“the construction of a new university ostensibly based on principles of free expression and academic freedom — had drawn the interest and participation of a star-studded cast of public intellectuals, academics and tycoons.
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all of the professors and staff were summoned, quite unusually and mysteriously, to a closed-door meeting. It had been called by Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire entrepreneur who’d co-founded the data analytics company Palantir Technologies with Thiel. Together with Ferguson and the journalist Bari Weiss, Lonsdale had been a driving force behind the creation of UATX and was a member of the board of trustees.
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“Let’s get right into it,” he said. Then, with heightened affect, Lonsdale explained his vision for UATX — a jingoistic vision with shades of America First rhetoric that contrasted rather sharply with the image UATX had cultivated as a bastion of free speech and open inquiry.
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Michael Lind, a well-known writer and academic who’d co-founded the center-left think tank New America, bristled at Lonsdale’s remarks. After asking some probing questions, Lind announced his resignation as a visiting professor on the spot, dramatically depositing his key fob as he exited.
Not long after, in the nearby Driskill Hotel, Lind was in the midst of composing a letter of resignation when Ferguson called him and persuaded him to stay.
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“According to Niall, under the constitution of UATX Joe Lonsdale, as chair of the board, had no authority to tell those of us at the meeting:
“That all staff and faculty of UATX must subscribe to the four principles of anti-communism, anti-socialism, identity politics, and anti-Islamism (this is the first time I heard of these four principles);
“That ‘communists’ have taken over many other universities and that he, Joe Lonsdale, would stay on the board for fifty years to make sure that no ‘communists’ took over UATX (the identity politics crowd and some Islamists are a threat, but the Marxist-Leninist menace in 2025?)”
Lind said when he asked for definitions of “communists” and “socialists,” he’d been told they included anybody who didn’t “believe in private property” and “hate the rich.” This, he wrote, struck him “as a libertarian political test excluding anyone to the left of Ayn Rand.” Lonsdale had said that the board would make a case-by-case determination on whether “New Deal liberals” would be allowed to work at UATX. Lind said that he considered himself “an heir to the New Deal liberal tradition of FDR, Truman, JFK and LBJ.” He was “in favor of dynamic capitalism in a mixed economy, moderately social democratic and pro-labor, and anti-progressive, anti-communist, and anti-identity politics.”
According to Lind, Londsdale repeatedly said that if the faculty weren’t comfortable with what he was saying they should quit.
“So I quit and I walked out,” Lind wrote.
But, Lind continued, “Niall emphasized that UATX is a real institution, not the plaything of donors and regents, and has a constitution that binds even the chairman of the board.”
Lind said that he took Ferguson at his word and withdrew his resignation on condition that “I am not Joe Lonsdale’s personal at-will employee, and that nobody at UATX needs to subscribe to the Four Principles of Joe Lonsdale Thought on penalty of losing his or her job.”
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as the former staffer told me, “After that, everything was different.”
It’s a difference that should make a difference to anyone who cares about American higher education, free speech and academic freedom at a time when each faces unprecedented threats — both internal and external.
Because so many of its leaders lean conservative, UATX has been portrayed in some quarters as having been a right-wing project from the start. However, the truth is vastly more complex.
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.
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It took only a week for the simmering conflicts to bubble into the public eye. On Nov. 15, 2021, Pinker announced on social media that he would be stepping off the board of advisers by “mutual & amicable agreement.” The same day, University of Chicago Chancellor Robert Zimmer announced that he’d resigned from the board four days earlier.
Zimmer’s resignation hinted at one of the fault lines: how much UATX would be defined by what it was against and how strongly it would make its negative case against the elite colleges it viewed as its competition.
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“Dissociation was the only choice,” Pinker told me in an email. “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.” Furthermore, Pinker added, “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.”
Other departures followed. University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone left the advisory board in October, telling Fortune that participation with UATX wasn’t a good fit since he believed universities should be non-ideological.
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Photos of Tufts political science professor Vickie Sullivan and journalist Lex Fridman were removed from the website, as was mention of the journalist Andrew Sullivan and University of Sussex professor Kathleen Stock.
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On Dec. 2, 2022, Heying resigned from the board, saying that it was “better to separate myself from the University, than to have my name be attached to an institution that does not represent my scientific and pedagogical values.”
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UATX doesn’t publish demographic data. The students with whom I spoke said their classmates — and the college’s leadership — were overwhelmingly white, disproportionately came from wealthy families and had an overrepresentation of apparent neurodivergence. They found ideological diversity to be particularly lacking. “I didn’t realize exactly how conservative it would be,” one current student told me. “You know, when I hear free speech and open debate and all that jazz, I assumed that there was going to be a more equal amount of political views, and there wasn’t.”
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the syllabus I reviewed for a class called “Intellectual Foundations of Science II” covered a range of topics unusual for a science class including “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.” A student who’d taken the course shared a slide with me on “ensoulment” — the principally religious question of when a soul enters the human body — and said that the class had been told that IVF but not abortion could be consistent with the Catholic belief about ensoulment.
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The poor quality of the science offerings had bothered Heying and Pinker. “Others thought I was the token liberal,” Heying told me, “but I came to understand myself as the token scientist.” In an email, Pinker wrote, “They should have hired a widely esteemed scientist and proven program builder to set up their science division.”
