Who Is the University of Austin For?

The project's uphill battle points to a deeper contradiction within what might be called neo-neoconservatism.

URL	https://Persagen.com/docs/neoconservatism-university_of_austin_texas.html	Former The New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss. [source]
Sources	Persagen.com \| other sources (cited in situ)
Source URL	https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/university-austin/
Title	Who Is the University of Austin For?
Subtitle	The project's uphill battle points to a deeper contradiction within what might be called neo-neoconservatism.
Author	David Klion is an editor at Jewish Currents and has written for The Nation, The New York Times, The New Republic, and other publications.
Date published	2021-11-26
Curation date	2021-11-26
Curator	Dr. Victoria A. Stuart, Ph.D.
Modified
Editorial practice	Refer here \| Date format: yyyy-mm-dd
Summary	The University of Austin (UATX) is a proposed American private liberal arts college announced in 2021 to be located in Austin, Texas. It has been described as "anti-cancel culture" and "anti-woke." As of 2021-11 the venture was reliant on a fiscal sponsor and was seeking accreditation.
Main article	Social conservatism
Related	Christian Right PragerU Trump University
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The University of Austin (UATX) was announced to great fanfare on Monday, 2021-11-08, on the popular Substack of former The New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss. "We got sick of complaining about how broken higher education is," Weiss tweeted that morning, "So we decided to do something about it. Announcing a new university dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth." Headed by Pano Kanelos [Panayiotis "Peter | Pano" Kanelos | local copy], the former president of St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland UATX boasted a roster of prominent academics and journalists known for pushing back against what they see as the cultural hegemony of "wokeness" that has supposedly undermined free expression and intellectual inquiry at America's leading universities.

"I am not alone," wrote Pano Kanelos [Panayiotis "Peter | Pano" Kanelos | local copy | see also] in the announcement. He then rattled off a list of cofounders that included Bari Weiss, Niall Campbell Ferguson, Andrew Michael Sullivan, Steven Pinker, Jonathan David Haidt, Glenn Cartman Loury, Caitlin Flanagan, Tyler Cowen, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, as well as former and current university presidents like Harvard University's Lawrence Summers and the University of Chicago's Robert Zimmer. Based out of Texas' capital [Austin] - which recently became home to the anti-woke Tesla, Inc. CEO Elon Musk and the like-minded podcaster Joe Rogan - UATX promised to offer bright young undergraduates an alternative to the stale liberal dogmas on race and gender. Focused around the "great books," the university of Austin would design its curriculum "in partnership not only with great teachers but also society's great doers - founders of daring ventures, dissidents who have stood up to authoritarianism, pioneers in technology, and the leading lights in engineering and the natural sciences." Anticipating the inevitable jeers from donors, foundations, activists, parents, students, and faculty in support of the status quo, Pano Kanelos added: "We welcome their opprobrium and will regard it as vindication."

Unfortunately for Pano Kanelos [local copy | see also], opprobrium has quickly become the least of his problems. Within a week of its announcement, several of the aforementioned luminaries who had gathered around the project were already distancing themselves. Robert Zimmer, the President of the University of Chicago, resigned from UATX' advisory board with a terse statement implying that Pano Kanelos had possibly misled him about the nature of his proposed involvement and "noting that the new university made a number of statements about higher education in general, largely quite critical, that diverged very significantly from my own views." Steven Pinker, who teaches cognitive psychology at Harvard University, was even more succinct in his resignation: Announcing in a tweet that he was withdrawing from the board, he added that he "won't be speaking on this further." (In a defensive statement on November 15, UATX acknowledged some "missteps" in its rollout of the advisory board.)

As many commentators have already noted, the problems with UATX run deeper than a botched rollout. In a conversation with The Nation's Jeet Heer, the writer Jacob Bacharach laid out the underlying financial challenges of setting up a real institution of higher learning, as opposed to a "Potemkin university" with no assets, no degree-granting programs, no campus, no courses, and no research programs. For now, the latter is all UATX is - and for it to become anything more, it will have to raise staggering sums of money from ideologically like-minded donors, which, one reasonably suspects, is perhaps the main purpose of the project. In the meantime, those advisers who already have coveted and lucrative gigs at accredited universities are making it clear that they have no intention of abandoning those sinecures.

Only time will tell whether UATX can deliver on its grandiose ambitions, or whether it will reveal itself as a de facto grift and a source of embarrassment for everyone who was briefly associated with it. But even if it does manage to produce something resembling an actual university, UATX will never truly compete with those elite schools that it has pitted itself against. The project's uphill battle points to a deeper contradiction within what might be called the recent wave of neoconservatism that has emerged in response to the social justice movements of the past decade. That contradiction, simply put, is that these intellectuals, like their neoconservative predecessors, depend on elite institutions for legitimacy.

Some of the figures involved in UATX are directly rooted in the neocon lineage; Bari Weiss, for instance, is a protégé of the neoconservative The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, while Niall Campbell Ferguson and his wife, Hirsi Ali [Ayaan Hirsi Ali], have been vocal champions of Anglo-American imperialism [American imperialism] in the Muslim world. Although today neoconservatism is usually linked to the foreign policy doctrine that gave us the Iraq War, it originated as a backlash to the New Left of the late 1960s, which challenged the mid-century liberal establishment's authority on every front - including by revolting against the administrations of leading universities like Columbia University and University of California, Berkeley [UC Berkeley]. Some of the foundational figures in the movement, like Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol - both of whom had grown up as working-class Jews with left-leaning politics [left-wing politics] - achieved professional success in elite universities after World War II, and the New Left's assault on higher education played a major role in spurring their shift to the right [right-wing politics].

The neoconservative reaction to left-wing activism on campus has guided the center and the right through multiple iterations of campus culture wars ever since. When Pano Kanelos [local copy | see also] writes that UATX students "will be exposed to the deepest wisdom of civilization 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," it's hard not to hear echoes of Leo Strauss, the political philosopher and defender of the Western canon who counted many key neoconservatives as his disciples; or of Allan David Bloom's 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, a touchstone of that era's fights over campus political correctness; or of Allan Bloom's close friend Saul Bellow [born: Solomon Bellows], who fictionalized Allan Bloom in his novel Ravelstein, and who mocked multiculturalists by challenging them to name "the Tolstoy of the Zulus, the Proust of the Papuans."

Who Is the University of Austin For?

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