Posts Tagged ‘Ayaan Hirsi Ali’

Anti-Woke Academics Announce New University of Austin

Tuesday, November 9th, 2021

Yesterday, a number of anti-woke intellectuals announced that they were starting a new university on Bari Weiss’ substack.

Pano Kanelos:

So much is broken in America. But higher education might be the most fractured institution of all.

There is a gaping chasm between the promise and the reality of higher education. Yale’s motto is Lux et Veritas, light and truth. Harvard proclaims: Veritas. Young men and women of Stanford are told Die Luft der Freiheit weht: The wind of freedom blows.

These are soaring words. But in these top schools, and in so many others, can we actually claim that the pursuit of truth—once the central purpose of a university—remains the highest virtue? Do we honestly believe that the crucial means to that end—freedom of inquiry and civil discourse—prevail when illiberalism has become a pervasive feature of campus life?

The numbers tell the story as well as any anecdote you’ve read in the headlines or heard within your own circles. Nearly a quarter of American academics in the social sciences or humanities endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences. Over a third of conservative academics and PhD students say they had been threatened with disciplinary action for their views. Four out of five American PhD students are willing to discriminate against right-leaning scholars, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.

The picture among undergraduates is even bleaker. In Heterodox Academy’s 2020 Campus Expression Survey, 62% of sampled college students agreed that the climate on their campus prevented students from saying things they believe. Nearly 70% of students favor reporting professors if the professor says something students find offensive, according to a Challey Institute for Global Innovation survey. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education reports at least 491 disinvitation campaigns since 2000. Roughly half were successful.

On our quads, faculty are being treated like thought criminals. Dorian Abbot, a University of Chicago scientist who has objected to aspects of affirmative action, was recently disinvited from delivering a prominent public lecture on planetary climate at MIT. Peter Boghossian, a philosophy professor at Portland State University, finally quit in September after years of harassment by faculty and administrators. Kathleen Stock, a professor at University of Sussex, just resigned after mobs threatened her over her research on sex and gender.

We had thought such censoriousness was possible only under oppressive regimes in distant lands. But it turns out that fear can become endemic in a free society. It can become most acute in the one place—the university—that is supposed to defend “the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.”

The reality is that many universities no longer have an incentive to create an environment where intellectual dissent is protected and fashionable opinions are scrutinized. At our most prestigious schools, the primary incentive is to function as finishing school for the national and global elite. Amidst the brick and ivy, these students entertain ever-more-inaccessible theories while often just blocks away their neighbors figure out how to scratch out a living.

The priority at most other institutions is simply to avoid financial collapse. They are in a desperate contest to attract a dwindling number of students, who are less and less capable of paying skyrocketing tuition. Over the last three decades, the cost of a degree from a four-year private college has nearly doubled; the cost of a degree from a public university has nearly tripled. The nation’s students owe $1.7 trillion in loans.

And to what end? Nearly 40% of those who pursue a college degree do not attain one. We should let that sink in. Higher education fails 4 in 10 of its students. A system that so brazenly extracts so much from so many without delivering on its basic promises is overdue for a reckoning.

The warped incentives of higher education—prestige or survival—mean that an increasing proportion of tuition dollars are spent on administration rather than instruction. Universities now aim to attract and retain students through client-driven “student experiences”—from trivial entertainment to emotional support to luxury amenities. In fact, many universities are doing extremely well at providing students with everything they need. Everything, that is, except intellectual grit.

Snip.

But we are done waiting. We are done waiting for the legacy universities to right themselves. And so we are building anew.

I mean that quite literally.

As I write this, I am sitting in my new office (boxes still waiting to be unpacked) in balmy Austin, Texas, where I moved three months ago from my previous post as president of St. John’s College in Annapolis.

I am not alone.

Our project began with a small gathering of those concerned about the state of higher education—Niall Ferguson, Bari Weiss, Heather Heying, Joe Lonsdale, Arthur Brooks, and I—and we have since been joined by many others, including the brave professors mentioned above, Kathleen Stock, Dorian Abbot and Peter Boghossian.

We count among our numbers university presidents: Robert Zimmer, Larry Summers, John Nunes, and Gordon Gee, and leading academics, such as Steven Pinker, Deirdre McCloskey, Leon Kass, Jonathan Haidt, Glenn Loury, Joshua Katz, Vickie Sullivan, Geoffrey Stone, Bill McClay, and Tyler Cowen.

