‘Higher education needs competition,’ one backer says
Many elite universities have publicly lost several ultra-rich donors in recent years for a variety of reasons, chief among them the schools’ embrace of diversity, equity and inclusion dogma, their willingness to tolerate rampant antisemitism, and their kowtowing to cancel culture demands.
But that doesn’t mean the 1 percent are giving up on higher education, if the donations pouring into a newly established institution in the heart of Texas are any indication.
The University of Austin, which recently welcomed its first class of students, has a parade of multi-millionaire and billionaire backers who have donated some $200 million to help the budding program become a success, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.
“Billionaires frustrated with elite colleges are banding behind a fledgling school in Texas that boasts 92 students,” the Journal reported, citing donors such as trader Jeff Yass, real estate developer Harlan Crow, investors Alex Magaro and Len Blavatnik, and tech mogul Peter Thiel.
“Much of higher ed today seems to want to reject Western accomplishments and the accomplishments of Western civilizations in their entirety,” Crow told the Journal. “Many people think that’s a bad idea.”
Yass, in a statement to the Journal, said: “Higher education needs competition. It is time for philanthropists to start new colleges in keeping with the way American learning institutions were founded.”
“Whether prospective students find UATX as attractive as donors remains to be seen,” the article continued. “UATX currently lacks accreditation and can receive it only after its first class graduates. As a way to offset the risk students are taking, the first class of students is receiving full-tuition scholarships worth about $130,000. More than 40% of the students in the class hail from Texas and a third are female.”
As The College Fix has previously reported, the University of Austin was launched to serve as a place where conservatives, libertarians, classical liberals — and progressives — could find a place where open debate and civil discourse is welcomed and encouraged, even when tackling controversial topics.
“We don’t want to be Yale,” its President President Pano Kanelos told The Fix in a 2023 interview.
“The degree that one holds is not a marker of the quality of their minds or teaching,” Kanelos said at the time. “We’re very interested in people who exhibit the kind of passion for inquiry that Socrates had, and we want to welcome those people to our institution.”
Last summer, the university hosted a “Forbidden Courses” program, where there were “no trigger warnings, microaggressions or safe spaces,” The Fix reported.
“Conversation was bound only by the university’s statement of principles: ‘freedom of inquiry, freedom of conscience, and civil discourse.'”
The founders of UATX promise “an education without the censorship and enforced ideology present at most traditional universities,” as The College Fix reported in November 2021.
“We are building something extraordinary in Austin,” philosopher Peter Boghossian, a founding faculty fellow, told The Fix at the time. “UATX is the real deal: it is a genuine alternative to the illiberalism and censoriousness that has taken over our university systems.”
MORE: World’s newest university established in Austin
IMAGE: University of Austin
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