One college is going against the grain, and the Left is furious.
They are giving their students a real education, and refusing to indoctrinate them.
Now, students are flocking to one university that is rejecting the woke agenda.
The University of Austin was recently founded by a group of academics who wanted to give their students free speech and academic freedom, instead of stifling wokeness and conformity.
Many laughed when the University of Austin was announced, thinking it would flame out quickly.
But those critics were wrong. And now the University of Austin is conducting its first classes with its first students.
Bari Weiss, the former opinion editor at the New York Times who quit because she was tired of the wokeness, is one of the people involved in the project.
She wrote about the University of Austin and the progress it has made on her Substack recently.
“The premise of UATX is simple. It goes like this: While the brand-name schools have the money they no longer have the mission. They have fundamentally abandoned the point of the university: the pursuit of truth.”
“Anyone with eyes can see the problem. But most of those people spend their time privately complaining about the status quo – while writing yearly checks to their alma mater so their children have a chance of getting in.”
“The good people at UATX, where I am on the board, aren’t sitting around criticizing. They are not waiting. They are doing.”
This university is an example of what it will really take to bring back freedom and intellectual diversity in the United States.
It is not good enough to just tear down the existing university system and leave smoldering ruins behind. Kids need an education – a real one.
The people who are building the University of Austin are building the foundation for a new education system, one that teaches freedom and civics and doesn’t force ideological conformity on its students.
Some of the students at the University of Austin will be conservative, and some will be liberal. Some will be libertarian. Some will be socialist.
No matter what their views are, they will be welcome to voice their opinion, but their views will be challenged and prodded. And that is what must happen in a true academic environment.
Weiss continued, “Since the school’s founding president, Pano Kanelos, announced the project this November in these pages UATX has raised more than $100 million – with no alumni. Within the first week, the school received more than 3,500 inquiries from professors at other universities. And a few weeks back, it opened its doors to its first students at its inaugural summer school.”
“I was blown away by the students I met there, and I was honored to lecture alongside teachers like Niall Ferguson, Kathleen Stock, Deirdre McCloskey, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Rob Henderson, and Thomas Chatterton-Williams.”
The fact that the University of Austin was able to raise so much money means that they are serious.
And if parents want their children to get a real education, and not be inundated with woke orthodoxy, the University of Austin is a great option for them.