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University of Austin(which sounds remarkably like The University of Texas at Austin, founded in 1883 [main has energy program bradley, robert frac tar sand]

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off bs 6 26 University of Austin

The University of Austin (UATX) is a four-year college forming the leaders and builders a free country depends on. Our students earn their place on merit, read the Great Books, master AI and data science, and work alongside the founders shaping American industry.

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“Our purpose: to educate citizens and leaders capable of assuring the success of constitutional liberty and national prosperity.”

Carlos Carvalho, President of the University of Austin

recent spkr

scholars

Harvey C. Mansfield

James Hankins

Scott Aaronson

Niall Ferguson

Tyler Cowen

Sean McMeekin

entrepreneurs

Alex Karp

Joe Lonsdale

Jimmy John Liautaud

Zach Dell

Daniel Lubetzky

Andy Aymeloglu

investors

Bill Ackman

Jeff Yass

Jason Calacanis

Peter Thiel

Mike Maples

Joe Liemandt

public intellectuals

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Bari Weiss

Rod Dreher

Michael Shellenberger

Liel Leibovitz

Yeonmi Park

Public Officials

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Gov. Greg Abbott

Sen. John Cornyn

Sen. Ted Cruz

Sen. Ted Budd

The Hon. Linda McMahon

Justice Evan A. Young

UATX is a Middle States Commission on Higher Education Accreditation Candidate; we anticipate full accreditation by 2028, subject to final Commission approval.

UATX is a school that admits students of any race, color, national and ethnic origin, gender, disability, age, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws to all the rights, privileges, programs, and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national and ethnic origin, gender, disability, age, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws in administration of its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship and loan programs, and athletic and other school-administered programs

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politco civil-war-university-of-austin-bari-weiss-00729688

They Wanted a University Without Cancel Culture. Then Dissenters Were Ousted.

Inside the civil war at the anti-woke university backed by Bari Weiss.

By Evan Mandery01/16/2026

Evan Mandery is a contributing writer at POLITICO Magazine and a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he researches and writes about inequality and higher education. He is the author of Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us.

The inaugural year of the University of Austin, or UATX as it’s known, had been marked by the frenzy and occasional chaos that one might expect from a start-up aimed at disrupting American higher education. The audacious experiment — the construction of a new university ostensibly based on principles of free expression and academic freedom — had drawn the interest and participation of a star-studded cast of public intellectuals, academics and tycoons.

Even measured against this high bar, however, April 2, 2025, would be a memorable day.

The night before, the campus had hosted a dinner and conversation between the prominent conservative historian Niall Ferguson and Larry Summers, the former Harvard University president and Treasury secretary. Later, that evening, the billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel would deliver the first of a series of lectures on the Antichrist. People at UATX had grown accustomed to fast-paced action.

But in the afternoon, all of the professors and staff were summoned, quite unusually and mysteriously, to a closed-door meeting. It had been called by Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire entrepreneur who’d co-founded the data analytics company Palantir Technologies with Thiel. Together with Ferguson and the journalist Bari Weiss, Lonsdale had been a driving force behind the creation of UATX and was a member of the board of trustees. But he wasn’t often present on campus, and it was almost unheard of for a member of the board to summon the staff, as Lonsdale had.

The campus was quiet that Wednesday, the first of the spring term. The college, which operates under a quarter system, doesn’t schedule classes on Wednesdays, and so no students would be around to see the staff coming and going from the conference room in the elegant, former department store where UATX had made its home. Through the window, one could see the huge American flag in the atrium, illuminated by a skylight in the ceiling. It was a warm, pleasant day in Austin, but Lonsdale’s mood didn’t match the weather.

“Let’s get right into it,” he said. Then, with heightened affect, Lonsdale explained his vision for UATX — a jingoistic vision with shades of America First rhetoric that contrasted rather sharply with the image UATX had cultivated as a bastion of free speech and open inquiry.

Joe Lonsdale speaks onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY in 2013. | Brian Ach/Getty Images for TechCrunch

“It was like a speech version of the ‘America love it or leave it’ bumper sticker,” one former staffer told me, and if you didn’t share the vision, the message was “there’s the door, you don’t belong here.” Like many of the people I spoke with for this story, the staffer was granted anonymity for fear of reprisal. “It was the most uncomfortable 35-to-40ish minutes I’ve ever experienced. People were shifting uncomfortably in their seats.”

The chancellor, Pano Kanelos, who’d recently been nominally promoted from the presidency, sat silently, noticeably ill at ease.

The harshness of Lonsdale’s diatribe would have been out of place on any college campus, but was particularly so at UATX, which had framed itself as a bulwark against the cancel culture that many contend has become common in the American academy. UATX’s image had never been entirely nonpartisan, but Lonsdale’s message signaled a decisive, rightward turn.

Michael Lind, a well-known writer and academic who’d co-founded the center-left think tank New America, bristled at Lonsdale’s remarks. After asking some probing questions, Lind announced his resignation as a visiting professor on the spot, dramatically depositing his key fob as he exited.

Michael Lind speaks at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, on Sept. 4, 2025. | Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images

Not long after, in the nearby Driskill Hotel, Lind was in the midst of composing a letter of resignation when Ferguson called him and persuaded him to stay. In an email I obtained that was sent to Kanelos, the provost Jake Howland, the university dean Ben Crocker and a fellow professor, Morgan Marietta, Lind related what Ferguson had told him:

“According to Niall, under the constitution of UATX Joe Lonsdale, as chair of the board, had no authority to tell those of us at the meeting:

“That all staff and faculty of UATX must subscribe to the four principles of anti-communism, anti-socialism, identity politics, and anti-Islamism (this is the first time I heard of these four principles);

“That ‘communists’ have taken over many other universities and that he, Joe Lonsdale, would stay on the board for fifty years to make sure that no ‘communists’ took over UATX (the identity politics crowd and some Islamists are a threat, but the Marxist-Leninist menace in 2025?)”

Lind said when he asked for definitions of “communists” and “socialists,” he’d been toldthey included anybody who didn’t “believe in private property” and “hate the rich.” This, he wrote, struck him “as a libertarian political test excluding anyone to the left of Ayn Rand.” Lonsdale had said that the board would make a case-by-case determination on whether “New Deal liberals” would be allowed to work at UATX. Lind said that he considered himself “an heir to the New Deal liberal tradition of FDR, Truman, JFK and LBJ.” He was “in favor of dynamic capitalism in a mixed economy, moderately social democratic and pro-labor, and anti-progressive, anti-communist, and anti-identity politics.”

According to Lind, Londsdale repeatedly said that if the faculty weren’t comfortable with what he was saying they should quit.

“So I quit and I walked out,” Lind wrote.

But, Lind continued, “Niall emphasized that UATX is a real institution, not the plaything of donors and regents, and has a constitution that binds even the chairman of the board.”

Lind said that he took Ferguson at his word and withdrew his resignation on condition that “I am not Joe Lonsdale’s personal at-will employee, and that nobody at UATX needs to subscribe to the Four Principles of Joe Lonsdale Thought on penalty of losing his or her job.”

“I look forward to teaching my class tomorrow morning,” he concluded, adding that he would need a new key fob.

Lind explained his decision to withdraw his resignation from UATX in this email. | Obtained by POLITICO

Neither Kanelos nor Lind responded to a request for comment. Lind’sbiography at New America does not mention an affiliation with UATX.

UATX did not make Lonsdale, Ferguson or Weiss available for comment and did not respond to a lengthy list of questions for this story. Lonsdale also did not respond to a request for comment sent to his venture capital firm 8VC.

The next morning, classes resumed, a seeming return to normalcy at UATX.

But, as the former staffer told me, “After that, everything was different.”

It’s a difference that should make a difference to anyone who cares about American higher education, free speech and academic freedom at a time when each faces unprecedented threats — both internal and external.

Because so many of its leaders lean conservative, UATX has been portrayed in some quarters as having been a right-wing project from the start. However, the truth is vastly more complex.

Over the past three months, I had more than 100 conversations with 25 current and former students, faculty and staffers at UATX. Each had their own perspective on the tumultuous events they shared with me, and some had personal grievances. But they were nearly unanimous in reporting that at its inception, UATX constituted a sincere effort to establish a transformative institution, uncompromisingly committed to the fundamental values of open inquiry and free expression.

They were nearly unanimous, too, in lamenting that it had failed to achieve this lofty goal and instead become something more conventional — an institution dominated by politics and ideology that was in many ways the conservative mirror image of the liberal academy it deplored. Almost everyone attributed significant weight to President Donald Trump’s return to power in emboldening right-leaning hardliners to aggressively assert their vision and reduce UATX from something potentially profound to something decidedly mundane.

It’s a tragedy worthy of the Greeks — whose view of classical education will soon take centerstage — which at its core is about the hubris of believing that first principles can transcend politics and the human temptation to succumb to power. In the staged version of the drama, the chorus would enter here to remind us that this essential flaw is one to which both the left and right fall prey.

UATX burst intothe national consciousness on Nov. 8, 2021 with a coordinated media blitz. An article in The New York Timesreported that a “a group of scholars and activists” had come together to build a new university “dedicated to free speech.”

The founders included Kanelos, who’d resigned the presidency of St. John’s College in Annapolis to run the new university, Weiss, Ferguson, Lonsdale and Heather Heying, an evolutionary biologist.

“Niall was the mind, Bari was the media and Joe was the money,” a former faculty member told me.

Binding the group was a sense of alarm over what UATX described on their website as “the illiberalism and censoriousness prevalent in America’s universities.” Weiss provided her Substack, “Common Sense” — later rebranded as The Free Press, to Kanelos to trumpet the birth of the school. “So much is broken in America,” he wrote. “But higher education might be the most fractured institution of all. There is a gaping chasm between the promise and the reality of higher education.” UATX was going to offer a new alternative. “An education rooted in the pursuit of truth,” he said, “is the antidote to the kind of ignorance and incivility that is everywhere around us.”

The Scarborough Building, the former department store which is now home to UATX, is seen on Nov. 4, 2023. | Plodinec via Wikimedia Commons

In a Bloomberg op-ed, Ferguson declared, “academic freedom dies in wokeness.” Lonsdale penned a piece for the New York Post, boldly promising that UATX would “prepare a new generation of leaders to think for themselves about all sides of an issue, speak truth to power, and take power back from ideologues.”

The announcement reverberated through the American academy; anyone who has spent time on a college campus over the past decade understands these concerns. In Heterodox Academy’s 2020 Campus Expression Survey, 62 percent of responding students said they believed their campus climate prevented students from saying things they believed. A 2024 survey, by FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, found that 35 percent of faculty self-censored or toned down their written work — about four times the rate reported by social scientists in 1954, at McCarthyism’s peak.

