Free speech warriors founded an anti-woke college. But theyre keeping their tenured day jobs – The Guardian

When the brand-new president of the University of Austin announced the establishment of a brand-new institution dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth last week, he painted a bleak picture of American academia.

So much is broken in America, wrote Pano Kanelos, the former president of a small liberal arts college in Maryland in a post on the Substack of the noted New York Times self-canceller Bari Weiss. But higher education might be the most fractured institution of all.

Traditional universities have abandoned the pursuit of truth to embrace illiberalism and censoriousness, Kanelos argued. On our quads, faculty are being treated like thought criminals, he added, before citing the cases of three academics who have in no way been treated like thought criminals though more on that later.

In the interest of truth, here are a few hard ones: the founders of the University of Austin have launched a website, not a university. They have no campus, no student body, no degree programs, no accreditation, no faculty and no army of graduate students and adjunct professors to do all the dirty work of actually, you know, teaching classes.

They do have a nice website though, and that website does (or did) include a fairly impressive list of bold-faced names. We count among our numbers university presidents: Robert Zimmer, Larry Summers, John Nunes, and Gordon Gee, and leading academics, such as Steven Pinker, Deirdre McCloskey, Leon Kass, Jonathan Haidt, Glenn Loury, Joshua Katz, Vickie Sullivan, Geoffrey Stone, Bill McClay, and Tyler Cowen, boasted Kanelos. We are a dedicated crew that grows by the day.

When I read the roster of academics attached to the University of Austin (or UATX as they apparently hope to be called) last week, I wondered whether any of those exalted figures would actually be resigning from their sinecures at such truth-abandoning institutions as Harvard, Brown, New York University and the University of Chicago. Over the past eight days a lifetime, really, if youre an eight-day-old baby the dedicated crew has shrunk to a smattering.

Gordon Gee, the president of West Virginia University (WVU), was first to bail on the project, writing a letter to faculty and students at the institution that pays his $800,000 base salary to assure them that WVU is his only priority; that he has no intentions of placing [his] energies elsewhere; and that he did not agree other universities are no longer seeking the truth.

Founding Faculty Fellow Kathleen Stock, a British philosophy professor, assured her Twitter followers that she would not be leaving the UK for Texas.

Haidt declared of UATX that he want[s his] kids to go there a far cry from wanting himself to go there. (As a faculty member at NYU, Haidts generous benefits package includes a 50% to 100% waiver of tuition should those kids elect to pursue an education at NYU rather than a university that lacks a course catalog, degree-granting ability or accreditation, let alone a thriving a cappella scene, improv troupe or student housing.)

And on Monday UATXs one-week-iversary both Zimmer and Pinker resigned from the schools advisory board. Zimmers statement noted that the universitys quite critical statements about the state of higher education had diverged very significantly from his own views, while Pinker declined to offer an explanation beyond the fact that hes concentrating on the (presumably more profitable) endeavors of promoting his book and podcast.

The problem with attempting to recruit among academias superstars is that such faculty members are in actuality treated not like thought criminals, but kings. Tenured professors at private institutions like Pinker and Haidt enjoy job security and remuneration that the vast majority of Americans can only dream of. While most American workers labor under at-will employment a legal regime that obviates any hope of freedom of speech in the workplace tenure protects Pinker from ever facing any kind of material consequences from his employer for, say, serious lapses of judgment in his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Few thought criminals enjoy the kind of soft landing granted to UATX advisory board member Summers, whose ill-fated tenure as president of Harvard was notable primarily for his sexist views on women in science, his dismantling of one of the best African American studies departments in the country, his alienation of the majority of the faculty, and his series of lapses of judgment in his relationship with Epstein. Following a one-year sabbatical, Summers was rewarded with a Harvard University professorship, the schools highest honor for a faculty member.

Imagine giving up all that institutional security for a chance to work at a startup whose founding trustee and presumed moneyman, Joe Lonsdale, calls men who take paid paternity leave losers. What does the University of Austin think its faculty advisers are, adjuncts?

Speaking of the fearless pursuit of truth, its worth taking a moment to interrogate Kaneloss characterization of the campus climate in relation to the three thought criminals he cited:

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.

Abbot did indeed suffer the embarrassment and inconvenience of having a prestigious lecture cancelled, and MITs decision is certainly open to critique. However, he remains a tenured professor at the University of Chicago and retains the steadfast support of his institution hardly the eight years in a gulag endured by actual thought criminal Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or even the loss of income suffered by Matt Hawn, a public school teacher in Tennessee who was fired for thought offenses that included assigning his students to read an essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates and listen to a poem about white privilege.

Ironically, Hawns employment appears to have fallen victim to the very movement that Boghossian has aggressively promoted this year the banning of critical race theory by Republican-controlled state legislatures. Meanwhile Boghossians own case is significantly more complex than Kanelos would have us believe. The philosophy professor fabricated papers in order to engage in a major academic hoax aimed at discrediting various fields he considers to be grievance studies, was subsequently found to have committed research misconduct by his institutional review board, and yet maintained his position until he chose to resign facts that are at least worth mentioning when presenting him as a victim of institutional harassment.

As for Stock, Kaneloss assertion lacks a citation for any actual mobs or threats, while raising questions about whether students at the University of Austin will have the right to express their views through the decidedly non-violent means of putting up posters and flags, which was the student activity that preceded Stocks resignation from Sussex.

If any of these free speech warriors wanted to actually take a stand for their stated beliefs, they would move to Texas, not to teach at a fake university, but to get a job at a public high school. They could then set about assigning their students to read one or more of the 850 discomfort-causing books that a state lawmaker, apparently invigorated by the anticritical race theory movement promoted by Boghossian and Weiss, has placed on a list for investigation by the Texas Education Agency.

The minimum salary for a Texas public school teacher with 20 years of experience is $54,540, however, so forgive me if I dont hold my breath.

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Free speech warriors founded an anti-woke college. But theyre keeping their tenured day jobs - The Guardian