UT Austin creates a University College to run a slimmer core curriculum that would be required by 2028

The University of Texas at Austin is creating a new college to oversee the required courses every undergraduate takes, part of an overhaul that would shrink the flagship's core curriculum and make it mandatory by 2028, KUT reported.

UT President Jim Davis announced the University College in his State of the University address Wednesday and named government professor Devin Stauffer its dean. Stauffer chaired the 22-member faculty task force whose recommendations became the new core.

What would change

Students today choose from a core that had grown to more than 1,000 courses. The new version would offer far fewer, require 36 credit hours instead of 42, and sort classes into three groups: arts and humanities, social sciences, and STEM. The task force's August report described the old core as a "set of random boxes to be checked."

Courses would start being offered in fall 2027, taught at first by existing faculty. Stauffer told KUT the university has received 1,200 applications from people wanting to teach core courses. The new college will also house a Center for Humanities that opened this fall.

The plan still needs approval from the UT System Board of Regents and the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. State law currently requires public university cores of at least 42 semester credit hours, and Stauffer said the coordinating board is rewriting those rules, a process he expects to take two to three years to align.

Supporters and critics

Stauffer said he hopes the core becomes a model for other universities and shows students and faculty that UT now treats general education as a priority. He said the task force wanted to rein in what he described as professors' freedom to teach whatever fit their narrow research interests, while not shutting out any perspective.

Some faculty see it differently. Several courses were left off the new list, among them classes on gender and sexuality studies, LGBTQ literature and the legacies of slavery. The American Association of University Professors said in a statement Wednesday that the core centers Western civilization and will leave students poorly prepared for a global workplace.

The School of Undergraduate Studies, which used to oversee the core, was folded into the provost's office in 2025, KUT reported.

Pauline Strong, a professor of Native American and Indigenous studies and an AAUP member, called the new college "a wholesale replacement of a college by a new college" and said many staff with years of experience lost their jobs when the old school was closed.

The university has also drawn criticism from students and faculty for making a series of changes, including merging departments and eliminating majors, without their input, according to KUT.

Sources

kut.org