We are also joined by journalists, artists, philanthropists, researchers, and public intellectuals, including Lex Fridman, Andrew Sullivan, Rob Henderson, Caitlin Flanagan, David Mamet, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sohrab Ahmari, Stacy Hock, Jonathan Rauch, and Nadine Strossen.

It’s an interesting collection of people, running from conservatives to “mugged liberals,” all of which I think have objected to the epistemological closure of social justice.

We are a dedicated crew that grows by the day. Our backgrounds and experiences are diverse; our political views differ. What unites us is a common dismay at the state of modern academia and a recognition that we can no longer wait for the cavalry. And so we must be the cavalry.

It will surely seem retro—perhaps even countercultural—in an era of massive open online courses and distance learning to build an actual school in an actual building with as few screens as possible. But sometimes there is wisdom in things that have endured.

Here’s the website for the new institution, which states the following principles:

Universities devoted to the unfettered pursuit of truth are the cornerstone of a free and flourishing democratic society.

For universities to serve their purpose, they must be fully committed to freedom of inquiry, freedom of conscience, and civil discourse.

In order to maintain these principles, UATX will be fiercely independent—financially, intellectually, and politically.

About funding:

We’re completely rethinking how a university operates by developing a novel financial model. We will lower tuition by avoiding costly administrative excess and overreach. We will focus our resources intensively on academics, rather than amenities. We will align institutional incentives with student outcomes.

The new university is located at 2112 Rio Grande Street in Austin, Texas. For those unfamiliar with Austin, that’s right in the West Campus area, AKA Fratville, immediately to the west of the University of Texas. Presumably they’ll be able to draw some students, talent, etc. from their location, not to mention a lot of nearby student amenities.

It will be interesting to see how this experiment works out, but one university isn’t enough to stem the tide. All of American education needs a hard reboot, one where everyone pushing social justice down America’s throat lose both their jobs and funding.

This Week in Jihad Part 2

Tuesday, November 24th, 2015

More links from the big bucket of Jihad news:

  • Obama’s Pentagon: We’re winning the war against the Islamic State! Whistleblowers: That’s because you’re cooking the books.
  • Scenes from the Pretend War: Obama blocks 75% of airstrikes against the Islamic State. Forget dying for a mistake, Obama is willing to risk American lives for a sham war he has no intention of winning.
  • Greeks say that it’s virtually impossible to screen terrorists out among incoming “refugees.”
  • Ayaan Hirsi Ali says that feminists are focused on “trivial bullshit” rather than fighting real threats to women like radical Islam.
  • Third Paris stadium jihadist identified as a “refugee” who came through Greece.
  • Syrian refugees: neither Syrians nor refugees. Discuss…
  • Obama’s approach to the Islamic State is entirely too wimpy for that noted right-wing troglodyte war-monger Dianne Feinstein.
  • MSNBC’s poster boy for how horrible the no-fly list has been arrested in Turkey for being part of an Islamic State cell. It’s almost as though the liberal media have been lying to us about Islam being a religion of peace…
  • Must be frustrating for the Islamic State to repeatedly detail the Koranic justifications for their actions, only for liberals to go: “No, this has nothing to do with religion. You guys are just using religion as a front for social and geopolitical reasons.”
  • Larry Correia doesn’t foresee a happy ending:

    Europe has been following the liberal, progressive, pseudo-socialist path a lot longer than we have. Instead of doing little things that make sense all along, they’ll let the problem get really big and stupid, and then it is guillotines, gulags, and cattle cars. There’s a lot of really pissed off Europeans right now, and over the centuries we’ve got plenty of examples of what masses of pissed off Europeans do when pushed.

