The weeks and months following the October 7 attacks on Israel revealed the crumbling foundations of America’s universities. Weak presidents, craven faculty, and cynical administrators across the country condoned calls for violence and illegal encampments as part of a larger assault on the West’s history, culture, and values.
Few understood just how broken our universities have become. Then, in December, the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT refused unequivocally to state that calling for the genocide of Jews violated their codes of conduct. In less than a month, two of those university presidents had resigned: Harvard’s under damning evidence that plagiarism marred her scholarly output and Penn’s under pressure after her disastrous congressional testimony. Two DEI officials at Harvard and one at Columbia have also been publicly outed as plagiarists, among other prominent examples of academic fraud exposed in recent months.
But that’s just the superstructure. Huge administrative bureaucracies, sometimes outnumbering students, are even more uniformly leftist than the overwhelmingly leftist professoriat. Working hand in glove, these forces dictate DEI’s rigid identitarianism, intersectional victimology, and anti-Western ideology in university teaching, programming, and hiring. Studies have demonstrated professors’ and students’ willingness to retaliate against right-of-center colleagues. It’s thus not surprising that many students censor themselves to avoid offending campus political orthodoxies, and that non-woke professors fear openly dissenting against their peers.
It is in times of crisis that strong foundations really matter. In replacing truth-seeking and merit with left-wing ideology, the universities are left with no foundation at all. But no university president, professor, or administrator can admit it. They maintain the fiction that their universities are ideologically neutral, pluralistic, and meritocratic institutions upholding standards of excellence. Nor have university boards of trustees seen the light: they carry on as if nothing has happened. Americans, though, increasingly know better.
The United States and its next generation badly need new academic institutions with solid foundations. That’s why I and other concerned individuals founded the University of Austin (UATX), which our constitution declares shall be “an institution of higher learning that champions the pursuit of truth, scientific inquiry, freedom of conscience, and civil discourse, and that is independent of government, party, religious denomination and business interest.” UATX stands for color-blind merit over identitarian bias, equality over equity, free speech over censorship, and truth over lies. We encourage our students to pursue the truth and speak out about what they see as right. We’re dedicated to forming the courageous leaders and leadership cultures of dissent and truth-seeking that America needs.
UATX’s curriculum is substantially different from that of legacy universities. First, students begin with Intellectual Foundations, our core program, where they stand on the solid ground of millennia of civilizational wisdom. Second, we reject most universities’ fashionable, Marxist-adjacent scorn for the world of innovation and industry. We contend that the best minds are often found outside university walls, especially today. Our students will learn from innovators’ experience and expertise as they build and iterate their projects. Third, we believe that breakthroughs arise out of the synthesis of understanding across fields, rather than the silos of particular and often irrelevant disciplines.
At UATX, admissions are based on “demonstrated academic capability and capacity for creativity or leadership,” and the hiring and promoting of faculty are based on “the quality of scholarship, teaching, service, and contribution to the university community.” In neither area do we rely upon identity categories to make judgments. Our bill of rights explicitly forbids faculty and administrators from using grades or other means to pressure students to adopt certain views, and it provides a means of appeal. Students may peacefully protest events at UATX so long as they do not prevent or disrupt those events—a commonsense approach painfully lacking at many schools since October 7. When significant disagreements arise, our adjudicative panel, composed of individuals from outside the university, will hear and decide cases. And should a university leader not uphold our mission, school constitutional authority empowers trustees to dismiss or suspend him.
This fall, UATX welcomes its inaugural class of 100 students. Many have told me that they chose UATX for its promise of unfettered pursuit of truth and freedom of speech. They understand what the alternatives are, and they’re often coming from distant places to join us. Our faculty, selected from thousands of applicants, have come for the same reason. Together, we’re building a new university on solid foundations and preparing our first cohort of students, whom we will equip to be the future leaders America needs.
Photo: Vieriu Adrian / Moment via Getty Images
