The inaugural Austin Union event, back in March 2024, featured a debate on the question: Is the United States Constitution broken? Later that evening, University of Austin (UATX) hosted A Conversation on Free Speech, Civil Discourse & Debate in a Healthy Democracy, featuring former ACLU president Nadine Strossen and then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I was lucky enough to be invited, and attend, at the Congress Avenue campus.
The unusual debate topic, and robust conversation between Strossen and Kennedy, sparked diverging discussions amongst us in the audience. The fading sunlight from within the atrium slowly dimmed to a cool night as we all exchanged heated opinions about how unique an experience we just had.
UATX had established itself a few years earlier, yet there were already a number of high-profile guests in attendance to see what had become of the start-up school “dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth.”
But despite the university seeking to be a beacon of “inquiry and civil discourse,” others have sought to cast it in a dark shadow, labeling it “right-wing,” “neoconservative,” or, even, “actually opposed to free speech.”
What needs to be understood, though, is that UATX is, actually, doing exactly what they are accused of — and it’s the responsible thing to do.
Maybe my favorite chiding of UATX has been by mainstream pundits who are unable to grapple with why leadership at UATX are admirers of Leo Strauss. “Neocons championing the Western canon is nothing new,” The Nation spurns.
Putting aside for a moment the gross misunderstandings of Strauss, his students, and those who find inspiration from his teaching. The most recent hit-piece has now come from POLITICO.
After running through accounts from former staff who describe an atmosphere as “America, love it or leave it,” the article goes on to describe a closed-door address that asked for adherence to four principles: anti-communism, anti-socialism, opposition to identity politics, and anti-Islamism.
It then attempts to prove how resignations and dismissals are proof that the institution replicated the very dynamics it opposed: “This was just going to be another elite institution — anti-woke Stanford 2.0,” Heather Heying, a former UATX board member, told POLITICO.
This isn’t the first. UATX has faced more than its fair share of criticism since it proposed a radically new proposition for academia in America.
The Harvard Crimson issued their early animus in 2021 saying it “represents a twisted attempt by a select group of aggrieved people to force their orthodoxy onto others through sheer spectacle.”
The perennial pessimists in Cambridge were also where Steven Pinker ran to after he stepped down from the UATX board of advisers: “The University of Austin was kind of stacked with right-wingers, not even necessarily free speech advocates — some of them were actually opposed to free speech.”
Others have also left. Some because they were “not comfortable with the course that UATX has set nor the messages it promulgates” or, even, that schools should be non-ideological saying it “wasn’t a good fit.”
The question being addressed by UATX is not what POLITICO, or The Nation, or any of the other dullard denunciations from the progressive prognosticators online. The issue at the surface is at the heart — that liberal education in the West needs to be reinvigorated.
“As students at the University of Austin,” the president’s message in the 2024-25 academic catalogue exalts, “you have the opportunity to pursue the life of the mind, while preparing yourself to live and act meaningfully in the world.”
To return to Strauss, a truly, classical liberal education is “in culture or toward culture” as he advises.
It is the “counterpoison to mass culture, to the corroding effects of mass culture, to its inherent tendency to produce nothing but ‘specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart,’ and the “ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant.”
Here we see the necessity of an education capable of forming those who can sustain the moral and intellectual preconditions of the West, conditions that precede and make possible free speech itself.
The vulgarity in which liberal education has been reduced to a therapeutic project of affirmation is precisely what UATX is attempting to resist. Education must have an ends.
At UATX, those who have departed are shucking that responsibility toward the “best or highest,” Strauss writes in Liberal Education and Responsibility. “As for the how,” he continues, “one knows it once one knows what education is meant to do to a human being or once one knows the end of education.”
So we all must ask: If the most important responsibility is intellectual responsibility, a clear distinction between ends and means, between what is noble and what is base, is liberal education possible?
I think it is (that’s exactly what I saw more than a year ago). And it is what UATX is striving towards.
