The University of Austin Did Something Every College Should
The University of Austin (UATX) recently did something that should be commonplace in higher education but is surprisingly rare. The new university posted its entire undergraduate reading list online - 224 books, essays, and primary sources, course by course and professor by professor -for anyone to examine. Regardless of one's views of the school itself, that decision deserves attention and every college and university in America should consider doing the same.
The reading list itself is serious and demanding. Students read Dante’s Paradiso and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Plato and Machiavelli, Montaigne and Tocqueville, Jane Austen and Melville. A course on the ideological experiments of the twentieth century pairs Solzhenitsyn and Arendt with the primary documents of the regimes themselves.
More importantly, the school’s list reflects genuine viewpoint diversity and that is exactly what higher education should aspire to. This list is not an ideological monoculture; in economics, students read Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Keynes alongside Hayek, Mises, and Sowell. In a course on the legacy of slavery taught by Coleman Hughes, the students read Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project essay and the historians’ letter challenging it, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” and Hughes’s own reply, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Thomas Sowell’s history of slavery. This back and forth and the competition of ideas in the classroom because of the well balanced syllabi is exactly what genuine viewpoint diversity looks like and it deserves recognition.
What is really unusual here is that because the UATX list is public, we do not have to take the university’s word for being a place that seeks balance. We can directly verify and that is exactly what transparency is so critical to higher education.
As I have written before, at many colleges and universities, syllabi are functionally hidden. They sit behind password-protected course-management systems, visible only to enrolled students and sometimes not even released until the first day of class. Families paying significant sums of money and making sacrifices for their children’s college educations regularly cannot see what their children will actually read. They are, in effect, told to trust the education process without ever seeing it and then wonder why their children come home radicalized with little intellectual balance.
Unsurprisingly, this lack of academic transparency has real consequences. Gallup just reported that Americans' confidence in higher education has fallen back to 38 percent, far below where it stood a decade ago. The most common reason skeptics give is the belief that colleges pursue political agendas in the classroom. Whether that perception is accurate or not, institutions make it harder to answer by keeping their curricula largely out of public view. When people cannot see what is being taught, suspicion fills the gap.
Transparency avoids suspicion; it invites critique, and critique makes institutions better. Each time UATX has posted a term's readings, readers have gone to work on them - faulting an early list for containing nothing from the Jewish tradition and little science, and pressing a later one on whether students encountering critiques of progressive orthodoxy were getting an equally rigorous tour through feminist thought and critical race theory. That is not a failure of the exercise; it is exactly the exercise working.
Notably, the current UATX list answers some of those early critics: the Hebrew Bible now appears across multiple courses, and a full sequence in physics, calculus, and engineering sits alongside the great books. A published reading list is a public statement about what an institution believes an educated person should read. It can be challenged, defended, revised, and improved - which is exactly how an academic curriculum ought to develop. I have shared my reading lists for years and have benefitted greatly from feedback and critique and this is how academia should work.
Transparency also helps students and their families make better choices. Prospective students and their families are making one of the largest financial decisions of their lives with remarkably little information about the actual product. Glossy brochures regularly showcase climbing walls, dining halls, and state of the art rec centers; but almost none showcase what students will read. A prospective student should be able to compare what colleges actually ask students to read just as easily as they compare majors, housing or graduation rates. Institutions confident in their curricula should welcome that comparison. Those that resist inevitably invite the question: Why?
As we have already seen from various schools and organized faculty groups, some will object claiming that syllabi are faculty intellectual property, or that public exposure will chill pedagogical experimentation. I have addressed these arguments before; first when Florida’s Board of Governors required its public universities to post syllabi online, and again when the University of North Carolina system followed suit. In both cases, faculty warned of catastrophe predicting a loss of academic freedom and speech and in both cases the syllabi went up and teaching continued, just as it has in Texas, which has required public syllabi since 2009. We must remember that ideas assigned in a classroom of dozens of students were never secrets to begin with – they can and should be shared, debated, and interrogated.
What distinguishes UATX today is that no board or legislature compelled the school to do anything. What a handful of states have had to mandate, UATX has done voluntarily and it has wisely gone further by publishing not merely course syllabi but a consolidated, university-wide reading list. Some will dismiss this as marketing and, in one sense, they are right. But transparency is one of the few forms of marketing that also strengthens an institution. It says to the public: Here is what we teach and you can evaluate our work.
Finally, there is a lesson for the higher education community here and it is that transparency is one of the few reforms entirely within higher education's own control. Colleges and universities are in the midst of a crisis of confidence and public funding and colleges and universities will not rebuild public trust or see funding restored through better marketing campaigns or carefully crafted mission statements.
Funding will resume and trust will be rebuilt only by revealing what is actually done in the classroom. A curriculum should not be hidden from the families paying tuition, the alumni supporting institutions or the public being asked to trust and fund them. Publish the reading lists. Let prospective students, parents, alumni, trustees and scholars examine them for themselves and debate the ideas and values.
One need not agree with every title on UATX's reading list - or with every aspect of the university itself - to recognize the value of this decision. Transparency should not be unusual in higher education. It should be the norm. Colleges ask students every day to defend their ideas with evidence and reasoned argument. Institutions should be willing to do the same with the ideas they assign.
