At first glance, the University of Austin (UATX) looks more like a buzzy Silicon Valley outfit than an academic institution. Its entire campus is the renovated 30,000-square-foot third floor of downtown Austin’s historic, art deco–inspired Scarbrough Building. The space is full of exposed concrete, interior glass walls, minimalist tables, and tufted leather armchairs. On a balmy day in late January, about eight months before the nonprofit university’s first class of 100 students is set to arrive, the hallways are quiet, save for the occasional clattering of a keyboard coming from a faculty member’s office. The library’s shelves are still sparse.

“For the first three or four months, it was like your typical startup,” says founding president Pano Kanelos, recounting those days in the summer of 2021 when he left his post as head of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, to begin scouting real estate opportunities for the recently announced UATX. Three years later, Kanelos is in his office, reviewing curricula vitae for the few remaining open faculty positions.

UATX, Kanelos says, will be “dedicated to the pursuit of truth and open inquiry”—two tenets he claims are largely missing from higher education these days. Its founders include controversial writer Bari Weiss, entrepreneur and venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, and several high-profile academics who aren’t exactly shrinking violets when it comes to cultural debates: historian Niall Ferguson, philosopher Kathleen Stock, and economist Lawrence Summers. All of them believe that contemporary college campuses suffer from a rampant illiberalism that stifles free speech, favoring liberals over conservatives. Many Americans agree: A 2023 poll by the University of Chicago and the Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs and Research found that 47% of respondents felt liberals had “a lot” of freedom to express their opinions on campuses, compared to just 20% for conservatives.

The debate over campus free speech is not new. It’s been a polarizing issue for decades. But conflict has become increasingly volatile over the past few months, reaching its highest pitch this spring when nearly 3,000 people, including many students, were arrested during campus protests over the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in Gaza. This followed the congressional hearings in December, when New York Republican Elise Stefanik excoriated the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania for their responses to allegations of antisemitism on campus after the October 7 Hamas attacks.

Kanelos says UATX will aim for less contentious discussion around difficult issues. “We’re trying to push against this idea that we all live in this world of political binaries,” Kanelos says, “and if somebody doesn’t stand where you stand, they’re the opposition—that’s all BS.”

But there are plenty who believe it’s this assertion that carries the whiff of BS. Skeptics argue that UATX’s claims of academic neutrality are contradicted by a donor base that includes the likes of right-wing real estate billionaire Harlan Crow, formerly secret patron to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Lonsdale, the cofounder of analytics giant Palantir, whose work with police departments and immigration authorities has sparked an outcry among progressives. UATX has already raised north of $ 200 million from more than 2,500 donors, far surpassing its initial fundraising targets.

“They said that they were going to have more financial independence through a different funding model, but their funding model appears to be the same as every other private college’s,” says Aaron Hanlon, head of the science, technology, and society department at Colby College. “They’re soliciting gifts and donations from people who will, like anybody else, have their own ideological motives.”

The skepticism isn’t just centered around UATX’s coffers; at nearly every level, the school features a who’s who of firebrand thinkers. Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist whose outspoken views on religion and gender have often put him at odds with liberals, is on the advisory board. Ferguson and Weiss sit on the board of trustees; both have often clashed with progressives on a variety of sociopolitical issues. The philosopher Stock holds views on gender that have sparked outrage, leading to her resignation from the University of Sussex. She’s now a founding faculty fellow at UATX.

It’s no surprise that UATX has at once been praised by Libertarian pundit George Will as a “university unafraid of true intellectual diversity” and maligned by New York Times Magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones as “Trump University at Austin.”

A Shakespeare scholar, Kanelos earned his undergraduate degree at Northwestern, his master’s at Boston University, and his PhD at the University of Chicago. As a member of the second class of Teach for America, he taught high school English in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley before moving on to teach at Stanford, the University of San Diego, and Loyola University in Chicago. By 2021, he was four years into his tenure as president of St. John’s College when he connected with Weiss, who famously left her perch as a New York Times columnist in 2020 after citing the paper’s “illiberal environment,” to chat about what both perceived as the creeping intolerance in America’s colleges. By the end of the conversation, Weiss was trying to convince him that it might not be such a crazy idea to start something new.

“I’m like, ‘Let me know how it goes,’?” says Kanelos. “And she said, ‘You should start this university. You’re a college president, you have experience.’?”

