If anything is a sign of the times, it’s that the announcement by Pano Kanelos, the putative founding president, of a new university was made on Bari Weiss’ substack.
So much is broken in America. But higher education might be the most fractured institution of all.
There is a gaping chasm between the promise and the reality of higher education. Yale’s motto is Lux et Veritas, light and truth. Harvard proclaims: Veritas. Young men and women of Stanford are told Die Luft der Freiheit weht: The wind of freedom blows.
These are soaring words. But in these top schools, and in so many others, can we actually claim that the pursuit of truth—once the central purpose of a university—remains the highest virtue? Do we honestly believe that the crucial means to that end—freedom of inquiry and civil discourse—prevail when illiberalism has become a pervasive feature of campus life?
There’s certainly no doubt, progressive rationalizations and denials notwithstanding, that there are serious issues on campus precluding speech and ideas that stray from woke orthodoxy, and that both academics and students feel as if they must self-censor to survive the authoritarian control over heretics. But that’s hardly new.
But we are done waiting. We are done waiting for the legacy universities to right themselves. And so we are building anew.
I mean that quite literally.
As I write this, I am sitting in my new office (boxes still waiting to be unpacked) in balmy Austin, Texas, where I moved three months ago from my previous post as president of St. John’s College in Annapolis.
A new university? Maybe new colleges sprang up on farmland a couple hundred years ago, and maybe there are some digital schools that exist mostly on the internet and TV commercials, but a new university?
Our project began with a small gathering of those concerned about the state of higher education—Niall Ferguson, Bari Weiss, Heather Heying, Joe Lonsdale, Arthur Brooks, and I—and we have since been joined by many others, including the brave professors mentioned above, Kathleen Stock, Dorian Abbot and Peter Boghossian.
We count among our numbers university presidents: Robert Zimmer, Larry Summers, John Nunes, and Gordon Gee, and leading academics, such as Steven Pinker, Deirdre McCloskey, Leon Kass, Jonathan Haidt, Glenn Loury, Joshua Katz, Vickie Sullivan, Geoffrey Stone, Bill McClay, and Tyler Cowen.
We are also joined by journalists, artists, philanthropists, researchers, and public intellectuals, including Lex Fridman, Andrew Sullivan, Rob Henderson, Caitlin Flanagan, David Mamet, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sohrab Ahmari, Stacy Hock, Jonathan Rauch, and Nadine Strossen.
A curious and not-insignificant mix of serious and dubious people are behind this new idea, even if it never occurred to any of them to check on whether the name of their new real-life-campus school, University of Austin, was already trademarked. Not yet accredited, and unable to confer a degree, and many of the founding advisors won’t be teaching there, but still.
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.
And, indeed, there was mocking aplenty on social media, both as to the people involved as well as the very concept. But then, mockery on social media is hardly the metric for much of anything given how the gnats love to swarm.
Meet the University of Austin. Crazy or brilliant? Necessary or nonsensical? And as a tangential question, does this mean that heterodox intellectuals have given up on elite universities and will no longer waste their time trying to take back the classroom, provide rigorous (white male) education and fight against the capture of higher education by the unduly passionate?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply.
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