Austin, Texas
The University of Austin (UATX) has attracted a lot of attention since it was announced in 2021. The idea is to have a college with a culture that is more focused on free speech and inquiry and less focused on progressive politics. If you want an in-depth description, check out this Econ Talk podcast with UATX’s founding president Pano Kanelos. Also, the Chronicle of Higher Education has a nice update. According to them, they’ve hired some faculty and have found some real estate in the Austin area. And most importantly, they have funders who have already donated millions to get the college’s endowment rolling.
Here, I will offer some commentary on UATX as someone who wrote extensively on an earlier wave of experimentation in higher ed (e.g., the ethnic studies movement of the 1960s).
First, despite what critics say, there is nothing odd or weird about UATX. The history of American higher education is filled with lots of experiments. This would include the movement for single ed liberal arts schools in the late 1800s, HBCUs in the same time period, the creation of the modern “multiversity” in the mid 1900s, the rise of “experimental” colleges in the 1960s, and various attempts at online education in recent years. They mystery is why an anti-woke college hasn’t happened sooner.
Second, there are two key obstacles to UATX’s long term success. One is relatively easy to overcome and that is money. Kanelos seems to be shooting for a college that would be like his former employer, St. John’s College. The idea is to have a mix of liberal arts undergrad students and some master’s degree students. Unlike St. John’s, which is limited to humanities, UATX would instead be a small school that offered basic humanities, social science, and some sciences. My intuition is that UATX master’s degrees would be like the MAPSS program at the University of Chicago. Students pay directly for preparation in various fields as either a job market credential or a steppingstone to an academic career. Certainly, a nation as large and wealthy as the US would certainly have at least a few hundred students who would pay for the UATX experience.
The second obstacle is “O’Sullivan’s law” which argues that most organizations will naturally experience a leftward drift because the sorts of people who like to become managers and organizational leaders tend to be do-gooders. This is doubly true in educational institutions. Perhaps the first leader for UATX will be 100% committed to free speech, but what about the leaders ten years from now? Already, a few folks associated with UATX (Steven Pinker and Robert Zimmer) were already scared off by the rhetoric. What if UATX invites Jordan Peterson to give a “Forbidden Ideas” course and the staff get upset? This is why some non-profits, such as the Olin Foundation, were instructed to spend out all funds so that people in the future won’t use the founder’s resources to support activities contrary to the donor’s intent. If you want a more recent example of this problem, see the recent litigation between Hillsdale and the University of Missouri, where Hillsdale sued to recover funds that were not used to support Austrian economics at Mizzou.
So the deeper issue is this. Certainly, with enough donor enthusiasm, you can make a “free speech university” but what can be done to sustain this culture ten, twenty, or fifty years down the line? It’s a tough problem, but I am keen to see how UATX approaches this problem. Until then, if you need a sociologist to give a lecture or two deep in the heart of Texas, feel free to give me a call.
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My books: Grad Skool Rulz - cheap advice manual for grad students / The history of Black Studies / Obama and the antiwar movement / A Social Theory book you will enjoy reading / Intro Sociology for $1 per chapter