Grifters Gonna Grift

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.

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— The New Inquiry (@newinquiry) February 20, 2024