Two references to the new University of Austin (#UTAX) arrived in my email feed Friday morning - one from The Washington Post Book Club and another from a friend - so I looked it up. “We’re Featuring a University Dedicated to the Fearless Pursuit of Truth,” the virtual calling card for the university reads. The WaPo correspondent, critic Ron Charles, called that motto “cringe worthy,” while my friend interpreted the words as timely pushback against “political correctness” and “cancel culture.”
What passes as a home page for the university at this early stage contains a list of founders, trustees, and nascent faculty. Bari Weiss @bariweiss, Niall Ferguson @nfergus, Glenn Loury, Steven Pinker @sapinker, David Mamet, Larry Summers @LHSummers and Robert Zimmer, the latter a former President of The University of Chicago, my alma mater, were names I immediately recognized.
This initial presentation, which included quality portraits and briefest of introductions to the men and women listed, felt a lot like what I’ve seen in ads for speakers at a motivational conference that salespeople often like to attend. If they hired an ad agency or PR firm to design this, they should fire them. I’m not looking for Zig Ziglar here. Better yet, don’t worry about promotion and marketing so much – just say what you believe and believe what you say.
Nonetheless, challenging legacy universities is not a problem – let’s keep everyone honest. How do you that? By challenging orthodoxies and received wisdom or, to adapt a line from an old gangster movie, Little Caesar can dish it out, but can he take it?
Because full-service universities can be billion-dollar enterprises these days I have to think this new school will deal mostly with political philosophy and perhaps macroeconomics, more like seminars offering certificates of completion than degrees as such, at least in the beginning. Less infrastructure and capital investment would be required in this case; also, the founders and faculty, as revealed so far, are mostly notable in the public sphere, at least, as thinkers.
According to Charles, UATX plans to offer a section on “Forbidden Courses” to encourage “spirited discussion about the provocative questions that often lead to censorship or self-censorship.” Then he issues a gratuitous slap in the face, writing that the course “sounds perfect for that guy in your writing workshop who brings every conversation back to Ayn Rand.”
The reference to Ayn Rand was uncalled for. Part of her thesis was that the more you let people do things for you, the more dependent you become on them, i.e., they own you at some point. I surmise Charles doesn’t think much of Rand, but I bet that he would be an admirer of the late R. Buckminster Fuller, as I am. Fuller, a futurist, often preached do-it-yourself solutions to modern living, including living simply, and he also warned against dependency and letting people do too many things for you that you could do yourself. Not so different than Rand, at least on this point.
The WaPo’s skepticism became clearer when Charles wrote, “As the money pours in – and it will – how might this new university play out? Will it become an oasis for unfettered scholarship or a refuge for transphobic climate-change deniers nattering on about the horrors of Islam?”
Questions often are really accusations, and I think that’s what the WaPo is doing here. Niall Ferguson is going to be transphobic? PBS used to like him. Robert Zimmer is going to write about the “horrors of Islam?” David Mamet is a climate denier?
Even Charles’ seemingly hopeful caveat that the new university might be “an oasis for unfettered scholarship” rings hollow in this context. The people who have lent their name to UATX clearly see themselves as a counterpoint to what they think, rightly or wrongly, is happening in both The Academy and media today (more the former than the latter, I’d say). I expect they will be oppositional, if not partisan; if no one else is doing an open forum they’re not going to feel compelled to do so. This is their right, maybe their remit, but potentially their downfall, as well, and I’d recommend they shoot for the middle, not some kind of antithesis. For example, the answer to an emphasis on identity politics and European-style Social Democracy (in theory and practice) is not to become merely oppositional or partisan oneself. Rather, I would argue that it is to commit to what is often called Classical Liberalism and Enlightenment values. These would include promoting the rule of law (bad laws? Change them!); the rights of the individual (this was a serious debate during the early days of Affirmative Action, namely are we talking about individual rights or group rights); the primacy of citizenship as opposed to racial, religious or ethnic identity; and more. That would define a middle position that should appeal to moderate Right- and Leftwing audiences alike. From what I know of Ferguson, Zimmer and Loury, this probably will be the case. Let Fox News have the Trumpsters.
At the same time, the folks at UATX would also be wise to recognize that there are huge problems in society, whether or not they like the solutions being promoted by what they see as “the Left.” For example, they may oppose “no bail” and an overly broad definition of “victimless crimes,” but they should more closely look at the horrors in some of our jails and prisons. A longish segment on the revamped free TV news network, Newsy, run by Scripps, recently documented the horrors at the Rikers Island jail in New York. If you’ve ever watched any of the “Law and Order” shows you’ve heard of Rikers. Mass incarceration is a thing – I hope the people at UATX understand this.
Ditto for income inequality in this country. One can criticize the Democrats’ tax plans either as pie-in-the-sky or the road to perdition in terms of inflationary pressures, but something really must be done about income inequality or else we’ll end up like Brazil, if we’re not already there. The same for resurrecting the inner cities – gentrification is not evil in and of itself, and it increases the tax base, which local municipalities want, but just moving people out to move other people in is no long-term solution. Homelessness, too – policies up and down the West Coast have failed, but what will UATX propose instead?
Overall, the new university will be competing in a marketplace of ideas, and everyone will claim to be speaking truth. One can only hope that the best ideas win out.
Gnawbone, where subscriptions always are free. If you found this post worth your time, please consider forwarding to others.
University of Austin Must be More than a Protest Movement
Even though the context of the creation of this new University has some merit, whenever, I see "Fearless Pursuit of Truth" either from the Left or the Right -- is enough to pause and question. Also ferguson, summers, pinker..they are just so outdated. Not just because they are old white men they just lost their edge and power of insightful critique. We will see.