This summer, America turns 250. Flags and fireworks will fly, and we will celebrate the genius of the Founding Fathers — the launching of the greatest act of self-governance in history.
At the opening of his presidential center in Chicago, Barack Obama acknowledged that genius while insisting the Founders’ work remains incomplete, a process of perpetual democratic expansion still unfinished.
Obama is not wrong that the work continues. But he has misidentified which work is still incomplete. The real task before us is not the completion of the founding. It is the forming of citizens capable of understanding and embodying its principles so that, as Benjamin Franklin warned, we may keep the republic.
Higher education is one of America’s chief institutions responsible for that formation. And it has too often betrayed this public responsibility. Over many decades, American colleges and universities have grown ashamed, if not disgusted, with the exceptional principles underlying the American founding.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the collapse of coherent core curricula. The days of requiring undergraduates to engage with America’s founding are over. The evidence is overwhelming, documented in “The Vanishing West” from the National Association of Scholars and most recently visible in Stanford University’s diminution of America in its newest Civic, Liberal, and Global Education core curriculum. Students now graduate credentialed but historically blind — or convinced that America is not exceptional, or certain that it is a blight on human history.
Our colleges and universities are deforming students, engraving within them either ignorance of or revulsion toward our nation’s founding. A country whose citizens neither know the richness of their origins nor prize what they have inherited cannot endure.
This fall, Cornerstone University is choosing a different and distinct way forward.
Our new undergraduate students will experience “the Cornerstone Core” — a general education curriculum built around three pillars: the beauty of the Christian worldview, the wisdom of the American experience, and marketplace intelligence. We know this is unfashionable. But we are convinced that the wisdom of Christianity, the American founding, and the free market can form the citizens our country desperately needs if it is to be preserved for future generations.
What does the Cornerstone Core look like in practice?
Students begin with an in-depth study of the Christian worldview: God’s unique creation of humanity; humanity’s need for salvation and redemption through Jesus Christ; God’s command that we love him and love others; and the promise of perfect justice through his coming kingdom. The beauty of these truths lies not only in their veracity but in their transformative power when embodied in daily life. Students will have opportunities to do this through vibrant campus life, daily chapels, and experiential learning.
Reverence for God, human dignity, the obligation to love and forgive, and the importance of personal and civic humility — these are virtues not only required by God but exhorted by the founders themselves as essential to keeping the republic.
Students will also critically engage with the wisdom of the American experience through the “Cornerstone Great Works Canon of the American Experience” — a curated collection of 50 foundational works illuminating the principles of America’s founding, the Biblical ideas that shaped them, and the conflicts and debates that have defined the American story. Students will engage founding texts directly: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers, grasping the Christian, moral, and philosophical inheritance that produced them.
This canon is not exhaustive. It is formative. It shapes students through direct encounter with the voices that have formed and continue to refine America.
The third pillar, marketplace intelligence, is no less important. The Cornerstone Core requires students to analyze the foundations of a free and prosperous society critically: free-market economics, property rights, and the creation of economic value. These are explored within the creative stewardship principles of the Christian worldview. The same Christian tradition that showed the divine origins of human dignity also gave moral grounding to voluntary exchange, the ethics of contracts, the beauty of work, and the legitimacy of private property. Students will also engage with artificial intelligence, emerging technologies, and quantitative reasoning within this same spirit: stewarding human creativity to create value for as many people as possible.
Two hundred and fifty years since the birth of our nation, we must remember that the American founding is not a process under construction. It is a set of permanent ideas: that rights are divinely endowed, not politically granted; that ordered self-government requires virtue and therefore moral formation; that religious liberty, economic freedom, and civic virtue are essential pillars of the American experiment.
RESTORING AMERICA: WHY ‘ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL’
It is time for our colleges and universities to recommit themselves to forming students through careful engagement with these exceptional principles. Our future depends on our willingness to graduate citizens who prize their country, understand its founding, and are fully aware of its promise and immense potential.
Cornerstone is willing to do this. The only question is why more universities are not.
Dr. Gerson Moreno-Riano is president of Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.