In May 2021, a quartet of intellectual dissidents gathered in Austin, Texas, united by a conviction that American higher education had lost its way. Venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, historian Niall Ferguson, journalist Bari Weiss, and Pano Kanelos – then president of St John’s College in Maryland – hatched a plan to build something new.
The University of Austin (UATX) was announced in October 2021, billed as a new institution that could address problems in higher education. The founders promised a return to a place where the “forbidden” was not just permitted but encouraged. Where views could be freely expressed with fear. Where speech was really free. They had, in their telling, finished waiting for universities to fix themselves.
I remember reading about this at the time, intrigued. I had become concerned that universities, particularly the most prestigious of them, had become echo-chambers in which non-heterogeneous views were, at best, derided and, at worst, silenced. Students were coming out of the elite university systems sounding suspiciously like a uniparty with a single, unnuanced, and left-and-woke-tinged worldview. And the outpouring of support on campuses for Hamas after the 7 October massacre seemed to me to be an extreme symptom of the ideological poisoning of universities.
The proposal for the new university was publicised in an article by Kanelos in Weiss’s newsletter Common Sense, (which has since evolved into The Free Press). The manifesto was stirring stuff. The founding president declared this would be a place “where intellectual dissent is protected and fashionable opinions are scrutinized”. Unlike Ivy League institutions, where “illiberalism has become a pervasive feature of campus life,” UATX would champion fearless inquiry, open debate, and the pursuit of truth unburdened by ideological orthodoxy.
The excitement was palpable, at least in certain circles. The initial advisory board read like a “Who’s who” of intellectual and academic celebrity: former Harvard president Lawrence Summers, University of Chicago president Robert Zimmer, academic and author Steven Pinker, psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt, former ACLU president Nadine Strossen, senior Brookings fellow Jonathan Rauch, black economist Glenn Loury, playwright David Mamet, and economist Tyler Cowen. Founding faculty fellows included Peter Boghossian, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Kathleen Stock – academics who had, in various ways, found themselves on the wrong side of campus orthodoxies.
Harvard’s Steven Pinker explained his early involvement by suggesting that “alternative models of a university could enrich higher education and challenge the legacy universities to rethink entrenched practices”. The coalition seemed to possess just enough ideological variety – former Clinton cabinet members alongside conservative thinkers – to suggest this might genuinely transcend tribal politics.
Money followed enthusiasm. The school raised $200 million in private donations before admitting its first student. High-profile donors included hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman and Harlan Crow, known for his friendship with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Following a large donation in 2025 by libertarian investor Jeff Yass, UATX announced that tuition would be permanently free.
The inaugural class of roughly 92 undergraduates arrived in September 2024, settling into a repurposed department store in downtown Austin. A 60-Minutes segment dubbed it “Disruptor U.” The curriculum promised engagement with Great Books, the Western canon, and ideas that mainstream academia had supposedly rendered taboo.
The trouble started almost immediately. On 11 November 2021 – barely a week after the launch announcement – Robert Zimmer resigned from the advisory board, saying that UATX had made statements about higher education that “diverged very significantly from my own views”. Steven Pinker followed suit, announcing his departure with characteristic diplomacy: “By mutual and amicable agreement, I’m stepping off the Board of Advisors of U of Austin, wishing them well”. He added that he would be concentrating on his books and podcasts.
Later, Pinker offered a more substantive critique. He told The Harvard Crimson that UATX had “confused freedom of speech with the political right” – that it had staffed itself primarily with people on the right, regardless of their position on free speech, extending to some opponents of it.
There were further signs of trouble. In January 2025, a group of board members led by Lonsdale convinced the board that Kanelos needed to leave the role of president and that UATX should emphasise technology in its curriculum and de-emphasise the “great books”. De-emphasise the “great books” of thought? You mean the canon of literature, philosophy, and scientific texts that are considered foundational to Western civilisation?
Uh oh.
Then came the meeting that would crystallise UATX’s drift from its founding promises. On 2 April 2025, the first day of the spring quarter, Lonsdale summoned all faculty and staff and told them they must subscribe to the principles of anti-communism, anti-socialism, identity politics, and anti-Islamism.
When professor Michael Lind – himself no friend of the progressive left – asked what precisely these terms meant, he was told that “communists” and “socialists” were people who don’t “believe in private property” and who “hate the rich,” and that the UATX board would make a case-by-case determination on whether “New Deal liberals” would be allowed to work at the school. According to reports, one former staffer described the gathering as “the most uncomfortable 35-to-40ish minutes I’ve ever experienced”. Another characterised it as “a speech version of the ‘America love it or leave it’ bumper sticker”. Lonsdale reportedly told faculty that if they weren’t comfortable with his vision, they should quit.
So much for free speech. The irony, of course, is exquisite. A university founded to combat ideological litmus tests was now instituting its own. Ellie Avishai, who had been drawn to UATX because she experienced “ideological tribalism” while at Harvard, never expected to also find “ideological litmus tests” at UATX. She was fired after posting a LinkedIn article suggesting that DEI could be criticised without being completely dismantled – a position that apparently constituted “wrongthink” in the new order.
In July 2025, when the conservative Manhattan Institute urged the Trump administration to condition universities’ federal funding on compliance with a new set of ideological rules, UATX’s new president, Carlos Carvalho, expressed support. New York Law School Prof Nadine Strossen, Jonathan Rauch, and Jonathan Haidt approached Carvalho with objections. Carvalho argued that UATX had always been a right-wing project.
This was apparently news to some of the people who had helped build it. On 18 July 2025, Larry Summers posted that he had resigned from the advisory board “effective today… as I am not comfortable with the course that UATX has set nor the messages it promulgates”. Strossen, Rauch, and Haidt also resigned.
By late 2025, roughly 20 of the university’s 54 non-faculty staff had departed, including the president, provost, lead fundraiser, and executive director of admissions. The institution that promised to disrupt higher education was experiencing startup dysfunction of a rather conventional variety. As of early 2026, UATX is still flush with cash (nearly $300 million in the war chest) and is still offering free tuition to a tiny cohort of students, yet it is struggling to keep a stable leadership team.
But as Evan Mandery (who covered this in detail in a Jan 17 story for Politico) concludes: “It’s a tragedy worthy of the Greeks, which at its core is about the hubris of believing that first principles can transcend politics and the human temptation to succumb to power.”
[Image: Salih Ferhat via Unsplash]
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