https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articl...54458.html
Texas is at least trying:
"...The forces favoring inertia, if not dereliction of duty, at large-scale organizations operate at most if not all colleges and universities. However, higher education lacks the discipline imposed by the profit motive. And at colleges and universities, tenure exacerbates the forces securing the status quo.
Academic tenure provides a vivid example of the law of unintended consequences. Created to safeguard academic freedom, tenure aims to empower scholars to follow the evidence and argument where they lead without fear that administrators and colleagues will fire them for vexing findings, unorthodox interpretations, and disagreeable speculations. In practice, however, tenure fosters a culture of conformity. It creates a clubby atmosphere – for the tenured professors – in departments, faculties, and disciplines. With substantial deference from the university administration, tenured professors confer tenure. Being human, they often expand and consolidate their career-making and career-breaking power by promoting candidates who can be counted on to share the tenured professors’ scholarly priorities, carry forward their research paradigms, and uphold their political opinions....
Accordingly, the staunch efforts of University of Texas at Austin President James E. Davis and Executive Vice President and Provost William Inboden to reform the university’s core curriculum deserve special attention. Last fall they created a task force to tackle the job. ...
The problems start with the current core’s basic approach. Students must take one or a few courses in each of 10 different areas encompassing the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. In practice, the core sets forth a large smorgasbord of classes revolving too much around professors’ specialized research interests and too little around students’ interest in acquiring a well-structured liberal education. The primary common experience the current core provides students is jumping through arbitrary hoops.
In contrast, the UT Austin task force proposes a core that offers “a rigorous and cohesive curriculum based on what students most need to learn in their first years of college.” The new core puts students first, featuring “realms of study and modes of inquiry,” emphasizing “fundamental themes and questions,” and helping students prosper “as thoughtful citizens, well-educated human beings, and capable members of the workforce with the adaptability they will need in an evolving economy.”
The proposed core comprises three principal categories. Students will take five classes in “Arts & Humanities” – one each in “Culture and the Arts,” “Great Questions of Human Life,” “Masterworks of Literature,” “U.S. History,” and “Western Civilization.” Students will take three classes in “Social Sciences” – one each in “Principles of American Politics,” “World Politics and Cultures,” and “Foundations of Social Science.” And students will take four courses in “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math” (STEM) – one each in “Great Ideas in Science,” “Natural Science & Engineering,” “Math, Statistics, & Data Science,” and “Computer Science & AI....”
These major reforms face major obstacles.
Can enough tenured faculty be persuaded to participate in the new core? If persuaded, will tenured professors, frequently themselves the product of an undergraduate education bereft of a coherent core and recipients of a graduate education centered on narrow research agendas, possess the wide learning, classroom skills, and temperament to assist students in exploring fundamental ideas, enduring questions, and clashing opinions? Can the Provost’s office and the committees overseeing the core’s major categories overcome the ingrained habits, stable and predictable procedures, and accumulation of experience that enable colleges and universities to function while also aggravating their malfunction?..."
Article suggests an even more tightly defined core, but points out that would also increase resistance.
