AUSTIN, Texas – The third floor of a historic high-rise in downtown Austin, Texas, with restricted elevator access may be an unexpected place to find a college campus, but it’s where America’s newest private university is preparing to open its doors to an inaugural undergraduate cohort this fall.
According to founding president Pano Kanelos, the University of Austin, or UATX, aims to address the perceived decline in intellectual freedom and prioritization of knowledge at established universities, with an emphasis on open inquiry, critical thinking, respectful, vigorous debate, and persuasive writing.
“Our core motivation is to renew the spirit of higher education,” explained Kanelos, a Shakespeare scholar who has become an outspoken advocate for classical education — study based on traditional liberal arts rooted in the canon of Western thought — following years of what he and other perceive as a retreat from the central purpose of higher education and academic scholarship.
The school’s opening on August 26 — several years in the making — comes at what many see as an inflection point for higher education in the US, with college campuses protests over Israel’s war against Hamas focusing attention on wider cultural battles taking place in academia that UATX aims to address.
The university was established in the wake of a number of watershed cultural events in American public life over the past few years that have affected how Americans converse and think about race, sexuality, gender, and a variety of other hot-button issues.
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In the wake of the 2020 racial unrest, there has been a resumption of debate about race in America as well as how it is taught in schools and universities. There has also been a renewed focus on Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion programs — including “diversity training” programs that were launched throughout corporate America — and how such programs affect free speech and academic freedom.
UATX President Professor Pano Kanelos at his office in downtown Austin, March 2024. (Ricky Ben-David/Times of Israel)
In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law last year banning DEI programs at public universities in the state, leading to the elimination of dozens of jobs as the legislation was rolled out this summer – during a contentious election year. Abbott’s move was seen as a GOP win and other Republican-led states including Florida, Utah, and Tennessee soon followed suit with similar bills banning or restricting DEI programs at public institutions.
In recent months, US academic institutions have come under heavy fire over their handling of anti-Israel sentiment on campus in the wake of the Hamas-led October 7 mass terror incursion into southern Israel and Israel’s ongoing military response in Gaza — demonstrations that Jewish students, faculty and others charge have strayed into antisemitism and turned some campuses into places where Jews no longer feel safe. The fallout has led to the resignations of three Ivy League presidents, and increased scrutiny of how university leaders are tackling the issue.
In many places, the protests have been viewed within the lens of a wider cultural battle that has been brewing in higher education for years: the clash between academia’s embrace of efforts to create safe, inclusive spaces for students and teachers representing a wide diversity of views and backgrounds and those who view those efforts as the latest iteration of PC culture gone wild, muzzling speech by “canceling” any whose ideas are deemed insufficiently in line with progressive ideals.
Those behind UATX are aiming to counter what Panelos described as the gradual but forceful introduction of “ideological protocols” at universities, which have ended up “distorting knowledge.”
“Universities have historically been places where we do our own thinking, places we dedicate to thinking, to knowledge creation, to the transmission of knowledge, to the preservation of knowledge,” he told The Times of Israel in an on-site interview this spring. At traditional institutions, “all the evidence points to a kind of retreat from that commitment” and at “many, if not most, universities and especially… elite universities… the pursuit of knowledge is maybe not always prioritized.”
While UATX was created years before the Israel-Hamas war turned antisemitism on campus into a major hot-button issue, Kanelos said one of the reasons it was founded was “because the very things that are causing that kind of antisemitic agitation at universities, the very kind of ideological positions that generate that, are the things that we’ve identified years ago as being problematic at universities.”
“In many ways, we started this university to create an institution that wouldn’t be vulnerable to the kind of ideological strains that are generating some of the most atrocious behavior we’re seeing on campuses,” he told The Times of Israel, speaking a week before the first pro-Palestinian tent had been pitched on a college campus.
An anti-Israel protester wearing a Hamas headband gestures toward pro-Israel counter-protesters at Baruch College in New York City, June 6, 2024. (Luke Tress via JTA)
UATX has had a “very significant number of Jewish applicants and faculty,” Kanelos added.
