I'm really curious to see if this experiment works out. Looking at their website, it seems that they don't have any land whatsoever, so does that mean this is going to be 100% virtual for now? They also don't offer degrees, so is this basically a glorified Khan Academy for the time being?
Also, it remains to be seen if they can resist the same forces that they say have overrun other universities in the country.
It's planning to be 100% in-person. They are looking into acquiring land. My own opinion is they should buy a large (university-scale) plot of land far enough from Austin that land is cheap.
I think its more “Church of Scientology, but with trendy right wing political talking points rather than science fiction self-improvement spiritualism as the hook” than “Khan Academy”.
>“I had one Texas mom email me who said she was crying at the possible opportunity for her children, and a very successful businessman who said, ‘my children may now have a place to go to school.”
Not a single university in the world is acceptable for their families? Are they looking for an education or a club to join?
A lot of people have been fooled into believing that traditional universities are places that brainwash their children to become marxists. These people are then unwilling to send their children to these institutions and instead seek out places like Liberty that market themselves as alternatives. Liberty bills itself as explicitly conservative. This one markets itself as focusing on "free speech", but that means something very clear to the target audience.
The "free speech in higher education crowd" are reacting to perceived leftist influence in traditional universities. This means conservative belief systems about labor, colonialism, race, gender, and sexuality.
Its not a for-profit business, its a donation driven — funded by a 501c3 and seeking its own 501c3 status — entity leveraging political tribal identity to target small donors and with large donors motivated by its political propaganda aims.
The main risk it faces is that entities with similar propaganda mission and appealing to similar tribal identity are already thick on the ground, but that hasn't seemed to be a major problem for new entities in the space recently, so I wouldn't bet against them succeeding to the extent of creating an durable operation, even if its never anything credible as a university.
At universities, ideas which were once countercultural and revolutionary have become the mainstream orthodoxy. I'm not sure anyone has quite confronted that reality yet. It seems almost like an army that won much more easily than they expected, and now doesn't quite know what to do off the battlefield.
I hope this university is able to balance these ideas into more of a discussion and less of a battle.
> ideas which were once countercultural and revolutionary have become the mainstream orthodoxy
In the abstract, isn't this a good thing? Like this true of lots of scientific advances. Germ theory or whatever initially being seen as a fringe idea, eventually being adopted as the leading explanation
> In the abstract, isn't this a good thing? Like this true of lots of scientific advances. Germ theory or whatever initially being seen as a fringe idea, eventually being adopted as the leading explanation
This is a cultural revolution, not a scientific one. Scientific ideas replacing proven-false ones is a good thing. Cultural crusades, especially those spread through intimidation and bullying, have next to nothing in common with that though.
It sounds like you're saying that new scientific ideas replacing old ones can be good, but new cultural ideas replacing olds ones is always bad? That's a position, but I don't quite see why I should agree with it. There are aspects of any society that can be improved!
That's true in biology or physics where actual facts - or things very close to facts - are being discovered, but not so in culture.
Culture doesn't "advance" like science, although it does change, and inevitably so, and in unexpected directions. Having flexibility and tolerance for heterogeneity is important, IMO. For example, look at how much China has changed from the cultural revolution of the 60s to the present. Instead of masses of kids waving a little red book arguing for "perpetual revolution" and going to work in a collective, the best ambition for many today is to be a small business owner or real estate investor, and virtually no one wants to work in a collective.
That's not good or bad in the abstract. It's good for good ideas and bad for bad ideas.
What is bad is that the tactics seem to still be battlefield-like tactics. Not literally of course, but major downsides for saying the wrong things, which has a chilling effect on intellectual discourse.
My experience has been that if you walk around a campus, you can find people studying all sorts of ideas. Some of that might even involve intellectual exercises where one tries to make a strong case for a “revolutionary” idea.
However, at their core, universities are fundamentally conservative big businesses: they want more money and less controversy. There aren’t any actual Marxists in the Dean’s Office.
It’s not obvious to me that this reflects anything special about this particular model for a university. Instead, I think it reflects the utter horrow-show that is the academic job market and, to some extent, the terrible matching in the rest of the job market as well.
Individual job postings at “regular” mid-tier universities attract hundreds of applicants, many of whom are extremely qualified.