  • LinkSwarm for March 6, 2105

    Friday, March 6th, 2015

    Welcome to Friday! With so much being written about Hillary Clinton’s secret email server (well, secret to mere peasants like you and me, if not foreign governments…) and the King v. Burwell ObamaCare hearings, I didn’t include anything on them in this LinkSwarm. Maybe later…

  • Egyptian-born imam called for Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s death for defaming Islam. Does the Department of Justice: A.) Seek to deport him, B.) Investigate his ties to terrorism, or C.) Hire him to teach Islam in prison? (Hat tip: Jihad Watch.)
  • The Syrian rebel group Harakat al-Hazm, the last “moderate” group backed by the White House, disbands and joins the jihadists. Another towering Obama/Clinton/Kerry foreign policy triumph!
  • So the forces trying to retake Tikrit from the Islamic State are Iranian-led Shia militias?
  • Hillary Clinton’s foreign payola wasn’t just illegal, it was unconstitutional:

    The Washington Post reported last week that the tax-exempt foundation run by Bill and Hillary Clinton accepted money from seven foreign governments while Hillary served as U.S. Secretary of State (it’s unclear how much foreign money the organization accepted while Hillary was a U.S. Senator). Super shady, right? It’s worse than that, though, because Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution actually bans foreign payola for U.S. officials.

    The constitutional ban on foreign cash payments to U.S. officials is known as the Emoluments Clause and originated from Article VI of the Articles of Confederation. The purpose of the clause was to prevent foreign governments from buying influence in the U.S. by paying off U.S. government officials. Here’s the text of the clause:

    No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

  • Ted Cruz participated in a discussion with Elie Wiesel on the dangers of letting Iran obtain nuclear weapons. But what would Elie Wiesel know about attempts to exterminate Jews?
  • Obama’s greatest accomplishment is kicking people out of the workforce. Well, at least domestically…
  • The New York Observer has a hotline to the Kremlin
  • Egypt declares Hamas a terrorist organization.
  • Maryland Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski to retire. (Hat tip: Moe Lane.)
  • Chicago’s credit rating slashed. That’s what happens when you spend like drunken sailors. Or, worse yet, Californians.
  • Via Borepatch, an entire blog dedicated to improvised arms.
  • The Top 10 GOP Donors in Texas.
  • Science shows that fracking is not responsible for earthquakes in the DFW area.
  • Guy decides to leave civilization behind and start his own Utopia. It turns out exactly as any rational observers would expect.
  • Tweet:

  • The Llamas With Hats saga is now complete.

  • LinkSwarm for December 12, 2014

    Friday, December 12th, 2014

    You might not know from scanning the headlines of what the mainstream media wants to focus on, but there’s been a lot of liberal meltdown this week, among the MSM themselves especially:

  • Social Security to become insolvent in 2024. Thanks Obama! (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • The Gruber hearings: More “I don’t remember” than a Peter Gabriel video.
  • Wendy Davis earns Texas Monthly‘s Bum Steer of the Year. You know a Democrat had to have an epic train wreck when the lefty sorts over there are pretty much forced to put them on the cover…
  • Rapes by Democratic bundler Terry Bean or Democratic Capitol Hill staffer Donny Ray Williams? “Meh.” “The Press isn’t all that interested in stories that reflect badly on Democrats.”
  • Feminists prefer narrative to truth. “There is nothing that is nice or kind or empathetic about the subordination of truth to narrative.”
  • More on the same theme: “When questions first emerged, a number of people treated quashing those questions as the moral equivalent of war, attacking the questioners as if being skeptical of a story was itself wrong — rather than exactly the spirit of inquiry that makes science, and public debate, work…When we get wedded to our narratives, we become blind.”
  • “After four years of disastrous liberal Democratic rule, led by President Obama, the desperation of the left is now contributing to its own decline. And it’s not just recent defeats at the ballot box: The Democrats’ systematic overreach is destroying the credibility of their messengers and belittling the causes they want to promote; making it harder for them to identify and solve real problems.”
  • 35 federal agencies plan to share your health data. What could possibly go wrong?
  • Feminists have used Title IX as a far-reaching tool to reorganize higher education to their ideological agenda.
  • “How feminism left me.”
  • We have a strong candidate for Most Clueless Example of Liberal White Female Privilege On Salon. Granted, it’s a target-rich environment…
  • Obama official who enabled illegal alien flood is resigning in advance of hearings How convenient…
  • “It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too.”
  • How 401Ks are killing off defined-pension plans. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • #GamerGate is winning. “The ‘gamergate’ controversy cost Gawker Media ‘seven figures’ in lost advertising revenue, the company’s head of advertising Andrew Gorenstein said at an all-hands meeting on Wednesday afternoon.”
  • “All lives matter.” “APOLOGIZE!” WTF? Congratulations, Social Justice Warriors. You’re now officially a cult.
  • ISIS beheads four children for refusing to convert to Islam.
  • Joe Biden lectures Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Islam, which is like Kayne West lecturing Stephen Hawking on quantum physics.
  • Indonesia editor to face blasphemy charges for mocking ISIS. (Hat tip: Jihad Watch.)
  • India judge decides that country’s Child Marriage Act doesn’t apply to the Religion of Peace. (Hat tip: Jihad Watch.)
  • Yet he who has never had a snake-throwing fight at a Tim Hortons cast the first stone. (Hat tip: Bill Crider.)
  • “Man With Gender Studies Degree Terrorizes Party”. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • And I’m not covering the CROmnibus debacle yet because I haven’t even read the summary of the summary of the summary of what’s in that monster…