Weiss was also connected with Lonsdale, who left Palantir in 2009 and went on to found the Austin-based venture firm 8VC, which focuses on backing companies with disruptive technologies. Lonsdale offered up an initial $ 10 million donation for a new university and connected Kanelos with some of the players in his network. Eventually, UATX was able to nab checks from the likes of Crow; Paul Hobby, the founder of private equity firm Genesis Park; and Technology for Education founder Teri Andresen, who sits on the school’s board of trustees and is married to Matt Andresen, cofounder of the trading firm Headlands Technologies.

The school hasn’t had any trouble attracting students and teachers, either. About 2,000 academics applied for 20 available professorship roles, says UATX’s chief operations officer, Curtis Guilbot, and the school received a few thousand applicants for its maiden freshman class, all 100 of whom will receive a four-year full scholarship to pay for the $ 32,000 annual tuition—a luxury the next class in line won’t have.

UATX is flush with cash at a moment when many established universities are struggling, faced with major budget shortfalls, stagnating graduation rates, and a looming enrollment cliff based in part on declining birth rates. At least 30 U.S. colleges shuttered in the first 10 months of 2023 alone. UATX has received approval from the state of Texas to grant degrees and is currently seeking full accreditation from the U.S. Department of Education, a process that may take a few years. “We’re trying to build a comprehensive university in the long run,” Michael Shires, UATX’s vice president for strategic initiatives, tells me. “And we know we can’t do it tomorrow.”

In late October, Morgan Marietta, then chair of the University of Texas at Arlington’s political science department, tried to moderate a Q&A on the Hamas attack and Israel’s retaliation in Gaza for students and faculty. The session escalated into a shouting match, with several attendees cursing the faculty. Some were escorted from the room. Marietta says he was later told that the department would have to get prior approval before hosting any events and provide the college with a risk assessment and a copy of any introductory remarks in advance. “That is a violation of every academic norm and the entire reason that any of us went into this profession,” Marietta says. (UT Arlington did not respond to a request for comment.)

Marietta resigned within a week and is now dean of UATX’s Center for Economics, Politics, and History. The new university will be free of such bureaucratic overreach, Marietta assures me when I speak to him in January. “We believe that civil discourse is the heart of the university,” he says, “which means that you are free to ask questions and speak, but so am I. No one can shout down anyone else.”

While civil discourse will be encouraged at UATX, protests may not be. A few months after I speak with Marietta, I follow up with him to ask about the thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators who have since been arrested on campuses around the country, many of whom were charged with criminal trespassing. Did that police presence and crackdown seen at schools like crosstown challenger University of Texas at Austin also constitute overreach?

Not in the slightest, he tells me. “The problem with the arrests taking place is that there are not enough of them,” he writes in an email. “The students and protesters who are setting up encampments on university property after being asked to leave should be removed and arrested for trespassing. They are threatening other students, shutting down classes, and violating the basic principle of a university—that all should be able to compete for persuasion through reasoned arguments without fear.”

UATX, for its part, didn’t shy away from a good marketing opportunity. On the social platform X, the school posted a video of UT Austin protests alongside the caption: “They burn it down. We build anew.”

While campus protests are not a recent phenomenon, America hadn’t witnessed anything approaching the intensity of this spring’s clashes in half a century, when anti–Vietnam War demonstrations resulted in the deaths of seven college-age protesters between 1968 and 1970. But the underlying tension has been building for decades, through ongoing culture-war squabbles, and many people don’t appear to have much faith in the academy’s ability to navigate this tricky terrain. A Gallup poll published last July—three months before the October 7 assault—found that just 36% of Americans had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. That marks a 12% decline from 2018 and a 21% drop from 2015. Republicans were the least confident, with just 19% voicing approval for the university system, compared to a still concerning 59% of Democrats.

UATX believes it can rebuild that trust through its curriculum. Students’ first two years of study will consist of the “Intellectual Foundations” program, which mandates Socratic seminar-style classes on subjects like philosophy, literature, and history. Rather than declaring a major, UATX students will then become “fellows” in their chosen areas of study. In order to graduate, students must also complete a “Polaris” project, whereby they “build, create, or discover something that meets a pressing human need,” per the website. All graduating students will receive a bachelor’s degree in liberal studies.

Kanelos’s pedagogical vision sounds like what already exists at many colleges, where students meet general education requirements before declaring a major and completing a capstone. Indeed, Kanelos’s old employer, St. John’s, remains a faithful adherent of the so-called great books model, which stresses a Western-focused canon. But Kanelos insists UATX isn’t promising more of the same.