> Individual job postings at “regular” mid-tier universities attract hundreds of applicants, many of whom are extremely qualified.
But if this is an order of magnitude more job inquiries than average, might that not reflect something different about the model? Maybe something as banal as "it attracted a lot of attention", but surely a 5x or 10x difference is indicative of something.
They’re presumably hiring for multiple jobs though, which knocks that number right back down.
I’ve heard of individual tenure-track jobs attracting 750 full applications. Low hundreds is probably more typical, depending on the school, year, and field (and 2020-1 has been absolutely bonkers), but it still wouldn’t take many to get to 3k total. This is especially true if counting informal “inquiries” rather than a complete application, which often involves quite a bit of customized writing (research plans, teaching statement, etc).
Ah the good old fashioned ways to increase the administrative bureaucratic arms of university. And then we wonder how university education cost has ballooned over 150% inflation in 10years.
It’s frustrating how much culture wars content is posted and upvoted on Hacker News these days. I feel like we can’t go a single day without these dog-whistle style articles.
This is 'weekend HN', where you will find a higher proportion of political posts, particularly those of a libertarian and alt-right variety. Eventually you just learn to either skip HN on the weekend or flag & hide as desired.
... alt-right? Would that not be pretty neo-nazi and white supremacy esque? This story hardly seems that.
I do get tired of low-key culture war content, but we're always surrounded by it. The left or the right trying to push their perspectives on the masses. It's gross, annoying, and probably bad in the long run but people love the left and the right like it's their favorite football team. They get buzzed on how the decisions the other has made disproportionately affect each other's groups. They love calling out the gotchas, embarrassing their opponents, and brewing on how short-sighted and stupid they are. It weirdly gives some people a sense of community, and they rally around it. It's like fusion in that way. It feeds itself.
> alt-right? Would that not be pretty neo-nazi and white supremacy esque?
I don't really want to engage in the shit-slinging that this thread will inevitably turn into/has turned into, but: alt-right, by many accounts, is a response of neo-reactionary thought and neo-reactionary writers were a common part of online silicon-valley-adjacent communities. It's not just tiki torches.
> I do get tired of low-key culture war content, but we're always surrounded by it.
I would suggest you log off then because:
> They love calling out the gotchas, embarrassing their opponents, and brewing on how short-sighted Android stupid they are.
Not even you can control yourself. This is the culture war: people burning their Nikes on Twitter, people posting their RBJ commemorative mugs on Insta, and you falling into the vortex yourself to kvetch about both sides--no doubt someone will show up to say how their _not like those other people_.
The comment was obviously fodder for ideological battle, regardless of what it was quoting from Wikipedia.
Can you please not post like that? It has destructive effects on the threads: it evokes worse from others, makes discussion quality significantly lower, takes threads into the direction of the same few generic black hole topics over and over again, has nothing to offer curiosity (which is supposed to be the guiding value of this site), and so on.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of which ideology you're battling for, because it destroys what the site is supposed to be for.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The article claims the university has a "diverse board of founding trustees and advisors", but amusingly the actual page has photos in black-and-white which is a frequent trick to obscure the lack of (racial) diversity
Edit: It also says that "UATX will ... eschew federal and state funding to maintain independence from government-imposed programs and excessive regulation" which sounds like it might be related to dodging Title IX?
And what might that be? I've seen a lot of comments from you in this thread with similarly vague references, but you seem averse to saying exactly what ideology you expect this university to espouse.
This is definitely dog-whistle university, but it will be amusing to observe its trajectory. If I had to place a bet I would guess a brief bit of press and notoriety over the next few years, then a long and quiet slide into obscurity; the primary purpose of this endeavor seems to be fleecing old, rich right-wingers into making large donations that can be used to feather nests and be extracted by the principals through other means. No serious scholarship will come out of it and eventually it will simply be viewed as the white nationalist version of Liberty University.
> DOESN'T IT TAKE SOME UNIVERSITIES A DECADE TO RECEIVE ACCREDITATION?
> Our conversations with our accredited partners lead us to believe that we'll have a much shorter time frame than that. But we're not waiting for accreditation to get started on our programming. Until it is accredited, UATX will offer ...
If you are graduating high school soon, I'd recommend not betting on this University until/unless they're accredited.
