A new college in Texas called the University of Austin (UATX) was the focus of a 60 Minutes special on CBS Sunday, highlighting the school’s decision to ditch modern leftist ideology found on most campuses and instead commit to old-school academics.
The university is replacing DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), with MEI (merit, excellence, and intelligence) in a U-turn from the current trajectory of American higher education.
Many of the students and faculty of UATX have “contempt” for high tuition prices and leftist campus culture such as “trigger warnings,” “micro-aggressions” and “safe spaces.”
The startup university launched classes for the first time this fall, hosting the 92-student inaugural class free of charge.
60 Minutes sat down with five students enrolled at UATX to learn more about their “pursuit of truth,” the university’s focal point.
Regarding the diversity of ideology found on campus, student Jacob Hornstein said, “I’ve met people of every political persuasion here from, like, far-left Democrats who are for Bernie Sanders or to the left of that even, to people who would make Donald Trump look like a liberal.”
Constantin Whitmire, another student attending UATX, described witnessing the self-segregation found at many other colleges, explaining he visited a college in the northeast where the student guide said, “We have different dorms for different student groups.”
“I didn’t wanna go to a space that was like that,” Whitmire stated.
At one point, Constantin and Jacob admitted they “vehemently disagree on many things” but still get along.
One of the university’s co-founders, Scottish historian Niall Ferguson, talked with 60 Minutes about his goals for the college.
Ferguson explained “free expression” has been stifled on campuses across the U.S. over the past decade and that there is a “huge disconnect between the academic ‘elite’ and the average American voter.”
He compared the current state of free speech on campuses reminiscent of “Stalin’s Soviet Union” where faculty and students fear repercussions for making statements deemed taboo by the leftist majority.
“The ideas that start on campus pretty quickly spread to corporations, to media organizations. University forms the way you think about the world for the rest of your life. If our universities are screwed up, and I believe they are, then that will screw up America as a whole quite quickly,” Ferguson told the CBS program.
Former New York Times journalist Bari Weiss, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and the former president of Maryland’s St. John’s College, Pano Kanelos, are co-founders of the university.
Larry Summers, former Harvard President and U.S. Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, is an adviser for the school.
Kanelos, who is the current president of UATX, told 60 Minutes “gender, race, ethnicity” have no impact on admissions, explaining, “The primary thing that we’re interested in is the mind.”
When he was asked if the university is a “conservative” school, in comparison to the “liberal” Harvard University, Kanelos answered, “Politics should be studied at a university. It shouldn’t be the operating system of the university. Any university that is identifiably political is not fulfilling its highest mission.”
Former ACLU President Nadine Strossen, a liberal-leaning individual who is a UATX adviser, said, “The most important topics of public policy debate are not being candidly and frankly discussed on campus, including abortion, immigration, police practices, anything to do with race and gender.”
Her argument for a more open-minded campus is that “education through more speech” is a better way to “eliminate discriminatory attitudes” than banning unpopular speech.
Some of the advisers and faculty at the school were hired after leaving their previous positions due to cancel culture.
Kanelos noted the goal of the university is not to serve as a “haven for people who’ve been canceled,” but that “many of the people who are pushing the boundaries in academic culture, let’s say, in the public sphere have paid a price for that and still should be heard.”
Since UATX is in its first year, the national accreditation won’t be decided until the first class has graduated.
The school will likely grow as word spreads of the anti-woke learning space, and hopefully similar startup colleges begin launching in other cities across the country.