English Professor Boris Fishman is sharing his experiences as a liberal professor teaching at the University of Austin, a three-year-old institution dedicated to free inquiry, open debate, academic freedom and free speech.
Fishman wrote that far from feeling like a fish out of water, working at UATX has been more rewarding and refreshing than his time working at an unnamed Ivy League institution and other universities.
Writing in the Free Press, Fishman shared his experiences at his former school of being passed over as a white scholar as well as needing to coddle student preferences. At the University of Austin, all that is behind him now:
My UATX students disagree with me and each other, politely but firmly, about the right place to introduce a secondary character in a story, whether a character’s transformation should have taken longer on the page, and ideological issues, too. They carefully diverge from each other, knowing they won’t be attacked by their classmates—a more meaningful definition of safe space. These young people are as vulnerable and impressionable as 18-year-olds have every right to be, but they are engaged, and they are resilient. I don’t take this for granted—it depends on our discourse staying civil and cordial. That is the only thing I aspire to police. I haven’t had to do much of it yet. …
UATX remains a place where, during our convocation ceremony, one of the university deans spoke about the community as a group of pioneers akin to the early Americans who struck out West and, encountering “emptiness,” made a “rough and ready homestead without assistance from the government.” I’m pretty sure that wasn’t “emptiness,” even if every land acknowledgment I’ve ever heard has felt profoundly hollow (seemingly so, above all, to the people it’s meant to honor).
It remains a place where “great men” are habitually celebrated far more than “great women,” and where our guest speakers—Curtis Yarvin, Rod Dreher, Alex Epstein, who made the “moral case for fossil fuels”—often skew far to the right, without a balance of speakers from the left.
But this is also a place where, in a letter to my dean and provost, I declined to appear in a photo with Texas governor Greg Abbott during our convocation at the Texas Capitol. I could have slunk out of it, but I wanted them to know. In his reply, the provost alerted me that the Abbott administration had been very helpful in clearing hurdles for the university with the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board—but he understood and respected my choice. I have not felt the freedom to be this open about a politically unpopular position—I was virtually the only person not in the photo—elsewhere.
I have students who are unvaccinated; students who wear “My Vehicle, My Choice” T-shirts as a kind of provocation, even though they’re left-leaning; students who advocate for transgender rights; students who are so comfortable being Jewish on campus that they wear massive Stars of David over their collars, as I never dared to; Mormon students who are incredibly reflective about their faith. I have a student who grew up in a conservative environment, but owing to her interest in journalism, thought her education would be incomplete without time in liberal media, and came away from her internships at The New York Times and NPR in no greater agreement with their editorial positions but with tremendous respect for their newsgathering. As she put it, “Without their reporting, conservative websites would have nothing to respond to.”
Fishman, in his essay, is careful to point out he is no MAGA-loving Trump fan, but he has been embraced at the University of Austin as someone who can offer value and perspective to his students’ education.
“It’s uncomfortable for me to be a secular person surrounded by so many colleagues of faith; a believer in vaccines with a student who has a Kennedy/Shanahan decal on his laptop; a liberal with a colleague who has a wall sign with that old Robert Frost quote: ‘A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel,'” Fishman wrote.
“I spent my first months at the university in anxious disorientation, my dreams full of directions that failed to pan out, of would-be guides who meant to fool me. But after a while, this disorientation settled into something like alertness. Aliveness. This wouldn’t be possible if the majority didn’t protect the minority view. But at this institution, it does. As the students being taught under this model enter the world, perhaps they can become ambassadors for the political coexistence that has become so grievously lost.”
Read the full piece at the Free Press.
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IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: Pictured, Boris Fishman / photo courtesy of the University of Austin
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