The University of Texas at Austin is cashing in on a major humanities boost, announcing plans to launch two new undergraduate majors in its School of Civic Leadership, Great Books and Strategy and Statecraft, powered by a $10 million grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The funding is geared toward small‑group humanities instruction while building practical routes into public service, medicine and national security careers. Pending approval from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, the majors are scheduled to debut in Fall 2027, and students applying to UT in this fall’s admissions cycle will already be able to select either option.
Grant details and timeline
According to UT Austin News, the $10 million NEH award will pay for 16 new faculty positions across both majors as part of a multi‑year effort to staff seminar‑style classes and capstone projects. Strategy and Statecraft is set up to combine close reading of foundational texts and diplomatic and military history with technical training and internship placements for students who want to move into foreign policy and national security work.
What students will study
The Great Books major is designed to plunge undergraduates into the texts that have shaped Western civilization, while Strategy and Statecraft will concentrate on the theory and history of strategy from American and global perspectives, paired with hands‑on preparation. The School of Civic Leadership, which welcomed its inaugural cohort in Fall 2025, already leans heavily on constitutional heritage, economic numeracy and a capstone thesis, creating the organizational backbone for the two new tracks, per the School of Civic Leadership.
Where this fits
The move slots into a broader UT campaign to bulk up civic and national security education, a trend that has also included a separate $10 million gift to the university’s Clements Center that expanded fellowships and student programming. Reporting by the Houston Chronicle noted that these investments are intended to build pipelines into government and defense careers for undergraduates.
Civic literacy and the pitch
Alexander Duff, an associate professor in the School of Civic Leadership, casts the new degrees as a response to what he calls low civic literacy, pointing to a statistic that fewer than 1 in 5 Americans can name the three branches of government. He argues that graduates should be able to talk about justice and liberty with the same confidence they bring to coding or data analysis. UT officials say the majors are meant to fuse judgment‑building across the humanities with the technical skills employers want, with faculty hiring expected to track the state’s curriculum approval process.
The proposals still need sign‑off from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board before they show up in university catalogs, and UT says recruitment for the new faculty lines and detailed curricular planning will begin once the grant is finalized. The university listed Mike Rosen in University Marketing and Communications as the media contact for the rollout.
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