Without first-class public universities, Texas cannot be a first-class state
According to recent reports, Texas now boasts 16 top-tier universities, more than any other state. The majority are public institutions, including the University of Texas flagship here in Austin.
Our state's commitment to state-supported higher education goes all the way back to the Texas Constitution in 1876. Article 7 directs the Legislature to 'provide for the maintenance, support and direction of a University of the first class' to be called 'The University of Texas.' The very first responsibility of this university is 'the promotion of literature.'
Senate Bill 37, under consideration in the Texas Legislature, would change our public universities so radically that they would no longer be first-class.
Without first-class public universities, Texas cannot be a first-class state.
While the state Constitution affirms the connection between studying literature and a thriving citizenry, the members of the 89th Legislature apparently feel differently. Under SB 37, hiring for faculty positions in liberal arts, communication, education and social work — but no other fields — become the responsibility of a state governing board whose members would not necessarily have either disciplinary expertise in the relevant academic subjects or training in college-level teaching and learning.
Why does this matter to anyone besides a few professors? To put the question another way, what do we actually do in the liberal arts?
'Liberal' arts does not mean 'liberal' as distinct from 'conservative.' In this context, 'liberal' derives from the Latin word liber, 'free.' Liberal arts are the subjects which befit free people to study, and which enable us to flourish as a free society.
The core of the liberal arts is learning to ask good questions and to respond to those questions effectively. Students in liberal arts often explore enduring human issues that can never be resolved once and for all, but that we all wrestle with as members of a pluralistic society.
How do I balance my obligations to myself and my family with my responsibilities to larger groups, such as my town, my workplace, and my country?
How do I work with people different from me to achieve goals that benefit us all?
How do I live my own deeply held values in a way that acknowledges that other people have different values that they believe in equally deeply?
None of these questions has one 'right' answer. Yet all of us ask them, often repeatedly, throughout our lives. Students in the liberal arts explore these questions through the subject-area expertise of their professors and by engaging with the variety of perspectives among their fellow students about human experiences that are brought to life in the art and literature of different times and places.
Such experiences not only characterize a successful college experience, but effective workplaces. Public universities hobbled by SB 37 would not simply violate Article 7 of the Texas Constitution. They would also endanger the Texas economy, to which public universities contribute billions of dollars annually.
Knowing how to ask a good question has never been more important than it is now, because of the increasing presence of AI in our lives. The information we get out of AI is only as good as the prompts we give it. Anyone who has used AI knows that it takes time, effort and know-how to create a good question.
Fostering transformative learning experiences for the young people of Texas is the most challenging and the most rewarding thing I have ever done. Combining deep subject area expertise with teaching experience in order to grapple with crucial human questions for the benefit of individuals and society is the work of a lifetime.
That is what makes a university first-class. Not faculty hired by political appointees, and certainly not SB 37.
Deborah Beck is the Christie and Stanley E. Adams, Jr. Centennial Professor in Liberal Arts and professor of classics at the University of Texas.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: State lawmakers want to strangle liberal arts in Texas | Opinion
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