As Minding the Campus readers are all too aware, these are dark times in higher education. Political correctness and an enforced far-left ideology (complete with loyalty oaths, departmental diversity commissars, Red Guard-style cancel culture mobs, and cowardly administrators and regents) have created an environment where intellectual rigor and academic freedom are dismissed as the products of white patriarchy, rather than revered as the bedrock of academe’s central mission: the disinterested pursuit of truth. Even when faculty and alumni have tried to stem this tide (such as with the endowment of a “First Amendment Center” at the University of Texas Law School and efforts to open a privately-endowed “Liberty institute” at UT), university administrators have repeatedly shown that while they will piously pay lip service to the principles of liberal education, they are ultimately either unwilling to stand up for such principles or were never actually in favor of them in the first place.
This situation has led many of us to simply cut ties with our alma maters, considering them to be “too far gone” for any meaningful chance for reform. But for those of us who received a classic liberal education—grounded in multi-disciplinary coursework emphasizing reasoning and intellectual rigor—ceding the battle completely is unthinkable. But what can be done?
One answer comes from Dr. Pano Kanelos, who yesterday nailed a thesis to the virtual doors of universities across the country:
Dr. Kanelos left his position as president of St. John’s College, Annapolis to move to Austin, Texas, and with a host of other scholars, academics, and philanthropists has announced the founding of the University of Austin (UATX), a new university devoted to “the fearless pursuit of truth.” In a tour de force manifesto published yesterday on Bari Weiss’s Substack blog (read the whole thing!), he laid out the all-too-common examples of how higher education has become completely unmoored from its foundations, ultimately concluding:
We had thought such censoriousness was possible only under oppressive regimes in distant lands. But it turns out that fear can become endemic in a free society. It can become most acute in the one place—the university—that is supposed to defend “the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.”
The reality is that many universities no longer have an incentive to create an environment where intellectual dissent is protected and fashionable opinions are scrutinized. At our most prestigious schools, the primary incentive is to function as finishing school for the national and global elite. Amidst the brick and ivy, these students entertain ever-more-inaccessible theories while often just blocks away their neighbors figure out how to scratch out a living.
Dr. Kanelos is actually doing something in response, and he is not alone in this venture. UATX’s Board of Advisors includes a dizzying array of academic superstars such as Larry Summers, Niall Ferguson, Arthur Brooks, and Glenn Loury; scientists like Steven Pinker, Dorian Abbot, and Lex Fridman; and luminaries such as John Lonsdale, Bari Weiss, Nadine Strossen, Andrew Sullivan, and David Mamet. (No word yet if Elon Musk is joining the party . . . but given his recent comments, his relocation to Texas, and his insistence on results over appearances, I would not be surprised if he does.) The university’s Founding Faculty Fellows are philosophers Peter Boghossian and Kathleen Stock, and humanitarian activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali—all of whom have had first-hand experience with the illiberalism of today’s campuses.
Bucking the trend of massive online courses, UATX will offer in-person instruction that returns to the classic university tradition. As Dr. Kanelos writes:
We believe human beings think and learn better when they gather in dedicated locations, where they are, to some extent, insulated from the quotidian struggle to make ends meet, and where there is no fundamental distinction between those who teach and those who learn, beyond the extent of their knowledge and wisdom.
Initially, UATX will offer a summer 2022 program for top students from other universities. This program, The Forbidden Courses, will focus on discussions of the most provocative questions of the day, especially those that usually lead to censorship or cancellation on “woke” campuses. This will be followed by master’s programs in Entrepreneurship and Leadership (fall 2022), Politics and Applied History (fall 2023), Education and Public Service (fall 2023), and Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (TBD). The four-year undergraduate program is slated to begin in fall 2024, with the first two years of study structured as an intensive liberal arts curriculum and the last two years as “junior fellowships” in one of four Academic Centers.
This will be, without question, a huge undertaking. However, the founders are girded for the struggle:
We expect to face significant resistance to this project. There are networks of donors, foundations, and activists that uphold and promote the status quo. There are parents who expect the status quo. There are students who demand it, along with even greater restrictions on academic freedom. And there are administrators and professors who will feel threatened by any disruption to the system.
We welcome their opprobrium and will regard it as vindication.
To the rest—to those of you who share our sense that something fundamental is broken—we ask that you join us in our effort to renew higher education. We welcome all who share our mission to pursue a truly liberating education—and hope that other founders follow our example.
For this alumnus of another university in Austin, I would much rather support those brave enough to return higher ed to its classical roots, as opposed to those who meekly surrender to DEI pseudoscholarship and populate the faculty with those who prize ideology over the pursuit of truth (who may well be worthy candidates for future Lysenko Awards).
I’m in. Who’s with me?