Kanelos said that universities had failed both students and the nation. Democracy was weakening because schools had become illiberal and incapable of producing citizens interested in or competent to participate in democratic governance. “We are done waiting for the legacy universities to right themselves,” he concluded in soaring rhetoric. “And so we are building anew.”

“I want to work there,” I told my wife.

Kanelos’ concerns resonated deeply with me, both intellectually and personally. I’m a lifelong civil libertarian and have watched with dismay as both the left and right have eroded academic freedom and open inquiry on college campuses. I’ve chronicled efforts to combat this trend for POLITICO Magazine. And, several years ago, I experienced a backlash firsthand, when a student excoriated me for defending the free speech rights of a conservative student at a campus forum on freedom of speech. With its lineup of heavy hitters, I thought UATX might be able to reverse the trend.

Pano Kanelos speaks during an UATX event in Austin, Texas, on Nov. 13, 2023. | Sergio Flores/Bloomberg via Getty Images

“I shared the same enthusiasm,” said Nadine Strossen, former president of the American Civil Liberties Union. “I was immediately enthusiastic about the mission of the university.” So too was Harvard linguist Steven Pinker. “I thought that alternative models of a university could enrich higher education and challenge the legacy universities to rethink entrenched practices,” he told me.

Kanelos identified 32 people as trustees, faculty members and advisers to the new university including Jonathan Haidt, the NYU professor whose work Kanelos evoked in proclaiming that UATX would produce an “antifragile” cohort with the capacity to think “fearlessly, nimbly, and inventively”; Summers; Pinker; the playwright David Mamet; Glenn Loury, an economist at Brown University; computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman; authors Andrew Sullivan and Rob Henderson; the journalists Caitlin Flanagan, Sohrab Ahmari and Jonathan Rauch; Stacy Hock, an investor and philanthropist; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a conservative, Dutch politician-turned-writer known for criticizing Islam’s treatment of women, and who is married to Ferguson.

The list leaned right, to be sure. Loury, who is Black, zealously opposes affirmative action. Mamet had called Trump “the best president since Abraham Lincoln.” Hock served as chairwoman of an organization called Texas GOP 2020 Victory. Several of the academics had experienced backlash for taking conservative positions. These included Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist who’d had a planned lecture at MIT on extraterrestrial life canceled over his views on DEI; Peter Boghossian, who’d resigned from Portland State University in part because of the institution’s response to his sending hoax articles to academic journals; and University of Sussex professor Kathleen Stock, who’d faced protests over her allegedly transphobic views, which she disputed.

But Summers had served in Bill Clinton’s Cabinet and as Barack Obama’s chief economic advisor. Others were unconventional, independent thinkers, and several, including Haidt and Strossen, had made advocating for free inquiry and open dialogue a major part of their life’s work. It was possible to believe that the group had just enough viewpoint diversity, and a depth of commitment to civil libertarian principles, that it might transcend the virtue signaling, intellectual hegemony and inclination to cancel that had stalled many American colleges and universities.

The coming together of this unlikely coalition sparked widespread enthusiasm. “It was the easiest fundraising pitch ever — a very American project in the best way,” the former staffer told me. “I never had an easier time getting meetings with wealthy people.” UATX stated an ambitious goal of raising $250 million. Just eighteen months later, they reported being more than halfway there.

But the early successes masked significant, underlying conflicts. While the university leadership was largely united in the need to respond to cancel culture, there was no consensus around an affirmative vision for the university.

The core problem was simple but profound: It was clear what UATX was not but entirely unclear what it was.

It took only a week for the simmering conflicts to bubble into the public eye. On Nov. 15, 2021, Pinker announced on social media that he would be stepping off the board of advisers by “mutual & amicable agreement.” The same day, University of Chicago Chancellor Robert Zimmer announced that he’d resigned from the board four days earlier.

Zimmer’s resignation hinted at one of the fault lines: how much UATX would be defined by what it was against and how strongly it would make its negative case against the elite colleges it viewed as its competition. Several people I interviewed said that Lonsdale in particular was highly motivated to vanquish such rivals, including his alma mater Stanford University.

Indeed, some early statements had a bit of throwing-down-the-gauntlet vibe. Of administrators and professors who felt threatened by UATX’s disruption of the system, Kanelos said, “We welcome their opprobrium and will regard it as vindication.” Ferguson wrote that he’d taught at Cambridge, Oxford, New York University and Harvard and had come “to doubt that the existing universities can be swiftly cured of their current pathologies.” He’d later to UATX as “the anti-Harvard.”

The early resignations seemed to be in response to the aggressiveness of the negative rhetoric. “The new university made a number of statements about higher education in general, largely quite critical, that diverged very significantly from my own views,” wrote Zimmer, who died in 2023.

“Dissociation was the only choice,” Pinker told me in an email. “I bristled at their Trump-Musk-style of trolling, taunting, and demonizing, without the maturity and dignity that ought to accompany a major rethinking of higher education.” Furthermore, Pinker added, “UATX had no coherent vision of what higher education in the 21st century ought to be. Instead, they created UnWoke U led by a Faculty of the Canceled.”

Other departures followed. University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone left the advisory board in October, telling Fortune that participation with UATX wasn’t a good fit since he believed universities should be non-ideological. In an email, Stone told me, “I had no time to be involved, so I resigned.” Photos of Tufts political science professor Vickie Sullivan and journalist Lex Fridman were removed from the website, as was mention of the journalist Andrew Sullivan and University of Sussex professor Kathleen Stock. Neither Fridman nor Vickie Sullivan nor Stock responded to requests for comment. In an email, Andrew Sullivan wrote, “I just didn’t have the time or energy to do it justice.”

On Dec. 2, 2022, Heying resigned from the board, saying that it was “better to separate myself from the University, than to have my name be attached to an institution that does not represent my scientific and pedagogical values.” In a letter published on her Substack, “Natural Selections,” Heying wrote that she didn’t think her colleagues’ vision was “sufficiently revolutionary.” To fix higher ed, UATX needed to address the root causes of “academic fragility,” which she argued, would require “tolerance for a great deal more risk than I think there is appetite for in this group.” Except for their reservations about DEI and cancel culture, Heying wrote, “It seems that others on the Board have trust in existing elite institutions.”

Heather Heying stands for a portrait in Los Angeles in 2018. | Damon Winter/The New York Times via Redux Pictures

Indeed, for a college committed to disrupting the status quo, UATX would come to rely quite heavily on traditional markers of merit for admissions. Today, UATX guarantees admission to anyone scoring at least a 1460 on the SAT, a 33 on the ACT or a 105 on the CLT. According to a UATX Substack, applicants below that threshold are evaluated on the basis of test scores, results on advanced placement and international baccalaureate exams, and three verifiable achievements, “each described in a single sentence.”

“There was no thinking expansively about whom to admit,” Heying told me. “This was just going to be another elite institution — anti-woke Stanford 2.0.”

Almost everyone I interviewed shared Pinker’s view that UATX lacked a unifying, coherent vision in its early days. But that’s not to say that individual leaders didn’t have their own, coherent visions. Soon, factions began to emerge.

In one corner was Kanelos and his supporters. While Kanelos had engaged in some challenging banter with the establishment, he’d also staked out some high ground. “We wanted to be able to bring together students and faculty from across ideological boundaries and throw in front of them some of the most vexing questions of the day,” Kanelos said in a 2022 interview. “Questions around empire, or gender, or race, and create a circle of trust where these students and faculty, who differ in so many ways, find what I call the highest common denominator.” Kanelos also emphasized UATX’s intellectual diversity. “Our backgrounds and experiences are diverse,”he wrote. “Our political views differ.” Heying echoed the sentiment. “The people who started Austin were not the alt right,” she told me.

“Pano is a decent, honorable person,” Heying said, echoing a view I heard from many others. She recalled having conversations with Kanelos about alternate pedagogies and ways to build something “not just like all of the other elite institutions out there.” But, she said, “those conversations withered on the vine.”

A faction competing with Kanelos’ included Lonsdale and several of his allies. Their view is difficult to categorize, and no two people described the lines of division the same way. Some framed it as a battle between the conservatives and the libertarians. Others saw it as the classicists versus the tech bros. But one name came up far more often than any other: Leo Strauss.

A German-Jewish emigrant, Strauss spent most of his career at the University of Chicago. An impactful teacher and prolific writer, Strauss criticized modern liberalism for undermining the influence of religion and natural law and advocated a return to teaching the ancient Greeks, who he said had deep insights into human nature and society.

Leo Strauss, seen in New York in 1939. | Monozigote via Wikimedia Commons

Strauss isn’t a household name, but he’s deeply influential on the modern right.

One can draw a straight line from Strauss to his student Allan Bloom, author of the 1987 bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind, which sounded an early alarm against identity politics, moral relativism and the decay of the university. From there one can make a direct connection to the prominent conservative intellectual Patrick Deneen, who has argued that liberalism’s emphasis on individual rights degrades authority, community and place. Deneen, who reportedly modeled himself on Bloom, won the American Political Science Association’s Leo Strauss Award in 1995 for best dissertation in political theory. Strauss was also the subject of a symposium at UATX in early January 2026, hosted by Loren Rotner, who received his PhD from Claremont Graduate University — a key institution for fueling what was known as West Coast Straussianism.

Kanelos’ view of the academy emphasized pluralism and the individual’s search for truth. On the other side, the Straussians weren’t quite so agnostic. They had a view of the common good they wanted to assert.

This conflict came to a head for the first time in September 2023 when Rotner, then the assistant provost, and Hillel Ofek, then the vice president of communications, engaged in what was described to me by several people as “a coup attempt.” They were critical of Kanelos’ leadership and believed that UATX had been neither aggressive enough in criticizing the universities with which they were in competition nor establishing UATX’s own identity. Another former staffer, who was granted anonymity out of fear of retaliation, said, “They attempted to persuade the UATX board that everything was heading in the wrong direction.”

The rebellion failed. Ofek and Rotner left UATX. Ofek took a position as director of strategy at Lonsdale Enterprises. Rotner became director of the Cosmos Institute, a nonprofit aimed at using AI for human flourishing. UATX did not make Rotner and Ofek, who have since returned to UATX as associate provost and chief strategy officer respectively, available for interviews or to provide comments.

Kanelos survived. UATX moved forward and began recruiting its first class.

In May, 2024, they hit a bump in the road when Jonathan Yudelman, a recent hire from Arizona State University, confronted a woman in a hijab in a video that went viral. But Yudelman was mostly associated with ASU, rather than UATX. The incident was handled internally and soon blew over. Yudelman remains at the university. UATX did not offer a comment on the episode, and Yudelman did not respond to a request for comment.

On Sept. 2, 2024, UATX opened its doors, presenting a united front to the world. In the morning, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott met with the inaugural class of 92 students at the state capitol. Down the block, in the Capital Ballroom of the Royal Sonesta Hotel, the students donned dark blue robes, signed the University of Austin register and, in return, received a copy of The Odyssey. Kanelos, clad in regalia, delivered a rousing address.

