The plans for the University of Austin, a start-up universityfounded under the banner of free inquiry and “the fearless pursuit of truth” and promising an undergraduate college by 2024, were greeted with a fair amount of skepticism by the journalists and academics in my Twitter feed this week.
The new university has a notable group of intellectuals on its board of advisers, and a distinguished former college president at its helm, and it’s beginning at a time when elite academia seems like it could use some shaking up. On the one hand their rapacious business dealings (like charging insane prices for not- particularly-valuable degrees), hedge-fund habits and administrative bloat make our leading universities seem like the most corporate and cynical of American institutions. At the same time they suffer from a self-inflicted McCarthyism, a climate of increasing ideological conformism punctuated by cancellation controversies and policed by diversity-equity-inclusion loyalty oaths.
Altogether, then, a sector seemingly in need of novelty and new experiments, ideally in the name of some sort of higher academic values. But people who care about academia are also subject to its ideological-professional pressures and unlikely to welcome certain kinds of criticism. So the fact that the University of Austin was announced with an essay on my former colleague Bari Weiss’s extremely popular but also extremely polarizing Substack, and offered in its initial literature a sharp-elbowed critique of progressive conformity in higher ed, was enough to guarantee a reflexively hostile response.
In fairness, not all of these insta-critiques read as ideological talking points or defenses of guild hierarchies. A few were more substantive, pointing to the tensions inherent in the new project, should it actually get off the ground. For instance, the tension between the desire to promote great academic seriousness and the culture-war flag-waving that might be necessary to rally donor support. Or again, the tension between the desire to restore older modes of liberal education and the internet-era impulse to offer something novel, an unbundled academic experience, some sort of Substack U.
But one issue that kept coming up deserves particular attention: the sheer financial and logistical challenge of getting a new university going. This issue was cited by critics as proof that the project would inevitably end up as a diploma mill or grift, while friendlier voices cited it as reason that the figures involved in the new university should be trying to strengthen existing institutions instead.