I imagine the prospect of not having to author Maoist style diversity statements and other indignities will be quite a draw. Universities have become inhospitable and intolerant places for even politically moderate folks.
To keep the parent comment honest, the word "Mao" doesn't appear once in this article; and in fact, near the top they use McCarthyism as an example of the type of "indignity" spoken of. Why a phenomenon identified in western society in the article needs to be made into some jab at maoists is beyond me though.
> The first named members of the UATX founding faculty include philosopher and outspoken feminist Kathleen Stock, who as a professor at the University of Sussex sparked controversy for stating that transgender women are not biologically women and for her support of a ban on transgender women in women’s bathrooms and giving puberty blockers to minor children.
Bigots always can't help but give themselves away.
"Caution about giving medical treatment to children?" Seems reasonable by default.
"Transgender women are not biologically women?" Well people disagree on what the definition of what a biological woman is but I understand what you're trying to say and sure there are of course relevant biological differences. Trans women can get prostate cancer. Some biology is relevant.
"Ban transgender women in women's bathroom?" Errr. You've given yourself away. This makes absolutely no sense. I don't go look at people's genitals when I go to the bathroom. Are you? Are butch lesbians supposed to go to men's bathrooms? We should do away with gender segregated bathrooms entirely and make inclusive privacy-focused spaces where you do your private business behind closed doors and interact at communal sinks and mirrors that do not require gender separation. But including this in your agenda reveals yourself as an illogical bigot, and the motivation for the rest of your arguments becomes invalid.
Deep breath.
Which is exactly the situation with the University of Austin.
"We are committed to these long-held ideals of the pursuit of truth, academic freedom, open inquiry, and spirited debate." That sounds fantastic! I agree with these concepts too! But...the people you now hire are going to speak volumes about what these words ACTUALLY mean to you.
If your pursuit of truth and open inquiry means exploring various justifications for restricting the lives of trans people, exploring only evidence that doubts climate change, and twisting data to try to establish risks of vaccinations, well...
Ya, it seems way too political from the onset, I suspect it'll grow into more of a partisan train wreck then something truly about the objective truth. But hey, I hope not, and awesome if it can be a really objective place, but it definitely is not starting as one from what this article mentions.
“…committed to ideological diversity and academic freedom.”
I mean… isn’t that a way to describe the charter of many universities? It’s practically a definition of the tenure model. Perhaps they are arguing that’s been lost in many universities, to which I would question why they believe a new university is a) the answer to the question and b) likely to somehow do any better. Smacks of someone who simply has a different perspective on diversity and freedom rather than a goal of increasing it.
Yes, that's the usual ideals of universities. The difference is that usually it comes along with not being allowed to make extremely hateful or racist or sexist comments. There's a certain part of american society that has lost their ability to see this distinction and thinks that they should be able to attack other people, say they are not legitimate humans. They think, wrongly in my view, that they aren't free if they can't attack people in this way.
"that usually it comes along with not being allowed to make extremely hateful or racist or sexist comments"
Unless that hatred, racism and sexism is targeted at white males. Then it's "punching up" (even though those doing it are usually far better off than those targeted) and is perfectly ok!
Both the left and the right reject "illegitimate humans." They just define legitimacy differently.
I find their definition of "trap house" to be entertaining.
>Once associated with inner city crack dens, "trap house" has also become generic slang for any place where young people can score beer.
Seems like they pulled that from urban dictionary [1] and changed a few words to make it more "professional".
> Originally used to describe a crack house in a shady neighborhood, the word has since been abused by high school students who like to pretend they're cool by drinking their mom's beer together and saying they're part of a "traphouse".
It doesn't just smack of it. It is nakedly obvious. The selling point is that it is a conservative-focused institution. Yes, college professors tend to vote blue. But the traditional university is going to be far more ideologically diverse than this place.
> Smacks of someone who simply has a different perspective on diversity and freedom rather than a goal of increasing it.
One only needs to look at the comment sections - if they even still exist - of various websites to notice that by nature of the perspective being different, it usually does inherently increase it.