“History is not a story unfolding; it is an epic being written. And its authors are those bold enough to exercise their agency in the pursuit of higher things,” he said. According to Kanelos, UATX was returning to the Platonic ideal — to the “olive grove on the fringes of Athens called the Akademia,” where students came together to ask “fundamental human questions.”

There were other schools in Greece, but Kanelos said Plato’s stood above them all. “What distinguished Plato’s Academy,” he told the students, “was doctrinal pluralism and a variety of intellectual approaches. There were no easy answers. Every discussion branched outward with ever-greater complexity.”

The pluralists had won. At least for the moment.

In a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction turn of events, UATX’s commitment to its founding principles would be tested on the school’s first day of operation by an incident of alleged sexual harassment that would dominate the campus’ freshman year.

The anti-woke founders of UATX hated every aspect of cancel culture, but they had a particular, visceral enmity for the procedures surrounding the adjudication of sexual misconduct allegations under Title IX.

In December 2023, Ferguson published a manifesto of sorts in The Free Press— the “Treason of the Intellectuals.” Over his long career, Ferguson wrote, he’d witnessed “the politicization of American universities by an illiberal coalition of ‘woke’ progressives, adherents of ‘critical race theory,’ and apologists for Islamist extremism.” Still, he reserved some of his harshest language for the “armies of DEI and Title IX officers,” who, he said, seemed, at many colleges, to outnumber the students. Because these universities are rich, Ferguson said in an interview shortly after the article’s publication, “they’re allowed to grow these enormous bureaucracies of non-academics, people not engaged in research or in teaching, purely engaged in administration. They’re a huge part of the problem.”

Again, many, many people in academia would concede that Ferguson and his colleagues were onto something. In 2014, a group of 28 current and former Harvard Law School professors published a letter in the Boston Globe arguing that the university’s procedures for deciding sexual misconduct claims lacked basic due process and were stacked against the accused. In 2024, FIRE harshly criticized new regulations from the Biden administration which, among other things, eliminated an accused’s right to a live hearing, threw out their right to cross-examine their accuser and witnesses, and allowed a single administrator to act as prosecutor, judge and jury.

UATX didn’t plan on accepting federal funding and hence wouldn’t be strictly constrained by Title IX. So, they were free to innovate. They took the novel step of drafting a constitution, which created a system of checks and balances. The Board of Trustees acted as the legislative branch, the president as the executive, and an external adjudicative panel as the judicial branch, with the power to enforce a bill of rights that protected academic freedom and other student and faculty rights.

Morgan Marietta, a former professor, credited Ferguson for developing this innovative structure. “This vision of constitutionalism, once you hear it, you realize, oh, that’s it,” he told me. “That is the great American idea that we should have realized should have been governing universities for the last 200 years. It should all be honest and open and transparent.”

Niall Ferguson speaks at the Centre for Policy Studies conference in London, England, on March 17, 2025. | Ben Whitley/PA via AP

But a theoretical commitment to constitutionalism was one thing. Its practical application to a sharply disputed campus incident was quite another.

For UATX’s inaugural freshman class, the first week of September 2024, was — in the words of a current student — “insane and fully booked.” They met donors, went on hikes, pitched businesses, had a pool party at Lonsdale’s house and read The Odyssey— with 60 Minutes filming many of the proceedings for a that would air in November.

The new students were a tightly knit group. Everyone lived in two floors of the Union on 24th, an apartment building, and took a private shuttle to cover the two miles to the Scarborough Building, the former department store where the college made its home. Most people didn’t think much of it when the university dean, Ben Crocker, called a student named Dan into his office on Monday, Sept. 9, the first day of classes. But at 7:44 in the evening, they received an email from three administrators saying that Dan had been removed from campus, “transported to his home out of state,” and barred from further access to the university.

(Dan is a pseudonym. POLITICO has granted him anonymity so he would speak candidly about the situation and about allegations that have not been proven in a court of law.)

The nature of the allegations concerned, at their core, a pair of charged statements Dan allegedly made that would be familiar to any Title IX officer. The first was a general statement implying that UATX girls carried themselves physically in a way that invited sexual assault. The second was a suggestion to a specific female student that she had carried herself in a way that invited sexual assault. Dan had already been the subject of some negative attention on campus because of provocative statements he’d made in a UATX-based Discord “introductions” chat. These included a challenge — “If I catch any of you guys in my stuff, I’ll kill you” — which was a reference to the 1981 movie “Stripes” and likely misunderstood by fellow students. In another exchange, a discussion of transgender issues, Dan expressed reservations about hormone treatment and said that he couldn’t wait “to play devil’s advocate for legalizing pedophilia.”

Between 8:30 and 9:00 p.m., Crocker visited the dorms, where he hosted a meeting on the roof to discuss the issue with students. Crocker’s message was that Dan’s conduct had been evaluated to be a “credible threat” — a phrase that would be repeated by the administration many times over the following days. Crocker then faced what one student attendee recalled as a “firing squad” of questions. Some students said that Dan had seemed off, but others saw his hasty removal as an example of the very cancel culture to which UATX was supposed to be the antithesis.

The following day, at lunch, Kanelos addressed the student body. He explained that he’d had to make calls in his career as a university president about how to protect students, that he took his commitment to student safety seriously, and that, in his view, the extraordinary circumstances called for Dan’s temporary removal. Students asked whether Dan would be appointed a lawyer and granted a hearing. “We were told, ‘yes and yes,’” said one student who attended the presentation.

I have spoken multiple times with Dan, who adamantly denies the allegations and says that he was appointed a faculty advocate but not a lawyer. Several students with whom I spoke and who were present at the gathering said that Dan had never directed a comment at a specific student.

“I’ll swear on the Bible that it didn’t happen,” said one student who, like several other students, was granted anonymity for fear of reprisal from the university.

McKenna Conlin, a current UATX student and former resident advisor, told investigators that Dan hadn’t said what he’d been accused of saying and that the affair had been a misunderstanding. She, Dan and others had been discussing the Title IX training that UATX had provided to the resident advisors, which was viewed as outdated and ineffective. They’d joked that better training might have prevented some inappropriate comments they’d heard from other male students — including the offensive comment Dan was accused of making. The comments on Discord had also been misunderstood, Conlin and others said, and were better understood as the product of an apparently neurodivergent mind embracing the college’s pro-speech mission than as sinister.

The student who allegedly issued the complaint did not respond to an email from POLITICO Magazine.

In any event, what divided the campus was not so much the truth of the allegations as the speed and process by which they were decided. Dan told me that while the community was told that his suspension was temporary, he was told on the first day of class that he was being expelled.

“The first day was a huge gut punch,” said a former student. “A week before, we’d got grandiose speeches about how we were done with the Title IX bullshit, and they even spoke about, you know, what happened to Brett Kavanaugh was terrible. The entire culture just eroded in the blink of an eye.” The former student pointed to it as the principal cause of his decision to withdraw from UATX at the end of his freshman year.

Another former faculty member who was closely involved with Dan’s situation expressed similar disillusionment with the process. Indeed, when the UATX adjudicative panel — comprising outside legal experts — reviewed Dan’s expulsion, it found that the procedures had violated the school’s constitution in several regards by, among other things, depriving him of his right to a public hearing and failing to include students in the jury that reached an initial determination on the expulsion decision. UATX argued that these provisions violated Texas law. The university thus took the highly unusual position that its own constitution was illegal, but Dan didn’t challenge this, and so the panel accepted the university’s argument. However, the panel also found that Dan had been deprived of his right to obtain witnesses in his favor.

The adjudicative panel’s decision — which POLITICO Magazine has obtained — referred to the procedures surrounding Dan’s case as “shambolic,” and said that UATX’s counsel had said of the procedures that they’d been “building the plane while we’re flying it.” “It was cobbling together handbooks, policies, and procedures,” the decision quotes UATX’s lawyer as saying. “There were a lot of cooks in the kitchen. The judicial handbook from what I understand was coming together kind of as a live document for a long time.”

The panel ultimately recommended that the school’s constitution be revised to conform with Texas law and that Dan effectively be retried under the new procedure and with the right to call witnesses.

According to the former faculty member, the university disregarded the panel.

“It was like, ‘Lord give me constitutionalism, but not yet,’” the former faculty member said. “It’s too bad. It would have been glorious.” Many faulted Kanelos for the departure from UATX’s founding charter.

UATX did not respond to a request for comment about the matter and did not make Crocker available for comment.

Dan confirms that a rehearing that might have allowed him to clear his name was never scheduled. He was, however, offered to reenroll at UATX, though with neither a guarantee of continued financial aid nor clarity as to the specifics of how to manage a return that would be “clearly uncomfortable for everybody,” and he ultimately did not return. (Tuition at UATX is free, but students bear the costs of housing, food and textbooks.)

Nearly ten months passed between the incident and when the adjudicative panel reached its decision in June 2025. It lingered so long that most students viewed it as the defining issue of their freshman year.

“The mood was strange, and I can’t honestly say it ever became normal,” said Conlin. “For many of us, there was immediate and irreparable damage of trust with university administrators that has stayed to this day.”

With Dan’s case lingeringin the background, UATX students settled into college life, which most students with whom I spoke found — Kanelos’ claims of revolutionary disruption notwithstanding — to be similar in many regards to any other campus.

UATX did not grant my request to visit, and classes operate under the Chatham House Rule, which prevents students from identifying speakers in the classroom — a prohibition respected by every student with whom I spoke. But several students had previously pursued degrees or taken classes at other colleges and thus had relevant points of reference. They said many campus dynamics would be familiar at any college — students ate together, dated their classmates and worried about exams. At the same time, several differences stood out.

The first is that UATX is not yet accredited (and under Texas law cannot call itself a college). It operates under a Certificate of Authority, awarded by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, on which Hock serves as chair. UATX is seeking accreditation from the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. Generally speaking, a college must graduate at least one class as a prerequisite for accreditation. UATX’s first class is scheduled to graduate in 2028.

Several students noted a lack of diversity. Consistent with its emphasis on “merit-based admissions,” UATX doesn’t publish demographic data. The students with whom I spoke said their classmates — and the college’s leadership — were overwhelmingly white, disproportionately came from wealthy families and had an overrepresentation of apparent neurodivergence. They found ideological diversity to be particularly lacking. “I didn’t realize exactly how conservative it would be,” one current student told me. “You know, when I hear free speech and open debate and all that jazz, I assumed that there was going to be a more equal amount of political views, and there wasn’t.”

Classes weren’t as innovative as most students expected. “Year one was exceptionally boring,” the student said. “They did great books, they just didn’t do it in a great way,” said another student, who lamented the amount of memorization required. “I thought we were going to be intensely debating,” he said.

