University of Austin: Game changer or stunt?
The upcoming launch of the University of Austin could be “the best news in academia in a long, long time,” said Quin Hillyer in Washington Examiner.com. Former St. John’s College President Pano Kanelos announced last week his plans to create a “fiercely independent” new institution of higher learning. His co-founders, columnist
Bari Weiss and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale among them, include conservatives and classical liberals who prize free speech. Their dream: a haven where scholars and students can engage in open, rigorous debate—what great colleges offered until they were “hijacked by the illiberal left.” Here’s why I’ve joined them, said historian Niall Ferguson in Bloomberg.com. Recent surveys have found that 62 percent of college students said that their campus’ progressive orthodoxy made them fearful of expressing their opinions. Put simply, “higher ed is broken.”
How seriously should we take this “new, unwoke university?” asked Alex Shephard in NewRepublic .com. Not very. UATX doesn’t have a campus, accreditation, or degree programs yet—just an offering cryptically called the “Forbidden Courses.” Rather than transcending identity-politics issues, the university boasts a founding faculty that seems determined to “relentlessly burrow into them” from one side, including such firebrands as British philosopher Kathleen Stock, who has been at war with transgender activists, and pundit Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has called Islam a “nihilistic cult of death.” Will the school offer a degree in “owning the libs”? Its website “largely consists of a plea for money from any wealthy donors who might also like to stand athwart history yelling stop.” Sounds like a “largely half-baked” hustle.
Problems are already surfacing, said AJ McDougall in TheDailyBeast.com. Two marquee-name scholars, evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker and University of Chicago chancellor Robert Zimmer, quit the advisory board this week, evidently uncomfortable with statements some far-right founders made about UATX’s mission. To succeed, said Daniel Drezner in The Washington Post, the university will need “large-scale investments” of hundreds of millions of dollars provided by plutocratic donors. But would the rich bet on the “cantankerous crew” behind this project, many of whom are not educators, rather than giving money to their prestigious alma maters? “Maybe, just maybe,” those potential donors “are exercising their own kind of independent thinking.”