Prominent academics recently announced the formation of a new institute of higher education: the University of Austin (UATX). The brainchild of Pano Kanelos, former President of St. John’s College, the collaborative project is a milestone in the modern history of academia: it signifies that the intellectual, political, and cultural climate on campus is finally so stifling, so biased, and so unhospitable to serious scholarly inquiry that very comfortable, very tenured professors are willing to abandon—at least nominally—the model of college education that has dominated American life for at least 50 years.
The University of Austin’s list of trustees, advisors, and faculty fellows reads like a red-carpet of American intellectual culture. There’s Glenn Loury (Professor of Economics at Brown University), Bari Weiss (former New York Times journalist), Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Hoover Fellow at Stanford University), Renowned blogger Andrew Sullivan, journalist and Catholic “integralist” Sohrab Ahmari, Jonathan Haidt (NYU professor and founder of Heterodox Academy), evolutionary biologist Heather Heying, and playwright David Mamet, among many more. But there are already signs of trouble. Harvard professor of psychology Steven Pinker and the Chancellor of the University of Chicago (Robert Zimmer) have already severed their association with the effort, which UATX attributed to “some missteps” in the rollout of the project.
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