this is transcendent honestly https://t.co/UdhCDRAMDQ pic.twitter.com/ZYu3KE9iT6
— katie (@focusfronting) February 19, 2024
There are WOKE DRAGONS under the bed, but our WHITE KNIGHTS will vanquish them for you (and a moderate fee)…
Remember Bari Weis and her proudly, avowedly University of Austin? Noah Rawlings, at The New Inquiry, goes “Inside the “Forbidden Courses” at the billionaire-backed University of Austin, the campus of the “anti woke” commentariat”:
A revolution in education! A resuscitation of the university mission! To happen in, of all places, not the pompous old northeast or the debauched West Coast, not New York or California but the country’s southern reaches—in the Texas Hill Country, in the city of Austin, where already technologists and venture capitalists had swarmed, drawn by the absence of income tax and the looseness of labor regulations, pulled by the mild zoning laws and the natural beauty and the food trucks and the good vibes. Austin, because it was “a hub for builders, mavericks, and creators.” Here a new university: the University of Austin, or UATX.
Around this idea journalists, historians, technologists, and financiers had assembled. People like Bari Weiss, Joe Lonsdale, Joshua Katz, Peter Boghossian, and more. They saw a void in American higher ed. There was not, they asserted, enough free speech. Where, they wondered, was the pursuit of truth? Nowadays, those things were hard to find, but they would be abundant at UATX, an institution to be built from the bottom up, through sheer will and courage—and some backing from billionaires. The Yales, the Stanfords, the UChicagos had been overrun by hordes of “diversocrats” and woke elites. At UATX there would be none.
Many of the founders had participated in the same conservative think tanks: The Hoover Institution, The Manhattan Institute, The American Enterprise Institute. Many had contributed to The Free Press, the digital paper founded by Bari Weiss in 2021, the same year UATX was announced. Many were friends or fans of Jordan Peterson. One UATX founder was even double-dipping, delivering lectures at both UATX and Peterson’s forthcoming Peterson Academy. One had been fired from Princeton University after sleeping with a student and “discouraging her from seeking mental health care,” per an official university statement. One had been accused of assaulting his girlfriend. (The charges were dropped.) Another had had a talk at MIT canceled after comparing Affirmative Action to “the atrocities of the 20th century.” And so, beneath their optimism, there churned bitterness and indignation at their mistreatment by the Thought Police—sour feelings they sweetened with their commitment to “free and open inquiry.”
To build a university you need money and time to raise it. But the founders were eager. They were ambitious, impatient. They wanted students and classes now. So in the summers of 2022 and ’23, UATX established weeklong programs where students at other institutions could attend seminars and lectures by “world-class scholars and knowledge creators”—a sort of anti-woke summer camp. Title: Forbidden Courses…
THE University of Austin is not in Austin. Not yet. It’s 200 miles northeast, in Dallas, on an office complex owned by Mr. Harlan Crow. “Old Parkland,” the complex is called. Crow, a conservative billionaire who recently made the news for funneling thousands of dollars in undisclosed gifts to Justice Clarence Thomas and his family, gives money to UATX, too. He also rents out rooms in Old Parkland to the nascent university, at what UATX founder Peter Boghossian called “a generous rate.” I would later encounter the rich Texan at several UATX lectures, squinting and smiling in preppy athleisure.
Crow is a savvy investor, from a family of savvy investors. (His father, Trammell Crow, was thought to be the largest private landlord in the US.) He invests not only in real estate but ideology. He’s donated to the conservative magazine The National Review, conservative thinktank The Witherspoon Institute, and at least two powerful libertarian organizations started with funds from Charles Koch—The Institute For Justice and The Cato Institute. If Crow is putting money behind UATX, it can be inferred that he believes the school will promote the same values as other recipients of his patronage—privatizing social services, lambasting attempts to increase sexual and racial diversity in education and the workplace—and will lead to the same effect—maintaining power in the hands of wealthy white men…
The students’ demographics were as revealing as their chosen majors. Roughly 80% were white. Over 70% were men. There was not a black man in the room. The way these percentages diverge from national higher education averages should tell you something about what kind of intellectual community UATX is building. In practice, UATX is recruiting a student body whose racial and gender makeup resembles a pre-civil rights university.
