by the Jefferson Council
Every incoming student in UVA’s College of Arts & Sciences is required to take four two-credit “Engagements” courses their first year — eight credits total, out of roughly 30 a first-year typically completes. It isn’t optional. It’s a graduation requirement, built into the College Curriculum that replaced UVA’s older general education system in 2017.
The College markets it as a way to “help students raise big questions. That’s the kind of language that could describe almost any course at any school. The Engagements actual course list, however, tells a different story.
The first year of college is supposed to do one thing above all: take a class of 18-year-olds from every background imaginable and forge them into a single community. That used to be the point of a shared first-year experience. UVA’s Engagements program does the opposite. Instead of bringing disparate students together around a common intellectual foundation, it sorts them into courses organized almost entirely around race, gender, and identity — teaching incoming students to see each other first as members of competing groups, not as classmates.
We pulled the full list of roughly 170 Engagements course titles directly from the program’s own website. A handful are genuinely academic — “Making History: How Historians Use Evidence,” “Discovering Nature,” “Language Meets Linguistics.” Nobody objects to those.
But the vast majority read less like an introduction to the liberal arts than a syllabus for identity politics, critical theory, and progressive political activism, dressed up as mandatory coursework for teenagers who are just beginning their college experience. In UVA’s own words:
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