To hear most university leaders talk, the most important thing of all is increasing “diversity.” They say that it’s a great matter of justice and equity to ensure that all groups are properly represented on campus and all feel welcomed.
But the commitment to diversity does not extend to beliefs that clash with leftist orthodoxy. When a number of conservatives and libertarians sought to inject more intellectual diversity into the University of Texas at Austin, they ran into an administration that was determined to thwart them. In today’s Martin Center article, Professor Richard Lowery recounts the sad tale of the Liberty Institute.
He writes, “No other recent effort that I know of has boasted the same combination of ambition, near success, and, ultimately, abject and total failure. The effort was undone not through the machinations of the campus Left but through weakness on the part of supposed conservatives, a lesson that anyone else wading into reform efforts should learn.”
UT’s leftist president, Jay Hartzell, found ways to subvert the intentions of the Liberty Institute’s backers. His most blatant move was to put an advocate of critical race theory in charge of the committee that was doing the planning for the Institute.
Rather than killing the liberty Institute, Hartzell schemed to ensure that it would not provide the intellectual counterweight to the dominant leftism on campus.
Lowery concludes, “Thus, we now have the beginnings of an institute that will both be intellectually mediocre (at best) and have no ability to fulfill its mission to bring underrepresented but important ideas to campus. The extreme hostility of the faculty toward this project shows the desperate need for something serious along these lines. However, with the current administration at UT-Austin, nothing will be possible without far more direct state intervention.”