Half of assigned readings must come from the approved list, which includes Morrison, Plato, Shakespeare and Marx.
Photo illustration by Inside Higher Ed | Wikimedia Commons | Public Domain
When the task force charged with creating the University of Texas at Austin’s new core curriculum unveiled its plan in August, the report noted that professors teaching two of the new courses—Great Questions of Human Life and Masterworks of Literature—will be required to assign texts from a curated list of preapproved authors. This week the university shared with faculty the list of authors for one of those courses.
In designing their syllabi for Great Questions of Human Life, professors must select readings from among 50 preapproved names—up from the 40 the task force estimated in August. Among them are playwright William Shakespeare, theologians Martin Luther and Thomas Aquinas, and philosophers Karl Marx, Confucius and Plato, some of whose writings were banned at Texas A&M University during a recent course review.
For each Great Questions of Human Life course, half of the assigned texts must come from the list of 50 approved authors—another tweak from the original proposal, which stated two-thirds of the texts must come from approved names.
The course is part of the new core curriculum’s arts and humanities pillar—the others are social sciences and STEM—and its goal is to “build foundational skills in rigorous textual analysis, oral presentation, evidence-based writing, and civil discussions across competing viewpoints,” according to a new prospectus of the course shared with Inside Higher Ed. Faculty have until Oct. 19 to submit proposals for fall 2027 and spring 2028 Great Questions of Human Life courses.
The initial list was put together by a handful of people, said Devin Stauffer, a government professor and chair of the task force. But the university intends to expand the list to as many as 100 authors over the current academic year. Once those 100 authors are approved, professors will need to draw at least 75 percent of reading materials from the list, the prospectus says.
Expanding the list will be a “more widely consultative” process, Stauffer said.
“The vision is, we'll draw faculty from the humanities and from around campus and figure out a process for turning the list from 50 to 100,” he said. “This is just the first cut.”
Stauffer told Inside Higher Ed in August that the task force intended the lists to “create something of a common experience for the students.” Some professors who teach English, history and other humanities disciplines at UT Austin, however, expressed concern that the lists would not include enough women or authors of color. The current list of 50 includes six women—Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Simone de Beauvoir, Toni Morrison and Mary Ann Evans, who used the pen name George Eliot. Four nonwhite authors—Confucius, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois and Morrison—are included on the list.
The executive committee of UT Austin's chapter of the American Association of University Professors said they were “disappointed and dismayed” by the list of authors.
“The list is backward looking rather than forward thinking,” they wrote in a statement to Inside Higher Ed. “Not one living author is included. This is not a list of authors aimed at preparing students for life and work in the 21st century. UT should allow faculty who teach a course on Great Questions of Human Life to choose the texts that best offer multiple perspectives on the particular questions they are considering. Anything less disrespects both faculty and students.”