Several students shared course syllabi with me. Most are easy enough to imagine being offered on any campus — with the notable exception of math and science. “The math classes go over algebra you learned in ninth grade,” a student told me. “There was just nothing there.” He described the offering as “schizophrenic” and described a class he’d taken at University of Texas at Austin as “exponentially more important.”

Indeed, the syllabus I reviewed for a class called “Intellectual Foundations of Science II” covered a range of topics unusual for a science class including “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.” A student who’d taken the course shared a slide with me on “ensoulment” — the principally religious question of when a soul enters the human body — and said that the class had been told that IVF but not abortion could be consistent with the Catholic belief about ensoulment.

The syllabus from the class “Intellectual Foundations of Science II” at UATX. | Obtained by POLITICO

A slide on “ensoulment” — the principally religious question of when a soul enters the human body — was shown in the class. | Obtained by POLITICO

The poor quality of the science offerings had bothered Heying and Pinker. “Others thought I was the token liberal,” Heying told me, “but I came to understand myself as the token scientist.” In an email, Pinker wrote, “They should have hired a widely esteemed scientist and proven program builder to set up their science division.”

Another surprising similarity with other colleges stemmed directly from Dan’s expulsion: The students feared cancellation. “At any moment a frivolous Title IX complaint could be filed against you,” a former student told me. “I’ve never felt my speech was so chilled as it was in the classroom at UATX.”

As UATX’s first semester ended and Trump reascended, the pluralists began to lose their grip on power.

In December 2024, Ferguson attended a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago hosted by Marissa Streit, CEO of the conservative educational nonprofit PragerU, which, among other things, has produced material comparing climate change deniers to Jews who resisted the Nazis. Soon thereafter, Ferguson softened his previously harsh criticisms of Trump, saying that he’d been wrong to call him a “would-be tyrant,” that the system could contain whatever tyrannical impulses the once-and-future president might have, and that it would have been a “disaster” if Kamala Harris had won the election.

In January 2025, UATX experienced its second attempted coup in less than a year and a half. “A consortium led by Lonsdale convinced the board that everything was going in the wrong direction,” a former senior staffer told me. They argued that “our great books curriculum was misguided, we weren’t doing enough on tech and our founding president was the wrong person for the job.”

This time Kanelos wouldn’t escape unscathed. On Jan. 10, Ferguson and Lonsdale announced that Kanelos had “graciously accepted” an offer to be “elevated” to the newly created role of chancellor, modeled on Oxford University. Other major changes would follow.

In March, Ofek and Rotner, who’d been principal architects of the first failed coup, returned.

Students gather in a common area at UATX on Sept. 15, 2025. | Jay Janner/The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images

Around the same time, UATX ended its relationship with Ellie Avishai and The Mill Institute, a nonprofit she led dedicated to promoting viewpoint diversity, which Kanelos had housed at UATX and supported with a half million dollar advance against future fundraising. Avishai’s sin appeared to be reposting on her LinkedIn account an article by the psychologist Michael Strambler, which argued that DEI was neither all good nor all bad. More deeply, the article condemned the temptation of embracing absolutist positions. Strambler gave a shout out to The Mill Institute, whose slogan is “Less certain, more curious.” The post attracted little attention — only 19 reactions — but two days later, Avishai was ousted unceremoniously. “The only communication that I personally received from the university was a phone call from this junior guy who was sort of happy to be the hammer,” Avishai told me.

The shifts in personnel coincided with shifts in advertising and admissions. “Come to a school that doesn’t hate you” read an ad in The New Criterion, a conservative literary magazine — which several people told me was intended as a reference to reports of antisemitism on other college campuses. Some of UATX’s early rhetoric had been challenging, but it hadn’t been in print and it hadn’t been this direct.

“Once we started going negative, gifts started drying up,” said the same senior former staffer, though, in retrospect, it might be more accurate to say that the diversity of the gifts started to shift. In November, UATX announced that it had received a $100 million gift from Jeffrey Yass, a billionaire investor who has been a significant supporter of Trump and MAGA-related causes.

On March 31, UATX announced its new “merit-first” admissions policy, guaranteeing admissions on the basis of standardized test scores.

Two days later, Lonsdale would address the all-staff meeting, and the extent to which things had changed would become apparent to everyone.

When UATX’s supporters and advisers came together for the college’s annual First Principles Summit — on May 3 — the rightward pivot away from pluralism couldn’t be ignored. The day before, the university had announced its new president: Carlos Carvalho, a professor of statistics at UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business, but it was Ferguson who held the spotlight.

Ferguson briefly addressed Kanelos’ change in role. “We shall soon have a constitutional monarch and a prime minister,” he said, according to a transcript of his remarks obtained by POLITICO Magazine. “I believe you will soon see the benefits of this modification to our constitutional order.” The bulk of his remarks focused on the Trump administration’s threats to the existing higher education order. The day after Lonsdale’s all-staff meeting, Harvard had received a letter accusing it of failing to protect students from antisemitism followed, one week later, by a letter demanding a long list of reforms as a condition of receiving continued federal funding.

In mid-April, FIRE issued a statement condemning the attacks as an infringement of the First Amendment and academic freedom that would “render Harvard a vassal institution.” At the summit, Ferguson said that UATX’s leaders needed to “think twice” before they uncritically embraced FIRE’s narrative that Trump was “the villain” and Harvard professors the heroes.

In the audience that day was Strossen, who in addition to serving as an adviser to UATX was a senior fellow at FIRE, a leading expert on First Amendment law and a past president of the ACLU. In advance of the meeting, Strossen had submitted questions about the separation from the Mill Institute and how well the university’s constitution was working.

Nadine Strossen testifies before the House Homeland Security Committee in Washington, on June 26, 2019. | Win McNamee/Getty Images

But, Strossen said, none of her questions were on the agenda. “There was, in fact, no opportunity for meaningful input by members of the Board of Advisors,” she told me. “It was just a show-and-tell session, and it wasn’t even show-and-tell. It was like lecturing at us.”

Strossen said that she admired Ferguson — “he’s brilliant, he’s witty, he’s erudite” — but she strongly disagreed with his questioning how FIRE could defend Harvard. “It’s as absurd as saying, ‘How can the ACLU be defending the Nazis?’” she said. “There had never been a stronger critic of Harvard,” Strossen added, noting that FIRE had ranked Harvard at the bottom of its free-speech rankings. “We were defending the academic freedom principles that were threatened by what the Trump administration was doing.”

The next day, a Sunday, Strossen emailed several people including Kanelos, Ferguson, Rauch, and FIRE’s CEO Greg Lukianoff. “I believe it is critically important for UATX, with its signature mission of defending academic freedom principles, to weigh in as a defender of these principles in the current context,” she wrote in the email obtained by POLITICO Magazine. “Otherwise, UATX will subject itself to plausible criticism that it is less concerned about the neutral pursuit of truth/protection of academic freedom than about attacking existing universities and/or supporting the Trump Administration.”

Kanelos offered to sign onto a joint opinion piece with Strossen on the Trump administration’s actions, but no one else expressed support for the idea. Strossen had the sense that Kanelos would be speaking for himself rather than UATX, and nothing ever came of her email.

“When we were no longer aligned with FIRE and the Mill Institute, I knew that we were fucked,” Conlin said.

On May 16, Avishai published an account of her firing — titled “Is the University Of Austin Betraying Its Founding Principles?” in Quillette, an online journal focused on free speech and identity politics.

One day later, Ahmari, who said he’d been brought into the project by Weiss, announced his resignation on X — citing his concern with Avishai’s termination. “I don’t believe in a value-neutral university. I’m not a free speech absolutist,” Ahmari told me. “But nevertheless, I want a credible institution and an institution that is, because of its richer worldview, more reasonable.”

“When you fire an administrator or you put pressure on her, because she said, ‘Look, I don’t like institutional DEI, but I think we should uphold diversity as a value,’ which is a perfectly innocuous thing to say, and I think kind of right for a university context — that’s more unreasonable than some of the stuff that went on at the ‘woke’ university that these people critiqued.” Ahmari said.

“I just felt like the worldview that was being pushed was just kind of a very gruff, intolerant conservatism, and not even an elevated one,” he said, “and it was too beholden to the donors, especially Joe Lonsdale.”

Over the summer, UATX drifted further away from pluralism and toward a more rigid, hard-right orthodoxy.

On July 15, the conservative Manhattan Institute issued a statement calling on Trump to draft a new contract with universities, violations of which should be punishable by revocation of all public benefit. “Beginning with the George Floyd riots and culminating in the celebration of the Hamas terror campaign,” the statement read, “the institutions of higher education finally ripped off the mask and revealed their animating spirit: racialism, ideology, chaos.” Universities had become tyrannical agents of “the Left” and forgotten that they and the state were “bound together by compact.” The signatories included Ferguson, Ali, Boghossian, now a faculty advisor at UATX, and UATX professor Alex Priou.

Two days later, the new president, Carvalho, issued a response on the UATX Substack. “This crisis is why UATX was founded,” he wrote, noting that the Manhattan Institute statement had been endorsed by “countless others — including members and supporters of UATX.”

Carlos Carvalho speaks at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, on Sept. 4, 2025. | Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images

Carvalho’s response was the final straw for some advisers. “It was all but a full-throated endorsement of the Manhattan Institute statement,” said Strossen. “That was to me completely antithetical to academic freedom, which was supposedly the core mission of the University of Austin.”

In a last-ditch effort of sorts, Rauch, Haidt and Strossen organized a call with Carvalho. The discussion didn’t inspire confidence in the group, said someone with knowledge of the call who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. Carvalho basically told them that UATX was a right-wing project, and that they’d known this when they signed up. But that wasn’t what any of them had believed.

On July 18, Summersannounced his resignation from UATX on X. The former Harvard president said that he saw major problems with the lack of diverse perspectives in elite institutions, but was “not comfortable with the course that UATX has set nor the messages it promulgates.”

The next day, Strossen declared her intention to resign. “I have become increasingly uneasy with UATX’s apparent drifting away from its mission of offering an exemplary model to galvanize other universities to live up to their truth-seeking missions,” she wrote in an email to Carvalho, Ferguson, Kanelos and Howland. Instead, she saw it “drifting too much toward piling onto the revengeful “anti-Woke” bandwagon,” citing the firing of the Mill Institute personnel as one of several additional concerns.

Carvalho asked her to defer her resignation until early August. Strossen obliged and told me that she wanted to do the “least possible damage to the institution.” Haidt and Rauch quietly separated from UATX shortly thereafter. Neither responded to a request for comment.

Over the late spring and early summer, so many other resignations and terminations followed that it was difficult to keep up.

