The University of Austin (UATX), not to be confused with the University of Texas at Austin, was founded in October, 2021 as a sort of heterodox university, one where all viewpoints could be represented and debated. In this sense it was a counter to “elite” universities like Harvard and Princeton, whose faculty are almost entirely liberal and where free speech policies are sometimes abrogated. Wikipedia says this about the founders:
The University of Austin was conceived in May 2021 when venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, St. John’s College president Pano Kanelos, British–American historian Niall Ferguson, and journalist Bari Weiss met in Austin. The proposal was publicized six months later in an article by Kanelos in Weiss’s newsletter Common Sense (which has since evolved into The Free Press).
Founding faculty fellows included Peter Boghossian, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Kathleen Stock. Other advisors included former Harvard President Lawrence Summers, former ACLU President Nadine Strossen, and former president of the American Enterprise Institute Arthur Brooks.
In November 2021, the university’s website listed Robert Zimmer, Larry Summers, John Nunes, Gordon Gee, Steven Pinker, Deirdre McCloskey, Leon Kass, Jonathan Haidt, Glenn Loury, Joshua Katz, Vickie Sullivan, Geoffrey Stone, Bill McClay, and Tyler Cowen as advisors to the university.
On November 11, 2021, Robert Zimmer announced his resignation from the university board, saying that UATX had made statements about higher education that “diverged very significantly from my own views”.[26] Shortly thereafter, Pinker followed suit. UATX apologized for creating “”unnecessary complications” for Pinker and Zimmer by not clarifying [sooner] what their advisory roles entailed.[28]
The founders and founding faculty are indeed a mixture of left- and right-wing people, and, with proper guidance and care, as well as a judicious selection of faculty, UATX had the possibility of turning into a decent alternative to other high-class but left-oriented schools. That was the original aim. Sadly, it did not happen.
I sensed trouble with Steve Pinker and our President, the late Bob Zimmer, resigned in November. There must have been something about the ideological leaning of the university—the feeling that it was founded to follow an antiwoke ideology rather than just allow all viewpoints to be erred—that turned off Steve and Bob. Here’s a FB post by Steve in response to a new article in Politico about UATX:
I don’t know why Bob Zimmer resigned, as he wasn’t explicit about it except to say, as the article notes, ““The new university made a number of statements about higher education in general, largely quite critical, that diverged very significantly from my own views.”
According to this new article in Politico by author and criminal justice professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice Evan Mandery, UATX entered the drain in the spring of 2025 when the right-wing nature of the school became explicit. And now more advisors and faculty have resigned, and it looks as if the school (which is unaccredited, but might be in two years) is doomed. But the trouble started almost immediately when the school was founded. Read about this mess by clicking the screenshot below:
Here are some of the people involved in UATX (indented quotes are from the article):
Kanelos identified 32 people as trustees, faculty members and advisers to the new university including Jonathan Haidt, the NYU professor whose work Kanelos evoked in proclaiming that UATX would produce an “antifragile” cohort with the capacity to think “fearlessly, nimbly, and inventively”; Summers; Pinker; the playwright David Mamet; Glenn Loury, an economist at Brown University; computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman; authors Andrew Sullivan and Rob Henderson; the journalists Caitlin Flanagan, Sohrab Ahmari and Jonathan Rauch; Stacy Hock, an investor and philanthropist; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a conservative, Dutch politician-turned-writer known for criticizing Islam’s treatment of women, and who is married to Ferguson.
The list leaned right, to be sure. Loury, who is Black, zealously opposes affirmative action. Mamet had called Trump “the best president since Abraham Lincoln.” Hock served as chairwoman of an organization called Texas GOP 2020 Victory. Several of the academics had experienced backlash for taking conservative positions. These included Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist who’d had a planned lecture at MIT on extraterrestrial life canceled over his views on DEI; Peter Boghossian, who’d resigned from Portland State University in part because of the institution’s response to his sending hoax articles to academic journals; and University of Sussex professor Kathleen Stock, who’d faced protests over her allegedly transphobic views, which she disputed.
I’m not sure if Boghossian and Stock can be said to “lean right”, but never mind. But also on the list were Pinker, Strossen, and Haidt, all of whom see themselves as classical liberals.
Resignations began early, as the school’s ideological antiwoke agenda was manifest from the outset. Others who resigned were Geoffrey Stone, Vickie Sullivan, Andrew Sullivan, Heather Heying, Nadine Strossen (former head of the ACLU), Jon Haidt, and Jonathan Rauch. This gutted the advisory board of most of its well-known liberals. Heying said she resigned because she didn’t think the university’s vission was “sufficiently revolutionary,” and Pinker emailed Mandery with further explanation:
“Dissociation was the only choice,” Pinker told me in an email. “I bristled at their Trump-Musk-style of trolling, taunting, and demonizing, without the maturity and dignity that ought to accompany a major rethinking of higher education.” Furthermore, Pinker added, “UATX had no coherent vision of what higher education in the 21st century ought to be. Instead, they created UnWoke U led by a Faculty of the Canceled.”