Say what you want about conservatives, and they may get angry and offended just as anyone else, but they do enjoy engaging in debate. But its an an open “secret” that the opposite end of the spectrum is much more eager to silence and ban opposition, both directly, and indirectly through the invention of new and use of existing words and phrases to character-assassinate even when the shoe doesn’t actually fit. You know, like “domestic terrorist” for parents who dare want to have a say in what the schools they pay taxes for teach their own children.
I regularly post in NYT comment sections, and over half of my comments - which I make sure to keep as civil as is reasonably possible - are not approved, while extremely incendiary comments in line with the NYT’s bias are in full abundance.
They can’t prove you wrong if you don’t let them speak.
80 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] thread> Newly-Announced Free Speech-Focused University of Austin Draws Over 3,000 Employment Inquiries in Four Days
Also, it remains to be seen if they can resist the same forces that they say have overrun other universities in the country.
Vast majority of organisations don't own any land - they lease office space.
Not a single university in the world is acceptable for their families? Are they looking for an education or a club to join?
The main risk it faces is that entities with similar propaganda mission and appealing to similar tribal identity are already thick on the ground, but that hasn't seemed to be a major problem for new entities in the space recently, so I wouldn't bet against them succeeding to the extent of creating an durable operation, even if its never anything credible as a university.
I hope this university is able to balance these ideas into more of a discussion and less of a battle.
In the abstract, isn't this a good thing? Like this true of lots of scientific advances. Germ theory or whatever initially being seen as a fringe idea, eventually being adopted as the leading explanation
This is a cultural revolution, not a scientific one. Scientific ideas replacing proven-false ones is a good thing. Cultural crusades, especially those spread through intimidation and bullying, have next to nothing in common with that though.
Culture doesn't "advance" like science, although it does change, and inevitably so, and in unexpected directions. Having flexibility and tolerance for heterogeneity is important, IMO. For example, look at how much China has changed from the cultural revolution of the 60s to the present. Instead of masses of kids waving a little red book arguing for "perpetual revolution" and going to work in a collective, the best ambition for many today is to be a small business owner or real estate investor, and virtually no one wants to work in a collective.
What is bad is that the tactics seem to still be battlefield-like tactics. Not literally of course, but major downsides for saying the wrong things, which has a chilling effect on intellectual discourse.
My experience has been that if you walk around a campus, you can find people studying all sorts of ideas. Some of that might even involve intellectual exercises where one tries to make a strong case for a “revolutionary” idea.
However, at their core, universities are fundamentally conservative big businesses: they want more money and less controversy. There aren’t any actual Marxists in the Dean’s Office.
Certainly not in the Bursar's Office!
Individual job postings at “regular” mid-tier universities attract hundreds of applicants, many of whom are extremely qualified.
But if this is an order of magnitude more job inquiries than average, might that not reflect something different about the model? Maybe something as banal as "it attracted a lot of attention", but surely a 5x or 10x difference is indicative of something.
I’ve heard of individual tenure-track jobs attracting 750 full applications. Low hundreds is probably more typical, depending on the school, year, and field (and 2020-1 has been absolutely bonkers), but it still wouldn’t take many to get to 3k total. This is especially true if counting informal “inquiries” rather than a complete application, which often involves quite a bit of customized writing (research plans, teaching statement, etc).
I do get tired of low-key culture war content, but we're always surrounded by it. The left or the right trying to push their perspectives on the masses. It's gross, annoying, and probably bad in the long run but people love the left and the right like it's their favorite football team. They get buzzed on how the decisions the other has made disproportionately affect each other's groups. They love calling out the gotchas, embarrassing their opponents, and brewing on how short-sighted and stupid they are. It weirdly gives some people a sense of community, and they rally around it. It's like fusion in that way. It feeds itself.
I don't really want to engage in the shit-slinging that this thread will inevitably turn into/has turned into, but: alt-right, by many accounts, is a response of neo-reactionary thought and neo-reactionary writers were a common part of online silicon-valley-adjacent communities. It's not just tiki torches.
> I do get tired of low-key culture war content, but we're always surrounded by it.
I would suggest you log off then because:
> They love calling out the gotchas, embarrassing their opponents, and brewing on how short-sighted Android stupid they are.
Not even you can control yourself. This is the culture war: people burning their Nikes on Twitter, people posting their RBJ commemorative mugs on Insta, and you falling into the vortex yourself to kvetch about both sides--no doubt someone will show up to say how their _not like those other people_.
