Reforming Education: “fewer administrators and more intellectual openness”

Emily Bobrow:

Growing up in Chicago, Pano Kanelos was expected to take over his parents’ Greek diner someday. But he loved books—he used to read in a booth at the back of the restaurant—and decided to go to college so he could keep reading. He chose Northwestern University in part because it was the only campus he had ever seen: No one in his family had gone to college. “I had no idea what to expect,” he recalls. 

The experience, Mr. Kanelos says, was “transformational.” Instead of running a restaurant he pursued a career in higher education. Last summer he resigned as the president of St. John’s College, a small liberal-arts school in Annapolis, Md., to take on his biggest challenge yet: helping to create the new University of Austin in Texas (UATX) as its first president. The plan, Mr. Kanelos explains, is to offer the kind of affordable, intellectually rigorous, ideologically heterodox experience that was available when he was a student in the late 1980s, but which he believes is increasingly rare in higher education today.