In September 2025, a month after William Inboden began his tenure as provost of The University of Texas at Austin, National Affairs published a long essay of his, “Restoring the Academic Social Contract,” that made a lot of waves in higher education circles. It began from the premise that higher education has breached its “contract” with the American people, too often failing in its twofold mission to educate citizens fit for a pluralistic democracy and to contribute research and scholarship that benefits society in various ways. In that essay and a series of fairly high-profile interviews he’s done since, including with The Chronicle of Higher Education, he also sketched out a vision for how to set things right.
In this interview with Inboden, who has a joint faculty appointment in the Department of History and the School of Civic Leadership, we discuss some of those issues as well as his personal background, his academic training, and his experience serving in the State Department and the White House.
Inboden’s most recent book is The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink (Dutton). He is also the author of Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960: The Soul of Containment (Cambridge University Press), co-editor of The Last Card: Inside George W. Bush’s Decision to Surge in Iraq (Cornell University Press), and co-editor of Hand-Off: The Foreign Policy George W. Bush Passed to Barack Obama (Brookings Institution Press).
During his first stint at UT Austin, from 2010-2023, Inboden was a faculty member at the LBJ School, founding executive director of the Clements Center for National Security, and founding editor-in-chief of the Texas National Security Review. Most recently, he served as director of the Alexander Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida and as Peterson Senior Fellow with the Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. We spoke in his temporary office (while the Tower is being renovated) in the Flawn Academic Center.
When did you fall in love with the study of history?
I grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and looking back now, I can see that my love of history started with the physical and material environment around me, and also with my dad’s love of exploring. He was an amateur prospector, a gold miner, as a hobby, and he had a real love of Native American history. I have memories from 4 or 5 years old of exploring abandoned ghost towns and mines around southern Arizona, visiting old Native American settlements, digging up pottery shards, things like that. I grew up with this love of the past from the physical culture around us.
There was another part of the Tucson material culture that I now can look back on and see was formative in my early love of history, which is the airplane graveyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. You may have seen pictures of it; it shows up in a lot of 1980s music videos. Almost every plane the U.S. Air Force has ever retired sits in that scrapyard in the desert outside Tucson, and the site also includes the Pima Air Museum, the biggest outdoor air museum in the world. I was a regular visitor there as a kid. Seeing those planes just gave me this fascination with military history, World War II, and Cold War history.
My mom also took me to the public library every week, and from early on I loved reading history books. I remember being in elementary school already assuming I’d major in history in college, and I never really lost that.
One other formative vignette: I went to a big public high school in Tucson, and my junior year I had AP U.S. history with Mr. Caruso. He was the first teacher to open my eyes to a more sophisticated approach to history. I’ll never forget the first day of class, when he’s asking us to define what history is, and we’re all fumbling around. We say vague things like “looking at old things,” “avoiding the mistakes of the past,” things like that. Then he said, “History is studying the past to learn the truth about ourselves.”
It made intuitive sense, but I’d never heard it put that way: history as part of a broader humanistic enterprise, connected to the transcendent questions of life. He was such a captivating teacher and became a wonderful mentor for me. He helped connect those threads from my earlier childhood — the antiquarian parts, the material culture — to history as the study of ideas and the human experience.
So it was an easy choice from day one of college to major in history and eventually do a Ph.D. in it.
Was there any time off between undergrad and the Ph.D.?
Yes, and this is an important part of my story. I did my senior thesis at Stanford under American historian David Kennedy, who was a Bancroft and Pulitzer Prize winner. He was my mentor and thesis advisor. (UT Austin history professor) Jeremi Suri was his other student that year. Kennedy encouraged both of us to do Ph.D.s, and I’m very grateful for that. I hadn’t thought about it much before that, but if David Kennedy says I can do this, then maybe I can do this. But I just didn’t feel quite ready to go straight into grad school. I wanted to take at least a year off and do something else, and that actually turned into four years.
I moved to D.C. and worked on Capitol Hill. My first two years I worked for Sam Nunn, the Georgia Democrat, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He was a wonderful boss, a great statesman, and that was an incredible learning experience. I’m still in touch with him.
I was pretty low on the totem pole, doing junior legislative foreign policy work with a focus on human rights and international religious freedom, and some speechwriting, but it was still great exposure.