None of us can help ourselves. We love to post
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Can you please not post like that? It has destructive effects on the threads: it evokes worse from others, makes discussion quality significantly lower, takes threads into the direction of the same few generic black hole topics over and over again, has nothing to offer curiosity (which is supposed to be the guiding value of this site), and so on.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit more to heart, we'd be grateful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Edit: It also says that "UATX will ... eschew federal and state funding to maintain independence from government-imposed programs and excessive regulation" which sounds like it might be related to dodging Title IX?
It's insane to me that "we won't mandate ideological orthodoxy" is some how a right-wing idea.
This means conservative belief systems about labor, colonialism, race, gender, and sexuality.
That is true of classical liberals, but not neo liberals.
> Our conversations with our accredited partners lead us to believe that we'll have a much shorter time frame than that. But we're not waiting for accreditation to get started on our programming. Until it is accredited, UATX will offer ...
If you are graduating high school soon, I'd recommend not betting on this University until/unless they're accredited.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/11/19/mathematician...
Thanks for flagging that McCarthy mention though because this type of illiberalism can certainly come from either direction
Bigots always can't help but give themselves away.
"Caution about giving medical treatment to children?" Seems reasonable by default.
"Transgender women are not biologically women?" Well people disagree on what the definition of what a biological woman is but I understand what you're trying to say and sure there are of course relevant biological differences. Trans women can get prostate cancer. Some biology is relevant.
"Ban transgender women in women's bathroom?" Errr. You've given yourself away. This makes absolutely no sense. I don't go look at people's genitals when I go to the bathroom. Are you? Are butch lesbians supposed to go to men's bathrooms? We should do away with gender segregated bathrooms entirely and make inclusive privacy-focused spaces where you do your private business behind closed doors and interact at communal sinks and mirrors that do not require gender separation. But including this in your agenda reveals yourself as an illogical bigot, and the motivation for the rest of your arguments becomes invalid.
Deep breath.
Which is exactly the situation with the University of Austin.
"We are committed to these long-held ideals of the pursuit of truth, academic freedom, open inquiry, and spirited debate." That sounds fantastic! I agree with these concepts too! But...the people you now hire are going to speak volumes about what these words ACTUALLY mean to you.
If your pursuit of truth and open inquiry means exploring various justifications for restricting the lives of trans people, exploring only evidence that doubts climate change, and twisting data to try to establish risks of vaccinations, well...
I mean… isn’t that a way to describe the charter of many universities? It’s practically a definition of the tenure model. Perhaps they are arguing that’s been lost in many universities, to which I would question why they believe a new university is a) the answer to the question and b) likely to somehow do any better. Smacks of someone who simply has a different perspective on diversity and freedom rather than a goal of increasing it.
Unless that hatred, racism and sexism is targeted at white males. Then it's "punching up" (even though those doing it are usually far better off than those targeted) and is perfectly ok!
Both the left and the right reject "illegitimate humans." They just define legitimacy differently.
1. https://freebeacon.com/campus/a-yale-law-student-sent-a-ligh...
>Once associated with inner city crack dens, "trap house" has also become generic slang for any place where young people can score beer.
Seems like they pulled that from urban dictionary [1] and changed a few words to make it more "professional".
> Originally used to describe a crack house in a shady neighborhood, the word has since been abused by high school students who like to pretend they're cool by drinking their mom's beer together and saying they're part of a "traphouse".
1. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=traphouse
One only needs to look at the comment sections - if they even still exist - of various websites to notice that by nature of the perspective being different, it usually does inherently increase it.
Say what you want about conservatives, and they may get angry and offended just as anyone else, but they do enjoy engaging in debate. But its an an open “secret” that the opposite end of the spectrum is much more eager to silence and ban opposition, both directly, and indirectly through the invention of new and use of existing words and phrases to character-assassinate even when the shoe doesn’t actually fit. You know, like “domestic terrorist” for parents who dare want to have a say in what the schools they pay taxes for teach their own children.
I regularly post in NYT comment sections, and over half of my comments - which I make sure to keep as civil as is reasonably possible - are not approved, while extremely incendiary comments in line with the NYT’s bias are in full abundance.
They can’t prove you wrong if you don’t let them speak.