Pano Kanelos, president, stood up. It was time for the opening remarks. Our chatter lulled, and he began to speak in gentle, benevolent tones. He told us that we weren’t starting a university; we were a university. This is what a university looks like: people coming together for conversations, much like the ones we’d been having over our complimentary chicken dinners. “Dia-logue,” he said. “From the Greek, logos.” Two rational beings, engaged in rational discourse. He smiled. We smiled. And with little further ado, he introduced Peter, whom the other students had not yet had the good fortune of meeting. Peter, Pano told us, was “kicking butt in the righteous name of freedom.”
Peter springs to the center of the room. The air pressure changes. A buzz, a hum, a current about us. He brims with a frenzied energy. Something is happening. He is going to give us a taste of what’s to come, he says. This is the kind of intellectual activity we’re going to experience at UATX. We’re going to grapple with big issues. We’re going to be daring, fearless, undaunted. We’re going, he says, to do something called “Street Epistemology.”
What is Street Epistemology? He’ll demonstrate. It’s one of two things he does, the other being jiu-jitsu. “I don’t have a life,” he says. “I talk to strangers and I wrestle strangers.” But before we can do Street Epistemology, Peter needs to think of some questions…
… I speak of the school’s true target audience, of the young neoconservatives who seemed to think trans athletes and immigrants were the greatest threat to the Union, whose high school tuition had cost 4x a degree from a public university, who nodded at UATX speakers with graduate degrees from Berkeley or UChicago as they railed against “elites” and “elite culture” on the office complex of a billionaire. At lunch or between class sessions, you could hear them say interesting things. Consider the remarks of a single afternoon. One student, bravely reviving the pseudoscience of physiognomy, said that if your index finger was longer than your ring finger, that probably meant you were gay. Someone else claimed that 20% of Gen Z identified as LGTBQ. “There’s no way a society can evolve if 20% of its population is gay,” another student added, shaking his head. “Evolve,” in this case, seemed to mean “stay the same” or “turn back the historical clock.” Later, yet another statistic was cited: “7% of France is Muslim.” “Yeah,” a peer replied, “that’s a problem because they don’t want to integrate.”
The subtext of these remarks was simple. The social capital, political influence, and access to wealth that was formerly the uncontested and exclusive prerogative of straight white men was now under question. They felt it at school. They saw it in the media. They were here, at UATX, to live out a dying dream, to vent their frustration at its loss, and to help one another cling to it as long as possible. They recommended internships in finance and tech to each other. They recommended books. “Have you read The Strange Death of Europe?” one student asked, referring to Douglas Murray’s 2017 political text which propagates the ethnonationalist Great Replacement Theory. “That’s a great book,” he heard in reply.