When Nunn retired from the Senate — I would’ve stayed working for him, I loved it — I moved over to the House of Representatives and worked for Tom DeLay — the Republican majority whip, known as “The Hammer,” out of the Houston area — for two and a half years. I had a foreign policy position with him as well.
Those four years on Capitol Hill were fascinating. I was privileged to be part of some very interesting legislative work — including a lot of work on human rights and international religious freedom — and I learned how the legislative process actually works. But by that point I’d gotten fairly burned out on politics, and I still had this interest in doing a Ph.D., so I applied to Yale, got in, and started grad school thinking I would never go back to D.C.
Let’s talk about the liberal arts and the humanities in particular. Enrollments for humanities majors and a lot of the social sciences have been trending down the past few decades. Is that an inexorable decline, or is there a way back for the liberal arts? And if there’s a way back, what is it?
I’m an optimist on the future of the liberal arts, and I say that as someone who has been quite critical of what I see as the self-inflicted damage the liberal arts have done to themselves across higher education.
We have the liberal arts for a reason. They are the intellectual heart of The University of Texas, of any great university, and I think we’re starting to see the beginnings of a deeper appreciation for the fact that if we are losing the liberal arts, we are losing a fundamental part of our soul as a people.
This is where the unfolding AI revolution is forcing an important conversation and a renewed appreciation for the liberal arts, both as a body of knowledge and as a set of skills. There is a body of knowledge, a canon, that any well-educated person in a free society should know. But there’s also the skills the liberal arts cultivate. It’s a very particular sort of skill to write an essay, write a research paper, read a whole book from start to finish. We’ve taken that for granted, but it doesn’t necessarily come naturally.
Writing is thinking. I may have a jumble of ideas kicking around in my head, but I have to start writing to force myself to think through them. The cognitive skills necessary to flourish as a human being and to be a successful professional will atrophy if we don’t force ourselves to cultivate them. The liberal arts are really key for that. As we continue to revise and develop the new core curriculum over the next year or two, I think the campus is going to see that the liberal arts have a very important role to play both as a body of knowledge and for skills development that might otherwise atrophy in the new AI era. We’re already hearing that anecdotally from employers. There are a lot of tech companies saying they actually like hiring liberal arts students.
So those are some of the reasons I’m bullish on the future of the liberal arts. COLA is one of UT’s crown jewels. We have some phenomenal departments in the College of Liberal Arts, lots of incredible scholars. It’s still one of our largest colleges in terms of student enrollment, and I don’t see that going away.
Let’s talk about the National Affairs essay you published shortly after you arrived here. What’s the elevator pitch summary of your argument?
The elevator pitch is that, as a historian, I was trying to make sense of how we got to this present moment of a crisis of public trust in American higher education. Using social contract theory, I posited that over the last century a social contract developed between the American people and elite research universities. The basic contours go something like this: The American people provide substantial federal funding for research, federal support for tuition through the GI Bill and Pell Grants, and the cultural and legal protections of tenure, academic freedom, and significant autonomy for research and teaching.
They also account for the symbolic power of universities. Why do we think a university diploma means something? Why do we think a diploma from some universities means more than one from others? I think there’s something real there representing a substantial educational accomplishment, but it’s also just because we’ve decided it means something, that it signifies something, and that decision is made by the public. If the entire country decided those diplomas were worthless, universities would lose a significant part of their power.
Those are most of the benefits the American people, sometimes through elected representatives, have provided universities. In exchange, to oversimplify, the universities’ part of the social contract was twofold. On the teaching front, the expectation was that universities would equip students not just to be professionals but to be citizens. Self-government is a tremendous privilege but also a real responsibility, and exercising it in a pluralistic democracy means educating students to love their country, recognize its flaws, and be devoted to it. Then on the scholarly side, the expectation was that universities would produce research that was useful and meaningful and provided benefits to society, and also, in the humanities and social sciences, help advance the discovery of the true, the good, and the beautiful, and foster real insights into the human condition and human flourishing.
My argument was that while the American people had for the most part upheld their part of the social contract, universities had — in different ways and to different extents on both components — abandoned or shirked or not fully lived up to their end. And hence we have the recent tumult of all these controversies, university presidents being forced out, pressure from Congress and state legislators and the White House.
We should talk about the consolidation of seven departments in the College of Liberal Arts into two new departments, which went into effect this fall. How do you see this fitting into your and the president’s larger vision of the university and of the College of Liberal Arts in particular?