“Most gen ed programs are built on the premise that every student should know a lot of things in different areas, and it’s just like some buffet-style menu,” he says. At UATX, the curriculum is more sequential, according to Kanelos, taking students into questions of the epistemological before wading into the sociopolitical. “And then you’re thinking about where does the idea of the sacred come from,” Kanelos adds, “and what do sacred texts look like?”

Though this fall’s classroom materials are still being finalized, a peek at UATX’s noncredit “Forbidden Courses” program last summer reveals classes that Kanelos says applied unusually open frameworks to otherwise familiar topics. A lecture titled “The Invasion of Ideology Into Evolutionary Biology,” for example, promised to explore questions like “Is sex binary?” and “Are there human races?”

UATX intends to differentiate itself in ways beyond curriculum. For one, it offers faculty only five-year contracts. Kanelos says the tenure system is partly to blame for universities’ turn toward the “intellectually monochromatic.” (The school declined to share salary information.)

UATX also farms out its administrative functions to the 53-year-old Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala. “Rather than us having an army of clerks answering phone calls about UATX admissions all day, we’ve employed this [outsourcing] model,” says Guilbot, the school’s chief operations officer, “which in itself is not terribly new, but it is kind of new for the university world.” It remains to be seen how this formula works for students dealing with the mundane problems of campus life.

In his own sleek office, Guilbot maps out on a whiteboard how exactly this 501(c)(3) nonprofit will sustain itself. UATX may create various forms of IP—outsourcing software it can then license to its peers, and an admittedly vague effort to spotlight public intellectuals. “I can’t say too much about this other than we’re looking at employing machine learning and AI,” he says. There are also designs to build a publishing and production division and to monetize speaking engagements, and a nascent collaboration with the local accelerator the Capital Factory to pair UATXers with tech services and mentors.

“The thing about being a successful startup is you have to have a core strategic plan,” says Keri Waters, the school’s chief innovation officer, “but you also have to be willing to be opportunistic.”

In March, A few days after my visit to Guilbot’s office, I am back at UATX’s campus once more, only this time, the place is humming with violin music and the steady clink of glassware. About 100 attendees—many of them donors to UATX—have come out to campus during the city’s annual South by Southwest conference to toast the school’s upcoming academic launch. They’ve been invited to indulge in berry brûlée and negronis, and to witness a fireside talk between former American Civil Liberties Union president Nadine Strossen and the independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“Their desserts are great,” raves one donor, David Miller. A former film student who now manages a crypto hedge fund, Miller says he witnessed firsthand the erosion of free speech in the classroom. “I had a pretty negative experience when I was at grad school with what some might call the political correctness,” he says. After first donating Ethereum (UATX is one of a few schools that accept crypto), he started making an annual flat contribution in 2022. “When I found out about UATX, I felt like, here’s a school that I don’t think is left or right. It’s dedicated toward free speech, free expression, open inquiry.”

Lorne Abony, who works as the managing partner of Texas Venture Partners and is listed as an official UATX “founder” (meaning he’s made at least a six-figure donation), feels similarly. “This is the most innovative and exceptional university in the United States,” he tells me as we take our seats in the atrium. “A lot of universities are irredeemable. They’ve been invaded by the woke mindset.”

Kennedy, a wild card and potential spoiler in the upcoming election, centers most of his hourlong talk on free speech: its importance in higher education (“The university should be an ecosystem where . . . everything can be discussed”) and its threatened status in an era of censorship (“There is a tribalism that pushes people into these orthodoxies”). Toward the end of the discussion, he also brings up vaccines.

Kennedy has long railed against inoculation, claiming it can cause autism. A meta-analysis conducted by the National Institutes of Health and published in the journal Vaccine in 2014 found that no such link exists, but Kennedy, once again, tells the UATX audience that he’d read hundreds of studies to come to his conclusion. “This whole idea that we heard during COVID of ‘trust the experts,’ that’s not a thing,” he says to a round of laughter. “Trusting the experts is not a feature of either science or democracy. It’s a feature of religion and totalitarianism.”

Watching Kennedy, a presidential candidate who has been repeatedly accused of distorting vaccine science, is maybe the perfect encapsulation of something Kanelos had told me back in January: that UATX’s embrace of heterodox thinkers does not inherently signal an endorsement of any particular ideology. “Heterodoxy is the opposite of orthodoxy,” he’d said. “How could heterodoxy stand for one political perspective?”

That may be a fair question, just as it’s fair to point out that Kennedy received no pushback on any of his vaccine-related comments—not from Strossen, nor from anyone else in the audience.

Fast Company

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