Dive Brief:
- The University of Texas at Austin is revamping its general education curriculum to narrow its spread and focus on topics such as Western civilization and broad U.S. history classes.
- The aim is for students to “grapple with big questions of human meaning and purpose, citizenship and self-government, scientific discovery, and the opportunities and challenges of technological innovation,” UT Austin President Jim Davis said Thursday in a public letter introducing the new curriculum standards.
- The university plans to pilot new core courses in fall 2027 and make the full curriculum available by fall 2028. Current students will not have to complete the new core to graduate, according to a FAQ page.
Dive Insight:
While announced with much fanfare, details of what will actually be taught and by whom in UT Austin’s new core curriculum aren’t yet clear. Over the next year, UT Austin plans to develop courses to meet the new core requirements.
The university’s plan calls for building those courses around three “pillars”: social sciences, STEM fields, and arts and humanities. Under those umbrellas are themes courses would cover, such as “Masterworks of Literature” and “Principles of American Politics.” STEM courses would include education in artificial intelligence.
The new curriculum will be narrower than UT Austin’s current core education and require six fewer credit hours. This will give students more flexibility in their overall course selections, the university said on an FAQ page.
UT Austin’s general education reboot follows its first “extensive review” of core curriculum in over two decades, the university said in its announcement.
The curricular overhaul comes as political leaders in Texas and other Republican-led states look to tighten control over general education and other courses at public colleges.
Last year, Texas enacted a bill, known as SB 37, that gives public university boards the ability to review general education requirements and reject courses from the core at the board’s discretion. It also called for general education that is “foundational,” prepares students for civic life and the workforce, and that provides “a breadth of knowledge.”
In its announcement, UT Austin said the new core curriculum plan “satisfies the requirements of SB 37.”
The Texas chapter of the American Association of University Professors fiercely opposed the bill, arguing that it “imposes political control over the core curriculum” and restricts instructors’ “ability to teach analytical thinking, a broad range of topics, and current scholarship that prepares students for careers and civic life.”
Earlier this year, the University of Texas System also adopted a policy for its campuses limiting teaching of “controversial and contested topics” and stipulating that their core curricula be composed of “balanced and broad-based courses that allow students appropriate options to meet the general education requirements without a requirement to study unnecessary controversial subjects.”
UT Austin administrators last fall tapped 22 faculty members from a range of academic colleges and disciplines to review the university’s core curriculum. The resulting task force concluded that the university’s current core curriculum included too many subject options that were often highly specialized.
“Because there are so many core courses to choose from, students are not given a sense of the uniting purposes of the core, and they tend to choose courses for reasons of convenience, idiosyncratic interest, and ease,” the task force wrote in a report summarizing its findings and proposal.
The task force called for a core curriculum — encompassing U.S. history, Western civilization, and world politics and culture, among other topics — that covers broad themes, important human questions and large sweeps of chronology. The group also said the university should encourage as much writing and in-person learning as possible and focus on smaller classes for the core.
Earlier this month, the Austin American-Statesman reported that UT Austin has “quietly” created a new Center for the Humanities that could have a role in shaping core curriculum. But so far, that role is unclear. And while the university has created a website devoted to the center, it has not officially announced the center’s launch or detailed its purpose. Two of the core curriculum task force’s members are listed as faculty at the center.
