The American Association of University Professors at UT Austin

August 10, 2026 – Austin, TX

In late July, members of the UT Austin faculty discovered a website, humanities.utexas.edu, announcing a new Center for the Humanities housed in UT’s School for Civic Leadership. The center boasts 14 newly hired humanities faculty––nine of whom are assistant professors, including two who have not yet completed their PhDs––along with one postdoctoral fellow. Five  of these faculty come from the University of Florida, including its new director, Robert G. Ingram, who was Provost William Inboden’s successor as director of the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Civic Education. 

The fact that this new center was not publicly announced to the UT community is concerning. More alarming is the Center’s description: “The Center for the Humanities is a new interdisciplinary unit focused on teaching and research tied to UT Austin’s core curriculum and the academic opportunities that emerge from it” (emphasis added). UT President Jim Davis announced a hand-selected committee last fall to evaluate UT’s core curriculum, a committee whose work was allegedly completed in May of this year, but to date, no one in the UT community has received any updates from the committee. Now a new, unannounced center’s website  explicitly states its teaching and research will be tied to UT’s core curriculum.

UT’s College of Liberal Arts is  globally renowned for its vibrant humanities-based curriculum, which includes faculty with decades of research and teaching expertise, many in the very Western Civilization-oriented fields the new Center for the Humanities seems set to emphasize. COLA’s Plan II Honors program was founded in 1935 and for nearly a century has been lauded as one of the nation’s premier liberal arts honors programs. In the realm of research, COLA already houses a Humanities Institute, which has long been a hub for humanities scholars to share ideas, garner research support, and host events. 

The School for Civic Leadership is duplicating the work of  already existing intellectual centers and programs on UT Austin’s campus. Last year, SCL announced the donor-funded Ackerman Program on Jewish and Western Civilization, which replicates much of the work of COLA’s Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies. After securing a non-competitive $10 million grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities last year, SCL has hired several faculty with liberal arts degrees including in economics, history, and political science. None of these faculty appear to hold joint appointments with their disciplines in COLA, nor does it appear they were vetted by faculty experts in those departments. 

Politically-appointed administrators at UT have criticized the liberal arts within American universities as too focused on structural inequality and too critical of the “Western tradition.” This critique merits consideration in an open forum. But the changes underway at UT suggest an as yet unannounced plan for SCL to take over much of the humanities-based teaching and research occurring within COLA without such a forum ever occurring. This unprecedented political interference in teaching at research at UT Austin should raise alarms for students and alumni alike. Not only will these changes harm UT Austin’s reputation as an international leader in higher education, but they will seriously hamper the ability of students to learn and pursue their interests freely. 

AAUP at UT Austin is committed to its core organizational mission of academic freedom. This means there should be room on our campus for faculty and students of diverse viewpoints to engage each other in a spirit of open inquiry. That commitment extends to faculty and students of conservative viewpoints, whose academic freedom we defend as strenuously as we would those of a politically liberal viewpoint.

The essential function of a university is to provide a space for people of diverse viewpoints to encounter each other, engage in respectful dialogue, and make up their own minds. AAUP at UT’s view is that the best place for those challenging conversations to happen is in the classroom, not inside ideologically-defined campus silos. By isolating conservative viewpoints inside such siloes and imposing these views on students through curricular mandates, administrators risk stripping students of their intellectual liberty, facilitating the creation of echo chambers that harm conservative students and faculty as much as they do left-leaning students and faculty. 

AAUP at the University of Texas at Austin has the following questions for UT’s upper administration:

• Why has a center been created on the UT Austin campus that duplicates already-existing faculty and course offerings in the College of Liberal Arts? 
• What unmet need is being filled with the center’s creation?
• Why has this center and its goals not been openly and transparently announced to the campus community?
• Who is funding the creation of this center and its ongoing operations? 
• Why have the faculty already hired into these positions not been vetted by their expert peers on our campus in a jarring departure from all campus norms and past procedures?
• Does the center have an overtly partisan mission, and will UT students be required to further this mission through mandated course offerings in the core curriculum?

UT Austin is a public university funded by the tuition payments of Texas families and Texas citizens’ taxpayer dollars. UT students, parents, and Texas taxpayers deserve transparency and accountability for how UT administrators are stewarding those funds. AAUP at UT Austin seeks immediate answers to the questions raised by the establishment of the Center for Humanities.