UVA's First-Year Experience is Supposed to Unite Students. Their Mandatory Engagement Courses Demonstrate Otherwise
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:
"Race, Racism, Colony & Nation"
"Your City is Still Segregated"
"The Ideology of Slavery: A Cautionary Tale"
"Who is an immigrant?"
"Borders, Belonging, and the Politics of Difference"
"Solidarity Beyond the Hashtag"
"Decolonize Mars"
"Housing Is a Human Right."
Why do we have Latinx festivals in the USA?
"Should People be Wealthy?"
"'Hateinnany': Fascism, Antifascism, and the Global Far Right"
"The Cultural Politics of Work"
"Sexual Objectification”
“Female Friendship vs. Patriarchy"
“Latine Love and Aesthetics”
“Analyzing Inequality”
“Performing the Black Aesthetic”
“His-story of Science”
“You are on Monacan Land”
This isn't a handful of outlier electives buried in a broad catalog. It's the dominant theme of the required first-year curriculum at one of the nation's premier public universities — a curriculum that, by design, every single incoming student must sample. Add in entries like "The Anatomy of a Con," “How to See Spirits,” and "Psychedelics -- Enlightenment in a Pill?," and the pattern is unmistakable: courses chosen less for scholarly pursuit than for ideological fashion and whimsy – and downright embarrassing for a school of UVA's caliber to put its name on.
This wasn't organic. It was an engineered format to indoctrinate a first year class of 18 year-olds with a social/political agenda. Then-College Dean Ian Baucom arrived at UVA in 2014 and used his authority over the College to push through the first overhaul of UVA’s curricula framework in more than 40 years. Baucom has since left the University, but the mandatory program he built still governs every first-year student in the College.Before 2017, students in the College fulfilled general-education requirements under what the University now calls the "Traditional Curriculum" — a subject-area model that was discipline-based rather than thematic. Its requirements were straightforward:
Social Sciences — 6 credits from two different departments
Humanities — 6 credits from two different categories
Natural Science and/or Mathematics — 12 credits from at least two departments (astronomy, biology, chemistry, environmental science, math, physics, or statistics)
First and Second Writing Requirements
A foreign language requirement
Students chose their own courses within each department-based area. The University wasn't in the business of deciding that a course like "Decolonize Mars" or "Sexual Objectification" was a more appropriate foundation for a UVA education than an introductory economics or history course .It simply required breadth and let students fill in the rest. That model is gone for incoming students. The curriculum changes include this University-curated list where identity language and politics isn't the exception, it's the norm.
In this recording from a March 2025 Board of Visitors meeting, renowned economics professor Kenneth Elzinga, who has taught at UVA for a half-century, expressed his concern with the Engagement courses. Elzinga described data pulled together at his request by a top student: across 836 Engagements course sections, the average GPA was 3.86, with nearly every student walking away with an A or A-minus. With grade inflation so severe, he compared the “absurd” program to a "participation trophy."
But Elzinga's deeper worry isn't just grades themselves. It's what students are giving up to get them. As an economist, he framed the problem in terms of opportunity cost: every course a first-generation student spends in an easy, guaranteed-A Engagements seminar is a course not spent in calculus, biology, or art history; those are the foundational classes that build the transcript, and the skills, a first-gen student most needs. "I worry about the alternative opportunities foregone," he remarked. His concerns raise the alarm on a program where rigor doesn’t seem to be the point. It must be noted that UVA’s average GPA has risen from 3.3 prior to the UVA’s curriculum overhaul in 2017 to 3.61 in 2026, according to UVA’s own internal data.
It’s not just a professor with concerns. Campus Reform recently spoke with first-year UVA students frustrated by these mandatory seminars, pointing to courses like "Race, Racism, Colony and Nation" and "You Are on Monacan Land." One was blunt: "The engagement courses are ridiculous to me." Others took issue with the registration process itself, which offers little transparency into course content and what the students will actually learn. That's worth noting the next time the University insists it’s about curiosity rather than a checklist that students are simply trying to get through.
The Engagement courses comprise 8 of the 30 first-year credits a student takes. UVA's own pitch for this program is that it teaches students to “connect ideas, engage meaningful challenges, and develop the curiosity and courage to pursue the big, complex questions that shape their lives, communities, and futures." Do courses like “The Ethics of Dungeons and Dragons” or “Videogames and Videography” fit that bill? What the data, the professors, and the students themselves describe instead is a curriculum model where an A is nearly guaranteed, rigor is optional, and various identity lenses sort students into categories before they’ve had a chance to simply be classmates. Judging by the current course list, UVA built the opposite of what a first year experience is supposed to do. UVA students deserve better.