The school’s first cohort will consist of about 100 students, some of them fresh out of high school, others with some university or higher education experience under their belt. The students were selected from about 2,500 applicants through what the University of Austin, or UATX, described as a rigorous admissions process — high SAT scores, various entrance exams on knowledge and ability, an essay and a personal statement.
Kanelos said the institution sought to recruit students “the way you might recruit a professional football team – pick each student very carefully because they’re going to create the foundational culture.”
That culture is of high importance to the newly accredited four-year university, whose motto urges faculty and students to commit to the “fearless pursuit of truth.”
Building a new university
The launch of the inaugural undergraduate class is three years in the making; all hundred-odd members of the cohort will receive full scholarships, thanks to a $250 million fundraising campaign targeting private donations.
The establishment of UATX was announced in the winter of 2021 with some big, controversial names attached, including former New York Times opinion editor and US journalist and commentator Bari Weiss, of the Free Press, renowned Scottish-American historian Prof. Niall Ferguson, and Somali-born Dutch-American author and scholar Aayan Hirsi Ali, whose anti-Islamism work has earned her fierce criticism from the left and accusations of Islamophobia. (She is also Ferguson’s spouse.)
The initial news of the university’s launch was met with dollops of snark and skepticism – one headline dubbed the institution the “anti-woke” university – and the project has since drawn criticism, mainly directed at the founders, and accusations that the school would not be on the level.
In an editorial titled “The University of Austin Champions Grifting Over Free Speech,” The Harvard Crimson claimed that “at its core, UATX doesn’t seem to care about free speech” and “represents a twisted attempt by a select group of aggrieved people to force their orthodoxy onto others through sheer spectacle.”
An opinion columnist for MSNBC wrote that there was “no substance behind the allegedly academic effort” by a “group of conservative and contrarian academics and journalists,” and that the new university appeared to be “the latest, and largest, in a long line of cancel culture-related grifts.”
Sarah Jones, a senior writer for New York Magazine’s Intelligencer, accused Kanelos of mischaracterizing the history of universities as having been “once free of donor pressure or administrative cowardice or, more to the point, pesky student activism. But this history only exists in his imagination.”
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump delivers the convocation at the Vines Center on the campus of Liberty University, January 18, 2016 in Lynchburg, Virginia. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images/AFP)
“Universities have always been fraught places, where the free exchange of ideas often results in intellectual turbulence,” which “Kanelos, Weiss, and their comrades” are seeking to escape, she wrote.
Jones compared UATX to Liberty University, a Christian institution founded in 1971 by televangelist and conservative activist Jerry Falwell, famous for his campaigns against desegregation and the US civil rights movement. Schools like Liberty “exist as laboratories for right-wing thought” that are “committed not to free expression but to indoctrination,” claimed Jones. UATX will be “no different,” she wrote, calling UATX a “Bible college for libertarians” without the Bibles.
The sharpest critiques were reserved for the core people associated with UATX: Weiss has been described as a “self-styled tribune of the people”; Ferguson as a “Stanford historian perhaps fired for blatantly trying to dig up dirt on a progressive undergraduate.”
But UATX’s founders are unfazed.
Illustrative: An aerial view of downtown Austin, Texas, August 2023. (felixmizioznikov via iStock by Getty Images)
Most of the criticism, said Kanelos, “had to do with people attached to the project, they didn’t even know what we were building as a university. They’re like, ‘we don’t like Bari Weiss, so therefore this must be some sort of fascist-like’” project. “They didn’t look at the other 50 people who were involved.”
Weiss and Ferguson both sit on UATX’s board of trustees with Kanelos, and Ali is on the board of advisors, which also includes Harvard University president emeritus Larry Summers, Shalem College dean of faculty Leon Kass, The Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan, and social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt.
What unites them all is the belief that something is broken with traditional higher education. Haidt’s 2018 bestseller “The Coddling of the American Mind” warned that university students were becoming increasingly intolerant of arguments they disagreed with and that universities were caving to their demands, to the detriment of the schools.
