IN EARLY NOVEMBER, a group of current and former university presidents, professors, journalists, economists, and others announced the creation of the University of Austin (UATX) — a college formed to endorse free expression and civil discourse that some believe have evaporated from some of the nation’s top schools.
While even members of its board of advisors do not share in all of the school’s claims — a point which the university has been clear to emphasize — some believe that higher education is “broken,” destroyed by a culture of censorship that has stunted intellectual dissent on campus. UATX’s mission is to provide an alternative to this broken system.
The university had an unorthodox launch, announced by Dr. Pano Kanelos, former president of St. John’s College, in former New York Times opinion writer Bari Weiss’s Substack newsletter. Weiss resigned from the Times’ opinion section in July 2020, citing her colleagues’ open hostility toward her divergent views and what she saw as the paper’s warped idea of truth: not as a “process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else,” she wrote.
Kanelos and Weiss are two of the school’s five founding trustees. The school’s goals are ambitious: to “reclaim a place in higher education for freedom of inquiry and civil discourse” and combat the “illiberalism and censoriousness” it perceives at America’s elite colleges and universities.
To critics, UATX is little more than publicity stunt to prop up the political right. The new university has no physical campus or accreditation yet to confer degrees. And it was barely a week old when it had to contend with news of the resignation of two of its most notable advisors — Robert J. Zimmer, chancellor of the University of Chicago, and Steven Pinker, the prominent Harvard psychology professor.
By the coming summer, however, UATX says it plans to offer “forbidden courses” to students looking to flee their condemnatory colleges and discuss topics which, the school says, otherwise might have forced them to self-censor.
“Students will become proficient and comfortable with productive disagreement,” UATX’s website says.
The school’s creation has further stoked the fire of claims that a lack of diversity of thought permeates elite US colleges and universities. But not all educators, even some who lean clearly to the right, are buying into UATX’s founding premise.
“I think, frankly, that the University of Austin’s fire and brimstone announcement was public relations,” Jonathan Marks, professor of politics at Ursinus College and author of Let’s Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal Education, wrote in an email. “It includes among its advisers people who think universities are excellent in some ways and can be improved in others. The University of Austin is welcome competition, and one wishes it well. But I think its premise that universities are unsalvageable is mistaken.”
The national conversation over the state of American academic life has particular resonance in Massachusetts, with its huge higher education sector, including many of the country’s top private colleges and universities. Most, if not all, of these schools promote free-wheeling intellectual investigation and truth-seeking as foundational. In recent years, however, schools across the state and the broader New England region have grappled with their own free discourse controversies.
In September, MIT disinvited University of Chicago geophysical sciences professor Dorian Abbot — who currently serves on the University of Austin’s board of advisors— from delivering its annual John Carlson Lecture after MIT students protested an op-ed Abbot had co-authored in Newsweek titled “The Diversity Problem on College Campuses.” The op-ed argued that diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives stifle a university’s search for truth — its core mission — by forgoing the hiring of the most talented and suitable minds in the name of greater equity. The op-ed likened the rise of DEI curriculum and programming on college campuses to Nazi Germany’s “obsess[ion] with race … that drove many of the best scholars out.”
MIT students protested that allowing Abbot to speak broke the university’s own commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Following the controversy, some students, faculty, and alumni organized into what they are calling the MIT Free Speech Alliance, committed to a nonpartisan promotion of diverse viewpoints, free expression, and “academic freedom and open scientific inquiry.”
Similar debates have erupted at Wellesley College. In a 2017 editorial in the school’s student newspaper, The Wellesley News, titled “Free speech is not violated at Wellesley,” the editorial board endorsed student protests against invited campus speakers who expressed divergent or provocative views. “Shutting down rhetoric that undermines the existence and rights of others is not a violation of free speech; it is hate speech,” the editorial said. “The spirit of free speech is to protect the suppressed, not to protect a free-for-all where anything is acceptable, no matter how hateful and damaging.”
Critics lit into the editorial. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, took to Twitter, writing that the article was “one of the more frightening editorials I’ve ever read.”
In October 2020, staff writers at The Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, published an article detailing the university’s storied history of debates and protests surrounding free speech, prompted by a university professor’s inviting political scientist Charles A. Murray, author of highly controversial work alleging a link between race and IQ , to speak to his class. Murray also spoke at Harvard in 2017, and was met then with loud student and faculty dissent. The article discussed at length incidents of conflict on Harvard’s campus between students and the viewpoints of invited speakers, clarifying that a central point of tension is between a camp that asserts that creating opportunities that allow students to “engage and critique controversial views” has educational merit, while others maintain that these events instead “legitimize discriminatory or hateful views” in the name of free discourse.
This debate translates to the classroom space as well. “There’s a tension between putting out a diversity of viewpoints and exposing students to those viewpoints, but also not making them feel uncomfortable or worse,” said Brian Schaffner, a political science professor at Tufts University. “When we’re talking about prejudice, there is a group that is the target of that prejudice and typically there are members of that group sitting in the class. That can feel difficult and quite uncomfortable for them, and so figuring out how to talk about those issues without making students feel pain … is a difficult thing to do.”
