New Texas college, UATX, encourages civil discourse and free speech | 60 Minutes

In a former Texas department store, the University of Austin, known as UATX, started classes this fall with a say-anything, shout-nothing philosophy. UATX’s motto is “the pursuit of truth.”

The school swaps DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion — for what some call MEI: merit, excellence and intelligence. UATX, co-founded by historian Niall Ferguson, launched with a focus on encouraging free speech and open debate. 

“University forms the way you think about the world for the rest of your life,” Ferguson said. “If our universities are screwed up, and I believe they are, then that will screw up America as a whole quite quickly.”

Flaws UATX founders see at colleges around the U.S.

American universities have long been left-leaning and sites of protest, but the atmosphere has intensified in recent years. College students have shouted down unpopular speakers and canceled professors. The campus chaos of this past year, since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, even led to congressional hearings about on-campus protests and, ultimately, the resignation of several university presidents.

The contempt for today’s campus culture — the safe spaces, trigger warnings, and microaggressions — helped swing this month’s election. President-elect Donald Trump has said he plans to tax and sue “excessively large private universities” for promoting “wokeness” and dismantle the Department of Education, which distributes billions of dollars to universities each year.

Harvard self reports that less than 3% of its faculty identifies as conservative, while more than 75% identify as liberal — a proportion that’s deeply inconsistent with the views and makeup of the American public. 

“There’s a huge disconnect now between the academic elite and the average American voter,” Ferguson said. 

This political imbalance, combined with social media and an army of campus administrators monitoring speech have led to a culture where, per one survey, nearly 80% of students self-censor on campus for fear of being ostracized, Ferguson said. 

Faculty feels the chill on free speech, too. Ferguson spoke of a university president who said he received, on average, one email a day from a member of the university community calling for somebody else to be fired for something they’d said.

“That reminds me vividly of the bad old days of Stalin’s Soviet Union, and yet it’s happening on American campuses,” Ferguson said.

Ferguson says, the problems at colleges have a ripple effect. 

“I think if a university system starts to go wrong, then something is bound to go wrong for the society as a whole,” Ferguson said. “The ideas that start on campus pretty quickly spread to corporations, to media organizations.”

Colleges, to the detriment of learning, have become echo chambers, according to UATX President Pano Kanelos. 

“One opinion meeting another opinion shouldn’t leave us with two opinions,” Kanelos said. “It should leave us with better opinions.”

How UATX got its start

UATX was conceived largely by frustrated professors looking to fix the problems they see on college campuses. Ferguson, an Oxford-educated historian and former Harvard professor, launched UATX in 2021 with former New York Times journalist Bari Weiss; Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of data analytics company Palantir; and Pano Kanelos, the former president of St. John’s College in Maryland. Among others, Larry Summers, the former Harvard president and U.S. treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, became an adviser. 

“From a historian’s point of view, it’s terribly important that the United States improves, reforms, revitalizes its universities,” Ferguson said. 

In an ad, the school said it was “done waiting for America’s universities to fix themselves.”

“Right up until I guess the early 2000s, it still seemed like universities were the places where you could think most freely, and speak most freely, and take the most intellectual risk,” Ferguson said. “And at some point in the last 10 years, that changed. And it changed in a way that began to stifle free expression.”

High-profile donors include Trump-backing billionaire Bill Ackman, a Harvard graduate who vocally criticized his school after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas against Israel that sparked the deadly war in the Middle East, and Harlan Crow, a close friend of conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. 

Nadine Strossen, a liberal legal scholar who headed up the ACLU for nearly 20 years, is also a UATX adviser. Strossen believes the most important public policy topics — abortion, immigration, police practices, race and gender — are not being discussed candidly on college campuses. Provided there is no serious harm, Strossen argues all speech should be allowed. 

“My concern is to try to eliminate the underlying discriminatory attitudes. You don’t do that by punishing expression,” Strossen said. “You do that through education, through more speech, not less.”

UATX’s free speech philosophy resonated with college professors across the country. When UATX announced its founding, thousands of academics sent in job inquiries. Some of UATX’s hires were disciplined at their previous schools; Kanelos said UATX is not a haven for canceled professors. 

“But many of the people who are pushing the boundaries in academic culture, let’s say, in the public sphere, have paid a price for that and still should be heard,” he said.

Critics attack UATX as nothing more than a right-wing university wearing the cloak of free speech. 

“Politics should be studied at a university. It shouldn’t be the operating system of the university,” Kanelos said. “Any university that is identifiably political is not fulfilling its highest mission.”

UATX received initial approval from the state of Texas and raised nearly $200 million from private donors, used in part to provide free tuition. National accreditation won’t be decided until the first class has graduated — a standard for new universities. 

What’s in the curriculum at UATX

UATX uses the Chatham House Rule to combat student fear of saying the wrong things in class. The Chatham House Rule means that students who may hear interesting or controversial points can refer to the information they’ve heard, but they cannot attribute it to the person who said it. 

“People fear that the thing they said that was not right, was politically incorrect, ends up on X or, for that matter, on Instagram,” Ferguson said. “And that which happens in the classroom should stay in the classroom.”

Classes at UATX are small, seminar-style and based in Western civilization—the Bible and Greek classics. Faculty includes a former Navy captain, a Greek Orthodox priest and a tech entrepreneur.

There are no on-campus science labs, but founders chose Austin for its booming startup culture. UATX links students with companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink and helps the kids sharpen their technical skills and even fund their own ideas. 

To stem the high costs of higher education, the UATX campus is bare bones: no dorms and no meal plans.

Who are the UATX students?

Unlike the nearby University of Texas at Austin — one of the country’s largest schools — there are just 92 students in the first class at University of Austin. Roughly half the students come from Texas. A third are women. Students share academic strength, averaging in the 92nd percentile on the SAT. Some were accepted at schools like the University of Chicago and Georgetown, but they chose UATX instead. 

University President Kanelos said the school looks for applicants who think deeply and challenge norms. 

“The primary thing that we’re interested in is the mind,” Kanelos said. 

Students told 60 Minutes the inaugural class is politically diverse. 

“I’ve met people of every political persuasion here from, like, far-left Democrats who are for Bernie Sanders or to the left of that even, to people who would make Donald Trump look like a liberal,” student Jacob Hornstein said. 

Despite the different views, student Constantin Whitmire said classmates listen to each other and are still friends. He and Hornstein agreed that they vehemently disagree on a lot of topics. 

“We still get along pretty well, and it’s a beautiful thing,” Whitmire said. 

Differing views and outspokenness about those beliefs are welcomed. It’s why Dylan Wu chose UATX; he wants his beliefs to be challenged. 

“I want them to be challenged because I know that I’m wrong in some way,” Wu said.