All too often at American Thinker we focus on exposing what’s wrong. That’s necessary to be sure, but in so doing we tend to overlook all the good that’s being done out there. It’s particularly easy to ignore the good in education because there seems to be so little of it. So, for these fewer than 800 words, we’ll revel in a bit of educational good news. We focus on the developments at a recently founded college, the University of Austin (UATX) in, of all places, Austin, TX.
I say “of all places” because Austin is to Texas as Jackson is to Wyoming. They’re both islands of lunatic blue surrounded by seas of red. Bastions of wokeness, cancel culture, pronouns, DEI, you name the social pathology, they’re at the cutting edge. Establishing an institution of higher learning in one of those places, particularly one besotted with deranged wokeism, is newsworthy indeed.
Founding member Bari Weiss says this ‘anti-cancel culture’ university will back ‘witches who refuse to burn’. These words have already been put into practice. Professor Kathleen Stock, forced to resign from the University of Sussex following a campaign of harassment by trans activists, has been announced as one of the first faculty fellows. Weiss’s spirited defence of ‘academics treated like thoughtcriminals’ is a desperately needed blast of oxygen for suffocating professors.
The University of Austin’s founders have a clear understanding of what has gone wrong in higher education. Its president is Pano Kanelos, formerly president of St John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. Kanelos criticises the world’s leading universities for purporting to stand for truth and intellectual freedom while betraying these values in practice. ‘We can’t wait for universities to fix themselves’, he writes, ‘so we’re starting a new one’.
One suspects the UATX will have no lack of students working to earn a degree that might provide access to a useful and lucrative career. Transcripts with no “studies” credits tend to help in that pursuit.
Across the Western world, universities are trying to balance two entirely incompatible values: inclusivity and academic freedom. The pursuit of inclusivity commits institutions to adopting ideologically contested approaches to race, gender and sexuality. The assumptions underpinning these approaches are placed beyond question. Academic freedom, on the other hand, permits the unfettered pursuit of knowledge. Universities that claim allegiance to both freedom and inclusivity are being disingenuous. Inclusivity always wins out and the upshot is an illiberal and conformist campus culture.
The University of Austin’s new president points to Heterodox Academy’s 2020 Campus Expression Survey that found 62 per cent of college students feel unable to say the things they believe. For several years, spiked’s own Free Speech University Rankings demonstrated that British universities and students’ unions restricted speech far in excess of any legal requirement to do so. Just this week, the Cambridge Union was revealed to have been drawing up a blacklist of speakers it will never invite back to address students.
For decades, Americans have witnessed the decline of actual learning in colleges and universities, replaced by political and sexual indoctrination. Woke administrations and faculty hire and promote only the woke, and DEI bureaucracies multiply like viruses, producing institutions with far more educrats than professors. So virulent are expanding education bureaucracies, the ranks of professors have become further thinned to make room for more educrats. This produces very few professors, who are supposed to be highly experienced and learned, replacing them with adjunct professors, people who may well be as capable, but who are paid little and have no job security or benefits and no hope of tenure.
That isn’t conducive to long-term success, nor to academic excellence. We’re also seeing how much “research” is fraudulent and must be rescinded, all trends that make a mockery of the idea of “higher” education and are convincingly convincing students and their parents vocational education makes more sense. It costs far less, takes far less time, and produces graduates able to quickly pay off whatever loans were necessary to earn their certificates.
Graphic: X Screenshot
But even more inspiring than the people involved are the University of Austin’s founding principles. Kanelos writes:
‘Our students will be exposed to the deepest wisdom of civilisation and learn to encounter works not as dead traditions but as fierce contests of timeless significance that help human beings distinguish between what is true and false, good and bad, beautiful and ugly. Students will come to see such open inquiry as a lifetime activity that demands of them a brave, sometimes discomfiting, search for enduring truths.’
That sounds like what college used to be, and the University of Austin isn’t the only institution embracing that ethic. It’s an idea so out there it just might work.
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Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.