University of Houston Cuts 40% of Core Courses

The University of Houston System Board of Regents has approved removing about 40 percent of the courses that counted toward its flagship institution’s core curriculum requirements.

The Houston Chronicle, which reported earlier on the vote, said it obtained a list of the roughly 100 cut courses, which include Black Liberation Theology, Intro to Global Climate Change, Intro to Ethnic Studies, Intro to LGBT Studies, Intro to Women’s Studies, the Bible and Modern Pop Culture, the History of Jewish Food, Dante and His World, Greek and Roman Myths of Heroes, Entrepreneurship, Tourism, Business Law and Ethics, and more. The University of Houston’s American Association of University Professors chapter provided Inside Higher Ed the same list, though the university and system spokespeople didn’t confirm or deny it.

The system did confirm that the changes, which the board approved unanimously Thursday, drop to the number of core courses students can choose from 241 to 144. The changes affect first-time students starting this fall. Many diversity-related courses will still count toward the core, including Intro to African American Studies, Introduction to Mexican American Studies and Latina/o Jewish History.

Texas Republican lawmakers passed Senate Bill 37 last year. It, among other things, requires public universities’ governing boards to review general education curricula every five years. The new law is part of a trend of red-state legislatures getting increasingly involved in gen ed.

SB 37 says the review must ensure the required courses are “necessary to prepare students for civic and professional life,” among other such broad, undefined criteria. The board’s vote Thursday was couched as part of the SB 37 review, but the University of Houston AAUP chapter has argued administrators are reading the law wrong.

In a July letter to university administrators and the Core Curriculum Working Group, the chapter wrote that administrators are “interpreting SB37 expansively in ways that go well beyond what the statute’s text requires.” The chapter further wrote that “there is virtually no transparency in this process. The committee’s report fails to identify which specific SB37 criterion is being relied on to justify the removal of any given course.”

David Mazella, an AAUP member and tenured associate professor in the University of Houston English department, told Inside Higher Ed the administrators are “aggressively complying with what they think are the requirements.”

“If those courses do not satisfy core requirements, they may go away, because we’re also under enrollment pressures,” Mazella said. He called the overall situation the “Orbanization of higher ed in Texas,” referring to the ousted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who cracked down on universities during his time in office.