UATX launches, touting ideological openness, debate and— for now—free tuition

These are not soaring times for higher education. Tuition costs rise unchecked. Contempt for today’s campus culture—the trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggressions—helped swing the election, and this past week, President-elect Donald Trump nominated former WWE executive Linda McMahon to lead the Department of Education, an agency that each year distributes billions to U.S. colleges… some that Trump has vowed to tax and sue for their quote wokeness. … But if America does one thing well, it’s innovation. Conceived largely by frustrated professors at schools like Harvard, Princeton, and Brown, the University of Austin, started classes this fall… a college start-up… touting open debate—a shout-nothing- but-say-anything philosophy—and (for now) free tuition…. Will this be just another politicized campus swinging right? Or a true disrupter, resetting the marketplace of ideas?

140-years-old, the University of Texas at Austin, ranks among the country’s largest schools. Football games draw more than 100,000 fans… but blocks away, in between a Ruth’s Chris and a Velvet Taco, on a floor of what was once a downtown department store: one of America’s smallest universities. UATX — the University of Austin. 

Jon Wertheim: How would you describe members of the founding class?

Olivia Antunes: Very outspoken. You’ll never enter a conversation and leave without something that you didn’t know before talking to someone.

Olivia Antunes, Dylan Wu, Constantin Whitmire, Grace Price and Jacob Hornstein are among the 92 students in the inaugural class. If UT is built around Longhorn football, the focal point of UATX …. 

Dylan Wu: Fearless pursuit of truth to me is I have this kind of mentality that the best way that you should go about your life is to always assume that you’re wrong in some capacity. 

Jon Wertheim: You’re prepared for that, (Right) to be challenged and stress-tested and–

Dylan Wu: Not so–

Jon Wertheim: –confronted?

Dylan Wu: It’s not just even prepared. That’s why I’m at this school. I want them to be challenged because I know that I’m wrong in some way. 

Jon Wertheim: What are some things that differentiate you guys?

Jacob Hornstein: We’re very intellectually diverse. 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.

Roughly half the students come from Texas. A third are female… they share academic strength —averaging in the 92nd percentile on the SAT.  Some were accepted at schools like the University of Chicago and Georgetown—but chose UATX for what it is…and is not…

Constantin Whitmire: I remember visiting a college in the northeast of the U.S. and the student guiding me there was like, “Ugh, we have different dorms for different student groups.” I didn’t wanna go to a space that was like that.

Jon Wertheim: Why do you think it’s important to be at a college where differing views aren’t just accepted and tolerated, but– but welcome? 

Constantin Whitmire: We’re actually listening to the other side and understanding each other. And still we’re friends with each other. I vehemently disagree with many of the things Jacob says. And I think you do too. I don’t wanna– 

Jacob Hornstein: It’s likewise. 

Constantin Whitmire: We still get along pretty well, and it’s a beautiful thing. 

Not exactly the vibe on so many other campuses….  long before Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th… colleges have been sites of protest and have leaned left… but the atmosphere has intensified over the past decade.

Speakers shouted down. 

Professors canceled when students feel unheard. 

Then the reckoning this past year …campus chaos led first to congressional hearings.. 

Then to the resignation of the presidents at Columbia, University of Pennsylvania and Harvard… 

Niall Ferguson: From a historian’s point of view, it’s terribly important that the United States improves, reforms, revitalizes its universities. 

Scottish-born, Oxford-educated, and recently knighted, Niall Ferguson is one of the founders of UATX. An historian, also known for his conservative views, Ferguson spent more than a decade as a professor at Harvard and is now a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

Jon Wertheim: You say something is rotten in the state of academia. What do you mean by that?

Niall Ferguson: Right up until I guess the early 2000s, it still seemed like universities were the places where you could think most freely, and speak most freely, and take the most intellectual risk. And at some point in the last ten years, that changed. And it changed in a way that began to stifle free expression. 

Jon Wertheim: We came across some data that less than 3% of the Harvard faculty identifies as conservative. More than 75% identifies as liberal. Wildly out of proportion with the American public.

Niall Ferguson: There’s a huge disconnect now between the academic elite and the average American voter. 

Ferguson says: this political imbalance plus social media plus an army of campus administrators monitoring speech… equals a culture where, per one study, nearly 80% of today’s students self-censor on campus for fear of being ostracized. Faculty feels the chill, too…

Niall Ferguson: The president of a university I won’t name once told me that he received, on average, one email a day from a member of the university community calling for somebody else to be fired for something they’d said. That reminds me vividly of the bad old days of Stalin’s Soviet Union, and yet it’s happening on American campuses.

Jon Wertheim: The stakes are that high?

Niall Ferguson: I think if a university system starts to go wrong, then something is bound to go wrong for the society as a whole. 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.

In 2021 Ferguson launched UATX with former New York Times journalist Bari Weiss, Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of data analytics company Palantir and Pano Kanelos, the former president of St. Johns College in Maryland. Larry Summers—the former Harvard president and U.S. treasury secretary under Clinton—became an adviser. In this ad, they announced they were, “done waiting for america’s universities to fix themselves.” 