The head of fundraising, Chad Thevenot, announced his resignation immediately after the April all-staff meeting. By the end of the summer, according to one of his former senior staff members, about half of Thevenot’s staff of approximately 15 had followed suit. (Thevenot, who recently co-founded a start-up called The Athos Group with Kanelos, did not respond to a request for an interview. On LinkedIn, Thevenot described Athos as “a firm devoted to helping founders, funders, and leaders build and renew the institutions that sustain a free and flourishing society.”) Overall, the former senior staffer estimated that approximately a third of the school’s staff resigned over the spring and summer. Of the 32 supporters Kanelos identified in his original announcement, nearly half had departed by the end of the summer of 2025.

The original constitution did not provide for the firing of the provost, but it was amended in May to allow the president to fire the provost with consent of the trustees. About two months later, Howland, the widely-admired provost — one of the few remaining senior staffers loyal to Kanelos — left the college. Several people I spoke with indicated that he’d been fired. (Howland, who is also joining The Athos Group, did not respond to a request for comment.)

In July, the constitution was changed yet again, significantly expanding the president’s power. Under the new rules, the president had ultimate authority to appoint investigators and impose sanctions. There would be no more public hearings or impartial juries.

When students returned for the second year of operation, the consolidation of power was nearly complete.

During the many conversations I had reporting this story, two questions came up more than any other.

The first: Where was Bari Weiss? Many of the people I interviewed told me about internal conversations and shared internal emails. Weiss, who remains on the board of trustees, was almost never present in the conversations as they were related to me, and while I saw many emails on which Kanelos and Ferguson were copied, I never saw any including Weiss.

Bari Weiss speaks onstage during an event in New York City, on Nov. 19, 2024. | Noam Galai/Getty Images for The Free Press

One person I spoke to, who was present during the early planning stages, told me that Weiss was “very elusive” and almost never present in person. This was ironic since UATX was closely associated with Weiss — a bust of whom now resides in the school library. Weiss, meanwhile, has only risen further during the Trump 2.0 era and is now editor-in-chief of CBS News, where she has been criticized as genuflecting to the Trump administration. A spokesperson for CBS News did not respond to a request for comment from Weiss.

One former member of the development team told me that they would routinely ask prospective donors how they got to know UATX. “Eighty percent of the time, the answer was Bari Weiss,” they said. “It was very often referred to as Bari Weiss’ University, or Bari Weiss’ University Project, or Bari Weiss’ University of Austin.”

For several people, this was a source of resentment. “I don’t care whether she wants to pretend this is all gone now — she is the reason that this place exists. She was huge, she was held in such high regard, she had such an enormous impact,” the former staffer said.

“I want her to be held to account,” she added. “I’m pissed.”

The second question: Was UATX a hard-right project from the start? Based on my reporting, I don’t think it was. I was struck by the sincerity of the commitment to free speech and open inquiry from so many of the people with whom I spoke. A few were Trump supporters, but many more were best identified as anti-woke moderates or liberals. The university’s saga has a strong sense of historical contingency — that it could have gone quite differently had some high-leverage moments gone otherwise. A notable example is the episode surrounding Dan’s alleged violation and expulsion, which several former staffers and faculty suggested was exploited by the Straussians as evidence of dysfunction in their successful second coup attempt.

A more helpful frame for making sense of this story is the one described by Michael Strambler in the article Avishai reposted prior to her firing: the near irresistible temptation humans feel to become convinced of the correctness of their positions. But certainty is incompatible with democracy and the academy, explains Ilana Redstone, a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Campaign; she is also a co-founder of the Mill Institute and was briefly associated with UATX.

Redstone says open inquiry requires three premises: Any claim can be questioned, questioning something doesn’t mean it’s wrong, and exploring an idea that someone thinks is odious doesn’t mean that someone wants to sign onto it. The paradox of democracy is that it can undo itself. One can exercise their free speech to advocate against free speech or use their vote to elect someone with authoritarian impulses. That’s the price of civil liberties. “If you really want to be the institution that is committed to open inquiry, to the pursuit of truth, et cetera,” says Redstone, “all of your own claims have to be subject to questioning.”

By its nature, a university — like democracy — invites the unbidden. It’s impossible to predict how students and faculty will exercise their freedom. The prospect that they would be allowed to speak and think freely, without fear of cancellation, is what made UATX’s original vision so exciting.

A bust of Bari Weiss resides in the library at UATX. | Obtained by POLITICO

The ultimate irony is that UATX fell prey to the very impulses that its founders and supporters so detested. “It’s easy to see when other people lack these things,” Redstone said. “It’s harder to see in themselves.” Redstone hastens to add this isn’t just a failure at UATX. It’s fair to ask whether any university lives up to these ideas. Fair to ask, too, whether any institution can truly commit itself to first principles or if the instinct to shape outcomes and inject one’s personal politics is irresistible.

“Open inquiry demands that you accept imperfection and occasional embarrassment, and constitutionalism demands that you admit and correct mistakes publicly,” Marietta, the former UATX faculty member — and current professor at University of Tennessee-Knoxville — told me. But, he added, “Most people who build something want to control it.”

When students returned for UATX’s second year, it was difficult not to notice the drift. The Tuesday night speaker series, at which attendance is mandatory, leaned unmistakably rightward — guests included Patrick Deneen, originalist judge Amul Thapar and Catherine Pakaluk, a Catholic University business school professor who’d written Hannah’s Children, about the 5 percent of American women who have five or more children.

Finally on Oct. 1, UATX delivered the coup de grace and announced Kanelos’ resignation. We can’t be entirely certain of his side of the story, but one thing was abundantly clear.

The pluralists had lost.

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SEE TYLER COWAN

oops

morphed into econ?

AI Overview

Glenn Loury is an American economist, social critic, and the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences at Brown University. A prominent voice in conservative and classical liberal thought, his academic expertise spans microeconomics, game theory, and the economics of race and inequality. [1, 2,3, 4]

Connection to Austrian Economics

Core Work & Background

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Artificial Intelligence

Cowen frequently discusses how AI will reorder global economies, schools, and spirituality. ]

For tips on how Cowen views the future of education and why he is bullish on AI mentoring, check out his thoughts shared via the University of Austin:

2m

[Tyler Cowen Is Bullish on AI Education — Here's Why

University of Austin (UATX)

YouTube · Jan 22, 2026](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSx9kcFr7XA&t=42)

Projects and Writings

Cowen hosts the popular interview podcast Conversations with Tyler, where he probes leading thinkers across a wide variety of topics ranging from AI and economics to Indian classical music and food. Along with Alex Tabarrok, he co-created Marginal Revolution University, an online platform designed to make economics education free and accessible. 1, 2,3, 4]

Environmental and Urban Ties

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COMM DR 12 25

Venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of data platform company Palantir, is calling for the return of public hangings as part of a broader push to restore what he describes as “masculine leadership” to the US.

In a statement posted on X Friday, Lonsdale said that he supported changing the so-called “three strikes” anti-crime law to ensure that anyone who is convicted of three violent crimes gets publicly executed, rather than simply sent to prison for life.

“If I’m in charge later, we won’t just have a three strikes law,” he wrote. “We will quickly try and hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others.”

Lonsdale then added that “our society needs balance,” and said that “it’s time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable.”

Lonsdale’s views on public hangings being necessary to restore “masculine leadership” drew swift criticism.

Gil Durán, a journalist who documents the increasingly authoritarian politics of Silicon Valley in his newsletter “The Nerd Reich,” argued in a Saturday post that Lonsdale’s call for public hangings showed that US tech elites are “entering a more dangerous and desperate phase of radicalization.”

“For months, Peter Thiel guru Curtis Yarvin has been squawking about the need for more severe measures to cement Trump’s authoritarian rule,” Durán explained. “Peter Thiel is ranting about the Antichrist in a global tour. And now Lonsdale—a Thiel protégé—is fantasizing about a future in which he will have the power to unleash state violence at mass scale.”

Taulby Edmondson, an adjunct professor of history, religion, and culture at Virginia Tech, wrote in a post on Bluesky that the rhetoric Lonsdale uses to justify the return of public hangings has even darker intonations than calls for state-backed violence.

“A point of nuance here: ‘masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable’ is how lynch mobs are described, not state-sanctioned executions,” he observed.

Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll argued that Lonsdale’s remarks were symbolic of a kind of performative masculinity that has infected US culture.

“Immaturity masquerading as strength is the defining personal characteristic of our age,” he wrote.

Tech entrepreneur Anil Dash warned Lonsdale that his call for public hangings could have unintended consequences for members of the Silicon Valley elite.

“Well, Joe, Mark Zuckerberg has sole control over Facebook, which directly enabled the Rohingya genocide,” he wrote. “So let’s have the conversation.”

And Columbia Journalism School professor Bill Grueskin noted that Lonsdale has been a major backer of the University of Austin, an unaccredited liberal arts college that has been pitched as an alternative to left-wing university education with the goal of preparing “thoughtful and ethical innovators, builders, leaders, public servants and citizens through open inquiry and civil discourse.”

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John Oliver Shreds Bari Weiss' Track Record After CBS News Appointment

John Oliver is certainly not a fan of Paramount’s decision to name The Free Press founder Bari Weiss as the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, and on Sunday night, he explained exactly why. The HBO host devoted the main story of “Last Week Tonight” to picking apart Weiss’ reporting track record, which he deemed “irresponsible” at best.

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shillenberger utx austin

https://www.public.news/p/escape-the-woke-matrix}:

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A founder of the University of Austin (UATX) is Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir. Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel is also a donor to UATX. Daniel Lubetzky, founder of Kind Snacks, is an additional donor.

Palantir founders involved with UATX

Other notable UATX founders and donors

Stanford controversy

In 2018, leaked emails showed he told two College Republican student activists at Stanford University, John Rice-Cameron and Max Minshull, to coordinate "opposition research" on Michael Ocon, a left-leaning student leader. Ferguson resigned from his leadership role in the Cardinal Conversations program after the email chain became public knowledge.[13]

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board of trustees

Faculty

staff

board of trustees

board of advisors

Teri Andresen

Civic Leader and Philanthropist

Brent Bellm

CEO, BigCommerce

Niall Ferguson

Historian, The Hoover Institution at Stanford University

plus icon circlegoldeb plus icon

Pano Kanelos

President

Joe Lonsdale

CEO of 8VC, Co-Founder of Palantir

Scott Malkin

Chair, Value Retail

Andrew Trousdale

Researcher and Artist

Bari Weiss

Founder, The Free Press

learn more

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shillenberger

CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech

The Chair is intended to advance the study of censorship and the technological, political, economic, and cultural conditions that lead to the suppression of speech. By exposing students to historical and recent manifestations of censorship, the Chair will facilitate the responsible exercise of free speech in a pluralistic society.

