UT President Jim Davis announced the establishment of the University College on Oct. 21. The college is set to launch next semester to implement UT’s new core curriculum, proposed by an appointed Task Force Committee. This announcement follows academic adjustments to the core that the University has both proposed and implemented since September.
A rough pilot of the new core will be implemented next fall, and the freshman class of fall 2028 will be the first required to complete the curriculum. The new University College will lead these changes, said Devin Stauffer, government professor and dean of the University College.
“The (college’s) first main mission is to facilitate getting the new core up and running,” Stauffer said. “Secondly, once it’s sort of up and running, then (we will) see what’s working, what’s not, get it in as good shape as possible and then to try to make sure that it keeps its integrity over time and gets better rather than worse over time. So, it’s essentially a shepherd of the core.”
University officials are now reviewing core class proposals, Stauffer said, with committees of around 15 professors assigned to each of the three foundational pillars of the new core: arts and humanities, social sciences and STEM. Each pillar includes specific requirements, creating 12 required classes in total, or 36 credit hours.
The current core has not been revised in over 20 years and requires 42 credit hours across 10 components of study, according to the UT Core Curriculum website.
The current core included over 600 courses, according to the Core Curriculum Task Force Report. Stauffer said he found the old Core to be in poor shape, with a “diffuse and random” selection that was often too niche.
“The politics of Thailand would be too narrow, for instance,” Stauffer said. “But, a course on Southeast Asia, that could fit. So again, broad, big picture, not super narrow.”
The task force designed three main pillars that define the new core. Those pillars contain 12 requirements, topics that classes fall under, such as: Great Questions of Human Life, Western Civilization, Great Ideas in Science, and Computer Science and AI. The University College will continue to implement these pillars and concepts.
Stauffer said that only around a month ago, the idea of a new University College was pitched to him before he was appointed dean. Before his appointment, Stauffer chaired the Core Curriculum Task Force Committee.
The committee was created in fall 2025 to submit a report with a proposed new core curriculum. The task force met on Friday mornings from November to May before submitting their proposal to UT’s president, provost and Board of Regents. After completing the report, the task force was dissolved, Stauffer said. The proposed core serves as a foundation for the University College.
Students will have a variety of options within those requirements, such as historical or contemporary and politics or culture courses, Stauffer said.
Stauffer said he urged students to view this new core as a way to become broadly educated, reaching beyond a student’s major. He said he wanted students to have “taken a serious dive into the main realms of human inquiry.”
Some have voiced concerns about the potential lack of diversity in the core, especially regarding the Western Civilization requirement. The requirement will include main ideas and developments that have formed Western thought. Some essential themes could include classical thought, Jewish and Christian tradition, Enlightenment, development of capitalism and industrialization, and ideological conflict in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, according to the Western Civilization prospectus.
To those worries, Stauffer said, “the point wasn’t to indoctrinate students in the principles of the West.” He said that the West is complicated and debatable, and students should be familiar with it, as it has “most shaped the world in which we live.”
To help balance the Western Civilization requirement, Stauffer said the World Politics and Culture course will encourage students to study non-Western cultures. The Task Force wasn’t trying to exclude anything, Stauffer said, merely trying to “get to the really big, fundamental stuff.”
He said some of those courses in world politics and cultures might “be able to find a path back into the new core if they’re conceived of in a broader, more fundamental way.”
Jarell Kearney, a third-year theater and dance major and African and African diaspora studies minor, said that while studying Western civilization is valuable, he thinks balance is better found by emphasizing non-Western voices.
“I have a foundation in Western civilization,” Kearney said. “I’ve experienced this firsthand. I’ve experienced what the ramifications of a world built with this worldview in mind has.”
Stauffer said the task force also emphasizes “AI literacy.” Stauffer said they wanted to give AI a place in the core while balancing it with more thoughtful, discussion-based courses.
According to the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence prospectus, many courses focus on understanding the algorithms behind AI and how systematic and design choices affect AI systems.
