In December 1964, a young man at the forefront of the campus free speech movement gave a victory speech to a crowd of thousands of supporters at the University of California, Berkeley.
UC Berkeley had bowed to protesters’ demands to end a ban on political activity and fundraising on campus. Graduate student Mario Savio
proclaimed
:
“It’s been said that we’ve been revolutionaries and all this sort of thing. In a way, that’s true. We’ve gone back to a traditional view of the university. The traditional view of the university is a community of scholars, of faculty, of students … who get together with complete honesty, who bring the hard light of free inquiry to bear upon important matters. … We’re asking that there be no restrictions on the context of speech save those provided by the courts, and that’s an enormous amount of freedom.”
The campus free speech movement, one of the first of 1960s counterculture, “would give students unprecedented leverage to make demands on university administrators,” a Savio biographer
wrote
.
Fifty-seven years since Savio made this declaration, free speech remains one of the most incendiary issues on campus. Now, however, critics say the suppression originates less from top-down policy and more from students and faculty with an increasingly woke agenda. Some feel that free inquiry into topics such as gender, race, and politics is suppressed and intellectual diversity is decreasing.
Enter the fledgling University of Austin in Texas. The university, which launched on Nov. 8, is positioning itself as an institution of retreat and renewal for the refugees of academia. Its founders are personalities from both the independent and legacy media, writers, professors, and philanthropists from across the political spectrum. Bari Weiss, Joe Lonsdale, Heather Heying, Niall Ferguson, and Pano Kanelos form the core group of founding trustees.
They hold in common a commitment to free speech, and to creating a new, “fiercely independent” liberal arts college that will challenge the typical approach to open inquiry, financial programs, and curricula in most of American higher education.
Founding President Kanelos’s announcement letter sounds like it could come from the same era as Savio’s speech:
“In these top schools, and in so many others, can we actually claim that the pursuit of truth, once the central purpose of a university, remains the highest virtue? Do we honestly believe that the crucial means to that end, freedom of inquiry and civil discourse, prevail when illiberalism has become a pervasive feature of campus life?”
The first 48 hours of UATX’s existence were padded with online mockery. Critics aimed at the school’s lack of accreditation and the fact that it doesn’t currently grant degrees, calling it a scam along the lines of Trump University. They launched ad hominem attacks against members of the advisory board. Some even claimed there is no problem with certain views being suppressed on college campuses, saying that “free inquiry” is code for right-wing indoctrination.
“We’re building a university. We didn’t open a university,” Kanelos said in response to the online maelstrom.
Kanelos left his role as president of St. John’s College, a liberal arts school with a curriculum based on the intensive reading of Western civilization’s classics, to help launch UATX. He addressed some of the controversy surrounding the launch in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
“I think we expected a reasonable amount of attention, but I didn’t think that we would spark the kind of vigorous debate and response that we’ve sparked,” Kanelos said. “And to me, that’s a very healthy sign. It means that people are really attuned to higher education and what’s valuable about it.”
As for accreditation, UATX is in the yearslong process of securing it, which the Washington Examiner confirmed. New universities can’t become accredited until after they begin offering classes and degrees so that accreditors can see the curriculum in action. Kanelos is confident that the school will be able to move relatively quickly through the process due to its traditional model of education, which will feature small, in-person classes and a liberal arts core curriculum.
“My impression is that oftentimes, it takes longer if you are trying to create programs that don’t fit within the normal parameters of accreditation,” he said.
It doesn’t offer degrees yet because the degree-granting programs aren’t scheduled to start until next year. The courses will begin next summer with a program for undergraduates called “The Forbidden Courses,” which won’t charge tuition.
In 2022 and 2023, UATX will launch different master’s programs and expects to welcome the first class of undergraduate students in 2024. Kanelos said they hope to keep tuition less than half of what universities can typically charge, or less than $30,000 per year.