US journalist Bari Weiss during an interview with ex-MK Einat Wilf (not in picture) at the Jaffa Hotel Chapel on January 28, 2024. (Tel Aviv International Salon)
The school also earned attention before launching due to a program it offered as part of a summer session for high school students titled the “Forbidden Courses,” taught by professors from New York University, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and Brown University, among others. Weiss promoted the class on her podcast and her involvement drew some chatter.
Other UATX programs and fellowships have drawn speakers like tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen and former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, alongside venture capitalists, scholars and intellectuals.
A summer lecture by Bari Weiss for UATX, taken as a screenshot from a promotional video for the university. (Screenshot/YouTube)
The school’s incoming undergraduates will study toward a BA in Liberal Studies, the only program offered.
The first two years will focus on what the school calls Intellectual Foundations, offering programs diving into the works of Homer, Plato, George Orwell, Tocqueville, Confucius, and Descartes among others; readings will also include the Book of Genesis and the Gospel of John.
UATX’s Intellectual Foundations is led by Prof. Jacob Howland, who serves as dean of the program and previously taught philosophy at the University of Tulsa. Howland was also a senior fellow at the Tikvah Fund, a conservative philanthropic foundation that invests in a range of educational initiatives in Israel and the US.
In the third and fourth years, students will pursue fellowships and internships in their areas of study and work with scholars and researchers at UATX’s Center for Economics, Politics, & History, the Center for Arts & Letters, and the Center for Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics.
“Our curriculum won’t be for the faint of heart,” the university has warned. “Courses will be purpose-driven, cohesive, and intellectually rigorous. That’s exactly what an education should be.”
Birds of a feather
Kanelos says the campus was founded as a pushback to the sort of groupthink and “atrocious behavior” that shuts down the free exchange of ideas on other campuses, though some have argued that the school is creating its own sort of echo chamber.
Some of the students who spoke to The Times of Israel expressed a desire to be part of a select group of kindred spirits, while also being critical of the sort of peer pressure and ideological and political homogeneity they say exists on US campuses today.
“I am excited to be with like-minded people who are passionate, convincing, and set in their beliefs,” Sam Indyk, 18, told The Times of Israel in a video interview over Zoom this spring. “We need intellectual pluralism, not mob dynamics, and more discussions.”
Indyk, the eldest of eight kids from a Jewish family in the Washington, DC, area, said he heard of the university through his father and looked into applying “immediately.”
It was a UATX session with high school students that helped him make the decision to pursue his education at the new private university.
UATX’s Prof. Jacob Howland, dean of the Intellectual Foundations, speaks to admitted students in April 2024 at an event hosted by the university in Austin. (Courtesy)
The decision carried some amount of risk. The school has no proven track record, and while it is recognized by Texas as a degree-granting university, UATX is still in the process of accreditation, a five-to-seven-year process, according to the school.
Indyk, who will pursue a Computing and Data Science track, said his family was supportive of the decision to apply and attend UATX this fall, though some friends and peers reacted with surprise.
For Indyk and others, the novelty is the point and they have embraced that newness over pedigree and legacy, which is a departure from the more traditional view of college for American students.
“There are no new colleges or universities, so it’s a risk, yes. The risk is 100 percent worth it to me. Having an unprecedented college experience is very valuable to me,” he said. “I want to do things that haven’t been done before and build traditions.”
Jacob Hornstein, 19, also from a Jewish family in the Raleigh, North Carolina, area, previously took classes at George Mason University as part of a fellowship program in DC and is currently on a gap year. He heard of UATX on Weiss’s podcast and his curiosity was piqued. Beyond the school being something new, he was also drawn by the “high-quality staff,” he told The Times of Israel.
With plans to go to law school and become a constitutional lawyer one day, Hornstein said he has been “horrified by what is happening on campus,” and views traditional universities as “complicit” in the danger posed to Jewish students in the current atmosphere.
