Under UT’s New Core Curriculum, Faculty Are Limited

The University of Texas at Austin unveiled its new core curriculum last week, 10 months after President Jim Davis instructed a faculty task force to review the existing general education requirements and “identify gaps in quality, rigor, or intellectual cohesion.” The resulting proposal was presented on Thursday to the University of Texas System Board of Regents, whose members applauded the committee for their work and embraced the new plan; one board member, Stuart Stedman, said he got “misty-eyed” reading the task force’s report.

The new core splits requirements into three pillars—arts and humanities, social sciences, and STEM—which represent the “three main spheres of intellectual endeavor,” the report states. For all core classes, it says, the university should prioritize small class sizes and writing assignments and minimize online teaching. In total, students will have to take 36 general education credits, down from 42. The STEM requirements are watered down while the humanities receive greater attention, faculty members told Inside Higher Ed.

For some requirements, such as U.S. History or Foundations of Social Science, faculty will suggest existing or new courses that could satisfy the requirement. Other requirements, like Great Questions of Human Life and Great Ideas in Science, will likely have classes built specifically around them. The proposed core also includes a Western civilization credit that replaces one of two currently required U.S. history courses, and a computer science and artificial intelligence requirement. A world politics and culture requirement was added to balance the Western civilization requirement, said Devin Stauffer, a government professor and chair of the task force.

Inside Higher Ed spoke with seven faculty members about the new core, and it received mixed reviews. Some professors said they appreciated seeing general education requirements take center stage. “In higher education, we have to get very used to the fact that we’re preparing our students for change that we can’t predict, and the core curriculum is where that conversation happens,” said chemistry professor Brent Iverson. Other faculty members expressed concern that the proposal takes a Western-centric approach to the general education curriculum. Still others said that the process of developing the new core was not transparent and reflects a top-down approach that doesn’t value faculty expertise.

The task force worked against a tumultuous political backdrop. Texas Senate Bill 37—which dictates that all public institutions in the state review their general education curricula every five years—was enacted a month before the task force was formed. After the law took effect, other Texas public systems, including Texas A&M and Texas Tech, implemented strict rules about how faculty could speak and teach about gender, sexuality and race. Nearly every four-year public institution undertook a comprehensive syllabi review, and faculty at several public universities were punished for their political speech.

But politics didn’t come up often in their work, Stauffer told Inside Higher Ed. “Politically speaking, there was a range of views on the committee, but we actually didn’t get into political arguments. It was in the backdrop, but it wasn’t really front and center in our conversations,” he said.

Other faculty are skeptical, however, that politics didn’t influence the resulting curriculum. Many of the faculty on the 22-member appointed task force “were selected for their conservative viewpoints,” said Julie Minich, a literature professor who previously taught American literature for the core. (That class is now being repackaged as Masterworks of American Literature.)

“I am quite shocked at the fact that they have not sought any faculty input except for people handpicked by the president,” Minich said. “There’s not any kind of mechanism for people who’ve actually been teaching these classes … to give any kind of feedback.”

Lauren Gutterman, an associate professor of American studies and vice president of the American Association of University Professors chapter at UT Austin, shared similar thoughts.

“The new Western civilization requirement, I think, clearly reflects [Provost William Inboden’s] views and is a direct response to what right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute have been calling for in terms of transformation of higher education,” she said.

Courses approved to satisfy the requirement “will focus on capacious themes, great ideas, and broad historical developments, such as the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, the rise of modern science and industry, or the development of liberal democratic nation-states,” the task force’s report states.

“The provost office left it in our hands,” Stauffer said. “And we had a wide range of opinions and some really good discussions among the group. I think the group was a more broad, more diverse group than some people on campus may think it is.”

During deliberations, “the argument was made that [the proposed core] is a little too West-centric. So we said, ‘OK, let’s have a world politics and cultures piece of this as well,’” he continued. “I understand where that critique [that the curriculum is too focused on the West] is coming from, but we were mindful of that and tried to address it. Our addressing of it may not be to everyone’s satisfaction, but it wasn’t something we ignored or didn’t care about.”

‘Not Killing Those Classes Yet’

Several proposed courses—such as Great Questions of Human Life and Masterworks of Literature—will require that at least two-thirds of assigned texts are pulled from curated lists of 40 approved authors. The purpose of the lists is to “create something of a common experience for the students,” Stauffer said. The number 40 was his idea—a play on UT’s nickname of “the Forty Acres”—but he expects more authors will eventually be included. It is yet to be determined who will decide which authors make the cut.

Faculty find the lists limiting, several told Inside Higher Ed. They also worry they won’t include enough women and nonwhite authors.

“We have to ask who’s probably not going to be on that list of 40 thinkers and writers, and I think it’s going to be a lot of women writers, a lot of authors of color,” said Gretchen Murphy, an English professor at UT.

Over all, however, she believes the English department’s prior contributions to the core were largely retained in the new model. “Humanities is the winner,” she said. Stauffer also said the task force was focused on giving humanities a larger part in the core.

Several faculty members shared concerns that moving certain classes outside the core will weaken already-vulnerable departments, including the now-consolidated ethnic studies and women’s and gender studies departments. During Thursday’s board meeting, board chairman Kevin Eltife repeatedly emphasized that elective classes will be evaluated by enrollments.

“Take something out of the core, and make it elective, it’s going to have to stand on its own in terms of supply and demand. So that course, whatever it is, may have had 200 students because it was a core course. If it becomes an elective, there might be only three people enrolled,” he said. “You’re not killing those classes yet, but the supply and demand is going to determine the catalog at some point.”

In the proposed core’s third pillar, STEM, students will take 12 credits. According to physics professor Peter Onyisi, the proposal “significantly weakens” the STEM portion of general education at UT. He takes particular issue with the Great Ideas in Science class, which aims to “help students appreciate the beauty of science as well as its explanatory power,” according to the report. He likened it to “episodes of NOVA with homework.”

“It really comes across as a class that’s intended to make people think, ‘Ah, science is great,’” Onyisi said. “I was joking with people that it should probably be called Bad Ideas in Science, because … most of science is not landmark breakthroughs. Most of science is hunting to figure out how to explain something you don’t quite understand or your experiment doesn’t quite work. Filtering science through very specific breakthroughs is really discarding most of what science is, and I think is doing students a disservice to present science in that way.”

He also believes the artificial intelligence requirement “is almost certainly going to be outmoded the moment it’s taught,” he said.

The proposed curriculum has not been approved by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, which is required for all general education curricula in Texas. But that process will be a bit more complicated this year, because while UT revamps its core, the coordinating board is also revising its standards. It may be a couple of years before it’s clear how UT’s plan aligns with state requirements, Stauffer said.

“We’ve moved before they moved,” he said. “They have a process of coming up with a new set of core requirements, but we went ahead and just did what we thought was best first, and we’re hoping that what we came up with will be regarded by the Higher Education Coordinating Board as compliant with their new framework.”