An Analysis of the Undergraduate Curriculum at the University of Texas at Austin, 2011–2025

Executive Summary

This report draws on a comprehensive dataset of syllabi to present a portrait of the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) from 2011 to 2025. With an eye to the breadth and balance of UT’s curriculum, our report proceeds in two parts: the first focuses on American civics; the second, on great books. Here are some of the main findings:

• UT’s curriculum has notable strengths. For example, its great books curriculum in philosophy has remained strong. Classical and Anglo-American authors are still commonly assigned, even as the curriculum has expanded to include more critical theorists. In fact, students have more opportunities to study Enlightenment thinkers as well as critical theorists than they once did.
• The literary canon is diversifying somewhat as well, but literary authors are assigned much less often today than they once were—and epics are less frequently taught together, leaving fewer opportunities to study the epic tradition from Homer to Milton.
• Classics from the conservative intellectual tradition are rarely taught. Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution, for example, is taught just a couple of times every year.
• Students at UT are required to take an introductory course in American and Texan politics, ensuring that all students learn about the American constitutional order. Elective offerings in American history and politics, on the other hand, tend to exclude important ideas. Liberal and centrist public intellectuals—not just conservative ones—are rarely assigned.
• UT’s curriculum has become more focused on race, gender, and social justice. And while these topics are important, they are generally not taught in ways that address wider scholarly controversies and may crowd out other issues of public significance; for example, many of the nation’s prominent non-left Black social scientists are rarely assigned in these courses.
• Even as elective offerings in American politics increasingly focus on inequality, UT’s curriculum shows little interest in America’s class divisions. Additionally, some of the most contentious issues in American politics, like racial bias in the criminal justice system and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, are generally taught in ways that do not open out into wider scholarly controversies.

Our primary aim in this report is simply to make UT’s curriculum more legible. We conclude, though, by observing that the recent civics reform movement—both at UT and around the country—has been focused on course offerings that feature foundational texts. At Texas, such efforts may help account for the enduring vitality of the philosophical canon. Our findings, however, suggest that it may be time to give more attention to UT’s elective offerings on the American experience—its people, controversies, and history.