THE AUDACITY TO CHALLENGE ENTRENCHMENTS.

The divinity schools that turned themselves into finishing schools for the Establishment managed to co-opt Johns Hopkins and his introduction of the German university model, as well as the efforts of Carnegie, Duke, Mellon, Rockefeller, Stanford and the like into the grift.

But the grift has been too obvious of late, and a number of disaffected academics are launching a new sort of start-up called the University of Austin.  "We Can't Wait for Universities to Fix Themselves. So We're Starting a New One."  Their reasons are familiar.

The reality is that many universities no longer have an incentive to create an environment where intellectual dissent is protected and fashionable opinions are scrutinized. At our most prestigious schools, the primary incentive is to function as finishing school for the national and global elite. Amidst the brick and ivy, these students entertain ever-more-inaccessible theories while often just blocks away their neighbors figure out how to scratch out a living.

The priority at most other institutions is simply to avoid financial collapse. They are in a desperate contest to attract a dwindling number of students, who are less and less capable of paying skyrocketing tuition. Over the last three decades, the cost of a degree from a four-year private college has nearly doubled; the cost of a degree from a public university has nearly tripled. The nation’s students owe $1.7 trillion in loans.

And to what end? Nearly 40% of those who pursue a college degree do not attain one.  We should let that sink in.  Higher education fails 4 in 10 of its students.  A system that so brazenly extracts so much from so many without delivering on its basic promises is overdue for a reckoning.

That ought come as no surprise to regular readers, and insiders who have more faith in business as usual in higher education have themselves expressed doubts.

It was not unwarranted to pose political questions in [humanities] research. We erred, however, in politicizing inquiry to the extent we did. There is nothing wrong with importing theory into studies of literature, art, cinema, and so forth. It was ill-advised to bring so much theory -- and almost always the same dense and ideologically tinctured brand of it -- to bear on our vast canon of texts and traditions.

But no decision we ever made could have been more catastrophic than this one: Somewhere along the way, we spiritually and emotionally disengaged from teaching and mentoring students. The decision -- which certainly hasn't ingratiated us to the job-seeking generation -- has resulted in one whopper of a contradiction. While teaching undergraduates is, normally, a large part of a professor's job, success in our field is correlated with a professor's ability to avoid teaching undergraduates.

It follows from this contradiction that the more accomplished the scholar, the less she or he is required to engage with students. Prestigious institutions perpetuate this logic by freeing their most distinguished faculty members from classroom responsibilities.

Somewhere Charlie "Prof Scam" Sykes is nodding.  "Now, restoring a state of good repair will be more difficult."  And it might require new ventures, such as this Austin operation.

Universities are the places where society does its thinking, where the habits and mores of our citizens are shaped. If these institutions are not open and pluralistic, if they chill speech and ostracize those with unpopular viewpoints, if they lead scholars to avoid entire topics out of fear, if they prioritize emotional comfort over the often-uncomfortable pursuit of truth, who will be left to model the discourse necessary to sustain liberty in a self-governing society?

At some future point, historians will study how we arrived at this tragic pass. And perhaps by then we will have reformed our colleges and universities, restoring them as bastions of open inquiry and civil discourse.

But we are done waiting. We are done waiting for the legacy universities to right themselves. And so we are building anew.

The founders "expect to face significant resistance."  On the internet, rapid response is the normal order of things.  Although Rod Dreher greets the announcement as "terrific news," while Spiked's Joanna Williams chastises the critics with "Those mocking the University of Austin before it even gets off the ground expose their philistinism," the critics are all over the place, complete with the predictable snark.  "Those associated with the new institution range from former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss to experimental psychologist and one-time Jeffrey Epstein associate Steven Pinker." From all the entries on somebody's record, it's always possible to find the most derogatory thing.

John "Just Visiting" Warner has to call attention to the piling on (he is an Inside Higher Ed contributor, so that's required, just like a Hail Mary at Easter) although he raises a number of practical observations.  If this university is a serious proposition, sooner or later it must pass muster with the cartel managers.  "Another unfair criticism is citing the institution’s lack of accreditation. As the system works, you must be up and running, teaching students stuff, before the accreditors will come in and consider a stamp of approval. In those cases, the preaccreditation students are granted accreditation retroactively, so it’s all good—provided you pass muster."  In addition, if it is a serious proposition, somebody has to build it.  "I see a lot of people who are used to working in the spotlight more than the trenches, and who, as of yet, don’t appear to be leaving their current positions to throw themselves into the day-to-day of UATX."  They've got to come up with a better symbol than something that looks like it identifies a tank car.  But there's a reason we speak of "armchair" model railroaders, there are probably many more pikes that exist on paper or in the imagination than there are taking form down cellar or in the bonus room.

Finally, he calls attention to the U.S. News problem.

I want to also note that this proposal has nothing to do with higher education writ large. This is a battle over “elite” higher education, spaces where many of the people who are signed on to the project either attended or work or both, and which they perceive to be less welcoming to people like them than those institutions should be. Rather than fight the internal battle, they intend to take their ball and start their own game.

None of this stuff matters to the vast majority of people who work in and attend postsecondary institutions in the United States, most specifically, public postsecondary institutions. However, what I think the UATX founders get right about higher education does have implications for how we should be thinking about our public postsecondary institutions.

Is he noting that the land-grants, regional comprehensives, and mid-majors are in the same business as the Ivies, and should behave accordingly?  Or is he suggesting that Ivy-envy has infested those institutions in the worst possible way, with the faddish multiculturalism and identity politics combining with access-assessment-remediation-retention to create dropout factories?  Or that the student-faculty nonaggression pact has so many adherents on the faculty that frustrated faculty see no better option than to attempt a startup?