The new school’s attempt to disrupt American higher education is off to a strong start — but it still has a long way to go.
The new school’s attempt to disrupt American higher education is off to a strong start — but it still has a long way to go.
E arlier this week, the University of Austin (UATX) — the ambitious attempt, begun in November 2021, to start a new school with the aim of stemming “illiberalism” on college campuses — announced a new set of summer courses, featuring teachers and lectures “at the very top of their field or industry,” according to Vice President of Communications Hillel Ofek.
The “Forbidden Courses” summer program is divided into two week-long sessions, each featuring four diverse courses. The first includes Dorian Abbot on science and Christianity, Rob Henderson on the psychology of morality, Katie Roiphe on “writing sexual politics,” and Walter Russell Mead on Anglo-American grand strategy; the second features Matthew Crawford and Marilyn Simon on the battle of the sexes, Mark Lilla on conservatives and reactionaries, Glenn Loury on racial inequality in America, and Luana Maroja on the ideological invasion of evolutionary biology.
The roster is impressive, no doubt, and UATX should be commended for its work so far. In just fourteen months, the school’s small but growing team — which currently consists of roughly 25 employees — has generated serious excitement from students and intellectuals, and according to Jacob Howland, UATX’s director of intellectual foundations, the university is “going gangbusters in terms of raising money.”
It’s not difficult to understand the excitement: In hindsight, the sheer audacity of actually starting a new university was bound to attract attention in an age when speech is so frequently divorced from action. But because attention is no guarantee of fundraising success, almost everyone on the UATX team was still taking a significant risk when they elected to work for a university with no students, no campus, and no accreditation.
For his part, Howland sounds relieved when he tells me, “We are really doing this.”
But are they?
Well, in one sense, they already have. “We intentionally went into this with the goal of transforming higher education and we are already doing that,” Howland says. Citing New College in Sarasota, Fla., and Ralston College in Savannah, Ga., as examples of UATX’s influence at work, Howland also mentions “folks in Europe” who are reaching out to UATX president Pano Kanelos for advice on starting similar schools on the Old Continent. Clearly, the small school in the Lone Star State has made a big splash, disrupting the enormous higher-education industry and catalyzing what one can only hope will be a revival of liberal education in the West.
This is no small thing. As a matter of fact, achieving such a beginning has required what Ofek calls the “very rare quality” of “courage, specifically the kind of courage necessary to pursue excellence regardless of what is intellectually or professionally trendy.” Ofek says this quality distinguishes the school’s new class of summer teachers and lecturers. It is definitely the most defining feature of UATX’s efforts to this point.
In any endeavor as great as founding a new university, however, courage is as insufficient as it is essential, and despite all its progress, UATX still has much to prove. Howland, who is designing the school’s undergraduate curriculum, says he is “confident about the nuts and bolts of the thing,” especially the project’s financial and social support, but readily admits that “there is a lot of work [to be done] between now and opening day” in the fall of 2024.
There certainly is. After all, designing summer courses for conservative- and classical-liberal–minded students who are understandably dissatisfied with their undergraduate education isn’t exactly groundbreaking. The Hertog Foundation, Hudson Institute, AEI, and many other organizations have been offering versions of precisely this sort of program for years. I have had the good fortune to participate in many of these programs, and though they each have their own strengths and weaknesses, they are all more or less the same. UATX may brand itself slightly differently — its courses may even be “forbidden” — but for the time being it is providing the same basic service to students.
This isn’t meant to be a criticism of UATX; it would be impossible to judge the project a success or failure in such a short amount of time, and Howland says the school is “proceeding slowly and deliberately,” with plans for 100 students in its inaugural Fall 2024 class, 150 the next year, 250 the year after that, and so on. But it is to point out an irony: Insofar as these summer programs exist because of deficiencies in America’s higher-education landscape, UATX’s real promise is that one day in the distant future it might make such summer programs less important because it has helped to address those deficiencies.
Ultimately, UATX’s ability to live up to its promise will be determined not merely by its courage, but by what it shows courage in defense of. And no matter how plainly the school’s website puts it, standing for “truth” in today’s world seems vastly more complicated than simply restoring academic freedom of inquiry.
Indeed, while liberal education in America has certainly suffered at the hands of campus authoritarians and top-down censorship, are there not deeper issues at work? Are the “superstitions of academic freedom” not at least partially responsible for the sorry state of our universities today? Is more freedom all that is needed to restore the “fearless pursuit of truth” in a post-modern society that has so thoroughly muddied the concept of truth itself?
That UATX aims to eventually answer these questions is what makes it such an intriguing project.
As the school moves ever closer to welcoming full-time students to campus in fall 2024, people who care about restoring liberal education in America should do three things: Be sure to give the school’s founders credit, for they have demonstrated the bold imagination and courage that are all too rare in American higher education today; be patient, because a great school is built over the course of decades; and ask lots of questions, because vague promises to prioritize “freedom” and pursue “truth” aren’t nearly enough in a world where freedom is constantly abused and truth is regularly manipulated.