The slow death of the University of Austin’s dedication to free speech and open inquiry
More likely than not, the University of Austin (UATX) won’t end up on the list of colleges you consider. Not to be confused with its cross-town neighbor, the University of Texas at Austin, UATX has yet to be accredited and is nowhere to be found on the Common Application. Instead, prospective students need only two things: their personal information and proof of “merit.” The application, which takes less than five minutes to complete, made the latter part very clear. An SAT score above 1460 means you’re in, no ifs or buts. Remaining applicants are ranked—yes, numerically ranked—by test scores. The UATX experiment is currently in the process of enrolling its third class of students, having commenced classes in 2024; however, the project has devolved into an ideological mess. Rampant politicking to seize control amidst UATX’s internal schism betrays the institution’s original values in favor of partisanship.
The University’s supposed goals were to create a heterodoxical, countercultural revolution within American higher education. Many of its founding thinkers backed “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” a letter published in 2020 by Harper’s Magazine criticizing the censorious nature of cancel culture and illiberalism across society. From those principles arose UATX, whose founders framed the project as a bulwark of free speech and open inquiry. The partnership—between historian Niall Ferguson, journalist Bari Weiss, Palantir entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale, biologist Heather Heying, and administrator Pano Kanelos—sought to protect intellectual conversations on college campuses, environments they thought had begun settling for comfort rather than “the fearless pursuit of truth.” Despite its controversial lineup of founders, the UATX project ostensibly supported a noble cause of restoring open debate. However, as a recent Politico piece notes, the choice to define UATX by what it stood against lacks both a sustainable identity and long-term viability, especially not for an institution of its proposed scale. Behind the anti-“woke” messaging, what actually is UATX?
Revolutions, in any context, occur as a two-step mechanism. Revolutionaries must both pinpoint a problem within existing systems and establish a feasible path forward. In the case of UATX, then, the project’s supporters evidently diagnosed misgivings with 21st-century American academia but lacked consensus to what the solution would look like. If you pitch yourself as “the anti-Harvard,” do you actually attempt to rethink the whole system of higher education or do you simply opt to operate as the conservative version of those you critique?
The stories emerging from within the University would suggest the latter. Conflict existed from the very beginning. Within a week of the announcement of UATX’s founding, high-profile professors and administrators like Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and University of Chicago chancellor Robert Zimmer had resigned from advisory positions, dismayed by the University’s onslaught of disparagement for the current state of American higher education. Michael S. Roth, President of Wesleyan University, chalks this negative press up to UATX’s efforts to solicit donors, “whose wallets will open more quickly when they hear complaints about woke warriors or pronoun police.” Nonetheless, professors like Geoffrey Stone of the University of Chicago cite the emergence of UATX’s “ideological vision” as a reason for their departure, with Stone stating that said vision conflicted with his belief in non-ideological institutions of higher education.
This vision has long deviated from the ostensible values of free speech and open inquiry laid out during UATX’s inception. Visiting professor Michael Lind recalls Lonsdale, chair of UATX’s Board of Trustees, telling staff and faculty they “must subscribe to the four principles of anti-communism, anti-socialism, identity politics, and anti-Islamism,” spurring Lind to promptly quit. Although eventually persuaded to stay, Lind’s discovery that “communists” and “socialists” meant those who don’t “believe in private property” and “hate the rich” ought to sound the alarms. One could be forgiven for mixing the university’s internal communications with memos sent during the Second Red Scare. In early 2025, the University also cut ties with the Mill Institute, an effort supporting open exchange of ideas in school environments. The apparent transgression was a LinkedIn post made by the Institute’s director that read “We can have criticisms of DEI without wanting to tear down the whole concept of diversity and inclusion,” which had angered a major donor to the University. The obvious need not be overstated; this witch hunt against those who step out of line with the institution’s right-leaning orthodoxy betrays UATX’s founding values, opting instead to proliferate the opposite ideology of the higher education establishment.
It would seem as if somewhere along the path from advocating for free speech to purging left-leaning ideologies, the technocratic libertarianism of Lonsdale and prominent donors like Peter Thiel and Jeff Yass hijacked the University’s trajectory and infused politics into an originally non-partisan mission. Most dissenters to UATX’s rightward spiral and abandonment of the original mission have since resigned or left. Among them include founders Kanelos and Heying, the latter of whom took issue with the University teaching biological science through theological principles like ensoulment.
The UATX experiment appears inlaid with a few unanswered questions. First, can a university be created today completely without reliance on existing systems? To return the university’s admissions practices, newly-minted UATX President Carlos Carvalho recently spoke at Yale, recommending that the institution “start admitting on merit alone.” Recent scholarship in economics asserts that standardized testing may well be the best predictor of student potential, but the manner in which Carvalho and UATX employ the word “merit,” as the supposed end-all-be-all factor of admission, serves to rebuke the emphasis on student body diversity commonplace in the universities UATX means to critique. The obsession with the concept of a perfect meritocracy, however, poses its own challenges. As Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel postulates, notions of merit develop hubristic attitudes in societal winners, which ultimately challenges the open dialogue across society that UATX originally stood for. Second, how free are we from our own biases? The inception of UATX was rooted in an idealistic vision that students could embrace doctrinal pluralism and come together to ask pressing questions in a manner reminiscent of Plato’s Academy. While indubitably a lofty goal, the UATX experiment’s vision appeared to be a non-partisan effort with good intentions. Coverage of the university’s founding in 2021, however, questioned “whether the founders would be able to translate a provocative idea into a viable institution” given their respective political leanings. The UATX of today would prove the doubters right.
