Recently a group of academics and journalists announced the foundation of a new American university, the University of Austin (not to be confused with the large old university already in that city, the University of Texas). The muted buzz that greeted this birth has now largely stilled, but I believe the initiative may prove to be of lasting importance. It has further publicized the charges of groupthink and herd mentality widely leveled against university faculties, especially humanities departments. These charges, which find expression in bizarre incidents reported in the popular press and close-to-the-bone spoofs in stand-up comedy and the satirical television serial The Chair, have already infiltrated the national political debate. The president of the fledgling institution declares it to be guided by three principles: unfettered search for the truth, freedom of inquiry and conscience, and civil discourse. What’s not to like? Well, according to a political cryptographer on MSNBC, what these principles really mean is that “In exchange for paying to indulge in racism and transphobia the students get…nothing.” The peculiar nastiness with which the erudite used to abuse each other was called “theological hatred,” odium theologicum. With the decline of religion we are left with odium academicum. Among more moderate cavils I have seen is an essay by the president of Wesleyan University (an institution in which faculty opinion on woke issues ranges all the way from A to A prime) gently lamenting the wrong-headedness of the whole Austin idea. He is not sure we need “another conservative university.” Nor am I, if what that description means is an indoctrination machine.
Academic wokeness is sufficiently irritating and, indeed, sufficiently intellectually pernicious to stimulate the foundation of an Anti-Woke academy, but Anti-Wokeness cannot be the sole or even main substance of an academic enterprise. I am a titular member of a controversial group called the Heterodox Academy founded by the social psychologist Jonathan Heidt at NYU. Its members believe that higher education should be characterized by “open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement.” That one can be controversial by loving Mom and apple pie should tell you something about the current state of many academic faculties. Such an organization as the HA does valuable work in defending liberal principles of academic freedom and comity. But there is a difference between the guiding principles of an educational institution and its curriculum. If the University of Austin can develop an excellent curriculum to which it applies its admirable principles, it could be a great success. But that will be an extraordinarily heavy lift. The names I have seen listed as its potential beginning faculty form a kind of Who’s Who of victims and critics of wokeness. I admire some of them enormously, but of course the way to build a great faculty is to hire people who know a lot about particular disciplinary subjects and are very good at teaching them. I will return to this theme in a moment.
First, I perhaps need to make the point that many of the world’s great centers of learning, like the social organizations founding them, were born in polemic and reaction. This is particularly true of American colleges. Many venerable institutions came into being because their founders were unhappy with the state of the venerable institutions to which they were at the time attached. The English monarchy is a most venerable institution. When they became aggrieved at the monarchy, the Founding Fathers dumped it and launched a cheeky start-up of their own. The origins of the western university—a construction of startling originality—were gaudily entrepreneurial and adversarial. Peter Abelard became famous by breaking with his old teacher, William of Champeaux, and setting off on his own. Several medieval universities were founded by disgruntled professors unhappy with trends in their own institutions. In early America the great engine of educational innovation was the Christian religion in its often warring sectarian forms. This or that religious group was desirous of having its “own” institutions or unhappy with trends in one that already existed. The great glory of American higher education, which is still in many ways the envy of the world, lies in its copious variety, aka “diversity”. You have your Harvard and you have your local community college. My view is the more the merrier. Let a thousand flowers bloom. I don’t think the mission of higher education is to spare undergraduates the “harm” of disputed ideas. When it comes to the power of Truth, I’m with Milton: “Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” In principle there is absolutely no reason that in this land of start-ups you could not launch a successful, potentially great, start-up university. But it will not be easy.
There is an often-told anecdote about the American tourist in Oxford dazzled by the utter perfection of the nearly sacred lawns within the individual colleges. She asks a gardener, busy in pushing a compressive roller over the grass, how he has achieved the magic effect. “Oh, it’s pretty simple,” he replies. “Keep people from walking on it, and just keep clipping it and rolling it, clip and roll, clip and roll—for eight hundred years.” Venerability cannot be ordered from Amazon. Ivy is a comparatively slow-growing plant. Most of our great institutions have impressive origin myths stressing their difficult and humble beginnings. I have not seen President James Garfield frequently quoted in recent decades, but every dog has his day. To Garfield is attributed another famous anecdote concerning higher education. The ideal college, he said, was “Mark Hopkins and a student in a log cabin.” (The theologian Mark Hopkins was a legendary teacher and president of Williams College in the middle of the nineteenth century. The remark was soon improved to “Mark Hopkins on one end of a log with a student at the other.”) Perhaps the University of Austin will be able to create a significant and credible institutional “presence” within a relatively short time. After all Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, did spring fully grown from the brow of Zeus. But that is a daunting challenge not to be achieved by high principles or noble goals alone. It will require a boatload of money.
Though their website is a bit cagey on the matter, Austin’s founders are talking about a bricks-and-mortar operation. That, in my opinion, is the only model capable of competing with the long-established institutions that are the American norm. On-line courses, “distant learning”—all well and good around the edges, but not a university. As it now can cost a million dollars to build a big house in this country, you can perhaps imagine what it would cost to reproduce the real estate of even a small liberal arts college, let alone a Cornell or a Chapel Hill. Or perhaps like me you cannot: anyway, some number ending with many zeros. Medieval universities could be peripatetic. The University of Austin doesn’t have to be in Austin. I suppose that one realistic possible head start would be to snap up one of several failing old institutions in a fire sale. (The term of art would be “partnering”.) Given two facts about the current cultural moment—the large number of the super-rich and the vehemence of our political divisions—I suspect there is a significant pool of potential mega-donors. Whether there is a sufficient pool of mega-donors committed to a fiercely independent enterprise—one of the founders’ stated promises—is another matter.
The problems that any nascent start-up faces are formidable. But its promise is still nonetheless great, and it enjoys some fine advantages and possibilities. One major problem in American higher education is its exorbitant cost, especially at the elite or “legacy” institutions. It is hard for me to believe that it is worth $80,000 per annum to bask in the intellectual radiance of Wesleyan or anyplace else. Not that I imagine that many families actually pay those fees. Like my own institution, Princeton, most of our very expensive institutions are actually charitable engines of financial redistribution which, through lavish programs of scholarship aid, have for decades been fostering the national meritocracy in which I still believe. It is easier to do this if you have an endowment of a few billions. But whether paid by individuals or by charitable endowments, the high costs are real. And though education is supposed to be highly profitable to those lucky enough to enjoy it, no epithet is more damning in the discussion of colleges and universities than “for profit”. One major factor in the rise of college expenses in recent decades is the manifest bloating of highly paid university administrations. A start-up could and should strangle this monster in the cradle. The Austin people seem to recognize this problem and be ready to address it. A second great advantage would be in faculty recruitment. College teaching is conspicuously a buyer’s market at the introductory level. And within current faculties, yearning to breathe free, there still are a great many talented professors who are passionate about Euler numbers, the Chanson de Roland, string theory, tectonic plates, Meso-American pottery, Kant’s second treatise, African economies, the Great Migration, the languages of the Malay peninsula. These are among a thousand other topics crying out to be studied and taught in a generous, liberal, and tolerant intellectual milieu. A very great deal about the ways our colleges are run seems tired and creaky, including the academic calendar, the nature and purpose of the doctoral dissertation in the humanities, and the conventions surrounding faculty tenure. The new broom sweeps clean. The founding of a new university might offer an opportunity for a deep dive into these troubled waters. But first things first. Having adopted its coat of arms, the UofA must now move on to the second requirement of an American university—a line of sweatshirts.
