Source: Politics<\/p>\n
The nation\u2019s newest university isn\u2019t 10 days old, but it\u2019s already entering damage-control mode. The University of Austin announced<\/a> Monday that high-profile advisers Steven Pinker and Robert Zimmer were leaving its board of advisers, where they briefly served as part of the brain trust shaping the college\u2019s free-inquiry-focused mission.<\/p>\n When the self-styled \u201cUATX\u201d launched last week, its founding president Pano Kanelos said it would \u201crestore the meaning to those old school mottos. Light. Truth. The wind of freedom,\u201d in the face of \u201cuniversities [that] are doing extremely well at providing students with everything they need\u2026 except intellectual grit.\u201d It was both a mission statement and an implicit critique: the University of Austin will be \u201cfiercely independent,\u201d in contrast to an academic establishment hopelessly captured by censorious progressive ideologues.<\/p>\n The launch announcement came with a roster of name-brand thinkers to lend it intellectual luster, including the historian Niall Ferguson of the Hoover Institution at Stanford (who is a founding trustee at UATX), former Treasury secretary and former Harvard president Larry Summers, and the polymathic economist Tyler Cowen. <\/p>\n Harvard\u2019s Pinker has kept quiet about why he\u2019s ending his affiliation, but the University of Chicago chancellor Zimmer made it clear<\/a>: He\u2019s all for free expression, but not the direct attack on existing higher education that attended the university\u2019s launch, saying in his statement that \u201cthe new university made a number of statements about higher education in general, largely quite critical, that diverged very significantly from my own views.\u201d West Virginia University president Gordon Gee, another adviser, kept his affiliation but said<\/a> even more directly: \u201cI do not agree other universities are no longer seeking the truth nor do I feel that higher education is irreparably broken.\u201d<\/p>\n The discord reflects the inconvenient contradiction at the heart of an ambitious project: Despite the University of Austin\u2019s claim to independence from the political minefield that is higher ed in 2021, it\u2019s almost impossible to see the project as anything but political in its own right. Kanelos, a former St. John\u2019s College president, announced<\/a> its launch on the Substack of Bari Weiss, another founding fellow who is not an academic, but a journalist who specializes in lancing the liberal consensus. Co-founder and trustee Joe Lonsdale, also a co-founder of the data analytics company Palantir with Peter Thiel, defended<\/a> the project in the conservative New York Post, and Ferguson wrote<\/a> acidly in Bloomberg that \u201cacademic freedom dies in wokeness.\u201d <\/p>\n The University of Austin\u2019s explicitly stated ideological commitment is to a pluralistic, classically liberal freedom of expression. But as Zimmer and others have pointed out<\/a>, the university\u2019s project as constituted today rests on an inherently political critique of schools as they are. And for an intellectual vehicle so committed to diversity of thought that it can\u2019t even exist in the current academic landscape, its affiliated thinkers comprise a near-monoculture in their own right: They\u2019re nearly all icons of the same confrontational, non-\u201cprogressive\u201d liberal rationalism.<\/p>\n In American politics, to claim the mantle of open inquiry \u2014 and a merit-based, rationalist freedom from ideological dogma \u2014 is to claim the moral high ground. But in doing just that, UATX has accidentally affirmed the criticism of the most left-leaning culture critics who loudly protest that there\u2019s no such thing as truth or objectivity. Based on its current intellectual coterie, the university\u2019s self-proclaimed \u201cindependence\u201d looks a lot like an attempt to re-assert the dominance of its participants\u2019 own values.<\/p>\n One doesn\u2019t have to totally surrender to relativism to acknowledge that kind of moral high ground is more of a goal, or aspiration, than a state that one can ever actually reach. When conservative figures like Sens. Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley cry that American institutions are captured ideologically and need to return to some Edenic, pre-woke ideal \u2014 or when progressive thought leaders like Nikole Hannah-Jones claim an objective factual basis for a project that\u2019s fundamentally ideological \u2014 they twist that ideal for their own political purposes. That\u2019s all part of the back-and-forth of American life. But in claiming to be outside it, UATX and its boosters set an almost impossibly high bar for their project.