“The thought was this, that students would be able to use AI as a tool without being overly reliant to do their thinking for them,” Stauffer said.
The task force also debated whether to keep signature courses, or UGSes, as a part of the core. Stauffer said the Great Questions of Human Life requirement replaces signature courses “in a way.”
The Great Questions of Human Life requirement will be seminar-style classes that examine texts, hold discussions and have students write critically, according to the Task Force’s report. Courses will cover topics like the human condition, liberty, civic life and mortality.
“The Texas 40: Great Thinkers” offers a list of authors that instructors can choose from, which will help define courses in the Great Questions of Human Life requirement. The current preliminary list includes 50 authors, featuring writers such as Sigmund Freud, William Shakespeare, Karl Marx and the Bible.
Students like Kearney criticize the list. Out of the 50 authors listed, four are people of color and six are women.
As someone who is both Black and queer, Kearney said he feels the scope of who is identified as a great thinker has been limited throughout time and expanded very carefully. He said if the only great thinkers presented are powerful white men, that’s all society will be able to see as such.
“They are saying the quiet parts into a megaphone and making it very clear, this is who matters to us,” Kearney said.
While UT is a Hispanic-Serving Institution, there are no Latino or Chicano authors on the preliminary list. Sofia Gomez, a sophomore double major in women’s and gender studies and Latin American studies, said that was her first red flag.
Gomez said she fears “a version of history where people of marginalized communities, histories of indigenous people, of Black people and of brown people here won’t be told, and they won’t be shared.”
Out of the 22 members on the task force, six are women, and none are women of color. Eight members are associated with the School of Civic Leadership, seven are fellows at the Civitas Institute and 10 are a part of the College of Liberal Arts.
These changes in Core first began with the consolidation of seven departments into the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Department of European and Eurasian Studies.
In August, the U.S. Department of Education called universities to “reaffirm higher education’s foundational commitments to academic excellence, pathbreaking research, and national service.” Within the same month, UT released a new proposed core curriculum accompanied by a list of classes to potentially be cut from the core. In September, the University cut women’s, gender and sexuality classes from the core.
Additionally, UT announced that majors like African and African Diaspora studies, Mexican and Latina/o studies, and women’s and gender studies will no longer be offered to students.
Kevin Foster, associate professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, said the missives can be “dizzying” at times because there are so many new changes.
“If they all have the same kind of orange letterhead and they’re coming from the same people, it’s a little difficult to discern which are the big seismic changes and which ones are the smaller changes,” Foster said.
Foster said that with these consolidations, it’s not intuitive to mesh a Department of Social and Cultural Analysis alongside anthropology, sociology studies and other disciplines. He said the University has “not yet defined the department’s intellectual realm, besides dropping a name on it,” making it difficult to define courses and attract students.
“The University has created a challenging circumstance through their creation of an entity that none of the faculty within that entity had asked for nor trained for,” Foster said.
Out of the 113 potential classes to be cut from the core, over 35 involve race or gender, 94 are COLA courses and over 20 are a part of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, according to records obtained by the Austin-American Statesman.
Despite a common misinterpretation, the list of classes released in August to be potentially eliminated from the core was made by the provost’s office, not the task force, Stauffer said.
Post-consolidation, many classes from the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis are under consideration for removal from the core. As a result, Gomez said many of her professors are held back by paranoia of losing their jobs.
“Nobody wants to be made an example of,” Gomez said. “So because of this, there’s a lot of holding back, and it sucks because I know that they want to teach me. I know that they want to be honest with me. But there’s just kind of this invisible barrier that’s happening right now.”
Foster said an issue will arise when professors choose not to speak about things for fear of reprisal or investigation. He said a large concern lies with “breadth of intellectual possibility” and the narrowing of both faculty and student voices.
“There is absolutely evidence that both of those are happening, and there are absolutely indicators of the University administration saying it’s not happening,” Foster said.