Michael Shellenberger is a best-selling author, a publisher of the Twitter files, and a pro-human environmentalist. He has broken a number of major stories, including San Francisco's supervised drug consumption site and cash incentives for homelessness, FBI misinformation about the Hunter Biden laptop, climate pseudoscience and climate anxiety, and more. As a leading expert on the suppression of speech who testifies and advises governments worldwide, Michael is uniquely qualified to lead UATX in its studies of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech.

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board of advisors

Faculty

staff

board of trustees

board of advisors

Dorian Abbot

Geophysicist, University of Chicago

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[### Dorian AbbotProfessor

University of Chicago

https://geosci.uchicago.edu › people › dorian-abbot](https://geosci.uchicago.edu/people/dorian-abbot/)

I have an undergraduate degree in physics (2004, Harvard) and a PhD in applied math (2008, Harvard). I came to the University of Chicago as a Chamberlin Fellow ...Read more

AI Overview

Dorian Abbot is a professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago. His academic research focuses on climate, paleoclimate, and planetary habitability using mathematical and computational models, as well as AI.

University of Chicago

Beyond his scientific work, he is a prominent advocate for academic freedom and meritocracy.

Professional Background

Free Speech Controversy

Professor Abbot gained national attention in late 2021 when MIT canceled his scheduled Carlson Lecture following a public Twitter campaign opposing university diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices.

YouTube·GOACTA +1

Chicago Maroon +2

Geophysical Sciences Grad Students Call on Faculty to Denounce Videos By Department Member

Following a set of videos published by professor Dorian Abbot, a group of students in his department are demanding that he be removed from his social media and website positions, as well as departmental denunciation of the video’s content.

Zoe Kaiser

By Matthew Lee and Caroline Kubzansky

December 2, 2020

A group of students in the geophysical sciences department are demanding that professor Dorian Abbot be removed from his position as Department Website and Social Media Committee Chair in response to a series of videos that criticized many diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts in his department and in academia as a whole.

In these videos, since taken down, Abbot alleged that his department discriminated against white and Asian candidates in their admissions and hiring processes, claimed that conservatives and Christians are mocked in the academic environment, and urged his colleagues to reject affirmative-action based hiring practices. These allegations, Abbot claimed on Twitter, are now the subject of an investigation by the University’s Title IX office.

“We are right to feel compelled to do something about [injustice],” Abbot says in one video, titled “My perspective on the current academic climate.” However, he goes on to describe how it seems to him that a white, conservative, Christian male from the Florida panhandle would not feel he had a place at UChicago.

Abbot also made specific allegations about hiring and admissions practices he viewed as problematic. In his video, Abbot says that in a recent selection process for a postdoctoral fellowship, two out of 47 male applicants were selected, versus six out of 31 female applicants. In the same video, Abbot also alleges that he “has seen us discriminating against Chinese applicants and I feel terrible about it. Chinese students are just as creative and independent thinking as American students.”

After discussing acts of service as a way of fighting injustice, Abbot urges his audience to “treat all applicants fairly by only judging them on the basis of their ability and promise as scientists.”

Abbot’s views have generated a controversy both within his department and in the general public.

Graduate students in the department of Geophysical Sciences delivered a letter to department faculty on November 20, writing that Abbot’s videos constitute an aggressive action toward underrepresented groups in the department and undercut the efforts of the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Coordination Team (EDICT). They also questioned the soundness of Abbot’s argument.

“In these videos, he uses anecdotal evidence and poor statistics not supported by peer-reviewed literature about diversity,” the letter says.

Among other demands, the letter’s signatories ask that Abbot’s Teaching and Research Assistants be allowed to opt out of their responsibilities, and that students in Abbot’s classes be given the option to complete the quarter with another instructor.

The letter also urges the Department of Geophysical Sciences publish a public statement denouncing Abbot’s videos, increase funding for equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) initiatives, and ensure that the department’s “hiring committee have a vested interest in improving equity, diversity, and inclusion.”

The petition also alleges that Abbot inappropriately used student photos obtained via his official role as Department Website and Social Media Committee Chair and demands that he lose his position and privileges for that role immediately. In “My perspective on the current academic climate,” a photo of several Department of Geophysical Sciences students gathering is displayed with the caption “let’s treat all applicants fairly by judging them only on the basis of their ability and their promise as scientists.” The same photo was featured on the Department of Geophysical Sciences’s official website under the “prospective students” page.

In response to a request for comment, Abbot directed The Maroon to a statement he posted on his Twitter.

In that statement, Abbot said that several of his colleagues had privately contacted him to express concern regarding “the way that anyone who tries to dissent on certain issues is immediately assumed to have racist or otherwise bigoted motives, which prevents the intellectual exploration of that issue,” and that he had intended the videos to follow up on those privately expressed concerns.

In a statement to The Maroon, organizers said they wrote the letter because they saw a lack of existing levers to enact social change in their department.

“There are currently no real or reliable means of addressing incidents of bias, nor of making structural or policy changes in the department,” organizers wrote. “The department culture is dominated by an inclination not to name names, and currently the department primarily relies on seminars and discussions rather than on changes that will materially help marginalized students in the department.”

The organizers added that they made the letter public in order to “put maximal pressure on department leadership.”

Geophysical Sciences Department Chair Fred Ciesla forwarded a request for comment to University spokesperson Gerald McSwiggan, who said that EDI efforts were a priority for the department as well as the University as a whole.

“Members of the Department of the Geophysical Sciences have been actively engaged in building a stronger, more diverse community of scientists through efforts such as the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDICT) team, membership in the American Geophysical Union’s Bridge Program, and education and discussion groups focused on diversity and inclusion,” he said.

McSwiggan added that the University does not speak for individual faculty members.

---

MAROON

By Basil Egli, Deputy News Editor

November 8, 2021

UChicago geophysical sciences professor Dorian Abbot was disinvited from the annual John Carlson Lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in September following backlash from MIT’s student body over Abbot’s public opinions on affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in higher education.

Robert van der Hilst, the chair of MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS)—which hosts the Carlson Lecture—cited a controversial op-ed Abbot coauthored in Newsweek titled “The Diversity Problem on Campus” when explaining the reason for the lecture’s cancellation.

Abbot has taught at UChicago since 2009 and became an associate professor in 2015. He researches climate change and the habitability of exoplanets and teaches a variety of courses, including the popular Global Warming course.

Abbot has been a figure of national controversy since August, when he co-wrote the Newsweek article with Stanford University professor Iván Marinovic. The op-ed expressed concerns about the increasing emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in many colleges and universities. Such initiatives, Abbot and Marinovic argued, are made at the expense of academic excellence and merit, thus actively harming the value of American institutions.

The op-ed compared the implementation of DEI curriculums to the rise of Nazi Germany, where “an ideological regime obsessed with race came to power and drove many of the best scholars out.” Van der Hilst cited this comparison as one of his key reasons for canceling the lecture.

The authors suggested that DEI should instead be replaced with another standard: Merit, Fairness, and Equality (MFE). The authors described MFE as a method “whereby university applicants are treated as individuals and evaluated through a rigorous and unbiased process based on their merit and qualifications alone.”

“Professor Marinovic and I wanted to express our opinions on a controversial topic openly. We hoped that this would encourage others to speak freely,” Abbot wrote in an email to The Maroon.

Abbot emphasized the values underpinning their proposed MFE system in an emailed response to The Maroon. “We suggest that universities should stop giving preferences to legacies, athletes, and donor children. We also suggest that universities should invest money in researching and implementing optimal techniques to improve K-12 education, particularly for children who are not currently receiving a high-quality education.”

Abbot was initially set to speak as a part of the Carlson Lecture Series in early 2020, but the event was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In September, MIT students and other people affiliated with EAPS pushed the university and the department over social media and in meetings to rescind Abbot’s invitation publicly. The protestors argued that the selection of Abbot as a lecturer reflected a lapse in MIT and EAPS’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

After the cancellation of his MIT lecture, Abbot was offered a lecture appearance by Robert George, the director of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, KOCHADEMIA which he gave on October 21 to a virtual audience of around 3,000. George, a well-known conservative intellectual, announced on Twitter that “MIT’s caving in to a cancel mob’s demand to disinvite a distinguished scientist who had been invited on the basis of his achievements to give an honorific lecture shows just how badly science today has been politicized. The integrity of science can’t survive politicization.”

In response to MIT’s decision, Abbot penned another op-ed, published in the Wall Street Journal in late October. Abbot framed his personal beliefs as concerns for equality, the prioritization of academic merit in the admissions process, and the separation of the scientific process from politics. He wrote, “I believe that every human being should be treated as an individual worthy of dignity and respect. In an academic context, that means evaluating people for positions based on their individual qualities, not on membership in favored or disfavored groups. It also means allowing them to present their ideas and perspectives freely, even when we disagree with them.”

In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Abbot re-emphasized the key points from his op-ed with Marinovic on which he has elaborated in various Twitter posts. He made similar arguments about merit-based admissions, separating politics and science, and political sensitivity on campus to those he had previously voiced on Twitter.

This is not the first time Abbot’s political views have caused controversy. Last year, Abbot released a Google Doc on Twitter titled “My Perspective on the Controversial Events of 11/13/20-11/15/20.” The document addresses a since-deleted videotaped slideshow that Abbot had shared with geophysical sciences department faculty in November 2020, explaining his belief that academia marginalizes people on the basis of political belief and exhibits bias toward women and non-Asian people of color.

Abbot’s slideshow and follow-up document, which were circulated around the UChicago community, were met with criticism. Particularly controversial was a slideshow that compared the cultural trajectory of college campuses to the Holodomor, the 1932­–33 genocide that killed millions of ethnic Ukrainians.

When asked why he released the document, Abbot stated, “I wanted to present those slides internally in my department, but was refused. I posted them on YouTube as a way to share them with my department. I did not realize they would get shared widely, and people started writing mean things to each other in the comments, which was not something I expected or was happy about. I’ve since learned that this is typical of discussions on the internet.”

Abbot, along with Chancellor and former University president Robert Zimmer, is listed as being on the board of advisors for the newly announced University of Austin, which is set to launch its undergraduate college in 2024.

---

[### Chancellor Zimmer Resigns From University of Austin ...

Chicago Maroon

https://chicagomaroon.com › news › uchicago-chancell...](https://chicagomaroon.com/28726/news/uchicago-chancellor-robert-zimmer-resigns-university-austin/)

UChicago's chancellor and former president Robert Zimmer announced his resignation from the University of Austin (UATX) Advisory Board.Read more

AI Overview

+9

Robert J. Zimmer, the late former president and chancellor of the University of Chicago, briefly joined the advisory board of the newly founded University of Austin (UATX) in November 2021 but resigned just days later.

