So what need is it filling, exactly? In a year or so UATX will offer its first credential, and despite all the rhetoric about the novelty of its principles, it’s one that many a new educational venture targets: a business certificate in “Entrepreneurship and Leadership.” (For those who can’t wait until the summer of 2023 for this essential service, there are at least 100 other programs in this area offered by universities from coast to coast.)
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The University of Austin makes space for itself in this ecosystem, however, not with a bold new idea but by attacking the other species already out there. Its own justification for launching is that other institutions suffer from not being adequately devoted to truth, from a lack of civility, from a failure to protect free speech and from being too tied to the elite liberal consensus that has been branded lately as “wokeness.” We’ve heard such complaints again and again from moderate and conservative critics at odds with students and faculty devoted to such things as rooting out racism, treating less conventional people with respect and eradicating gender-based violence and discrimination. Most of the critics are themselves in favor of these things in principle, but they fear that through a combination of self-righteousness, hypocrisy and group think, campus cultures have gone too far.
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I realize that the University of Austin is trying to raise money from donors whose wallets will open more quickly when they hear complaints about woke warriors or pronoun police.