    LinkSwarm for April 14, 2014

    Monday, April 14th, 2014

    Time for another LinkSwarm:

  • By the standards of signing up the previously uninsured, “Obamacare may be headed for an epic failure.”
  • Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius resigns, leaving behind a legacy of incompetence and deception. “Rarely has any single public official done more to undermine the public’s confidence in the ability of government to function than Kathleen Sebelius.”
  • This just in: People still think ObamaCare sucks the farts out of dead wildebeests.
  • “Democrats face this reality: [ObamaCare]’s a political loser, and there’s no easy fix.”
  • New Jersey children lose health insurance thanks to ObamaCare.
  • The real reason for the Bundy Ranch standoff: Harry Reid’s son is in the pay of a Chinese solar power company that wants the land.
  • How Harry Reid’s insider trading and crony deals have made him a wealthy man.
  • Speaking of Harry Reid (via Iowahawk’s Twitter feed):

  • It turns out that the Overland Park Jewish Center shooter shared two fraternal organizations with late Sen. Robert Byrd.
  • Left out of all the left-wing Cesar Chavez hagiography: “Chavez had a very strong dislike for illegal immigrants.”
  • Indeed, we can best honor Cesar Chavez by making his birthday National Border Controls Day.
  • Backers of illegal alien amnesty may think it’s now or never.
  • It must have been a sad day for John Edwards, being barred from his sugar momma’s funeral.
  • Jay Carney is so use to lying, he can’t even resist PhotoShopping his own house. Badly. (Or maybe The Washingtonian is simply desperate to glamorize all Democrats profiled they won’t let little things like “competence” stand in the way…)
  • Is it just me, or did Hillary Clinton choose a singularly unflattering outfit for ducking shoes in?
  • The ideological slap-fight between radical lesbian feminists and tranny activists. “But all crazies are not created equal and, as crazy as the radical man-hating lesbians may be, they at least have valid science on their side in saying that ‘female’ is a biological category — genetically determined, rather than being a ‘social construct.'”
  • Vermonters just aren’t sure they want eyeball-bleeding tax rates just to satisfy the left-wing fantasy of single-payer health care.
  • France’s ruling socialists get their collective (ha!) asses kicked in municipal elections.
  • Property prices collapse in China. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Puerto Rico: 1.2 million workers, $70 billion in debt.
  • DC Power couple divorcing. Hilarity to ensue for, oh, probably a year or so.
  • Cowardly Brandeis University withdraws planned honorary degree for Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
  • Who is killing the bankers of Europe?
  • Ex-Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wants to “fix” the Second Amendment so its easier to disarm citizens.
  • Alec Baldwin forgets yet again that Twitter is not his friend.
  • Round Rock incumbent City Councilman Carlos Salinas appears to be benefiting from his position in a way that violates both city and state codes. How nice to pass a city-funded, interest-free loan for a building to a crony, then lease the same building back at below-market rates…
  • Well, this is disturbing: Kobe Bryant dispensing actual wisdom: “If we’ve progressed as a society, then you don’t jump to somebody’s defense just because they’re African-American. You sit and you listen to the facts just like you would in any other situation, right?” (From a New Yorker piece behind a paywall.) And naturally a firestorm erupted…
  • Speaking of the NBA: How two brothers owning a failing ABA franchise managed to earn a cool$1 billion from the NBA. The advantages of foresight,,,
  • PAX coming to San Antonio in 2014.
  • And remember that your taxes are due tomorrow…