BY HANK REICHMAN

Yesterday’s launch of a new “university,” the so-called University of Austin (or UATX; their own acronym, which looks more like a listing on the stock exchange), garnered widespread ridicule on academic social media.  University of Rhode Island historian Erik Loomis no doubt spoke for many when he tweeted, “Honestly, making fun of this Austin University thing has been the best part of my day.”  There’s already a parody Twitter account, University of Austin Classics (UATX), employing the same layout as the new institution’s website and offering proposed classes for the school’s promised 2022 summer session of “forbidden courses.”  Here’s one:

New course announcement: "The Symposium Almost Got It Right."

A challenging pursuit of truth awaits. pic.twitter.com/SHjGCe9SHv

— University of Austin Classics (UATX) (@uaustinclassics) November 9, 2021

UATX boasts that it will be “devoted to the unfettered pursuit of truth” and “fully committed to freedom of inquiry, freedom of conscience, and civil discourse.”  Very admirable.  But when we look at who is behind this effort, the reasons for the skepticism and sarcasm greeting its announcement become clear.  Interestingly, yesterday a visit to the UATX website led one to an impressive board of academic “advisers.”  Today, however, that page has apparently been erased.  Perhaps that’s because one of those advisers, the infamous E. Gordon Gee, president of West Virginia University (for the second time, and formerly president of Ohio State [also twice], Brown, and the University of Colorado, as well as Chancellor at Vanderbilt) quickly seemed to disassociate himself from the project, or at least from its founding president’s ridiculous broad-brush accusations that “universities are no longer seeking the truth” and that “higher education is irreparably broken.”

Still, UATX president Pano Kanelos — who claims to have left his position as president of St. John’s College in Annapolis, known for its “great books” curriculum, to head the new venture — provided a who’s who of participants in the project in his announcement post on the substack of former New York Times writer Bari Weiss.  That post is easily mocked, in Paul Campos’s words, “if only as an object lesson in the ability of our most ludicrously self-regarding and mawkishly preening intellectuals to perform otherwise anatomically impossible acts.”  Among the several exaggerated charges against contemporary higher education made in this ridiculous screed, is Kanelos’s lament that “Nearly 40% of those who pursue a college degree do not attain one.  We should let that sink in.  Higher education fails 4 in 10 of its students.”  This is perhaps a bit less shocking coming from Kanelos, however, when one learns that, well, at St. John’s College, with fewer than 500 students, small classes, and highly selective admissions, nearly 30% don’t earn a degree.

But let’s look at the group that Kanelos and Weiss have assembled.  Here’s who he names:

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.

Now, some of these names are indeed impressive, although as many have pointed out the list tilts quite disproportionately toward the right end of the political spectrum.  And one wonders how many of those listed in the second and third paragraphs, like Gee, may be having second thoughts, prompting the swift removal from the UATX website of the list of advisers.  But, be that as it may, let’s look a bit closer at a few of those Kanelos identifies as initiators.

We can start with Bari Weiss.  This self-proclaimed champion of “free speech” first made a name for herself as an undergraduate at Columbia, where she led a vicious campaign (thankfully, in the end unsuccessful) that sought to fire professors of Arab descent critical of Israel.  Moving on to the Israeli journal Haaretz, she publicly campaigned against tenuring a controversial Barnard professor (again, without success).  At the Times she criticized the organizers of the 2017 Women’s March for their “chilling ideas and associations,” and published an article criticizing leftists for intolerance while employing as evidence an “antifa” Twitter account widely known to be fake — an embarrassing retraction followed.  As the Financial Times put it, Weiss is a “self-styled free speech martyr.”

Stanford historian Niall Ferguson, known for his defense of British colonialism and his critique of John Maynard Keynes for being gay, gained “free speech” notoriety when he secretly conspired with two student Young Republicans to smear a left-wing student activist.  He also authored a piece in the conservative Stanford Review that accused another professor of being the leader of a terrorist organization.  When interviewed, Ferguson admitted the charge was false, and further acknowledged that “part of the goal of the article was intimidation of faculty, specifically to discourage them from associating with the violent Antifa movement.”  What an exemplary advocate of those prized UATX “principles” of “freedom of inquiry, freedom of conscience, and civil discourse!”