Anti-Israel protesters march from Philadelphia City Hall to University of Drexel Campus where they set up an encampment in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on May 18, 2024. (Matthew Hatcher / AFP)
None of the students who spoke to The Times of Israel identified the protests or campus antisemitism as a motivating factor in sending them to UATX, but many predicted that the school would be free of such tumult, noting it as a plus.
“The University of Austin will be safe for Jewish students,” Eitan Zarin, 18, predicted over Zoom from his family home in the Los Angeles area.
Zarin, born to Israeli parents, will attend UATX straight from high school, and wants to pursue a career in “STEM, mathematics, physics, engineering – and have the problem-solving skills for the future.”
“I’m really looking forward to being around people who are competent, hard-working, curious,” he said, adding that UATX students have a shared “goal to build something new.”
A university startup
Indyk, Hornstein, and Zarin recently visited Austin for “Admitted Students Week” where they met with faculty and staff, participated in educational sessions and bonding events, and took part in a host of outdoor activities.
They also toured the UATX campus — 30,000 square feet of downtown Austin’s eight-story Scarbrough Building, which was considered the city’s first skyscraper when it opened in 1910.
The spot is just a few blocks from the state capitol on the corner of Congress Avenue and Sixth Street in Austin’s commercial district, an area famous for its entertainment venues and live events.
The eight-story Scarbrough Building, left, is seen in Austin, Texas, on March 2, 2023. (Ceri Breeze/iStock)
Located above a trendy taco joint, the university’s space looks more like a well-funded startup than an institution of higher learning, albeit one with a decisively old-school, academic ambiance.
There are elegant shades of blues and browns, heavy wooden desks and tables, aromatic leather couches and chaises, assorted globes, brass reading lamps, and a beautiful library with vintage furniture fresh from Cambridge University.
The space is skillfully divided into lecture halls, common areas, reading nooks, meeting rooms, and staff and faculty offices. There is also a fully stocked, open-plan kitchen by the entrance. (The school is arranging housing for students elsewhere in Austin.)
Ample windows offer expansive views of the city, which is home to the University of Texas at Austin, Fortune 500 companies including Dell Technologies, Tesla, and Oracle, hundreds of startups and a world-renowned live music scene.
Six blocks away from UATX, the tan dome of the Texas State Capitol looms as a center of conservative power in the largely liberal city.
Austin’s relaxed, casual vibe and stunning natural scenery have made it a major draw for students, young families, academics, and tech professionals. Home to nearly 2.5 million people, the Austin metro area was among the fastest-growing regions in the US in recent years. A sizable Israeli community in the Austin area has seen significant growth over that time.
A view of the entrance to UATX from the elevators in the Scarbrough building in Austin, Texas, March 2024. (Ricky Ben-David/Times of Israel)
Among those who have migrated to the area is Kanelos, who previously served as president of St. John’s College, Annapolis, in Maryland.
“What I love about Austin is you have all these people coming here who have purposefully uprooted themselves from somewhere else where they felt… there wasn’t enough opportunity, and they’re pioneering types, they want to go somewhere where they can build something and create something and think anew about something,” Kanelos told The Times of Israel from his window office.
“It is an entrepreneurial place, an innovative center, a growing city. That’s a healthy environment to build a new university and to introduce students to,” he added.
In a sense, he said, UATX is a startup. “This is a startup university and this is something that almost never happens or at least not anymore. It’s exciting because I feel like in many ways we’re living in a startup world, where there are so many gaps to fill and so many opportunities.”
Identifying those opportunities “is really essential for industry sectors, and education itself to evolve and be successful,” said Kanelos.
Cost-cutting in Guatemala
UATX costs $32,500 a year for full-time students, not including housing or over $2,000 for fees, books and activities. The school says the price is competitive for a high-level liberal arts college, and UATX says it plans to keep tuition prices within reason by discarding what administration costs it can, or finding ways to turn a profit.
“At places like Yale now, you have more administrators than undergrad. Literally. We don’t need to get into the reasons for this other than bureaucracy,” Kanelos said.
Beyond “administrative bloat,” Kanelos also blamed what he called “luxury amenities” offered by many universities.