THE guest speakers and founders of UATX were the ideal figures to strengthen these students’ ideas—or to indoctrinate the unconverted. Each evening after class we would congregate in the Debate Chamber of Old Parkland to heed them…
First up: Kevin D. Williamson, Writer in Residence at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, wearing a salt and pepper beard, a pink shirt, a blue tie. He riffed on the topic of journalism for 30 minutes. He enjoined us to read the bible and to “get yourself an 8th-grade grammar book” instead of a journalism degree. He suggested, usefully, that we “learn something about something.” He threw in a few zingers. For instance, The Washington Post published “boring, dry, sterile” articles. And Bernie Sanders was not “as crazy as he seems,” he was actually “a lot crazier than he seems.” Williamson shared some inspiring historical factoids, like, “the people who wrote our constitution, these people didn’t have law degrees,” forgetting the 32 framers who were lawyers. (Ralph, back in the hotel room that same night, would ruefully describe the whole thing as “a little too irreverent.”) Harlan Crow was in the audience with us that evening, wearing a pink quarter-zip sweater and a red face, chuckling at Williamson’s tedious jokes. At the end of the talk, when some students became aware of Crow’s presence, the excitement in the room was palpable. He embodied, after all, peak success…
On the third day, we heard from Richard Hanania, who is the author of the book The Origins of Woke—blurbed by billionaire Peter Thiel as showing that “we need … government violence to exorcise the diversity demon.” Hanania is also the author of blatantly white supremacist articles, as HuffPost reported not long after I attended UATX. Writing under the pseudonym “Richard Hoste” in the early 2010s, Hanania advocated ethnic cleansing and forced sterilizations based on IQ tests. When HuffPost disclosed this at the beginning of August, Hanania claimed that his views had since changed—as would any neo-Nazi who cares about his upcoming book’s sales. The thing is, recent writing under Hanania’s own name is no less fascistic. He is the author of tweets supporting eugenics and calling for “more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people.” …
DESPITE UATX’s claims of ideological uniformity in higher ed, the regressive social politics found at the school are not much different from those you might hear as students trickle out of a data structures or financial investments class at a major university. But UATX is a “genuinely safe space,” as Weiss put it, in the sense that it isolates students from the inconvenient opposition of other peers and professors. It is a monoculture of free-market faith which provides, in the end, a venue for young people seeking success in tech and finance to network and to fortify the rightwing ideas that brought them here in the first place. On November 8, UATX announced that it had received certification from the State of Texas and would welcome its first graduating class in the fall of 2024. This month it hosted a prospective student’s weekend. While the university still lacks national accreditation, which typically takes at least five years to obtain, it is now able to grant degrees. But will the university actually get off the ground? Can its rightwing summer camp actually evolve into a four-year degree? UATX is more viable than you may think. The university’s 2021 tax returns declared over $10 million in assets. This fall, Pano Kanelos stated that UATX had raised around $200 million, or 80% of the school’s $250 million fundraising goal. That number is significantly larger than the endowment of comparably small schools, like Antioch College ($49.5 million), American Baptist College, ($11.2 million), and Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts ($4.6 million)…
If anything is novel about UATX’s model, it is the creation of a rightwing monoculture in the form of a university, rather than a thinktank or policy institute. The university model carries certain advantages. Major investment firms and tech companies have long aimed recruiting efforts at select schools based on reputation and social connections. UATX could present rightwing business leaders with a new, particularly convenient recruitment scenario: they would know in advance the political commitments of the student body, making it that much easier to maintain a conservative culture within their companies. While blatantly reactionary universities do already exist, they tend to be religious or obscure or both. UATX replaces religion with a gospel of technocapitalism. It wards off obscurity by inviting noisy online extremists, like Hanania, and courting the favor of high-profile rich men, like Lonsdale, Andreessen, and Crow…
By all means, read the whole thing, for a panorama of unintentional humor among the ‘intellectuals’. I am, for some reason, convinced that Harlan Crow’s grandkids are not liable to enroll in the University of Theoretically-Austin; this seems like a holding pen for the next generation of Vivek Ramaswamys and Richard Hananias, aspiring (confused) wanna-bes hoping the grift will last long enough for them to score a ‘leadership potential’ position where they can aspire to attract a sugar daddy of their very own.
While our site is still down from all the traffic, use this: https://t.co/glaTgNP28R
— The New Inquiry (@newinquiry) February 20, 2024
Snarki, child of Loki
When’s the first “school shooting”?
Baud
Common ground with Jackals. Nice.
dmsilev
I read that yesterday; it was great fun. So many good bits. I liked the architectural criticism:
Add an excessive amount of fake gold and you have the Trump “look” down pat.
Elizabelle
Whoa boy.
dmsilev
Make Phrenology Great Again:
Baud
@dmsilev:
I wonder how common that is. That would look weird to me, looking at the shape of my hand.
Another Scott
Relatedly, ABL had an interesting week. There was a long thread on Twitter (that is almost impossible to see unless you have an account or the nitter gods are smiling on you). Fortunately, she put a free 4:22 video on Patreon that explains what happened.