Heather Heying, formerly of Evergreen State College, left that institution with her husband, Bret Weinstein, after the latter was the target of student demonstrators.  That incident may well have been a genuine case in which leftist students improperly threatened the speech rights of a faculty member, although that is disputed.  In any case, Heyring’s record since leaving Evergreen does not inspire confidence.  This year the couple published a book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, that one reviewer charged “lazily repeat[s] false information from other pop-science books”, and that overall exemplified an “annoying, know-it-all attitude.”  What sort of false information, you may wonder?  Well, Heying has said that she has taken ivermectin to guard against COVID-19 and that she and Weinstein have not been vaccinated “because we have fears.”  I guess UATX, which brags that it will not be online but hold in-person classes at a yet to be acquired campus in Austin, won’t have a vaccine mandate.

Other UATX notables include Kathleen Stock, who resigned her position at the University of Sussex, claiming that student protests against her anti-trans ideas curtailed her academic freedom.  Or, as Sarah Jones wrote in New York magazine, “Put another way, Stock found free expression a bit too lively to tolerate.”  Peter Boghossian, one of the culprits behind the widely ridiculed “Sokal squared” hoax that failed, resigned his position at Portland State University after he was found by his institutional review board to have committed research misconduct.  Joshua Katz, who also signed on as an “adviser,” received a year-long suspension from Princeton University over an inappropriate relationship with an undergraduate woman.

And then there’s Joe Lonsdale, who, curiously, recently relocated to Austin.  He isn’t an academic at all, nor is he a journalist, a public intellectual, or any sort of educator.  What he is is rich.  According to its FAQs, UATX is “fiscally sponsored” by a little-known nonprofit called Cicero Research.  According to public filings, Cicero is affiliated with Lonsdale, cofounder of the polarizing data-mining company Palantir.  As of 2020, however—the most recently available filing—Cicero Research listed no assets.  Here’s more about Lonsdale, who was also accused of raping a woman he mentored, an allegation he vehemently denies:

While less known than another Palantir cofounder, the former Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel, Lonsdale has courted plenty of controversy himself.

Late last month, he assailed secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg for taking a lengthy paternity leave. (Buttigieg’s husband, Chasten, later announced that the baby has been dealing with health issues and spent a week on a ventilator.)

“Any man in an important position who takes 6 months of leave for a newborn is a loser,” Lonsdale tweeted. “In the old days men had babies and worked harder to provide for their future – that’s the correct masculine response.”

In that FAQ, UATX claims, “We have secured the seed money necessary to launch the university.  But we are in the process of securing $250 million, which will enable us to grow into a comprehensive university.”  Could that money be coming from Lonsdale?  From Thiel?  From the noxious egotist Elon Musk, who also recently relocated to Austin?  As a writer in Haaretz, Weiss’s former employer, wrote,

It is true that established universities do not have an unblemished record when it comes to insulating their academics from donor interference, but that only makes it so much harder to believe the University of Austin will somehow manage to do that.  In any event, the present lack of transparency does not help. . .

That the University of Austin will be particularly vulnerable to external incentives to reinforce the views it already seems inclined to promote is hardly a positive harbinger.  The result is more likely to be a symptom, or exacerbation, of our contemporary intellectual woes than an antidote.

It’s hard not to be sympathetic to Sarah Jones’s comparison of UATX with Jerry Falwell’s infamous Liberty University and similar right-wing institutions founded on a desire to provide an alternative to the rough-and-tumble of actually existing higher education.  “These schools,” she argues, “exist as laboratories for right-wing thought; they are committed not to free expression but to indoctrination.  The University of Austin will be no different.”

Jones concludes:

What we’ve got, then, is a Bible college for libertarians.  Those disturbed by progress will find shelter on campus.  Pledging freedom from wokeness, the University of Austin actually seeks freedom from free exchange.  There is a soupçon of social liberalism, which extends no further than equality for LGB people and not to trans people and which is too inadequate to greatly distinguish the school from other conservative institutions.  In this university, Falwell would see kindred minds.  There’s nothing new here.

[UPDATE November 12:  I dashed off this piece largely in response to the near-uniform disdain for this announced project on academic Twitter.  Hence it was admittedly a bit snarky.  But for a more thorough and measured, but not less devastating, analysis see this piece by Aaron Hanlon in The New Republic.  And James Galbraith, who teaches at U. of Texas in Austin, takes on Niall Ferguson here.]

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and president of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019.  His Understanding Academic Freedom has recently been published.