A UATX banner at the UATX campus in downtown Austin, March 2024. (Ricky Ben-David/Times of Israel)
A college president, he said, has to manage “an entertainment district, workout facilities, lifestyle stuff, a sushi bar, this and that. What does this have to do with learning?”
UATX strips all that down with a business plan designed to channel the majority of its spending into academics. In tax filings from 2022, the latest publicly available, the school said it spent nearly three times as much on program services as it did on management.
Instead, the school outsources many non-academic tasks overseas to save on labor costs, building a “virtual administrative hub in Guatemala,” said Kanelos.
“These are degreed bilingual administrators who can do all sorts of things, the back office stuff for the university at a radically lower salary rate,” he said.
“The salaries we pay them are better than practically anything you can find in Guatemala. But by American standards, they’re significantly less so that lowers the cost [of education],” he added.
If UATX’s virtual administrative hub in Guatemala is successful “we can start selling those services to other universities that want to lower their administrative costs and that becomes a revenue stream for us,” said Kanelos.
“We’re going to continually try to innovate and iterate on ways that bring revenue into the core operations of the university and then offset the need to collect substantive tuition from students,” he explained.
A bonus of having a virtual administrator hub is that it “also keeps administrators off your campus, so you don’t have an administrative culture, you have an academic culture,” Kanelos quipped.
‘Coercion’ on campus
Ferguson, Kanelos and others see academic groupthink and a move away from truth and toward ideology as culprits behind the unprecedented crisis on university campuses, where administrators have had to appear before Congress and explain the surge in antisemitism. Some universities are facing lawsuits and investigations over their handling of the unrest over the past several months.
Universities have also had to grapple with vandalism, graduation disruptions, occupation of buildings, encampments, and others threats by anti-Israel students, faculty, and supporters intent on forcing divestment from Israel.
Pro-Palestinian student protesters lock arms at the entrance to Hamilton Hall on the campus of Columbia University, on April 30, 2024, in New York City. (Jia Wu / AFP)
To Kanelos, the issue isn’t their message, but rather how they deliver it, which he described as “coercion.”
“Students have the right to try and persuade the university that a particular course of action is warranted, but they have no right to use coercive means to achieve their ends,” he said. “I think that there are clear lines that divide free speech from actions that inhibit the operations of a university.”
In an op-ed for Newsweek in May, Howland, director of UATX’s Intellectual Foundations Program, argued that “students who chant genocidal slogans, tear down posters of Israeli hostages, deface Jewish spaces and displays, heckle and film Jewish students, and disrupt programs that feature defenders of Israel are engaged in expression that aims to shut down speech.”
Kanelos said he believes that “it’s one thing to have ideas about what’s happening politically in the world. It’s a totally different thing to turn your ire toward members of your own community just because of who they are. It’s a radically different step to take.”
Illustrative: Police patrol as workers clean up anti-Israel graffiti at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) campus after police evicted pro-Palestinian protesters, May 2, 2024. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP)
Ferguson said that he was not surprised by the antisemitism that has surged on campus since October 7: “Radical left groups have been at it for a while. I have seen the antics of progressives, and the ‘woke’ and Islamist connection.”
“What happened on October 7th is something that none of us could foresee but the response of university communities to what happened on October 7th was foreseeable,” Kanelos said.
Administrators themselves are to blame, said Ferguson. “University governance is a problem. It is aggressively politicized and in pursuit of political goals. Trustees go along; there is no judicial branch where you can say ‘this is wrong.’”
Ferguson, who drafted UATX’s constitution, noted that the school would have “an explicit judicial branch” and “due process.”
There’s also no tenure track at UATX, which Ferguson said is a “core tenet” as “academic freedom is protected more than tenure” and “tenure enforces conformism.”
“It is up to us now to execute, to deliver a first-class experience,” said Ferguson. “If we get it right, we will attract clever people and compete with the incumbents. We will start competing for brain power,” he said.
The events since October 7 have “created a cultural moment, where people started realizing something is very wrong,” he added. “We now no longer have to explain why the University of Austin is needed.”
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