her home state of Georgia, but shows similar patterns in tracking students and resources away from smaller state institutions toward the campuses at Austin and Gainesville.
Ritter then takes on the enemies of General Education directly: College Board’s Advanced Placement program and, to a lesser extent, Dual Enrollment courses. Her disdain for College Board in particular is clear. She writes, “If General Education has an enemy, its name is Advanced Placement” (107). Her principal gripe with AP is that it promotes the idea of credit by examination, perpetuating the belief that Gen Ed courses are something to be exempted from and have no inherent value beyond what is printed on a transcript. Ritter provides a fascinating exploration of College Board’s advertising rhetoric and the rhetoric of its grading practices. These are real strengths of the book—it demonstrates how much of their monopoly is in fact rhetorical rather than grounded in good theoretical and pedagogical practices.
But what is a potential college student facing an ever-growing price tag on their university degree to do? Perhaps one of the weakest parts of Ritter’s argument is that she does not fully address this issue from a student-facing standpoint. Ritter argues that colleges must address the issue of credit by exemption more holistically. Among other things, they “must openly acknowledge the possibility of colleges and universities ceasing to offer Gen Ed curricula altogether, and recognize how this would forever change the meaning of a college degree and perhaps the purpose of higher education itself” (109). The practical steps needed to take on College Board’s monopoly are missing from these chapters of the book.
Ritter’s chapter on Dual Enrollment moves to her area of expertise: college writing. As a college writing professor, she explores the impact of the first-year college writing courses (often called Composition I and II). She writes that “First-year writing holds a more fraught position than almost all other subjects in Gen Ed, as the act of writing itself—in personal, academic, and professional settings—is something that people profess to simultaneously know everything and nothing about” (154). This is why the idea of getting this course “out of the way” before entering college is particularly enticing and common. However, echoing her point from Chapter 1, Ritter argues that by taking DE courses, students miss out, because such courses “systemically break apart the scaffolded learning of Gen Ed programs into discrete, stand-alone courses somehow both high-school appropriate and college appropriate in their content and delivery, functioning as divisible units of pre-college credit” (161). In essence, she argues that DE credit is just another way that Gen Ed becomes less about educating a student as a whole person and more about education being a means to an end.
So, what is the solution to this problem, according to Ritter? How do we save Gen Ed? Just as she examines this problem from a rhetorical perspective, so she argues that the solution is, in part, rhetorical. Ritter argues that more direction needs to come from Gen Ed (and particularly writing studies) faculty themselves: “Across these present and absent rhetorical formations regarding the first-year course, writing studies is not doing enough to strongly voice its importance and use value against other available pre-college credit mechanisms for Gen Ed…that imminently threaten the course’s longer-term existence on college campuses” (156). At a higher level, Ritter’s argument here makes sense. In an ideal system, college writing professors work together with other Gen Ed professors on campus to scaffold out instruction tailored to the expectations of their institution. This makes taking the course at that institution inherently more valuable than taking it in high school. However, Ritter does not discuss the specifics behind the work of scaffolding such instruction or how common this practice already is on college campuses.
Ritter highlights a particular Gen Ed discipline, philosophy, that seems to have justified itself through a variety of rhetorical strategies, including the American Philosophy Association’s “Statement on the Role of Philosophy in Higher Education.” This statement “makes clear how the discipline fits into other academic and public spaces, and into the national (and international) conditions for higher education” (184). Ritter argues that philosophy departments have defined their place and function on college campuses, and that other Gen Ed departments like writing studies need to catch up and “move toward reframing the rhetoric of writing studies as relevant to its long-standing core liberatory mission” if they, too, want to survive (187). Ritter’s argument is compelling, and her call seems not too difficult for people within the discipline to answer. Whether such work will actually produce better numbers in General Education courses remains to be seen. Her case study on the discipline of philosophy does not offer any statistics to support its efficacy. However, perhaps this is because such success is, like the value of General Education itself, not quantifiable.
Ritter’s belief in General Education and its value is idealistic, and perhaps justifiably so. The outcome of the G.I. Bill on individual Americans and the U.S. economy is not debated. The link between independent thought and the liberal arts goes back to the choice of “liberal” to describe them. They are the arts of a free people, rather than the servile arts.
In her conclusion, titled “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” Ritter writes, “First, we would need to agree, as a citizenry, on the actual purpose of college. Right now, there is a clear division between those who see college as an innate good that edifies a person, educates them about the wider world, and prepares them to be part of a functioning democracy, and those who see it as simply an (expensive) means to a better personal economic end” (188). She believes that to “resc[ue] the dignity and integrity of higher education as a whole,” society must shift toward a more idealistic mindset about education in general (205). According to Ritter, and to the myriad other writers talking about this and similar issues, the cycle of how we think and talk about the purpose of education in the U.S. needs to be broken in order to right the ship. Students must be persuaded that reading Don Quixote or learning Italian in a college classroom are valuable pursuits regardless of how well they improve future employment prospects, as is taking a college-level writing course at one’s own four-year institution. Rhetoric is a good place to start in calling students, institutions, and lawmakers back to a fuller understanding of the value of Gen Ed—perhaps words are the first step in keeping the circle unbroken.
Sarah Selden Linville earned her bachelor's in English and secondary education at Palm Beach Atlantic University and her master's in English and American studies at the University of Oxford. She has taught English in Palm Beach County, in Spain on a Fulbright grant, and currently teaches in Littleton, Colorado.
