A series of faculty committees will assist the University of Texas at Austin’s senior campus leadership in enacting recently announced changes to the university’s core curriculum.
Provost William Inboden informed faculty of the new structure on Wednesday.
“These committees bring together excellent, dedicated faculty from across disciplines to review courses in their respective areas,” Inboden’s email stated.
The committees will cover three broad jurisdictions:
- Arts & Humanities Committee
Great Questions of Human Life; Western Civilization; U.S. History; Masterworks of Literature; and Culture and the Arts. - Social Sciences Committee
Principles of American Politics; World Politics and Cultures; and Foundations of Social Science. - STEM Committee
Great Ideas in Science; Computer Science and AI; Natural Science and Engineering; and Math, Statistics, and Data Science.
Membership of the first two committees largely featured members of the university’s School of Civic Leadership and the College of Liberal Arts. The STEM committee is primarily from the College of Natural Sciences, with a handful from the Jackson School of Geosciences and the Cockrell School of Engineering.
The new committees will function as part of a new “university college” acting as “the guardian of the Core Curriculum,” university President Jim Davis announced in a speech last week.
Davis unveiled the new core curriculum at the August meeting of the UT System Board of Regents.
This followed a curriculum review that was undertaken after the passage of Senate Bill 37, a 2025 state law that reformed several aspects of university governance.
As part of those changes, the new law requires governing boards of taxpayer-subsidized university systems to conduct a review of all general education curricula every five years. General education requirements are a set of courses all students must complete, regardless of major.
Higher education authors Jason Brennan and Phil Magness have criticized these mandates as a subsidy for economically unsustainable programs that frequently protect woke curricula from accountability.
The new core has a series of requirements in arts and humanities, artificial intelligence, social sciences, and STEM. Inboden recently rejected a series of grievance studies-themed materials for it.
UT-Austin is a component of the University of Texas System. The UT System is overseen by a Board of Regents that is appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Texas Senate. Kevin Eltife of Tyler is the current board chair.
