Cambridge, watch out. Free thinking is back in vogue
Last November, the birth of a new university was announced by journalist and media disruptor Bari Weiss. The University of Austin Texas (UATX) would pursue the “north star” of “truth”, and other such grandiose missions. All this may sound overblown and terribly earnest, but the goal was laudable: to offer new horizons of learning and free thinking to students bewildered by what has happened to traditional colleges and universities.
These are institutions which, particularly in America, regularly conduct witch hunts on those who question woke orthodoxies in ways that, just ten years ago, wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow and are completely legitimate. No wonder there was a gap in the market for somewhere that does things differently. A big hole.
UATX raised millions easily and quickly from thrilled billionaire donors, and claimed to be flooded by applications from staff and students.
The university launched last week in Austin with the first of its Forbidden Courses (on topics such as gender, identity and empire). Lectures and seminars came from affiliated big-hitters including women’s rights activist and critic of Islam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, historian Niall Ferguson, playwright David Mamet and Bari Weiss herself. Classes are also on offer from Peter Boghossian, who quit his post as a philosophy professor at Portland State after being hunted by the university’s woke stasi, and Kathleen Stock, hounded out of her post at Sussex University for insisting on the reality of biological sex.
It’s easy to mock the Austin project – indeed, most American media coverage of it has done little else. But then, it would, saturated as it is with the very distortions in thinking that made the new university necessary.
Universities should take note. Especially British universities, which have been steadily sliding into the morass of woke madness.
For too long, universities, particularly prestigious ones such as Cambridge (one of the worst offenders) have assumed they will automatically attract students, and that – being full of all those terribly clever people – they’re morally superior to the rest of the world, and that what they say and do is what goes.
What they don’t seem to realise is that not every student is in love with the deadening strictures of woke thinking, even at Oxbridge or Yale. Some feel the education for which they pay through the nose has been sacrificed to an anti-learning ideology cooked up by a cultish cabal. And some, as demonstrated by the first set of courses in Texas, are taking their business elsewhere. Universities should watch out: UATX won’t be the last of its kind.