Chicago Maroon +1

The Context of His Involvement

Zimmer was a highly prominent, nationwide champion of academic freedom and campus free speech. Under his leadership, the University of Chicago established the Chicago Principles, a gold-standard framework for free expression adopted by dozens of universities. Because UATX was explicitly launched to counter what its founders called a "rising tide of illiberalism" in higher education, Zimmer initially agreed to serve in an advisory capacity to support its focus on civil discourse and open inquiry.

University of Chicago News +4

Reason for Resignation

Zimmer resigned from the UATX advisory board on November 11, 2021, only three days after the new institution was publicly announced.

Chicago Maroon

According to an official statement released through UChicago News, Zimmer stepped down due to the highly critical rhetoric UATX used against existing academic institutions:

Chicago Maroon

"While the new organization’s commitment to a liberal arts education and free expression reflects topics that are very important to me... the new university made a number of statements about higher education in general, largely quite critical, that diverged very significantly from my own views."

Chicago Maroon

Zimmer preferred to defend free expression and institutional neutrality from within existing universities rather than aligning with an outside venture structured around ideological opposition to mainstream academia. Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker also stepped down from the UATX advisory board during the exact same week.

Grokipedia +1

(Note: Robert J. Zimmer later passed away on May 23, 2023, at the age of 75).

Chicago Maroon +1

Recent Work

He continues his teaching, research, and advocacy. You can explore his work on climate and planetary habitability through his official University of Chicago Profile or watch his discussions on scientific creativity and academic culture onYouTube.

‪Dorian S. Abbot‬ - ‪Google Scholar‬

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Sohrab Ahmari

Journalist and Author

Arthur Brooks

Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership, Harvard University

Tyler Cowen

Economist, George Mason University

Richard Dawkins

Evolutionary biologist

Caitlin Flanagan

Writer, The Atlantic

E. Gordon Gee

President, West Virginia University

Robert P. George WITHERSPOON KOCHADEMIA

Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University

Jonathan Haidt

Social Psychologist, New York University

Rob Henderson

Writer and Gates Cambridge Scholar, Cambridge University

Ayaan Hirsi Ali MRS NIALL

Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Stacy Hock

Philanthropist and Investor

Leon Kass

Dean of Faculty, Shalem College

Joshua Katz

Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

GGL 6 26

AI Overview

Dr. Joshua T. Katz is a member of the Board of Advisors for the University of Austin (UATX), an institution he joined when its formation was first announced in 2021. He is a prominent classicist, linguist, and public commentator who currently serves as a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). [1, 2, 3]

Role at UATX

Professional Background

Princeton Controversy and Free Speech Advocacy [1]

Glenn Loury

Economist, Brown University

6 26 Glenn Loury - Wikipedia

Glenn Cartman Loury (born September 3, 1948) is an American economist, academic, and author. He is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences at Brown University, where he has taught since 2005 also as a professor of economics.[2] At the age of 33, Loury became the first African American professor of economics at Harvard University to gain tenure. Loury achieved some prominence during the Reagan Era as a leading black conservative intellectual.[3][4] In the mid-1990s, following a period of seclusion, he came to adopt more progressive views.[5] Loury has somewhat re-aligned with views of the American right, with The New York Times describing his political orientation in 2020 as "conservative-leaning".[6][7][8]

...

Loury was critical of Barack Obama 2008 presidential campaign.[27] He continued to criticize Obama as president calling his tenure "depressing in the extreme" and also criticized Obama's closeness to Al Sharpton.[28][29] In 2016, he supported Hillary Clinton.[30] After the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Loury warned it was dangerous for people not to recognize Donald Trump as the 45th President. During debates with John McWhorter, Loury defended Donald Trump.[31] During Trump's presidency he doubted claims that Trump was an existential threat to the public. After Trump refused to concede that he lost the 2020 U.S. presidential election, he rebuked him.[32] Loury would later blame Trump for the 2021 U.S. Capitol attack but opposed Trump's second impeachment.[33]

Race

Loury opposes reparations for slavery and affirmative action.[17][34] He has said that "affirmative action is not the solution, but neither is it the problem".[35] Conversely, he has criticized affirmative action saying, "Affirmative action is dishonest. It’s not about equality, it’s about covering ass."[36][37]

~ blm, IMMIGRATION

David Mamet RIBBETING

Award-winning playwright and author; Pulitzer Prize winner

Harvey Mansfield

Professor of Government, Harvard University

Wilfred McClay

Historian, Hillsdale College

Deirdre McCloskey

Economist, University of Illinois at Chicago

John A. Nunes

Former President, Concordia College

Jonathan Rauch

Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution

Nadine Strossen

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Larry Summers

President Emeritus, Harvard University

Andrew Young

Civil Rights Leader, Ambassador, and U.S. Congressman

learn more

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an 3 24

in August of 2023, Politico reported that right-wing billionaire Leonard Leo is "best known as Donald Trump's White House 'court whisperer," having "played a behind-the-scenes role in the nominations of all three of the former president's Supreme Court justices and promoted them through his multi-billion-dollar network of nonprofits."

Caroline Ciccone, president of the watchdog Accountable.US, told Politico "Leo spent years stacking the court with ideological kindred spirits. Now he's funding a dark web of special interest groups to push an extreme agenda."

According to a Monday, March 18 report published by Rolling Stone, the billionaire — "long averse to media attention" — in a recent podcast interview first reported by Accountable.US "spoke about his $1.6 billion dark money fund, called the Marble Freedom Trust, explaining: 'We’re trying to really institute a lot of legal and social change through philanthropy.'"

READ MORE:How GOP activists sway SCOTUS to boost 'their historical narrative' with 'no real vetting process': report

The conservative activist, according to Rolling Stone, "also offered his thoughts on how billionaires can help conservatives limit regulations, take over corporate C-suites, reshape America’s education system, and influence our culture," and as a "devout Catholic, additionally discussed his interest in reforming religious institutions."

Speaking "with Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of surveillance company Palantir and the University of Austin, a conservative alternative college he started with journalist Bari Weiss," Rolling Stone notes, Leo said, "It’s really important that we flood the zone with cases that challenge misuse of the Constitution by the administrative state and by Congress," urging "the ultra-wealthy to support these litigation efforts."

Referring to the conservative-majority high court, he emphasized, "We have a great Overton window in the next couple of decades to really try to create a free society. And I think we should take full advantage of it."

Additionally, as a proponent of the effort to establish a publicly funded religious school in Oklahoma, Leo also "talked about the need to reform the clergy," during the interview, saying, "This is one that I just started thinking about, there’s the whole issue of clergy, and this is a tough one to crack. This may not be for everybody, but my own perspective is: God made us to know him, to love him, and to serve him. And I think our religious leaders need to center more on that, and less on knowing, loving, and serving ourselves, and whatever personal desires or affections we may have."

READ MORE: 'Watershed moment' as group of Christian conservatives find 'sympathetic audience' at US Supreme Court

Furthermore on the subject of education, the billionaire added, "We need to create talent pipelines for K-12 education and for higher ed, something like you’re doing with the University of Austin, so that we remind people that the purpose of higher ed, for example, is to basically build a citizenry that’s committed to the Constitution as it was originally written."

Rolling Stone reports "Leo explained this means recruiting teachers and working to influence education board races, 'so that we can begin to have some sanity and local education.'"

READ MORE:Leonard Leo allies lead effort to establish publicly funded religious school

*Rolling Stone's full report is availableat this link (subscription required)

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11 21 no lnx

'Thought criminals': Aggrieved conservative elites announce new university dedicated to 'truth' — but who’s funding Ii?

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement November 08, 2021

Bari Weiss. Andrew Sullivan. Jonathan Rauch. Larry Summers.

Those are some of the more recognizable names a new university launched Monday lists on the front page of its website.

Its founder says some of them have been "treated like thought criminals."

The University of Austin (which sounds remarkably like The University of Texas at Austin, founded in 1883,) in an announcement says it is "dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth." It is not currently accredited and offers no degrees.

But some of the people it is attracting have highly-controversial backgrounds. Indeed, some, like Weiss and Sullivan, seem to thrive on creating controversy.

It's clear, from its founder's message, that this is an enterprise dedicated to protect those who use their huge platforms to decry being "canceled."

"Nearly a quarter of American academics in the social sciences or humanities endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences,"Pano Kanelos, the former president of St. John's University and apparently the founder of The University of Austin, writes Monday at Bari Weiss' Substack. "Over a third of conservative academics and PhD students say they had been threatened with disciplinary action for their views. Four out of five American PhD students are willing to discriminate against right-leaning scholars, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology."

Kanelos discusses some of the University's founding faculty – a prerequisite appears to be having been subjected to criticism.

"On our quads, faculty are being treated like thought criminals. Dorian Abbot, a University of Chicago scientist who has objected to aspects of affirmative action, was recently disinvited from delivering a prominent public lecture on planetary climate at MIT. Peter Boghossian, a philosophy professor at Portland State University, finally quit in September after years of harassment by faculty and administrators. Kathleen Stock, a professor at University of Sussex, just resigned after mobs threatened her over her research on sex and gender."

Its FAQ answers the question "Why Austin?" by jokingly replying: "If it's good enough for Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, it's good enough for us."

The big question of course is who is funding this endeavor? The "University" says it will have a physical campus.

That's expensive, as is paying top names.

"We have secured the seed money necessary to launch the university. But we are in the process of securing $250 million, which will enable us to grow into a comprehensive university," it says.

"UATX has requested and is awaiting a tax-exempt determination from the IRS. At present, UATX is fiscally sponsored by Cicero Research, a tax-exempt entity organized under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code."

An online search for "Cicero Research" nets almost nothing, except a one page listing on Cause IQ, a company to help nonprofits grow.

According to that filing for the year ending December 2020, Cicero Research has no full-time employees, no assets, but under "characteristics" is tagged "political advocacy."

Who's actually funding this is currently unknown.

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GIZMODO

#Palantir Co-Founder Starts Anti-Woke University With Clown Car of Intellectual Dark Web Dweebs

So far, the University of Austin's accreditations consist solely of gathering a group of the nation's loudest contrarians.

By Tom McKayPublished November 8, 2021

A screenshot from the University of Austin’s website. Screenshot: The University of Austin (Fair Use)

A sampling of the nation’s most intolerable contrarian columnists, right-wing pundits, and other stuffed shirts is launching their own university in a bid to challenge the supposedly woke academic status quo—courtesy of funding from an obscure libertarian nonprofit linked to Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale.

The University of Austin or UATX, which is absolutely not to be confused with the University of Texas at Austin, a real school, aims to offer “forbidden courses” that will spark students to ask “provocative questions that often lead to censorship or self-censorship in many universities.” It boasts a bevy of headache-inducing personalities on its Board of Advisors, which consists largely of the type of people who have branded themselves as the last defenders of liberalism (against the tide of woke liberals).