That was pretty much my view as well. If you look at the curriculum page of UATX, you’ll see that science is pretty much limited to math and data analysis. As Mandery notes, the curriculum was in places bizarre. He reproduces the syllabus below, saying”
Indeed, the syllabus I reviewed for a class called “Intellectual Foundations of Science II” covered a range of topics unusual for a science class including “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.” A student who’d taken the course shared a slide with me on “ensoulment” — the principally religious question of when a soul enters the human body — and said that the class had been told that IVF but not abortion could be consistent with the Catholic belief about ensoulment.
Enlarge this if you want to see part of the science curriculum, best described as a “dog’s breakfast”. Francis Collins on God? People from Colossal Biosciences on “de-extinction”? There is apparently no introduction to basic biology, but just a bunch of topics of current popular interest. This is no way to get a biology education.
Here is what’s represented as a slide from the class above. This does not belong in a biology class; it’s theology:
Another quote from the article:
The poor quality of the science offerings had bothered Heying and Pinker. “Others thought I was the token liberal,” Heying told me, “but I came to understand myself as the token scientist.” In an email, Pinker wrote, “They should have hired a widely esteemed scientist and proven program builder to set up their science division.”
As far as I can see from looking at the curriculum, they don’t have a decent one that could undergird a quality liberal-arts education. The goals of UATX at the outset were admirable, but the ideological motives of the founders eventually warped the school:
Over the past three months, I had more than 100 conversations with 25 current and former students, faculty and staffers at UATX. Each had their own perspective on the tumultuous events they shared with me, and some had personal grievances. But they were nearly unanimous in reporting that at its inception, UATX constituted a sincere effort to establish a transformative institution, uncompromisingly committed to the fundamental values of open inquiry and free expression.
They were nearly unanimous, too, in lamenting that it had failed to achieve this lofty goal and instead become something more conventional — an institution dominated by politics and ideology that was in many ways the conservative mirror image of the liberal academy it deplored. Almost everyone attributed significant weight to President Donald Trump’s return to power in emboldening right-leaning hardliners to aggressively assert their vision and reduce UATX from something potentially profound to something decidedly mundane.
There are a lot of other issues discussed in this long article, issues like how it dealt with a sexual harassment violation, abrogating the school’s own rules for how to adjudicate violations. This all culminated in a meeting on April 2 of last year when conservative founder Joe Lonsdale laid down a right-wing law for UATX:
. . . in the afternoon, all of the professors and staff were summoned, quite unusually and mysteriously, to a closed-door meeting. It had been called by Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire entrepreneur who’d co-founded the data analytics company Palantir Technologies with Thiel. Together with Ferguson and the journalist Bari Weiss, Lonsdale had been a driving force behind the creation of UATX and was a member of the board of trustees. But he wasn’t often present on campus, and it was almost unheard of for a member of the board to summon the staff, as Lonsdale had.
. . . . . “Let’s get right into it,” he said. Then, with heightened affect, Lonsdale explained his vision for UATX — a jingoistic vision with shades of America First rhetoric that contrasted rather sharply with the image UATX had cultivated as a bastion of free speech and open inquiry.
. . . “It was like a speech version of the ‘America love it or leave it’ bumper sticker,” one former staffer told me, and if you didn’t share the vision, the message was “there’s the door, you don’t belong here.” Like many of the people I spoke with for this story, the staffer was granted anonymity for fear of reprisal. “It was the most uncomfortable 35-to-40ish minutes I’ve ever experienced. People were shifting uncomfortably in their seats.”
. . .In an email I obtained that was sent to [President] Kanelos, the provost Jake Howland, the university dean Ben Crocker and a fellow professor, Morgan Marietta, Lind related what Ferguson had told him:
“According to Niall, under the constitution of UATX Joe Lonsdale, as chair of the board, had no authority to tell those of us at the meeting:
“That all staff and faculty of UATX must subscribe to the four principles of anti-communism, anti-socialism, identity politics, and anti-Islamism (this is the first time I heard of these four principles);
“That ‘communists’ have taken over many other universities and that he, Joe Lonsdale, would stay on the board for fifty years to make sure that no ‘communists’ took over UATX (the identity politics crowd and some Islamists are a threat, but the Marxist-Leninist menace in 2025?)”