The university has secured approximately $10 million in seed money to launch. Joe Lonsdale, a venture capitalist who helped found data analytics company Palantir, was one of the main contributors, Kanelos confirmed. The school is now looking to raise $250 million to cover startup costs.
“We’re trying to approach this in a kind of grassroots way,” Kanelos said. “We want this university to be broadly representative of what people are looking for in a university. So, we want lots of people to be participating in the process of founding it.”
The launch struck a chord. Within two days, the team received 3,000 inquiries from professors interested in working with them.
The University of Austin could be the beginning of a new free speech movement, one that both follows the steps of and reacts against the legacy of the 1960s campus free speech protests. Though half a century apart in their pleas, both Savio and Kanelos want to return to the same vision of education.
Julie Reuben, a professor of the history of American education at Harvard University, told the Washington Examiner that the idea of going back to a time when education was freer is nothing novel. There are many similarities between the speech situation of 1964 and today, she said, including a desire to change things up by turning back to tradition. But are they chasing ghosts?
“There always is a little bit of an idea of a golden age that never existed,” Reuben said. “But at the same time, I do think that there have been periods where things have maybe worked better than other periods.”
She said that UATX is unique in combining two movements in higher education, the 1950s boom in robust liberal arts curricula and the campus free speech movement of the 1960s.
“[Liberal arts] education didn’t necessarily coincide with a period of high levels of academic freedom,” she said.
Reuben said that watching the formation of this new university is “exciting,” and that it could prompt other colleges to reevaluate.
Few private universities have been founded since World War II. Several are Catholic institutions dedicated to both the liberal arts and the church’s teachings. Some are in the midst of expansions to meet growing demand.
Thomas Aquinas College in California was founded in 1971 as part of what Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito called “the real counterculture” at the school’s 50th-anniversary celebration.
“That was a very, very complicated time in American history,” said Paul O’Reilly, the incoming president of Thomas Aquinas College. “There was a lot of upheaval in the universities. It’s not unlike that situation we find ourselves in now.”
TAC and others such as Christendom College and Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts are thriving. O’Reilly oversaw TAC’s acquisition of a second campus in Massachusetts to meet the demand. The continued attractiveness of the “counterculture” bodes well for UATX’s success.
O’Reilly and Reuben said UATX will need to solidify its mission with an affirmative case for its own value. As of now, the pitch is essentially what it is not: that it’s not woke and won’t engage in cancel culture.
“The only concern I would have is, if you believe that truth can be known — and I presume that’s what they believe if they think there’s the pursuit of truth — then once you’ve acquired the truth to the extent that you can do that, then I don’t think you could say that there continues to be open inquiry,” O’Reilly said, pointing out that there isn’t open inquiry into the sum of a triangle.
Reuben said another challenge lies in keeping the political culture from becoming skewed in one direction.
“The fear would be that it would be saying it’s the kind of institution devoted to true freedom, it would become a politically conservative alternative,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s always terrible, but I don’t think it would fulfill what the founders say they’re going to offer.”
Already, one prominent advisory board member, University of Chicago Chancellor Robert Zimmer, has stepped down due to UATX’s “statements about higher education in general, largely quite critical, that diverged very significantly from my own views.”
Kanelos said UATX is “resolutely not against higher education” and that the founders are committed to restoring a lost vision of universities as a place of questioning.
For now, the vision for the future of UATX looks like a student body of 2,000 to 3,000 on land purchased in or near Austin, a city that, UATX quips, is “good enough for Joe Rogan and Elon Musk,” with the help of thousands of donors who support the school’s vision of an institution that is politically, financially, and intellectually free.
“What we’re doing is essentially what American higher education has always done as it continues to produce new projects,” Kanelos said. “We’re going to get some things right, we’re going to make mistakes. The reason that we’re doing this is because we really do think that focusing on open inquiry and civil discourse now, in this moment, is something that will help us as a culture. That’s our goal.”
Virginia Aabram is a breaking news reporter for the Washington Examiner.