I think a really important level-setting principle for that decision is that back in the fall of 2025, the president and I asked all of our academic units to take a fresh look at themselves and ask: Are you organized in the best way? Are your department structures most optimized, in terms of resource allocation, staffing levels, and things like that, when it comes to both student demand and interest and areas of faculty and research strength?
In a number of parts of the university, including COLA, it became apparent that these were not the most optimal structures, that resources weren’t being best aligned with areas of student interest or research promise.
One example is the School of Information. We determined that it made sense to wind it down as a school and instead make it a department in the new School of Computing, alongside computer science and statistics and data science, within the College of Natural Sciences. There was certainly a lot of consternation when it was first announced, but we’re already seeing positive returns in terms of faculty forming good research collaborations with others in computer science and statistics and data science. I think that was the right decision.
There are a couple of other similar reorganizations going on elsewhere in the university, and I think that this level-setting context is important, because affected faculty or students in one particular department may feel like they’re being singled out, but this is taking place in other parts of the university too.
Within the College of Liberal Arts, the two areas the review focused on were some of the area studies and some of the European languages and cultures departments. And just as one point of comparison, the College of Natural Sciences is roughly the same size as COLA but has 12 departments, while COLA has roughly twice that number. Within that, when you look at faculty lines and staff numbers relative to undergraduate majors, there are some wildly disproportionate allocations of resources. That quickly surfaced areas where we could better steward resources while still keeping those faculty and a lot of the same classes. A lot of what those departments were doing will now just be part of the consolidated departments, European and Eurasian Studies and Social and Cultural Analysis.
One of the things I’ve said at various points to people in the administration is that it feels like, for a long time, it’s been all sticks and no carrots for the COLA community.
My guess is that if you did an anonymous survey of COLA faculty, you’d be surprised at how many of them were broadly sympathetic to the way you frame things in the National Affairs article. I don’t know if it’s a majority, but it’s probably at least a healthy minority, and there are others in the college who maybe don’t agree with the overall vision but who would be totally happy to collaborate with the Tower if they saw a constructive way forward. They want that vision.
Can you paint for me an affirming, optimistic vision that most of us within the COLA community can look at and say, “Hey, we can be a vital, forward-looking community again.”
Okay, I’ll try to bring together a few threads I put out there earlier. First, I see the liberal arts as the intellectual heart of the university. I hope that’s a very strong validation. And this may be the first time in UT’s history, or at least the first time in many years, that you have a president and a provost who were both liberal arts majors in college. We know of what we speak, and we care about it deeply.
Second, look at the new core curriculum requirements for the university, with COLA being strongly represented on the faculty task force. COLA could be a very important academic unit for teaching and offering a significant number of these core curriculum classes. That is more than just happy talk about being the intellectual heart of the university. For every entering UT freshman, starting a couple of years from now, a substantial number of those core curriculum classes are going to be offered by COLA faculty and COLA departments. I hope that’s grounds for optimism.
Another area where I expect to see new growth and prioritization for the university are courses and programs around national security, foreign policy, and international relations. COLA already has very substantial strengths there, a lot of really stellar faculty, and I see more growth and new searches replenishing and growing the ranks.
I also think there’s going to be a hunger, across academia, for a new generation of scholars who can teach in Western civilization and civic thought programs. A number of COLA Ph.D. programs, if done right, can be great sources of new faculty talent for those. So we’re likely to see improved job prospects for our graduate students in some realms where hiring has been tight for a long time.
The new initiatives on campus that are liberal arts adjacent, like the School of Civic Leadership, the Clements Center, and the Civitas Institute, see COLA as an important partner. My own faculty appointment, which is held jointly between history and the School of Civic Leadership, is no accident. I see real opportunities for continued growth in terms of collaborations between COLA and these units.
Finally, the academic medical center is probably the most important new initiative this university has in front of it for the next many years. It’s a very big focus for President Davis, and it’s very important that it be integrated as much as possible with the rest of the academic mission of the whole university. That has implications not just for the obvious partners, like natural sciences, engineering, and pharmacy, but for COLA as well. Whether we’re thinking about ethics of healthcare and medicine, human psychology, the economics and finance of healthcare, or the history of medicine, these are areas of strength for the liberal arts. Our departments all have real roles to play. As that signature new initiative unfolds, I think there’s real potential for COLA to play a meaningful part there too.