As universities draw the line between productive and unproductive disagreement, and those of free speech and harmful speech, the way forward remains unclear. “I think it can be difficult to facilitate freedom of speech when we disagree with the speakers or even find their views repugnant,” said Vickie Sullivan, another political science professor at Tufts and a member of the University of Austin’s board of advisors. “We recognize it as a good for ourselves, but it is hard to uphold it for those who have viewpoints with which we strongly disagree.” Ultimately, though, Sullivan believes that “the best answer is more speech, not less.”
Provocative speakers and lecturers often prompt public protest and subsequent allegations of stifled speech, but college students are also grappling with the issue in daily, informal, and seemingly apolitical interactions. Some students whose political opinions fall outside the progressive or liberal norm on most New England campuses say they must self-censor in order to protect themselves from becoming the target of on-campus backlash.
“I do feel like there is an air of somewhat self-censorship on campus with people outside of the political orthodoxy,” said Tufts student Mitch Rogoff, secretary of the university’s Republicans Club. “I definitely am extremely mindful of anything that I might say on campus.”
Some students claim that the views that are freely expressed between students tend to remain fixed within a liberal, socially acceptable worldview. “I think the vast majority of views that are heard in the public sphere — both socially, in class, and in extracurriculars — tends to lean in one direction,” said a Harvard student who asked to remain anonymous. “I also think that there is a culture here, and I think it’s a culture that is pervasive across higher education in the country, of ‘woke-ism’ as a form of social capital, and it’s a race to see who can be more woke, more subversive in their thinking.”
Nationwide, political polarization and increased partisan sorting — a phenomenon where voters with similar viewpoints concentrate in certain geographic locations — allow self-affirming feedback loops to thrive on campuses, say some students.
That’s made it hard to even raise the issue of how campus culture has led people to air views only within like-minded groups. Just bringing up that issue, said Mitch Saunders, vice president of Tufts Democrats, can generate fear that “you’re going to be canceled” or accused of “saying something wrong.”
Add in the power of social media and the debate over campus speech can take an ironic turn. The Harvard student who requested anonymity to share views on the climate on campus worries about speech being stifled or people self-censoring if their views don’t conform to prevailing progressive orthodoxies. But one idea he has for combatting that is itself a clampdown on speech — imposing firm rules against sharing outside of a class views aired by a fellow student in a course that may be unpopular or controversial.
“There is no assurance of privacy when you say something in the classroom because there are all of these anonymous forums,” said the student. “You know that if you say something weird, someone could post about you online. There has to be some sort of assurance by the administration that there is a zero-tolerance policy for anyone posting anything that goes on in the classroom — that the classroom is a purely confidential space. There is no understanding of that now, and that lags way behind the social media era.”
The University of Austin is inserting itself into an educational sphere rife with internal debate and often conflicting opinions about how to make free discourse work better on college campuses. Following its “forbidden courses” program set to launch this summer, it plans to roll out a graduate program teaching entrepreneurship and classical principles of leadership in fall 2022, and to establish its undergraduate college by 2024.
While its website is replete with grand ambitions, it remains to be seen whether the university’s mission will take a firm enough hold with a large enough portion of the public to become a sustainable enterprise. It’s also hard to overlook the disconnect between the school’s claim to fierce independence and the politically charged manner in which it has represented itself thus far.
The new university’s “affiliated thinkers comprise a near monoculture in their own right: They’re nearly all icons of the same confrontational, non-‘progressive’ liberal rationalism,” wrote Derek Robertson in Politico. “Based on its intellectual coterie, the university’s self-proclaimed ‘independence’ looks a lot like an attempt to reassert the dominance of its participants’ own values.”
The debate over what constitutes intellectual freedom often comes down to a question of how universities can better foster respectful dialogue on a day-to-day basis. Many students and professors say the key is treating campus as a place for learning and growth rather than one of harsh judgment when broaching conversations about hard — and potentially polarizing — topics. Saunders, the Tufts Democrats leader, says that approaching those whose views might contain harmful rhetoric or ideology with an aim to inform is crucial. “Educating people is the best way to deconstruct the hostility of the climate in general,” he said.
Sullivan, the Tufts professor who sits on the University of Austin’s board of advisors, says we should be reminded that institutions of higher education are spaces that encourage students to strive toward a greater sense of truth, something we do not immediately or perfectly possess. Recognizing that, she said, “should result in a degree of humility.”
Kate Seklir is a junior at Tufts University participating in the Student Dispatch, a writing program run by political scientist professor Eitan Hersh and editor Rachel Slade. The purpose of the program is to give the students a chance to write about state and local news and gain valuable skills they need to be good citizens and writers. The pilot program is funded with a grant from the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts.