Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the National Association of Scholars’s weekly CounterCurrent newsletter on August 18, 2026. My colleague Kali Jerrard does an excellent job each week covering the latest developments in higher education, and I’m happy to crosspost her work here. To subscribe or browse past editions, visit the CounterCurrent archive.

The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) has unveiled a proposed overhaul of its core curriculum, strengthening its general education requirements based on three pillars: the Arts & Humanities, the Social Sciences, and STEM.

The UT Austin Core Curriculum Task Force Report has drawn considerable attention because of its extensive nature—many education reformers are hopeful of the changes that would take place beginning in the fall 2028 semester. Last fall, a 22-member task force was convened by UT Austin President Jim Davis. Esteemed university faculty, along with Melinda Zook of Purdue University and Roosevelt Montás of Bard College, came together to create the three pillars of the proposed core: 15 credits in the Arts & Humanities, 9 credits in the Social Sciences, and 12 credits in STEM. The task force also took input from students, other faculty, and deans during the process.

Devin Stauffer, the Chair of the Core Curriculum Task Force and Professor of Government at UT Austin, shared with me in a recent interview that the committee drew inspiration from other notable core curricula, specifically Columbia and the University of Chicago, along with Purdue University’s Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts program.

“It was a good process,” Stauffer said. “I think there were serious discussions where there was a range of views, but it was amicable. It wasn’t especially political; it was really focused on the educational challenge and trying to do something that we thought was educationally sound.”

Major changes to the core curriculum include considerably narrowing the hundreds of available course options to a smaller menu of options centered “around foundational texts, broad fields of study, and what the university calls the ‘fundamental questions and themes’ of human life,” as well as reducing required core curriculum credit hours from 42 to 36. These changes will effectively end the free-for-all grab-bag of available classes, broadening study, and deepening knowledge among students.

“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 report notes. The new proposed core would solve this issue, as it is “a rigorous and cohesive curriculum based on what students most need to learn in their first years of college.” One example from the university’s press release on the report describes the problem plaguing the current core curriculum,

[W]hile standard U.S. History classes are available, because of the number of specialized courses that also count toward the state U.S. History requirement, a student could fulfill all six hours of U.S. History and never study the American Revolution, the U.S. Constitution, the Civil War, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II and other defining moments in the history of our country.

The report task force drew guidance for its work from four principles:

1. The interests of the students should be paramount.
2. The core should be structured by realms of study and modes of inquiry.
3. Core courses should be about fundamental questions and themes.
4. The core should prepare students both for further study and for life.

UT Austin’s last core curriculum review and update took place in 2004, so serious introspection by the university was long overdue. While UT Austin was a leader among Texas universities in publishing its core curriculum assessment, it is not alone in this process, as the University of Houston, Texas A&M University, and Texas Tech University have also announced similar reviews of their core curricula.

Spurring public Texas universities into action is Senate Bill 37 (SB 37), which was signed into law last year. SB 37 gives governing boards more authority to review and reject general education course offerings at a governing board’s discretion and requires universities to review general education curricula every five years. UT Austin’s new core curriculum satisfies the conditions of the legislation. SB 37 corresponds with other Texas initiatives to crack down on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and other activist ideologies in higher education. (Whether this has worked is unclear.)

Whether or not the reviews and proposed curricula at Texas colleges and universities remain a long-term commitment is also something to monitor. Since public university governing boards are appointed by the state governor, and SB 37 gives these boards more power over institutions, shifting political winds could destabilize any progress currently being made. Let’s hope that these institutions truly see the need for change and strengthening their core curricula and are not merely going where the political storm blows.

All too often, college and university core curriculum becomes sprawling, unruly, and far too narrow in areas of study. One example at UT Austin is that students could take “The History of College Football” and fulfill part of the U.S. History core credit requirements—this would no longer be the case under the new core. Stauffer hopes that UT Austin’s new core will serve as an inspiration to other colleges and universities who share the same sentiment that core curricula have become too fragmented. Regarding the university’s new core curriculum, Stauffer said,

I’m proud of what we came up with. I think it’s a serious improvement; it may need some refining over time. We’ll see. My hope is that it takes root well at Texas and gives the students a better foundational education …

He went on to say,

You can think broadly of what we were trying to do. That cores all over the country have, I think, fragmented into distribution requirements with a whole lot of narrow courses put in very general buckets. We are testing the proposition: is it possible to reverse that trend? And to try to restore a coherent core.

Professors instructing core classes can find proposed requirements and criteria within the report. Additionally, core classes will have oversight by three separate oversight committees upon implementation (one committee for each core curriculum pillar), along with a few subcommittees for certain classes. The new core classes will be slowly phased in before the 2028 fall semester to test for snags and streamline the process.

Expanding the humanities influence within the UT Austin core piqued my interest, as all too often, higher education throws humanities and great books instruction aside in favor of activism. This gives me hope that UT Austin students will be instructed with renewed rigor and will be impressed upon the importance of academic excellence and virtuous citizenship. Critics and skeptics may find the new requirements limiting and worry that moving certain classes outside the core will further weaken departments like ethnic studies and women’s and gender studies. Which many would argue should not be in the core curriculum to begin with.

UT Austin’s Core Curriculum Task Force Report is a promising start at one of Texas’s flagship universities to renew academic excellence. With hope that the new UT Austin core remains impervious to malign ideological influence and mission creep under the guidance of faculty and committee oversight, this is very good news out of the Lone Star State. Other colleges and universities should take inspiration.