<\/p>\n None of which is to say its structural or ideological critique of academia is inherently wrong \u2014 one would be hard-pressed to find anyone who isn\u2019t a well-paid university administrator willing to say the current system is working just perfectly as it is. But the launch of UATX, and the vociferous reaction it has inspired, already serve as a cautionary tale about the notion of objectivity in modern American life \u2014 how seductive the claim to neutral ground can be, and how powerful, but perilous, a tool it\u2019s become in the culture-war toolbox.<\/p>\n Although the university\u2019s founding advisers<\/span> might be uniform in their opposition to a certain brand of progressive rhetoric, they\u2019re something of a fractious bunch. For all the bile that Ferguson mustered in his Bloomberg op-ed, there\u2019s the circumspectness of someone like Cowen; for the oak-paneled gravitas that a figure like Gordon Gee brings, there\u2019s the bare-knuckled punditry of Andrew Sullivan. It includes a playwright (the Trump-supporting David Mamet) and a geophysicist (Dorian Abbot, who co-wrote<\/a> an op-ed criticizing affirmative action policies and was disinvited<\/a> from a prestigious MIT lecture for his troubles).<\/p>\n What leaves the project most vulnerable to critique in these early stages, however, is who\u2019s not present \u2014 namely, anyone from the progressive left they believe threatens free speech in the academy. In an email, spokesperson Hillel Ofek said the school \u201cwill not hold any political or ideological test for its faculty. We believe a fundamental part of liberal education is engaging rigorously with radically alternative views and ideas, including those that challenge freedom of speech. We would certainly welcome someone who was a critic of freedom of speech from the left or the right, as long as they abided by our university operating principles of open inquiry and civil discourse.\u201d<\/p>\n So what, then, explains the center-right lean of the school\u2019s initial roster of advisers? For critics, the most charitable view might be that the university\u2019s founding trustees fear progressive censoriousness as too much of a threat or hindrance to include (see: Karl Popper\u2019s \u201cparadox of tolerance<\/a>\u201d). But to deploy Occam\u2019s Razor, it\u2019s much easier to imagine that no one on the left \u2014 especially in the cutthroat world of higher education, where reputation is currency \u2014 might have been willing to sign on to a project that their peers would inevitably write off as a reactionary sop to anti-political-correctness dinosaurs.<\/p>\n \u201cIt seems to me that for somebody who, for lack of a better terminology, is progressive, I doubt that they would welcome the opportunity to serve on the board of advisers,\u201d said Nadine Strossen, a professor at New York Law School and a former president of the ACLU who believes robust free speech protections are paramount to not just the flourishing of liberalism, but racial justice in its own right<\/a>. Strossen, a UATX advisor, said she\u2019s \u201chad many long conversations with [university president] Pano [Kanelos], and I have absolutely no doubt that he would welcome advice from somebody who would speak out and be critical of everything, including the fundamental mission.\u201d<\/p>\n As it happens, they do in fact have someone willing to criticize the fundamental mission of free inquiry. But it\u2019s not a critic from the left: it is Sohrab Ahmari, the arch-conservative Catholic and self-described \u201cpost-liberal.\u201d In an essay<\/a> for The American Conservative, Ahmari wrote that \u201cthey welcomed the prospect of a traditionalist internal dissident with a seat at the table\u2026 I think it\u2019s just about time that we orthodox believers returned the favor to liberal institutions \u2014 and to treat our presence within them as a test of their liberality, according to their own principles.\u201d<\/p>\n An endorsement from someone like Ahmari \u2014 an admirer of Viktor Orban\u2019s \u201cilliberal democracy\u201d who once famously wrote<\/a> that conservative Christians \u201cshould seek to use [the values of civility and decency] to enforce our order and our orthodoxy, not pretend that they could ever be neutral\u201d \u2014 is pretty stark proof of the school\u2019s claim that no idea is too dangerous to go un-explored in the classroom. But in the absence of any theoretical counterpart on the left, it also paints an easy target on the university as simply a vehicle for grievances against so-called \u201cwokeness,\u201d the only otherwise plausible affinity Ahmari might have with its mission.<\/p>\n