UATX received initial approval from the state of Texas; and raised nearly $200 million from private donors—in part to cover tuition. 

Kanelos was named president.

He says that to the detriment of learning, colleges have become echo chambers.. 

Jon Wertheim: What is going on on campuses that are leading you to draw this conclusion?

Pano Kanelos: It’s as if people have come to expect that there are just sort of two versions of everything. And therefore, there’s a right version and a wrong version, and depending on which side you stand. But the truth is that one opinion meeting another opinion shouldn’t leave us with two opinions; it should leave us with better opinions. 

To combat fears of saying the wrong things in class, UATX comes armed with a weapon…

Jon Wertheim: Tell an American audience. What do you mean by Chatham House Rule?

Niall Ferguson: The Chatham House Rule is a great British invention. And it says that if you are a participant in a discussion and you hear an interesting thing said, maybe a controversial thing, you can refer to the information that you’ve gleaned, but you can’t attribute it to a person. People fear that the thing they said that was not– not right, was politically incorrect, ends up on X or, for that matter, on Instagram. And tha– that which happens in the classroom should stay in the classroom.”

At UATX, classes are small, seminar-style, and based in Western civilization—the bible; Greek classics.

Faculty includes a former Navy captain, a Greek orthodox priest—Father Maximos teaches a class on chaos and civilization—and a tech entrepreneur….

There are no on-campus science labs, but founders chose Austin for its booming start-up culture, linking students with companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink…

And helping the kids sharpen their tech skills and even fund their own ideas. 

To stem the scandalously high costs of higher education, the UATX campus is bare bones. 

No dorms (the students live in apartments next to UT undergrads) and no meal plan (cook for yourselves, kids.) The closest thing we found to a college rager? Students learning the Texas two-step…. 

Jon Wertheim: When the guys next door are playing beer pong and you’re- you’re reading Aristotle and working with lasers–

Grace Price: Playing chess.

Jon Wertheim: Any envy?

Dylan Wu: That’s not to say that, you know, we’re all prudes and we just spend all– who– all day reading Aristotle. We– we– we have fun, you know? 

As for admissions…UATX swaps DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion—for what some call MEI: merit, excellence and intelligence.

Jon Wertheim: Gender, race, ethnicity, what is the factor of that in your admissions decisions?

Pano Kanelos: We don’t take any of that into consideration in admissions. The primary thing that we’re interested in is the mind. 

Jon Wertheim: Meaning what?

Pano Kanelos: A kind of capacity to think deeply, to answer questions to challenge norms. 

Jon Wertheim: I gotta tell you, we did not see a particularly diverse student body.

Niall Ferguson: We are putting resources into finding talent of an intellectual variety. And if you’re interested in diversity, I recommend you look at the social backgrounds of our students, at the family circumstances of our students.

High profile UATX donors include Trump-backing billionaire Bill Ackman, a Harvard grad who vocally criticized his school after October 7th… and Harlan Crow, close friend of conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas… critics attack UATX as a right-wing university, simply wearing the cloak of free speech. 

Jon Wertheim: UATX has been called the anti-woke university. “Harvard is a liberal university. UATX is gonna be a conservative university.” 

Pano Kanelos: 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. 

Jon Wertheim: Pushback might be, are you gonna be too dependent to donors? We– we’ve seen on other campuses what happens–

Pano Kanelos: Absolutely.

Jon Wertheim: –when the donor class gets dissatisfied. You worried about that?

Pano Kanelos: If donors are ever pushing us in a way that is not aligned with our mission and that, somebody’s gonna call us out on it. 

And the backers aren’t solely from the right…. a liberal, legal scholar Nadine Strossen was president of the ACLU for nearly 20 years. She is now a UATX adviser.

Nadine Strossen: 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. 

Provided it comes with no serious harm, Strossen argues all speech should be allowed…. 

Jon Wertheim: You think censorship leads to worse outcomes than allowing even the most objectively hateful speech?

Nadine Strossen: My concern is to try to eliminate the underlying discriminatory attitudes. You don’t do that by punishing expression. You do that through education, through more speech, not less.

Free range free speech…resonated. When UATX announced its founding, thousands sent in job inquiries. some of UATX’s academics were disciplined—canceled, they may say—at their previous schools.

Jon Wertheim: Some of the advisers and faculty came here under some clouds of controversy. 

Pano Kanelos: I mean, that’s not what we’re seeking. I mean, we’re not, you know shelter for—

Jon Wertheim: Ha– haven– haven for the canceled–

Pano Kanelos: –for– haven for people who’ve been canceled. But many of the people who– 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.

UATX’s national accreditation won’t be decided until the first class has graduated—a standard for new universities….. Meanwhile, applications are open for the second class—tuition still free, so is the speech.

Produced by Denise Schrier Cetta. Associate producers, Katie Brennan and Elizabeth Germino. Edited by Jorge J. García.