I Have Four Degrees from Harvard and Stanford. Of Course I Support the University of Austin.
Cheering for America's newest school
Harvard was once a start-up, a new school in the new world, very far from the ancient universities of Europe that had been the centers of learning since the the dim and distant Middle Ages. Even the name of the town where Harvard was planted was copied from the past: there had been a university in the other Cambridge for four and a half centuries by the time unlaughing Puritans created their breakaway. To this day, Harvard bears the fingerprint of its Anglican ancestors in its House system and decentralized DNA. In ways large and small, it is Oxbridge 2.0.
Stanford was once a sleepy school in a sleepy part of the country, far from the crisp leaves and chilly quads of the Ivy League, founded not by clergymen or Boston intellectuals but by a railroad tycoon and laid out in a valley that had not yet grown rich off silicon. It was good but not great, and certainly not a destination.
The situation today is very different, as tech’s billions have transformed Palo Alto and Stanford into the geographic and academic vanguard of the new economic order, the places where the future is being made. The landscape has tilted, and it is now out west that the new elite trains and iterates. They continue to fail better and we prepare to enter the metaverse, a space of virtual possibility and real dollars.
Harvard and Stanford are the exceptions that prove the rule: higher education has proven reluctantly resistant to innovation. There are other success stories: NYU, where I teach now, comes to mind as a school that has made moves up the academic and endowment rankings. But overall, the collegiate universe is steady state: there is far more turnover at the summit of the Fortune 500 list than the U.S. News & World Report college ranking.
This points to a basic truth: while it sometimes might appear that elite campuses are in perpetual crisis over politics, culture wars, and freedom of speech issues, the real story is the almost unbelievable scale of their success. When I applied to Harvard as an undergraduate, the admissions rate was 9.1%. This year, it is 3.4%. When I moved into Harvard Yard as a freshman, the endowment registered at at $29.2 billion. This year, it is $53.2 billion. Our best and brightest are flocking to institutions that are the very definition of too big to fail.
In fact, American elite higher education has two problems: its underlying economic model is too conservative and hierarchical, and its politics and campus culture are too radically progressive. They have become gildedly woke, and nearly impossible to financially disrupt. Stunted by jargon infested thinking and hobbled by administrative bloat that serves mostly to ferret out campus heretics, the university is in a strange place, caught between a hardened radical orthodoxy and and almost unfathomable wealth. This isn’t just limousine liberalism: it’s private plane socialism.
This is the reality, then- a roiling surface and preposterously still currents underneath. Add to this brew the strangeness of Covid, which took the university online with mostly underwhelming results and simultaneously created nostalgia for the cozy confines of a dorm room, with an atmospheric sense of anti-institutional sentiment and creative chaos, and something was bound to pop.
Into this strange set of affairs enters the announcement of the founding of the University of Austin (UATX) a new institution helmed by Pano Kaneklos, the former president of St. John’s College, and backed by a heterodox band of thinkers and unified by their opposition to the current intellectual regime on the left. People like Larry Summers, Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss, Jonathan Haidt, Glenn Loury, Caitlin Flanagan, Niall Ferguson, and others write from a range of perspectives, but they each have the virtue of being invariably more interesting than their critics.
What are they up to? UATX defined itself as “a liberal arts university committed to freedom of inquiry, freedom of conscience, and civil discourse. To maintain these principles, the university is fiercely independent—financially, intellectually, and politically.” Its push is away from what it describes as the “censoriousness and illiberalism” of the modern university, and its pull is towards the “pursuit of truth.” It also seeks to combat the tyranny of the screen by aiming to hold in person classes. These are meant to begin in the summer of 2022, with the first masters programs slated to go live that fall and the undergraduate program up and running in 2024. The vibe feels like Columbia’s Core Curriculum meets Elon Musk.
Regardless of your politics, you should be rooting for UATX to succeed. But in a crucial way, it already has, by clarifying that the current intellectual scene is divided between those who act out of fear and those who build out of hope. This has nothing to do with where you went to school. It has everything to do with your openness to newness and your willingness to say or support something that might be both unpopular and right.
I have spent most of my adult life on campuses in one way or another, and I love them deeply. My happiest moments have been spent in places where learning is the point and community is a live and wild thing. It is precisely that love that drives me to cheer for the University of Austin. As in pizza places and grocery stores, competition when it comes to universities is good. Harvard will be Harvard, but maybe a little bit of a push from the outside will make it a better Harvard.
This is a moment that will be won by the creators, not the complacent, and the periphery, not the center. The mainstream is often wrong, and nearly always predictable and uninteresting. A bias towards action means that the real risk is not doing anything at all.
The sneering, snarky tone of so much of the online criticism of UATX says more about those on the sidelines than those in the arena. It has everything to do with the species of awkwardness that ensues when someone is being out-hustled, outthought, and outworked. Or else it is a kind of guild mentality, the peevishness of people on the lookout for something that might threaten their preciously held stock in the status quo. The fact that the Harvard Crimson editorial board published an unhinged screed about the project is even more reason to take it seriously.
The critics of UATX are playing defense. They are already one step behind the people willing to put their name on something that hasn’t been around for three centuries. I write this as someone who for a long time derived a large sense of my identity from prestigiously WASPY university names.
But the biggest gift that Harvard and Stanford gave me was the ability to think for myself. The excellence of my education would be wasted if it was not deployed to support any and all efforts to make sure that others get the same thing. And if it is a small school in Texas that is “doing the work,” then all the power to them.