Places like the University of Austin, driven by the Great Books, merit, and free inquiry, are part of the mix in changing higher ed’s tune.

T oday, I’m writing about a miracle. That’s the University of Austin, the new, high-energy, high-quality college in Austin. I spent the day there two weeks ago, meeting students, attending classes, and going to the symphony with the entire student body.

Off and on, I write about the sad state of America’s colleges and universities, once among our crown jewels but now, overall, husks animated by greed, hubris, and fake religions like race-explains-everything, “the Earth is on fire,” and brutal, blunt antisemitism. Laziness, too, since at Harvard nearly everyone gets an A.

And terrible leadership. The mere presence of a Penny Pritzker or a Claudine Gay or Princeton’s toxic president, Christopher Eisgruber, blights the crops, sours the milk, and turns the bulls limp. I hope that over time, with tough love and a diet of slaps of firm government, our elite, entitled schools can reform themselves — or be reformed. The stakes are too high. Prestigious universities are too important to be left as hazardous waste dumps.

Back to the University of Austin — UATX. It’s a new school, opened in 2023, so it’s got a freshman and sophomore class, now about 75 students each. With nearly 4,000 degree-granting, post-secondary schools in the country, you’d think that no void has gone unfilled, but UATX founders, students, and faculty see one big canyon-sized hole. “The institutions that were meant to strengthen and improve our society — schools, universities, newsrooms, boardrooms — have instead become engines of confusion, cowardice, and ideological conformity.” That’s from the school’s statement of purpose. It’s building a new leadership class, what it calls the Navy SEALS of the mind, driven by love of freedom and country — the American flag is much present in classrooms and public spaces — and the primacy of truth, or reality, over lazy, queasy hedges.

The Great Books reign supreme, among them Homer, Herodotus, Euclid, Confucius, the Bible, Tacitus, Machiavelli’s Prince, Descartes, lots of Burke, Tocqueville, Middlemarch, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Scruton’s Beauty, and many famous speeches. Praise the Lord, every American undergraduate should read Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, but they’re more likely to know Maya Angelou’s poems, stuff for dullards, and think that’s quality. “Does my sexiness upset you / Does it come as a surprise / That I dance like I have diamonds / At the merging of my thighs.” Wow. Angelou’s certainly a star, a star driveler, that is.

Admission to UATX is merit-based, measured almost entirely on test scores. Applicants are automatically admitted if they have an SAT score at or above 1460, an ACT score at or above 32, or a CLT, or Classic Learning Test, score at or above 105. Tuition is free. Students live in group housing near Texas’s Capitol, in an Art Deco building that was once Scarborough’s department store. There’s no affirmative action. There are only three sports teams — rowing, golf, and weightlifting — and not much of a club culture. The DEI page on the school’s website? Straightforward but profound and provocative. It’s the Declaration of Independence.

I talked with 20 or so students and heard 20 or so more speak in class. That’s a quarter of the student body. They’re free-thinking, curious, and articulate. I talked with a pair of brothers whose parents were born in Greece. The older brother was 25, worked in high tech after high school, but wanted a firmer intellectual and philosophical foundation. His brother comes straight from high school. I talked to homeschooled kids, a student who’s a veteran, and lots of STEM students. A new student, entering her sophomore year, transferred from Columbia. A rabbi’s daughter, she’d been pummeled by Jew haters, sued the school, got a settlement, and fled Morningside Heights.

They’re all risk takers since UATX is a brand-new start-up. New colleges and universities, after all, are few and far between, since basics like infrastructure, personnel, and legal barriers to entry — accreditation — are huge hurdles. UATX has the infrastructure, with the old department store converted into classrooms, big lecture halls, offices, and commodious public spaces. It’s construction-site chic, but learning is messy. I asked some of the students what their parents thought of their choice. It surprised me to hear from a few that going there was their parents’ suggestion.

The faculty is small, so students get lots of attention, and the program of outside speakers is a draw. So is the school’s governance. Joe Lonsdale, a Stanford alumnus and, early in his career, a Palantir billionaire, is one of the founders. He seems like a man with common sense who sees, as I do, that elite campus muckety-mucks prefer the ease of conformity, which greases the rise to the next job, and don’t care a whit about the student who thinks and speaks freely. Niall Ferguson, the renowned British-American historian, is also a founder. Bari Weiss is another trustee. I read the Free Press every day and admire her for unshackling her chains to the New York Times. She’s a liberal mugged by reality. Lonsdale, Ferguson, and Weiss are infinitely connected with smart, dynamic, provocative, and — mostly — commonsense thinkers who can make things happen.

Carlos Carvalho is the school’s new president, starting just a few weeks ago after years as a statistics professor at the University of Texas’s business school in Austin. He was the director of the university’s Salem Center, a think tank established in 2020 to develop better ways to measure and interpret the tradeoffs that inevitably unfold when government puts its thumb on the scale of human endeavor. He doesn’t think that a student’s mind is a pot to be filled with dogma. He believes in disciplined thinking and the richness of human life.

In late August, he gave his first convocation speech, titled In Defense of Inequality. It was unique — we won’t hear anything like it from any other new university president — but also intuitive to everyone who isn’t woke or who won’t play woke. We’re not all the same, he said: “We have unequal curiosity, unequal intellect, unequal talent, unequal courage, unequal drive, unequal achievement.” Enabling those gifts to shine rather than forcing them into a mediocre, conformist mold is the mission of his new university.

