Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Why we need new universities
The plans for the University of Austin, a startup university founded under the banner of free inquiry and “the fearless pursuit of truth” and promising an undergraduate college by 2024, were greeted with a fair amount of skepticism by the journalists and academics in my Twitter feed this week.
The new university has a notable group of intellectuals on its board of advisers, and a distinguished former college president at its helm, and it’s beginning at a time when elite academia seems like it could use some shaking up. On the one hand their rapacious business dealings (like charging insane prices for not-particularly-valuable degrees), hedge-fund habits and administrative bloat make our leading universities seem like the most corporate and cynical of American institutions. At the same time they suffer from a self-inflicted McCarthyism, a climate of increasing ideological conformism punctuated by cancellation controversies and policed by diversity-equity-inclusion loyalty oaths.
Altogether, then, a sector seemingly in need of novelty and new experiments, ideally in the name of some sort of higher academic values. But people who care about academia are also subject to its ideological-professional pressures and unlikely to welcome certain kinds of criticism. So the fact that the University of Austin was announced with an essay on my former colleague Bari Weiss’ extremely popular but also extremely polarizing Substack, and offered in its initial literature a sharp-elbowed critique of progressive conformity in higher ed, was enough to guarantee a reflexively hostile response.
In fairness, not all of these instacritiques read as ideological talking points or defenses of guild hierarchies. A few were more substantive, pointing to the tensions inherent in the new project, should it actually get off the ground. For instance, the tension between the desire to promote great academic seriousness and the culture-war flag-waving that might be necessary to rally donor support. Or again, the tension between the desire to restore older modes of liberal education and the internet-era impulse to offer something novel, an unbundled academic experience, some sort of Substack U.
But one issue that kept coming up deserves particular attention: the sheer financial and logistical challenge of getting a new university going. This issue was cited by critics as proof that the project would inevitably end up as a diploma mill or grift, while friendlier voices cited it as reason that the figures involved in the new university should be trying to strengthen existing institutions instead.
The point itself is absolutely correct: You can’t start a real competitor to our major universities on the cheap. At the same time, though, America is an extremely rich country, with many great new fortunes rising in the internet era, and we’re supposed to be a dynamic one — the kind of place where competitors are always rising and falling, where startups regularly overthrow monopolies, where big social and technological changes yield new thinking, new movements, new institutions.
That’s our self-image, at least. Whether it matches reality is more doubtful — and the fact that we have seen so few important universities established since the 19th century, and that people who set out to start one are assumed to be engaged in a quixotic or foredoomed quest, is a notable case study in American stagnation.
A version of this point was made by
Niall Ferguson, one of the advisers to the University of Austin, in a column making the case for the project. You don’t have to agree with his entire argument to recognize that he’s right about the striking dearth of new academic institutions, the striking sameness of the U.S. News & World Report lists year by year. Yes, occasionally existing schools dramatically reinvent themselves (as NYU and Washington University in St. Louis did in recent decades), or outsider colleges succeed as business propositions (like Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, cited by skeptics as an example of where the University of Austin might end up). But overall the elite-college landscape looks more like a cartel than a zone of thriving innovation.
This puzzle is not resolved by suggesting that it takes more money to start a top-flight college than it did when Leland Stanford or Johns Hopkins helped establish the schools that bear their family names. True, it would take hundreds of millions of dollars today, if not billions, to set a new college on its way. But the Stanford and Hopkins gifts came to hundreds of millions in today’s dollars, and donors gave nearly $50 billion to American higher education in the 2019 fiscal year. Is it so implausible to imagine a world where
5% or 10% of that spending went to a few significant startup universities? Alternatively, the federal government spent about $150 billion on higher education in 2018; a billion-dollar endowment for a new public university would cost a tiny fraction of that.
I’m emphasizing both private and public largess because different factions and groups in our national life, not just conservatives and liberal critics of wokeness, would benefit from more academic entrepreneurship. For instance, in my experience, successful people from Silicon Valley, whatever their political beliefs, tend to have very definite views on what’s wrong with the legacy institutions of the East Coast and their hidebound ways. But that certainty often coexists with a digital-age bias against any kind of old-fashioned institution-building, an impulse to “disrupt” philanthropy rather than simply imitating the tycoons of the past.
Obviously there are lots of potentially admirable and productive ways for internet tycoons to disburse their billions. But universities are the great power centers of science and industry and culture in our time, they’re generally agreed to be in serious need of reinvention and reform, and it’s a little peculiar that you don’t see the new superrich trying to put their stamp on the meritocracy — that we don’t yet have the Gates University or the Bezos Collegium.
Not every rich donor has the Muskian or Bezosian capacity to start a university single-handedly. But even just the opportunity to help shape a new one seems worth more than the chance to become a rounding error to the multibillion-dollar endowments of the Ivy League. Amid all this week’s tweeting about the University of Austin, for instance, the journalist Julia Ioffe asked its partisans: “Would you send your kids there? If it was between, say, Harvard and University of Austin, what would you choose?” I have no idea what the parental answer ought to be, given that the startup school is just an outline at the moment. But if I had money to give to a university and I had any sympathy for the Austin project whatsoever, I would definitely choose to put it there rather than into Harvard’s pockets.
A similar logic applies to public money we spend on higher education. I’ve argued before that conservatives should favor establishing national public universities, under bipartisan supervision and with a mandate to cultivate ideological diversity, rather than fighting endless battles at the state level over cutting funding or programs or blocking tenure appointments they dislike.
But the left, too, which has its own litany of complaints about the corporate university, should see advantages in establishing novel institutions. Forgiving student debt is well and good, but I suspect that if you took the billions of dollars of higher-ed money being pondered in the Build Back Better plan and set up a group of national public universities aimed at offering low-cost educations to low-income Americans, you would do more good than sluicing it through the system that saddled all those kids with debt in the first place.
And for that matter, if you’re the kind of progressive donor or foundation that’s given generously to the initiatives and ideas that the University of Austin’s would-be founders regard as threatening to academic freedom, wouldn’t you want to see your own vision of the university realized with full integrity somewhere, instead of being compromised by its association with historically tainted institutions?
The absence of such true experiments tends to confirm one of my working theories of our era — namely, that you can tell that some of the talk about roiling crisis and radical transformation is overblown because of how tightly people cling to existing power centers, and how few are willing to strike out on their own.
Whatever comes of its attempt, then,
I’m grateful for the University of Austin’s provisional existence — as a modest effort to push back against decadence, a small attempt to prove my diagnosis wrong.