The best news in academia in a long, long time came with this week’s announcement that distinguished scholars and thinkers are founding a new university “fully committed to freedom of inquiry, freedom of conscience, and civil discourse.”
Put another way, the new University of Austin will stand against “cancel culture,” speech codes, leftist indoctrination, “safe spaces” for students who can’t bear opinions different from their own, obsessions with race and sex to the exclusion of substance, racial preferences in admissions, and hugely expensive administrative staffs.
It will feature a traditional liberal arts curriculum, will have a real campus and real classrooms, and will be “fiercely independent — financially, intellectually, and politically.”
With a full launch of the four-year undergraduate program not slated until the fall of 2024, the University of Austin will begin a master’s program in “Entrepreneurship and Leadership” next fall, and even before that, it will hold a 2022 summer program called “Forbidden Courses,” in which “students will become proficient and comfortable with productive disagreement.”
True open-mindedness, not ideological straitjackets, will be the norm.
The university is a joint project of a host of luminaries from across the political spectrum who have in common a commitment to open debate and civil dialogue. It will be headed by Pano Kanelos, recently the president of St. John’s College in Annapolis, famed for its “Great Books” curriculum. Others on its 31-person board of advisers are so varied and distinguished that it’s hard to choose whom to highlight. Among them, though, are conservatives such as Arthur Brooks, former president of the American Enterprise Institute, Ayaan Hirsi Ali of the Hoover Institution, and Hillsdale College historian Wilfred McClay, along with liberals Larry Summers (former president of Harvard), former New York Times editor Bari Weiss, and Nadine Strossen, who for 18 years was president of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet also is on board, as is famed evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker.
What the incredibly diverse board members all have in common is a commitment to the idea of a university as a place that doesn’t force answers on students through ideological intimidation but instead encourages queries aimed at rigorous, “unfettered pursuit of truth.” Note the word “pursuit,” which indicates a cast of mind favoring inquiry over the hidebound certainty you are likely to get on most campuses.
One might say this will be a campus where scholars will be open to questions and to questing, to discussion without repercussion, not because those scholars fear they are wrong but because they always strive to be more right. The humility to acknowledge human fallibility, including one’s own, is a necessary predicate for advancing and increasing knowledge rather than just regurgitating it.
“Our classrooms,” says the school’s website, “will be places where 1) every opinion will be heard and 2) every opinion must be supported by evidence.” This is, in short, what the expectations were for every university before academia was hijacked by the illiberal Left.
It’s also what some of today’s struggling small colleges, of which there are many, should consider refocusing on, quite ostentatiously, if they want to stand out from their competitors and attract the attention of parents wanting their children to get a real education, not a “woke” therapy session.
Suffice it to say that anyone who doesn’t welcome this broad-minded, cross-ideological entry into U.S. higher education has no real love of learning. The new University of Austin is a grand experiment worthy of universal applause.