People apparently need to learn the hard way not to go after her…
Cheers,
Scott.
Harrison Wesley
I’m so clueless that when I saw “Joe Lonsdale,” my immediate reaction was WTF. I had just about ordered myself to never watch Bubba Hotep again when it occurred to me that there might be another Joe Lonsdale….
Doug R
Waiting for the part where the bears show up, like that libertarian town in Vermont.
Delk
Ummm…maybe he should take a look at this mo’s hands.
bbleh
I kinda got lost at the part where someone at “the billionaire-backed University of Austin, the campus of the ‘anti woke’ commentariat” is lecturing on “street epistemology.”
Thinking maybe Trump University was a more practical bet.
lollipopguild
It can be tough to be full of yourself and 100% full of horseshit at the same time but they seem to be ready to try.
Urza
@bbleh: No, Trump U was a full scam. This might actually produce some new thought leaders for the reich wing, or at least people that can hop on the wingnut welfare train.
Harrison Wesley
…and I also mixed up “Lansdale” and “Lonsdale.”
Hoppie
Right, inherited piles of cash and property. Kind of hard to emulate that.
Kent
This place already exists.
It is called Liberty University. Or Bob Jones University if you are a touch more racist.
And it is a dystopian hellhole.
bbleh
@Urza: guess that depends on what qualifies as “thought leaders.” Perhaps indeed people truly absorbed in, um, street epistemology, or sexual-orientation physiognomy, can serve as thought leaders, if only as the blind (okay, phenomenally stupid) leading the blind (ditto).
But mostly it sounds to me like another scam to absorb money from credulous fools, except in this case catering to a wealthier clientele.
Urza
@bbleh: They’ve spent the last 60 years dumbing down their base and having each new generation fully invested in the lies of the previous. Their current thought leaders aren’t exactly the brightest and it can only go downhill so long as they keep denying reality. This one being billionaire funded its not about the scam for money. Its about changing society one credulous moron at a time.
Another Scott
Wikipedia:
(Emphasis added.)
Also, the “(around) $200M raised” seems to get mixed in with a “$200M endowment”. Often, an endowment isn’t spent – schools live off the investment income. That’s the whole point. Hiring faculty, buying facilities, etc., etc., shouldn’t be coming out of an endowment.
It seems very hinky.
Cheers,
Scott.
HumboldtBlue
The United States leads the world in many categories, but one category goes under the radar and unnoticed.
We have the stupidest fucking people on earth in this country, Just dumb motherfuckers, dense, insipid, dull, stupid, simple, foolish, just all-around stupid motherfuckers. We grow them like weeds, and they take root and are nourished in a right-wing field of bullshit, nonsense, absolute lies and self grievance.
Suzanne
I will note that “Old Parkland” is the old Parkland County Hospital and surrounding buildings, The “new” Parkland hospital, completed about a decade ago, was designed in part by my former firm,
Anotherlurker
@Another Scott: I applaud ABL! She rocks it.
Regarding the woman who attacked he for speaking the truth, all I can do is quote the great Frank Zappa :” I’m not black but there’s a whole lot of time I wish I could say I’m not white.” (“Trouble Every Day” from the album “Freak Out” 1965
Anonymous At Work
UATX won’t survive for one simple reason: Employers use college degrees as signifiers of what the employee may have learned, at what levels, against what competition/companionship, and what indications it can give about your background. A UATX “degree” will only signify a hot-house flower unable to stand on its own in the outside world and taught nothing but confirmation bias. The only places interested will be thinktanks, online blogs, and other sinecured places owned by major donors. And supply will far outstrip demand.
Sister Golden Bear
@Another Scott: For those who want the tl;dr version A racist on Twitter fucked with ABL and found out. Oh, did they did find out
But definitely watch the video. Because ABL is full of awesome.
BruceFromOhio
Yeah, no thanks. Monoculture can’t handle challenge or diversity, it just dies. And the sooner the better.
