Filing this one for CBS in the better-late-than-never category (or perhaps decades late), Sunday’s episode of 60 Minutes led with a lengthy profile of the upstart University of Austin (UATX) and its classical liberal education and commitment to free speech as a way of realizing that, for lack of a better term, American universities are not only hot beds of chaos (as exhibited by the aftermath of October 7), but exhibit little to no ideological and political diversity).
Correspondent Jon Weretheim had quite the amusing opening, telling the elite, far-left audience something long apparent to the rest of us
These are not soaring times for higher education. Tuition costs rise unchecked. Contempt for today’s campus culture - the trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggressions - helped swing the election, and this past week, President-elect Donald Trump nominated former WWE executive Linda McMahon to lead the Department of Education, an agency that each year distributes billions to U.S. colleges, some that Trump has vowed to tax and sue for their “wokeness.”
Wertheim made the pivot to University of Austin, calling the school’s launch this fall an example of “innovation” and “conceived largely frustrated professors at schools like Harvard, Princeton, and Brown” that “tout[s] open debate, a shout-nothing-but-say-anything philosophy, and, for now, free tuition.”
“Will this be just another politicized campus swinging right? Or a true disrupter, resetting the marketplace of ideas,” he wondered.
He then began the taped portion with by showing UATX’s humble beginnings in a downtown high-rise and specifically a former department store.
Wertheim had a group of students explain what it’s been like, including the welcome reality that isn’t seen on other campuses where students not only engage and disagree, but still respect each other (click “expand”):
WERETHEIM [TO ATUNES] How would you describe members of the founding class?
OLIVIA ANTUNES: Very outspoken. You’ll never enter a conversation and leave without something that you didn’t know before talking to someone.
WERTHEIM: Olivia Antunes, Dylan Wu, Constantin Whitmire, Grace Price and Jacob Hornstein are among the 92 students in the inaugural class. If UT is built around Longhorn football, the focal point of UATX —
MAN #1: Pursuing the truth.
MAN #2: So you stop by telling the truth.
KANELOS: In pursuit of truth.
DYLAN WU: Fearless pursuit of truth to me is I have this kind of mentality that the best way that you should go about your life is to always assume that you’re wrong in some capacity.
WERTHEIM [TO WU]: You’re prepared for that —
WU: Right.
WERTHEIM [TO WU]: — to be challenged and stress-tested and —
WU: Not so —
WERTHEIM [TO WU]: — confronted?
WU: It’s not just even prepared. That’s why I’m at this school. I want them to be challenged because I know that I’m wrong in some way.
WERTHEIM: What are some things that differentiate you guys?
JACOB HORNSTEIN: We’re very intellectually 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.
WERTHEIM: Roughly half the students come from Texas, a third are female. They share academic strength, averaging in the 92nd percentile on the SAT. Some were accepted at schools like the University of Chicago and Georgetown but chose UATX for what it is and is not.
CONSTANTIN WHITMIRE: I remember visiting a college in the northeast of the U.S. and the student guiding me there was like, “Ugh, we have different dorms for different student groups.” I didn’t want to go to a space that was like that.
WERTHEIM: Why do you think it’s important to be at a college where differing views aren’t just accepted and tolerated, but welcome?
WHITMIRE: We’re actually listening to the other side and understanding each other. And still, we’re friends with each other. I vehemently disagree with many of the things Jacob says. And I think you do, too. I don’t want to —
HORNSTEIN: It’s likewise.
WHITMIRE: We still get along pretty well, and it’s a beautiful thing.
WERTHEIM: Not exactly the vibe on so many other campuses.
Wertheim provided even more Captain Obvious statements about the decay of universities:
Long before Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, colleges have been sites of protest and have leaned left, but the atmosphere has intensified over the past decade. Speakers shouted down...Professors canceled when students feel unheard...Then the reckoning this past year. Campus chaos led first to congressional hearings...Then to the resignation of the presidents at Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard.
