FEATURED
The University of Texas at Austin has cut four majors in ethnic and gender studies amid plans to strip 113 “topic courses” of core curriculum eligibility beginning Spring 2027.
African and African diaspora studies, Mexican American and Latino studies, women’s and gender studies, and a planned race, indigeneity and migration major have been eliminated, according to an email to faculty. UT said current students may finish the three legacy degrees, while the department works to propose a new combined major.
The move comes as the Lone Star State’s flagship undertakes a broader overhaul of both degree programs and its core curriculum, Inside Higher Ed reported.
American studies Professor Lauren Gutterman told the publication she worries reducing the number of degree programs could eventually make faculty positions more vulnerable.
According to emails Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Michael Drew sent recently, “specialized and sometimes narrow” classes ranging from “Slavery and its Legacies” to “Rhetoric of Cuteness” are set to lose eligibility toward UT-Austin’s present 42-credit core curriculum requirement.
Courses that lose their core designation “will remain available as elective and major-specific courses,” Provost William Inboden wrote.
The course removals are part of a multi-year restructuring of the university’s core curriculum, driven in part by SB 37, a Texas law requiring that general education courses be “foundational and fundamental” and prepare students for a civic and professional life.
Texas A&M System regents also recently removed more than 200 courses from core eligibility under the law. As at UT-Austin, the removals included courses focused on race and gender, alongside climate change, Bible as literature, and other subjects. University of Houston system leaders in August similarly removed 133 courses from its core curriculum, from “Intro to Global Climate Change” to “Introduction to LGBT Studies.”
SB 37 additionally shifts authority away from professors, making faculty councils explicitly advisory bodies to university and system administrators, while requiring the governor-appointed board of regents to review general education at least every five years.
At UT-Austin, the curriculum changes are planned to phase in over the next several years, with a new 36-credit core curriculum designed by a 22-member faculty task force created by University President Jim Davis in late 2025.
The proposed curriculum would be structured around three pillars: Arts & Humanities, Social Sciences, and STEM, each divided into more specific requirements, 12 in all, including Western Civilization, Principles of American Politics, and Computer Science & AI.
“The goal is not to determine what students think,” Davis wrote in August, “but to ensure that they are capable of thinking well by exploring important ideas together.”
Task-force member Rich Reddick, meanwhile, voiced reservations about how the new framework would be implemented.
“Academic freedom is a big piece of this,” Reddick told The Texas Tribune. “I can’t imagine telling our faculty colleagues, ‘Here’s your syllabus, teach this.’ It’s not going to work.”
Though the task force designed the broad “umbrella” for the new core, it “did not have any role in eliminating specific courses,” task-force member Renita Coleman told The College Fix.
Coleman later identified Academic Affairs Assessment Manager Emily Hires as the official handling “core curriculum assessment.” Hires did not respond to The College Fix’s questions about her role in the 113-course review.
In records obtained by The College Fix, Drew also placed every core-designated course in the newly consolidated departments of Social and Cultural Analysis and of European and Eurasian Studies under review, calling it “part of the broader curricular review previously announced for these departments.”
Losing core eligibility can have consequences beyond whether a class fulfills graduation requirements. After “History of the Southeast Asian Diaspora in the U.S.” lost its U.S. History designation in January, reported enrollment fell low enough that the course was canceled for the semester.
“You’re not killing those classes yet, but the supply and demand is going to determine the catalog at some point,” Regent Chair Kevin Eltife said.
The core overhaul has also drawn support.
Thomas Lindsay, higher-education policy director for Next Generation Texas at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, wrote that the university is trying to restore “a sense that some things really are worth knowing.”
“The old Core had grown into hundreds of courses of widely varying quality and purpose. A student could satisfy the state’s American-history requirement without necessarily studying the American Revolution, the Constitution, the Civil War, or other events that every educated American should recognize as central to our nation’s story,” Lindsay wrote this month.
MORE: As Texas lawmakers crack down on DEI curriculum, lawsuits fly and professors revolt
