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.