More truth-telling came from UATX co-founder and Hoover Institution senior fellow Sir Niall Ferguson, who said “it’s terribly important that the United States improves, reforms, revitalizes its universities” and that universities have moved dramatically “to stifle free expression” to create “a huge disconnect now between the academic elite and the average American voter” with rampant censorship and self-censorship.
Wertheim seemed shocked when he said 60 Minutes “came across some data that less than three percent of the Harvard faculty identifies as conservative” and “[m]ore than 75 percent identifies as liberal,” which is “[w]ildly out of proportion with the American public.”
After Ferguson said this is reminiscent “of the bad old days of Stalin’s Soviet Union,” he added a rotten university system means “something is bound to go wrong for the society as a whole” with “ideas that start on campus pretty quickly spread to corporations, to media organizations” and thus a “screw[ed] up America[.]”
Once he ticked through other founders (including Bari Weiss) and its $200 million raised by private donors to get it off the ground, he spoke with UATX president and Palantir co-founder Pano Kanelos and then explained the school functioning off of Chatham House rules (click “expand”):
KANELOS: Our work is to stir up settled ideas.
WERTHEIM: He says that to the detriment of learning, colleges have become echo chambers. [TO KANELOS] What is going on, on campuses —
KANELOS: Yeah.
WERTHEIM [TO KANELOS]: — that are leading you to draw this conclusion?
KANELOS: It’s as if people have come to expect that there are just sort of two versions of everything. And therefore, there’s a right version and a wrong version, and depending on which side you stand. But the truth is that one opinion meeting another opinion shouldn’t leave us with two opinions; it should leave us with better opinions.
MAN #4: Like me ask, what do you mean by that exactly?
MAN #5: The Christian values that we have —
WERTHEIM: To combat fears of saying the wrong thing in class, UATX comes armed with a weapon. [TO FERGUSON]: Tell an American audience, what do you mean by Chatham House Rule?
FERGUSON: The Chatham House Rule is a great British invention. And it says that if you are a participant in a discussion and you hear an interesting thing said, maybe a controversial thing, you can refer to the information that you’ve gleaned, but you can’t attribute it to a person. People fear that the thing they said that was not right, was politically incorrect, ends up on X or, for that matter, on Instagram. And that which happens in the classroom should stay in the classroom.
WERTHEIM: At UATX, classes are small, seminar-style, and based in Western civilization, the Bible; Greek classics. Faculty includes a former Navy captain, a Greek orthodox priest, Father Maximos, teaches a class on chaos and civilization, and a tech entrepreneur.
WOMAN #2: You’re trying to play the Steve Jobs role here, right?
WERTHEIM: There are no on-campus science labs, but founders chose Austin for its booming start-up culture, linking students with companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink —
WOMAN #3: How do you take this cutting-edge research —
WERTHEIM: — and helping the kids sharpen their tech skills, and even fund their own ideas.
WOMAN #4: We have both a non-profit and a start-up side.
WERTHEIM: To stem the scandalously high costs of higher education, the UATX campus is bare bones...No dorms. The students live in apartments next to UT undergrads, and no meal plan. Cook for yourselves, kids. The closest thing we found to a college rager? Students learning the Texas two-step.
Wertheim explained UATX also came up with a remarkable replacement for DEI, “swap[ping] DEI, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, for what some call MEI: Merit, Excellence and Intelligence” for its admissions process.
He finally provided slight push-back: “Critics attack UATX as a right-wing university, simply wearing the cloak of free speech.”
In response, Kanelos argued “[p]olitics should be studied at a university,” not used as “the operating system.”
Sure enough, Wertheim himself proved Kanelos’s point by pointing out another UATX adviser includes “liberal, legal scholar Nadine Strossen,” who “was president of the ACLU for nearly 20 years” and her declaration that campuses are not fostering real debate about public policy.
Strossen even responded to Wertheim invoking the predictable opposition to free speech with screeches about hate speech: “My concern is to try to eliminate the underlying discriminatory attitudes. You don’t do that by punishing expression. You do that through education, through more speech, not less.”
To see the relevant transcript from November 24, click here.