Why Austin? The governor and the legislature, all right down the road, are very much geared to school reform, so the school knew that its work would be warmly welcomed. Texas is a hub for new ideas. Entrepreneurs fleeing freedom-dead California and the Northeast are settling there. Austin’s a nice place, as are San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston.

Carvalho and the trustees have a huge job. There are tens of millions to be raised. Can they do it? Of course they can. All they need are a few good billionaires. UATX is building a brand but also a unique, bonded alumni base. Over the years, with 75 or so freshly minted B.A.s each year, that becomes hundreds and then thousands of people with a distinctive turn of mind and a distinctive identity — “I’m a renegade.”

Is UATX right-wing? I hate the term since it’s squishy and usually tossed as a distracting squib. I asked a few of the students whether their colleagues were mostly conservative, though I said “Trump voters” once or twice. I heard “yes,” “all over the map,” “mostly we’re libertarian,” one “we’re galloping individualists,” and one “we’re happy warriors.”

The faculty? Based on the profiles of the professors, I’d say no one is working on how trans women of color deal with rising tides in Gaza. The core curriculum for the first two years at the school is based on intellectual foundations, timeless questions, logic, good writing and speaking, and “the unique vibrancy of the American form of government and way of life.” We can’t understand the Western world without understanding America. After this core curriculum, students can focus on STEM, political economy, arts and letters, or education innovation, which aims at overhauling K–12 education in America. There’s no tenure at UATX. The faculty are nearly all much younger than I, with many early in their careers or mid-career. Many must’ve found that teaching in elite or even mid-range schools was a draining exercise in walking on pins and needles. They didn’t want to do it.

I attended two classes. One session covered the chapter on music in Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, published in 1987. Bloom argued that what he called classical music was dead insofar as young people were concerned. But what is classical music, and what killed it and replaced it? Rock music is among the assassins, he said, along with the demise of live performance, the fact that few now learn to play an instrument, and the treating of classical music as an esoteric taste that requires special training by academic gatekeepers.

Many of the students knew a lot about classical music, so they understood how the beauty, mystery, and sensuality of music can appeal to the heart, while the structure and organization of classical music appeals to the mind. I taught Phillips Academy students for years. At UATX, class engagement and discussion were of the same high caliber and without sycophancy. The students and the teacher, Ben Crocker, an Australian music scholar and the university’s dean, know that learning best comes from conversation, which leads to revelation.

The all-school group of around 150 students then convened, dressed to the nines, for a question-and-answer hour on music, attention spans, and complexity. Crocker played two tunes, Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” from 2019 and then Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” from 1955 — catchy but few knew it. I hid my chagrin. Both works were, in their day, universally known by educated young people.

Ellish’s tune started and finished three and a half minutes later with boom, boom, boom, basically the three-beat tune, a combo of keyboard bass, a drum machine, and amplified finger snaps, with monotone, hard-to-hear lyrics about a nosebleed and a bad guy. It comes with a video. It’s minimalist, electro pop, murmured background music for a club where you neither care whether you hear what your date is saying nor wish to dance with him, her, them, or it.

Rest assured, Eilish’s bloody nose in the video is computer-generated. “Rock Around the Clock” is not much more complicated, five repeated beats, but it’s authentically instrumental rather than techno. Upbeat and egalitarian, it invites dance. It isn’t augmented by video, and no one needs a blood transfusion. It’s sharp and clean, and it’s done in two minutes. It’s got lyrics, too, matched to rhythm. The beat of “Bad Guy” is oppressive. “I’d listen to it,” a student said, “and then I’d talk to someone, if I could hear.”

Back in time again, 70 or so years before “Rock Around the Clock,” to the early 1880s, to Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7. Bruckner (1824–1896) was Austrian and much loved for music that appealed to the German-speaking volk. Symphony No. 7 is more than an hour long, so we got only a few minutes of it in class. Recorded music, of course, didn’t exist, but educated people, young and old, went to concerts if they lived in cities. It’s got lots of things that “Bad Guy” and “Rock Around the Clock” don’t have, like four movements, tubas, and a cymbal crash, but it had one thing in common with them: a basic few notes right at the beginning and repeated, often in an inverted format, with many different instruments enlisted.

It has complexity. “You can’t say it’s happy or sad,” one student said. “Different people get different things from it. . .  One person will get different things from it.” I don’t know much about music but that is one central element of a great work of art. With class winding down — we needed to get a quick pizza dinner before heading to the symphony — we heard a few moments of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 from 1808, when the Allens labored in the fields or preached in the pulpits and likely didn’t know Beethoven from beets à la Poitevine. We’re country souls. Beethoven’s 5th starts with the famous four-note motif that’s the foundation for the whole symphony, evoking darkness, struggle, victory, and glory.

Good music takes effort and engagement, as do all good, virtuous things. Students recognized something basic and profound. We’re conditioned to brevity. That’s one curse of modern life. We’re conditioned to ease, too. Among the worst things that today’s academics have done is put great music, art, and writing on the shelf, like elegant, boutique goods that are rarefied and hard to qualify.

The symphony? At 7, pizza-fed, the student body, chaperones, and I headed in an Uber caravan to Austin’s symphony hall for a Prokofiev violin concerto and Saint-Saëns’s Symphony No. 3, his organ symphony. The conductor Peter Bay, also the Austin Symphony’s music director, spoke to our group before the concert. The hall doesn’t have an in-house organ, so a temporary one was built, an act of improvisation, and the organist performed with fresh exuberance, as if no one knew what the instrument was capable of doing.