Ongoing Turmoil at UATX

Like just about everyone else who seriously considered the various statements made about the new University of Austin, I worried that its clashing goals would undermine its academic mission. The university's web site offers these two key goals:

WE FEARLESSLY PURSUE THE TRUTH
At UATX, we recognize the existence of truth. We seek truth so that we may flourish.

WE CHAMPION ACADEMIC FREEDOM At UATX, students, faculty and scholars have the right to pursue their academic interests and deliberate freely, without fear of censorship or retribution.

But if you know the truth, why do you support the freedom of professors and students to question it? Would the university be truly devoted to freedom, or would it focus on being a conservative bastion?

According to Evan Mandery, these struggles have broken out into the open across campus, leading to shouting matches and at least one high-profile resignation. 

Over the past three months, I had more than 100 conversations with 25 current and former students, faculty and staffers at UATX. Each had their own perspective on the tumultuous events they shared with me, and some had personal grievances. But they were nearly unanimous in reporting that at its inception, UATX constituted a sincere effort to establish a transformative institution, uncompromisingly committed to the fundamental values of open inquiry and free expression.

They were nearly unanimous, too, in lamenting that it had failed to achieve this lofty goal and instead become something more conventional — an institution dominated by politics and ideology that was in many ways the conservative mirror image of the liberal academy it deplored. Almost everyone attributed significant weight to President Donald Trump’s return to power in emboldening right-leaning hardliners to aggressively assert their vision and reduce UATX from something potentially profound to something decidedly mundane.

Steven Pinker, who was one of the original board members but soon resigned, put the situation like this in an email to Mandery:

Dissociation was the only choice,. I bristled at their Trump-Musk-style of trolling, taunting, and demonizing, without the maturity and dignity that ought to accompany a major rethinking of higher education. . . . UATX had no coherent vision of what higher education in the 21st century ought to be. Instead, they created UnWoke U led by a Faculty of the Canceled.

Mandery's article is long and interesting, especially on the experience of UATX students, so I recommend it. 

But my basic response is to fear that in America, escaping from politics is pretty much impossible, and the only way to create an anti-woke university is to wallow in conservative grievance.