@Anonymous At Work: Exactly.
rekoob
@Suzanne: This past week, I’ve been watching the now decade-old series on “The Sixties” on HBO/Max. Old Parkland, the current site of UATX, is where President Kennedy was brought after being shot.
I have a lot of thoughts about UATX. I’ll summarize it by saying I’m shaking my damn head.
TBone
We here in central PA are also forced to acknowledge these types of idiots. The Open Discourse Coalition (founded by Bucknell alumni in 2020) opened in an old bank building on our main drag in town. Among the early presentations was one by Jordan Peterson. Someone hung a banner over the building’s new signage (which has a Rump hairdo crest over the ‘O’) that said “Center for White Grievance and Victimhood” so the police opened a vandalism investigation 😆 Apparently the video of Peterson has been disabled (maybe as a result of his public “penis milking” fiasco).
Free Speech as a Precondition for Mental and Social Health
October 19, 2021 Jordan Peterson
https://www.opendiscoursecoalition.org/what-we-do
Peterson’s public humiliation: “But one of his most recent posts from March 12th is anything but typical. It depicted a frame from an explicit adult film that Peterson claimed to be a Chinese government breeding facility. Rest assured, there is no evidence of the Chinese Communist Party conducting a so-called “male milking operation.” The images are actually from a dominatrix sex dungeon in Southwest England, not from a Xi Jinping forced breeding facility.”
https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/what-happened-to-jordan-peterson-his-chinese-communist-milking-arc-explained
RSA
@Another Scott: I’m imagining the school’s motto: “If your parents can’t afford full-boat tuition, you don’t belong here.”
Suzanne
I would also add “economic control of women to enable sexual access” to this list…. but pretty much yeah.
Suzanne
@Anonymous At Work: The author of the piece notes that some kinds of employers may want UATX graduates, because they’ll know what their politics are. “Culture fit”, and all that.
I am curious how a university targeting white dudes is gonna do. Something like 60% of college degrees are already earned by women these days. I can’t see many straight 18-year-old guys wanting to go to what will amount to a boys’ school.
rekoob
@Anonymous At Work: Accreditation will be at the hands of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges: Link
I’m thinking that peer review will be an interesting moment for the faculty at UATX.
trollhattan
@Snarki, child of Loki: Bespoke ammo.
RedDirtGirl
@Another Scott: And another one bites the dust!
delphinium
Truly, stupid is as stupid does.
As Mr. Squier sang: “Spread the ear pollution, both far and wide…”
TBone
@Doug R: 😆
Starfish
Look, just because Vivek bounces around on stage looking stupid, does not mean that he did not graduate Yale Law School, live every other asshole who runs for president.
Princess
They’re all so deadly boring. If they were capable of original thought or creative action, they wouldn’t need a protective hothouse like UTAX.
TBone
@Kent: My neighbors’ son attends Liberty Bibberty. He is almost functionally illiterate and also works on the comms team of a congressperson. Evangeluglicans.
delphinium
@HumboldtBlue:
Right? I mean how many of these think tanks and institutes are there, all spewing the same, tired garbage?
CaseyL
@rekoob: I’m not sure they’ll care about accreditation. They’re not imparting knowledge; they’re cultivating hothouse flowers for the RW welfare circuit. Accreditation is irrelevant.
I do kinda wonder what these “top of the top” blossoms will do if they ever need to complete an actual project that requires knowledge of something besides computer science and finance.
Or how they think life on a neo-Confederate plantation will work for them if they need, say, emergency medical care, or their town’s sewage treatment plant stops working, or crop failure takes out most of their expected food harvest.
trollhattan
Area Man seems fit for UATX faculty.
We’re not sending our best.
H.E.Wolf
@CaseyL:
Unrelated to this post, I saw an article today that reminded me of your comment yesterday about letters from your grandparents. https://nitter.unixfox.eu/pic/orig/media%2FGGhN1VgWoAAqutQ.jpg
Maybe there’s a historian or a library archivist* near you who might be interested in the letters you have? Let them struggle with the bad handwriting; they’re probably used to it. :)
*UW’s library archive dept. is badass. They have a collection of material from the 1919 strike by the Wobblies… and another collection of material from the 2017 Women’s March, including pink knitted hats.
sralloway
@Suzanne: Incel Safe Place.