Those personalities include Bari Weiss, a former New York Times opinion editor who has spent most of her professional energy yelping about left-wing Twitter mobs; conservative British historian Niall Ferguson, who left Stanford after leaked emails showed him encouraging campus Republicans to do “opposition research” on a left-wing student; former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who has somehow tried to make the “wokeness” of central bankers a culture-war issue; amateur race scientist and self-declared ethnic penis size expert Andrew Sullivan; scorched-earth culture warrior Sohrab Ahmari; and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, an identity politics alarmist who is popular with the neoliberal crowd. One of its “founding faculty fellows” is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Hoover Institution scholar who believes Islam is inherently violent and has more recently begun parroting the line that “wokeism” is just like white supremacy.

The effort will be headed up by inaugural president Pano Kanelos, the former president of St. John’s College (Annapolis) who is also another culture-war obsessive who believes academic freedom is being derailed by leftists. Alongside them will be fellow traveler and venture capitalist Lonsdale, one of the tech billionaires known for complaining about the supposedly stifling political culture of Silicon Valley.

UATX—which as of right now, is not accredited in anything but giving people aneurysms—says on its website it is “fiscally sponsored” by Cicero Research, which is affiliated with Lonsdale’s libertarian Cicero Institute. Lonsdale is best known for partnering with right-wing venture capitalist Peter Thiel to found Palantir, the big data analysis firm infamous for courting contracts with federal immigration agencies and the military. (Disclosure: Thiel bankrolled a lawsuit that bankrupted Gizmodo’s former parent company, Gawker Media.) Lonsdale and his firm 8VC moved to Austin from San Francisco last year, citing the location as conveniently closer to companies he backs across the country and a way to escape California tax rates—Texas has no income tax.

According to the Daily Beast, public filings show Lonsdale listed as a member of Cicero Research. Beyond potentially being UATX’s financial benefactor and a member of its board of advisers, it’s not clear how big a role Lonsdale will play in the project: a spokesperson for the school told the Beast only that “We’re very proud to have Joe Lonsdale both on our board and as one of our financial supporters.” The Beast noted that UATX says it already has seed funding and is looking for $250 million more in investment.

UATX does not yet offer degrees but is seeking accreditation from the Texas Higher Education Board and initial accreditation through the Higher Learning Commission to offer master’s degrees in fall 2022 and undergraduate degrees in 2024. In an FAQ, it explains the choice of location in Austin with “If it’s good enough for Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, it’s good enough for us,” adding that the city is experiencing a “historic boom in talent and capital.”

For a taste of Lonsdale’s political leanings, refer to a recent tweet in which he responded to a tweet about Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg by claiming that men who take half a year of paternity leave are “losers” failing to take “the correct masculine response” of the “old days”. That remark didn’t go down particularly well with Initialized Capital founders Alexis Ohanian and Garry Tan, who shot back that their company offers four months of paid paternity leave. Buttigieg’s spouse, Chasten Buttigieg, subsequently stated that their baby had serious health issues and spent three weeks in the hospital, including a “terrifying week” on a ventilator. Lonsdale also totally denies accusations of rape from a female Stanford student he mentored.

As New York Mag argued, the concept behind UATX isn’t exactly new: conservatives have tried to build their own academic safe spaces free from dissenting voices for decades, like Jerry Falwell’s evangelical Liberty University, Republican candidate factory Patrick Henry College, and MAGA-friendly Hillsdale College. The magazine also noted that many of the individuals associated with UATX aren’t exactly known for their embrace of the spirit of open debate, like Bari Weiss, who as a student at Columbia University developed a reputation for targeting Arab professors as Israel-haters, or the anti-trans scholar Kathleen Stock, who quit the University of Sussex after students protested her transphobic views. If history is any example, UATX will be more of a cancel culture-obsessed hivemind than a beacon of debate.

UATX didn’t immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment on this story, but we’ll update if we hear back.

---

GGL 10 25

[### Deep-pocketed donors fund 'anti-woke' university

New York Post

https://nypost.com › 2024/10/14 › business › deep-poc...](https://nypost.com/2024/10/14/business/deep-pocketed-donors-fund-anti-woke-university/)

Oct 14, 2024 — Other donors include PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, who has previously offered to pay students $100,000 to drop out of college and ...

[### A Texas university created by Palanatir cofounder Joe ...

Fortune

https://fortune.com › 2023/05/30 › university-of-austin...](https://fortune.com/2023/05/30/university-of-austin-marc-andreessen-joe-lonsdale-bari-weiss/)

May 30, 2023 — The school has put down roots in the now hometown of Joe Lonsdale, the cofounder of Palantir who runs the multibillion-dollar Austin-based ...

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University of Austin (UATX), a new school proclaiming its dedication to freedom of thought and discourse, is tightly intertwined with—and quickly racking up support from—a powerful and pointedly vocal group of venture capitalists.

The school has put down roots in the now hometown of Joe Lonsdale, the cofounder of Palantir who runs the multibillion-dollar Austin-based venture firm 8VC. Over a hot weekend at Lonsdale’s enormous 11-bedroom home on the west side of Austin, a group that included former New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss, evolutionary biologist Heather Heying, and Harvard University professor Arthur Brooks hashed out what it would look like to set up a new university, explains Pano Kanelos, president of the University of Austin, in an interview with Fortune. Kanelos, whom Weiss enticed away from his role as president of St. John’s College, says he was drawn to the various personalities all converging over the importance of higher education.

“We just all agreed—I would say the spirit of it was there are a lot of things in the world [that] are broken now,” Kanelos says, using language notably synonymous with the slogan of 8VC, plastered on the homepage of the firm’s website: “The world is broken, let’s fix it.”

:{:{Even Netscape cofounder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen is getting involved. While it is unclear whether he, like Lonsdale, has donated to the school, he will join Lonsdale as a lecturer for the university’s second rendition of its academic program called “Forbidden Courses”—named such because UATX argues the “current [political, social, and cultural] turbulence” prevents people from “encountering one another honestly and authentically,” according to the school’s prospectus. The free program taking place in June will delve into questions around science and religion, race, gender politics, and conservatism, among other things, and participants will be reading everything from books by Edmund Burke and Thomas Sowell to selections from the Book of Genesis. }:

Web3 startup Spindl CEO Antonio García Martínez and Guillermo Rauch, CEO of web development unicorn Vercel, an 8VC portfolio company, are on the roster as lecturers too. (Founders Fund vice president Mike Solana had been scheduled to lecture as well, though he has since pulled out because of a conflict, according to UATX. MaC Venture Capital’s Adrian Fenty and a16z’s Katherine Boyle are listed as speakers for another program, the university’s yearlong entrepreneurship and leadership Polaris fellowship, according to the UATX prospectus). The tech founders and venture capitalists will be joining people like economist Glenn Loury, teaching on racial inequality in America, and author Katie Roiphe, who is teaching how to write about sexual politics. Last year philosopher Kathleen Stock and economist Deirdre McCloskey debated gender and transgender issues in an hour-long session UATX later published onYouTube.}:

Financially, venture capitalists and tech CEOs are stepping up with cash. Kanelos estimated that approximately one-third of the school’s nearly $150 million in donations have come from individuals working within the venture capital or tech ecosystem. (He declined to name specific individuals who had donated, and a spokesperson later said the school wouldn’t confirm exact figures. Andreessen, Solana, Lonsdale, and Rauch didn’t respond to requests for comment regarding lectures. Weiss declined an interview.)

“We’ve had so many people actually reach out to us and say, Can we get involved? Can we do a seminar? Can we run a workshop?” Kanelos told Fortunefrom the university’s newly obtained campus space in Austin, located on the top floor of a building on Congress Avenue. “[Andreessen and Solana] were eager to [lecture] when presented with the opportunity.”

The new university has garnered an unusual degree of attention for a school that is still drafting an undergraduate program and is still waiting on the state of Texas for authorization to offer degrees and charge for courses before it can start the accreditation process. Part of the attention stems from the school’s initial key members, many of whom have stirred up criticism based on their critiques of cancel culture, “woke”-ness, and sometimes affirmative action or the DEI movement. In a Bloomberg piece about the launch of the university, board member Niall Ferguson wrote: “Academic freedom dies in wokeness.”

Some of the frustration comes from personal experience of those involved. Philosophy professor Kathleen Stock, for example, who is a faculty fellow at UATX, was accused of transphobia after publishing a book about gender identity and ended up resigning at the University of Sussex after experiencing harassment. (Stock and UATX reject these claims against her.)

Lonsdale himself had been banned from campus as well as teaching or mentoring students at Stanford University, based on an undisclosed relationship he had with a student he was mentoring in 2012 that eventually led to accusations of sexual assault and a lawsuit as detailed in a *New York Times Magazine* story. (Lonsdale vehemently denied the allegations, filed a countersuit for defamation, and published correspondence between the two of them that combated the claims; the parties settled at the end of 2015, and the Stanford bans have since been lifted.) When asked whether the allegations against Lonsdale had ever come up when forming the University of Austin, Kanelos described it as a “nonissue” and said that no one else has ever asked him about it. (Lonsdale didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Kanelos protests any notion that the university is intended to combat cancel culture, and goes so far as to say, “We’re not allowed to use the word woke…That’s just not who we are,” Kanelos says. “You don’t build a university to be against things. You build a university because you believe in things. We’re not here to cancel cancel culture: Why would you spend your time doing that? We’re here because we believe in and we have foundational principles: We believe in open inquiry. We believe in freedom of conscience. We believe in civil discourse.”

The school has had some of its early advisors step back, such as the University of Chicago chancellor and president emeritus Robert Zimmer, who parted ways with UATX shortly after its launch, noting that he disagreed with “a number of statements about higher education in general, largely quite critical” that the university made at the time. Psychologist Steven Pinker, another early advisory board member, resigned around the same time, though he didn’t elaborate other than to say on Twitter that it was a “mutual & amicable agreement,” that he wished the university well, and that he wouldn’t be commenting further (the university published a statement regarding these departures on its website). Heather Heying, a founding trustee of the institution, published a resignation letter from the board in December, noting that it was “better to separate myself from the University, than to have my name be attached to an institution that does not represent my scientific and pedagogical values.”

Kanelos says more than 5,000 academics have reached out, some of whom expressed interest of teaching at the university. At a year and a half, the school is more than halfway through its fundraising goal to raise $250 million and has more than 2,200 donors. Its first class of 27 Polaris fellows, part of its yearlong leadership and entrepreneurship program, will graduate next month. And it’s getting its campus ready for 2024, when it plans to enroll the first class into its four-year undergraduate program, which the university expects will cost students around $32,500 a year.

Kanelos says, despite the criticism, the overwhelming message he has received is that the vision of UATX is resonating. Clearly it’s resonating with at least some venture capitalists too.

About the Author

Jessica MathewsSenior Writer

Jessica Mathews is a senior writer for Fortune covering startups and the venture capital industry.

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