Lind said when he asked for definitions of “communists” and “socialists,” he’d been told they included anybody who didn’t “believe in private property” and “hate the rich.” This, he wrote, struck him “as a libertarian political test excluding anyone to the left of Ayn Rand.” Lonsdale had said that the board would make a case-by-case determination on whether “New Deal liberals” would be allowed to work at UATX. Lind said that he considered himself “an heir to the New Deal liberal tradition of FDR, Truman, JFK and LBJ.” He was “in favor of dynamic capitalism in a mixed economy, moderately social democratic and pro-labor, and anti-progressive, anti-communist, and anti-identity politics.”
According to Lind, Londsdale repeatedly said that if the faculty weren’t comfortable with what he was saying they should quit.
“So I quit and I walked out,” Lind wrote.
A lot of the other resignations, including from notables like Strossen, Rauch, and Haidt, followed. There were emendations of the schools’ constitution, giving the President more power, and the Provost resigned, presumably after told he’d be fired.
Now things are in a mess. I sure as hell wouldn’t send a student to UATX to get a good education, for what they’ll get is a spotty but an anti-woke education. Yes, I am by and large anti-woke myself, but I am also pro-liberal-education, and by “liberal” I don’t mean “Left-wing’ but “liberating the mind”—through free inquiry.
At the end Mandery has two questions:
The first: Where was Bari Weiss? Many of the people I interviewed told me about internal conversations and shared internal emails. Weiss, who remains on the board of trustees, was almost never present in the conversations as they were related to me, and while I saw many emails on which Kanelos and Ferguson were copied, I never saw any including Weiss.
Weiss, one of the founders, was the person whose presence brought in many donations, but she seems to have absented herself from UATX. This may be because she’s burdened with running both The Free Press and CBS News, but she did not respond to a request for a comment. But wait! There’s more!:
The second question: Was UATX a hard-right project from the start? Based on my reporting, I don’t think it was. I was struck by the sincerity of the commitment to free speech and open inquiry from so many of the people with whom I spoke. A few were Trump supporters, but many more were best identified as anti-woke moderates or liberals. The university’s saga has a strong sense of historical contingency — that it could have gone quite differently had some high-leverage moments gone otherwise. A notable example is the episode surrounding Dan’s alleged violation [the sexual harassment charge] and expulsion, which several former staffers and faculty suggested was exploited by the Straussians as evidence of dysfunction in their successful second coup attempt.
So UATX, in its very first full year, was eroded by the very thing it tried to avoid: pervasive ideology in the curriculum:
When students returned for UATX’s second year, it was difficult not to notice the drift. The Tuesday night speaker series, at which attendance is mandatory, leaned unmistakably rightward — guests included Patrick Deneen, originalist judge Amul Thapar and Catherine Pakaluk, a Catholic University business school professor who’d written Hannah’s Children, about the 5 percent of American women who have five or more children.
As Mandery says, “The pluralists had lost.” Indeed. Nobody took care to forge a proper curriculum, and the right-wing bent of those who didn’t resign is forcing the school into a conservative version of Harvard—except it’s not nearly as good as any of the “elite” colleges that UATX aped.
My prediction is that the whole enterprise will fail. And if it doesn’t, it will never be a good place to send students, even though admission is based purely on meritocracy and tuition is free. Other schools may be full of left-wingers, but most of them don’t impose their views on the students in class, and it’s still possible to get a good education.
Mommas, don’t let your babies grow up to be UATX students.
It is easy to destroy something compared to creating something. One can go nowhere with a vision of just being anti woke without a rigorous and constructive process and vision. Part of the far left has the same problem. These people are no exceptions. What a mess!
No one should be surprised by what happened. Much of the to-do about wokeness (not all) was in non-science fields even about sci issues, so many of the aggrieved came from non-sci disciplines. HxA leaders themselves focused on the liberal leanings of academics, as though that was the problem rather than suppression of ideas from wherever on the political spectrum by ideology. Focus on liberals would seem to invite a right-leaning alternative as the answer. And the term “heterodoxy” itself causes problems. What could be more heterodox than religious-themed courses in biology? Or given a topic often discussed here, Maori ways of knowing intruded into science courses. You’re not trying to suppress alternative, heterodox views are you Jerry? What’s that saying … “Be open-minded, but not so much that your brains fall out.” Bit like the challenge posed by a value like tolerance. Should we tolerate intolerance? We (at least some of us) don’t mean unlimited heterodoxy or tolerance, but where’s the (undoubtedly fuzzy) boundary?
Virtually every political or social position, liberal, conservative, or middle of the road, tends to frame itself as heterodox, a bold defiance of the established order. Things are going wrong right now, but we’re here to bring a welcome change. About the most heterodox thing you can do is walk around with a sign calling for “Status Quo.”