Another surprising similarity with other colleges stemmed directly from Dan’s expulsion: The students feared cancellation. “At any moment a frivolous Title IX complaint could be filed against you,” a former student told me. “I’ve never felt my speech was so chilled as it was in the classroom at UATX.”
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The shifts in personnel coincided with shifts in advertising and admissions. “Come to a school that doesn’t hate you” read an ad in The New Criterion, a conservative literary magazine — which several people told me was intended as a reference to reports of antisemitism on other college campuses. Some of UATX’s early rhetoric had been challenging, but it hadn’t been in print and it hadn’t been this direct.
“Once we started going negative, gifts started drying up,” said the same senior former staffer, though, in retrospect, it might be more accurate to say that the diversity of the gifts started to shift. In November, UATX announced that it had received a $100 million gift from Jeffrey Yass, a billionaire investor who has been a significant supporter of Trump and MAGA-related causes.
On March 31, UATX announced its new “merit-first” admissions policy, guaranteeing admissions on the basis of standardized test scores.
Two days later, Lonsdale would address the all-staff meeting, and the extent to which things had changed would become apparent to everyone.
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On May 16, Avishai published an account of her firing — titled “Is the University Of Austin Betraying Its Founding Principles?” in Quillette, an online journal focused on free speech and identity politics.
One day later, Ahmari, who said he’d been brought into the project by Weiss, announced his resignation on X — citing his concern with Avishai’s termination. “I don’t believe in a value-neutral university. I’m not a free speech absolutist,” Ahmari told me. “But nevertheless, I want a credible institution and an institution that is, because of its richer worldview, more reasonable.”
“When you fire an administrator or you put pressure on her, because she said, ‘Look, I don’t like institutional DEI, but I think we should uphold diversity as a value,’ which is a perfectly innocuous thing to say, and I think kind of right for a university context — that’s more unreasonable than some of the stuff that went on at the ‘woke’ university that these people critiqued.” Ahmari said.
“I just felt like the worldview that was being pushed was just kind of a very gruff, intolerant conservatism, and not even an elevated one,” he said, “and it was too beholden to the donors, especially Joe Lonsdale.”
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In a last-ditch effort of sorts, Rauch, Haidt and Strossen organized a call with Carvalho. The discussion didn’t inspire confidence in the group, said someone with knowledge of the call who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. Carvalho basically told them that UATX was a right-wing project, and that they’d known this when they signed up. But that wasn’t what any of them had believed.
On July 18, Summers announced his resignation from UATX on X. The former Harvard president said that he saw major problems with the lack of diverse perspectives in elite institutions, but was “not comfortable with the course that UATX has set nor the messages it promulgates.”
The next day, Strossen declared her intention to resign. “I have become increasingly uneasy with UATX’s apparent drifting away from its mission of offering an exemplary model to galvanize other universities to live up to their truth-seeking missions,” she wrote in an email to Carvalho, Ferguson, Kanelos and Howland. Instead, she saw it “drifting too much toward piling onto the revengeful “anti-Woke” bandwagon,” citing the firing of the Mill Institute personnel as one of several additional concerns.
Carvalho asked her to defer her resignation until early August. Strossen obliged and told me that she wanted to do the “least possible damage to the institution.” Haidt and Rauch quietly separated from UATX shortly thereafter. Neither responded to a request for comment.
Over the late spring and early summer, so many other resignations and terminations followed that it was difficult to keep up.
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I had reporting this story, two questions came up more than any other.
The first: Where was Bari Weiss? Many of the people I interviewed told me about internal conversations and shared internal emails. Weiss, who remains on the board of trustees, was almost never present in the conversations as they were related to me, and while I saw many emails on which Kanelos and Ferguson were copied, I never saw any including Weiss.
One person I spoke to, who was present during the early planning stages, told me that Weiss was “very elusive” and almost never present in person. This was ironic since UATX was closely associated with Weiss — a bust of whom now resides in the school library.
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One former member of the development team told me that they would routinely ask prospective donors how they got to know UATX. “Eighty percent of the time, the answer was Bari Weiss,” they said. “It was very often referred to as Bari Weiss’ University, or Bari Weiss’ University Project, or Bari Weiss’ University of Austin.”
For several people, this was a source of resentment. “I don’t care whether she wants to pretend this is all gone now — she is the reason that this place exists. She was huge, she was held in such high regard, she had such an enormous impact,” the former staffer said.
“I want her to be held to account,” she added. “I’m pissed.”
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The ultimate irony is that UATX fell prey to the very impulses that its founders and supporters so detested. “It’s easy to see when other people lack these things,” Redstone said. “It’s harder to see in themselves.” Redstone hastens to add this isn’t just a failure at UATX. It’s fair to ask whether any university lives up to these ideas. Fair to ask, too, whether any institution can truly commit itself to first principles or if the instinct to shape outcomes and inject one’s personal politics is irresistible.
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When students returned for UATX’s second year, it was difficult not to notice the drift. The Tuesday night speaker series, at which attendance is mandatory, leaned unmistakably rightward — guests included Patrick Deneen, originalist judge Amul Thapar and Catherine Pakaluk, a Catholic University business school professor who’d written Hannah’s Children, about the 5 percent of American women who have five or more children.
Finally on Oct. 1, UATX delivered the coup de grace and announced Kanelos’ resignation.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/01/16/civil-war-university-of-austin-bari-weiss-00729688