Over at Bari Weiss’ substack blog, Common Sense, Pano Kanelos, former President of St. John's College and now newly minted President of the newly minted University of Austin, explains his game plan: We Can't Wait for Universities to Fix Themselves. So We're Starting a New One.
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 thing is, I invented that. Well, sort of. I proposed something similar in a little post, Koch U? Why not?, I ran three years ago. The new U that Pano’s pitching is a pretty bare-bones version of my extravagant vision of a brand new, quota-free, spare no expense, Stanford by the Sea, that would be both rigorous and glamorous. But I probably got carried away with all the fun of spending someone else’s money.
St. John’s College, located in Annapolis, Md. is famous for its devotion to the “Great Books”, starting most emphatically with Plato, so it’s not surprising that Kanelos’s vision is heavy on the traditional humanities, but you have to start somewhere, and as long as the place doesn’t turn into some sort of Plato cult, I don’t see that as a problem. What I do see as a problem is this sort of thing: “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.”
Well, I wouldn’t say “retro” so much as “fussy and donnish”. I like screens. Anyone who thinks computers are vulgar and common—and it sounds an awful lot like that’s where Pano is going with this—is missing the whole point. Or, at least, my whole point. If you go on MIT open course ware, you can literally see a Nobel Prize winner laboriously writing out “deoxyribonucleic acid” for a classroom of about 50 students. They never heard of PowerPoint?1 Pano and his gang, some of whom I like more than others—they tend to be a little too anti-woke for my taste, although the wokies are frequently so obnoxious it’s hard to keep a sense of balance—need some injection of “West Coast” thinking, to, you know, wake them up to the realities of the 21st Century. The extraordinary advances in modern science, which are constantly reshaping the world we live in—the coronavirus vaccine, for example—are the fruit of silicon. Plato isn’t passé, but he doesn’t have the answers for everything.
UPDATE
Actual academic dude Daniel Drezner takes a trollish look at what, he feels, might turn into nothing more than "Troll U", and also sniggers at the new U's board of advisors, claiming that it does not auger well for future collegiality. "If its faculty even remotely resembles the board of advisers, the school would be assembling the most cantankerous, egotistical assortment of individuals since the Trump White House. Faculty governance is difficult in the best of times, and trying to herd that crew toward collective decision-making might require the very kind of illiberalism that they accuse other universities of embracing."
Dan finds the board dubious in the extreme because has so many former university presidents as its members. That does sound scary.
1. And what’s the purpose? How you can get into MIT without already knowing how to spell deoxyribonucleic acid?