It’s a shame the University of Austin failed to live up to its early ideals, and fell apart so quickly. They probably should have made a point to have some “woke” professors and courses. And, of course, a core curriculum.
I had thought once that they should include far left professors among them, in order to truly claim to be heterodox.
But I don’t think that would have made a difference, given events like that extraordinarily abusive meeting from this Lonsdale person. Boy! What a jerk!
The spread of political views will not co-exist in harmony, and I guess we should not be surprised.
How could this have worked? Rather than trying to include a wide range of political views under one roof, maybe something safer like a cast of characters with a range of centrist views. Call that heterodox even though it really isn’t.
How hypocritical. The right always claims universities are merely liberal indoctrination centers, then they established their own “university” indoctrination center.
OK, I will say/ask this :
Where are the laboratory courses?
The Gold Standard for science is not fame, names, nor publications or funding – it is reproducible empirical results from some type of experimental, material laboratory work. Theory serves experiment.
Obligatory Feynman, and let’s give him a bit of room here ’cause this excerpt is box-office grade expression of thought :
“In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is – if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.”
-Richard P. Feynman
The Character of Physical Law 1965
Chapter 7, “Seeking New Laws”, p.150 (Modern Library edition, 1994)
ISBN 0-679-60127-9
(Also can be found in spoken form on YouTube videos of Feynman himself).
BTW : this quote is best read using Feynman’s accent.
Richard Feynman is my hero, and I can just hear him saying that, complete with significant pauses that force you to think about each point.
A reader here – Jeremy – pointed the bolded quote out once – in a sort of normal science post – and it hit me like a lightning bolt.
I already knew of it, but setting it in context … sort of ‘righted the ship’ for me…
Thanks Jeremy and PCC(E)!
“Where are the lab courses?”
Labs are fantastically expensive to create and furnish to a high standard. Austin, despite being funded by multi-billionaires, want to do their operation on the cheap. After all, they don’t get much ideological bang for their buck from pure science research or teaching. Virtually all of their teaching seems to be instructors talking and showing slides in lecture halls.
If this were a seedcorn operation hoping to make a success and grow, one could understand them avoiding large expenses early on, and that may have been part of the original thinking. But with the ideological programme outlined above, it seems unlikely that they’ll ever be interested in serious science research and teaching.
Well, that’s disappointing.
https://professortimkane.substack.com/
Yeah, vigorous debates about evolution… And a lot of the other stuff is at best a bit trendy, and in no way engages with modern times. An important example is the focus on so-called Great Books, which will presumably uphold Western civilisation. Read the Odyssey! No empiricism is needed, you can just get your “ancient wisdom” and “higher truths” from Plato and some 19th-century novelists.
It’s difficult to start a university and bring it to a stable, self-sustaining* state. Lacking a vision would be another impediment. The state of affairs is unfortunate but not all that surprising.
My favorite class has got to be “Clean Meat.”
*By self-sustaining, I mean supported by tuition, donations, and grants such that it can keep going indefinitely. It has to get to the point where it no longer depends on being propped up by the founders.
Arnold Kling:
For Politico, Evan Mandery writes a story about internal conflict at UATX last year. He wants to create a narrative in which “right-wingers” battled “pluralists.” I think that over-simplifies and distorts the events, which sound to me like what I call corporate soap opera.
If you read the article, take it as people who are unhappy about how things turned out for them personally taking their gripes to the media. Actually-existing UATX is doing fine without them.
My remarks:
In my experience in organizations, personality conflicts get blown out of proportion by the parties involved. Staff imbue their power struggles with profound cultural and historical significance. Never under-estimate the extent to which something portrayed as a deep battle over principles is mostly just a clash of egos.
https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/corporate-soap-opera-at-uatx
Perplexity:
Despite the turmoil, UATX reported a 448.4% increase in submitted undergraduate applications between January and December 2025. The university reached $214 million in fundraising by 2024 and continues to offer free tuition to its students, who are admitted solely on merit. UATX announced plans for a Distinguished Visiting Scholars program and hopes to launch a master’s degree in entrepreneurship once authorized to offer graduate degrees.
It’s hard to imagine any respectable accrediting organization endorsing that curriculum. Lonsdale’s solution will probably be to create his own accrediting org.
Universities worldwide need to get back to disciplines and then teach the courses essential to disciplines. A Chemistry major needs to take Organic Chemistry and then you hire academics to teach Organic Chemistry. In the Arts, nutter academics will never agree to what are the few essential courses in, say, Anthropology or History. That’s why you need Deans to be academic superstars instead of line managers who sign forms and attend endless talkfest meetings. How many universities worldwide require History majors to study the French or Industrial Revolutions?