RevRick
@Doug R: Nah, it’s more likely that a massage parlor will open next door. And a pizza parlor. Gotta cater to the needs of white boys.
Frankensteinbeck
@HumboldtBlue:
I have heard Brits claim their country holds that distinction, but I’ve never been in a position to compare the two.
RevRick
UATX sounds like an incel echo chamber.
kindness
What company (other than a right wing media company) would want to hire someone who comes out of an institution even more stupid than when they went in?
RaflW
@Suzanne: Sounds like a great place to corral a bunch of overprivileged incels.
MisterForkbeard
@Harrison Wesley: Yep. This Joe Lonsdale is… well, I’ve met him and I’m not surprised he’s involved with this at all. It fits him perfectly.
CaseyL
@H.E.Wolf: Thank you! I was looking at the Washington State archivist site; UW is another possibility.
Not sure they’d be interested in letters, etc., about people who never set foot in Washington, though.
I might have to contact comparable organizations in Pennsylvania or Florida, where my grandparents did live. Or even New Jersey: they had a house in Atlantic City, where three generations of us summered every year for decades.
JeffH
@rekoob: As someone who has actually helped start a new college, I’ve been watching these bozos and laughing my ass off. Getting accreditation is a ton of work and not very glamorous work. I can not see these folks sitting down and arguing out the details of a curriculum, working out policy manuals, and all the other details that go into a SACS application. (Ours was a stack of binders 3 feet tall.)
Ultimately this place is going to a think tank and a seminar hosting center, not an actual university. They aren’t going to do the grunt work for the full thing.
Captain C
@Anonymous At Work: I could see the modern version of a shady boiler room finance operation recruiting for people greedy enough to creatively rationalize screwing people in hugely profitable ways and
gulliblenaive enough to be used as a fall guy when the operation is blown and it’s time to get the hell out of town.CaseyL
@JeffH:
I mean, near as I can tell, they’re not even teaching rhetoric.. Which would be useful for propagandists, but you can’t reach it without going into why it’s effective, which is too close to critical and analytical thinking.
glc
@Another Scott:
@Sister Golden Bear: Finally found a link that worked for me:
Patreon.
And yes it was worth seeing.
scav
@CaseyL: Supposedly they’ve got Deidre McCloskey and she taught rhetoric, among other things, when at Iowa. Under the name of Donald, at that point. Wonder how all the computer incels reconcile that. Apparently, she’s reconciled it somehow.
Roberto el oso
That The University of Austin is presently located in Dallas is … unsurprising.
I loved the bit about “street epistemology”. The absurdity that anyone could do this with a straight face. It reminded me of the Monty Python sketch where someone goes down the shaft to discuss Proust with miners.
wjca
You have to have a really prosperous country to afford so many people with no common sense. The closer to subsistence you get, the more rapidly reality smacks you up side the head. (Or removes you from this vale of tears. No need for a Darwin Award when nature will do the job instantly and everybody knows it.)
Ghost of Joe Liebling’s Dog
I loved
It’s true! “Millions” are just a very large quantity of “thousands,” so an actual lie has not been told (aspiring Kesslers and NPR journos take note).
A nit, I suppose…
Ladyraxterinok
@Suzanne:
Was the Old Parkland the Parkland hospital JFK was rushed to???
Chetan Murthy
@scav: wait, Deirdre McCloskey is a RWNJ now? Oh sigh. I remember years ago, right after she transitioned, she was doing work on the differential treatment of women in econ. Good work, IIRC. Sigh.
Suzanne
@Ladyraxterinok: Yes.
Paul in KY
@Another Scott: You don’t say….
Paul in KY
@Suzanne: Most of these dweebs wouldn’t get any play even if we went back to BeaverCleaverland!