We expect to face significant resistance to this project. There are networks of donors, foundations, and activists that uphold and promote the status quo. There are parents who expect the status quo. There are students who demand it, along with even greater restrictions on academic freedom. And there are administrators and professors who will feel threatened by any disruption to the system.
We welcome their opprobrium and will regard it as vindication.
To the rest — to those of you who share our sense that something fundamental is broken — we ask that you join us in our effort to renew higher education. We welcome all who share our mission to pursue a truly liberating education — and hope that other founders follow our example.
It is time to restore the meaning to those old school mottos. Light. Truth. The wind of freedom. You will find all three at our new university in Austin.
I don’t know whether this is going to work, but I think it’s a wonderfully exciting endeavor. In the American university today, the systemic and/or emergent silencing of those who dissent from or even merely question the Successor Ideology is made possible by the belief, by all parties involved, that the dissidents have nowhere else to go. But what if they do have somewhere else to go? And what if philanthropists who wish to support higher education have a choice between institutions with long-recognized prestige — always an irresistible draw in the past — and institutions that fit the philanthropists’ ideals?
(One thing I don’t understand: the presence of Sohrab Amari on the university’s Board of Advisors. Isn’t its classical liberalism antithetical to his frequently-articulated vision of the social world as an arena for defeating your enemies in ideological combat and enjoying the spoils of your victory?)
This will be very, very interesting. A tiny bit of me wants to check Twitter to enjoy the inevitable DEFCON 1 meltdown — but all the rest of me immediately slapped down that tiny bit and I don’t think we’ll be hearing from it again.
This was a blog post, wasn’t it? Dammit.
