As Minding the Campus readers are all too aware, these are dark times in higher education. Political correctness and an enforced far-left ideology (complete with loyalty oaths, departmental diversity commissars, Red Guard-style cancel culture mobs, and cowardly administrators and regents) have created an environment where intellectual rigor and academic freedom are dismissed as the products of white patriarchy, rather than revered as the bedrock of academe’s central mission: the disinterested pursuit of truth. Even when faculty and alumni have tried to stem this tide (such as with the endowment of a “First Amendment Center” at the University of Texas Law School and efforts to open a privately-endowed “Liberty institute” at UT), university administrators have repeatedly shown that while they will piously pay lip service to the principles of liberal education, they are ultimately either unwilling to stand up for such principles or were never actually in favor of them in the first place.
This situation has led many of us to simply cut tieswith our alma maters, considering them to be “too far gone” for any meaningful chance for reform. But for those of us who received a classic liberal education—grounded in multi-disciplinary coursework emphasizing reasoning and intellectual rigor—ceding the battle completely is unthinkable. But what can be done?
One answer comes from Dr. Pano Kanelos, who yesterday nailed a thesis to the virtual doors of universities across the country:
We are done waiting for the legacy universities to right themselves. And so we are building anew.
Dr. Kanelos left his position as president of St. John’s College, Annapolis to move to Austin, Texas, and with a host of other scholars, academics, and philanthropists has announced the founding of the University of Austin (UATX), a new university devoted to “the fearless pursuit of truth.” In a tour de force manifesto published yesterday on Bari Weiss’s Substack blog (read the whole thing!), he laid out the all-too-common examples of how higher education has become completely unmoored from its foundations, ultimately concluding: