Ivy League Backlash Draws Money, Students To Upstart University In Texas

The project — to address the “gaping chasm between the promise and the reality of higher education” — was backed by prominent people in academia and finance, including the historian Niall Ferguson, former Treasury Secretary  Larry Summers and venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale. 

But it was hard to envisage how exactly the University of Austin would get off the ground. There was no leafy campus, a glaring lack of accreditation and, of course, no network of notable alumni to entice new students. The idea of the little upstart being able to compete with Ivy League institutions to enroll the nation’s best and brightest seemed far fetched.

Two years on, UATX, as it's known, is having a moment.

Pano Kanelos, the institution’s president, said it's seeing a surge in interest from donors horrified by the response at top-tier universities to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, including what some saw as a failure to directly condemn terrorism and attacks on Jewish students. To Weiss and other backers of UATX who had previously decried cancel culture and  diversity programs they perceive as having run amok, the response represented the culmination of the far-left takeover of elite education. For them, it showed how out of touch university administrators had become and proved the need for an institution that rejected “illiberalism,” like the University of Austin.

People “who have been supporting institutions with significant donations for a long time have been shaken up by the events that are happening on campus, whatever their politics are,” Kanelos, who previously led Annapolis-based liberal arts school St. John's College, said in an interview. “So donors are looking for institutions that I think are trying to find solutions to our political conflicts and complexity.”

UATX got its license to operate in Texas last month and is preparing to enroll its first undergraduate class — hoping to bring on 100 students in the fall of 2024. The school has held more than 60 events over the past two years and has already raised nearly $200 million. This week, seeking to keep the momentum and checks flowing, supporters met at startup accelerator Capital Factory's headquarters in downtown Austin — a telling backdrop for a school that fashions itself like a Silicon Valley upstart. There was a line out the door for the happy hour, though no sign of Weiss, Ferguson or Lonsdale at the event. 

Teri Andresen, who sits on the board of trustees for UATX, was there after pledging $10 million to the school in 2022 along with her husband, Headlands Technologies co-founder Matt Andresen. They had been drawn to the idea of starting a new college as they became disillusioned with higher education, particularly after Teri’s alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, allowed a transgender woman to compete on the women’s swim team. The universities’ responses to the attack in Israel has deepened their commitment.

“So whereby Penn and Harvard and Columbia, and whatever institution you can think of, made statements about certain incidents, but then didn't make an equal statement about the atrocities in Israel — that is where the problem was,” Teri Andresen said.

The gap between college students and faculty who are far to the left of many universities’ biggest donors on cultural and social issues had been apparent for several years, but took on new prominence in campus newspapers, alumni networks and social media since the attacks in Israel and its response in Gaza.

Harvard has been among the schools at the epicenter of the blowback. Current head Claudine Gay has been criticized by investor Bill Ackman and Summers, a former Harvard president who is on the board of advisors of UATX. Penn has also been rattled by calls from alumni, including Apollo Global Management Inc. head Marc Rowan, to change its leadership. At Stanford University, more than 1,400 students, faculty, parents and alumni signed an open letter criticizing the university's failure to clearly condemn Hamas. 

Civil Discourse

In many ways, it seems the University of Austin was founded for these times.

Supporters say the college is needed as an alternative to the liberal atmosphere that pervades much of higher education and, they maintain, encourages mindless groupthink. UATX fashions itself as an apolitical university that values “sustained civil discourse” and “intellectual risk-taking.” While many of its backers lean conservative, others identify as liberals who feel like they’ve been left behind by far-left politics.

Weiss resigned from the New York Times in 2020, saying she was bullied by liberal colleagues. She then founded her own media company, the Free Press, which has gotten a surge of attention for its coverage in the aftermath of the attacks on Israel.

Ferguson, a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, is a prolific historian who has written 16 books and taught at Harvard, the London School of Economics and New York University. As a vocal critic of higher education institutions who he says have created a “chilling” atmosphere around freedom of speech, he met with Kanelos, Weiss and Lonsdale in Austin in May 2021, where the idea for UATX was formed.

Among the recent donors that have backed UATX’s vision of higher education is Paul Hobby, the founder of Houston-based private equity firm Genesis Park. He first heard about the school when his son, who is pursuing an MBA at the University of Texas, enrolled in UATX’s part-time fellowship program. He said he made up his mind to donate this summer and in October sent a six-figure donation to UATX — he declined to specify the exact amount — enough to make him what the university calls a “founding donor.”

“There is a moment here where we can profit from the lostness of the Ivy League institutions and the faculty that want to flee that environment,” Hobby said in an interview. “UATX can create talent and recruit talent.”

Still, it’s yet to be seen if the critiques of the Ivy League and other established universities will actually dissuade students from attending. Elite institutions have seen record undergraduate applications in recent years. And their endowments — Harvard’s is $50.7 billion and Penn’s is $21 billion, for example — provide a buttress against changes in donor sentiment. 

Not Oxford Yet

UATX’s classrooms, on the third floor of the historic Scarborough building in downtown Austin, are still under construction with plans to finish in December. When students are done for the day, they’ll be able to head down to ground level to pick up dinner at Velvet Taco or a gigantic bowl of booze at Punch Bowl Social. For now, the UATX staff works out of an office about 20 minutes from downtown Austin, which Kanelos described as more “Dunder Mifflin than Oxford University.” At this week’s tours of the new campus, visitors were handed UATX branded hard hats once they reached the third floor. 

While the first cohort of students will attend UATX tuition free, they will still have to pay for their housing and living expenses, Kanelos said. After the first class tuition will be around $32,500 a year. To be sure, starting a school from the ground up is no easy feat, and UATX is still figuring out the details around key parts of campus life like housing. Other small, private colleges have struggled financially across the US due to declining enrollment.

So far, the University of Austin has held seminars for more than 500 students. Its “Forbidden Courses” summer program included an appearance by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and delved into “science and religion, race, gender politics, Anglo-American grand strategy, our moral judgments, debates within conservatism, and the state of evolutionary biology,” according to the university’s website.

Gunnar Michelsen attended this week’s event with his younger brother, a senior in high school interested in joining UATX's founding class. Michelsen, a University of Chicago graduate who participated in the Forbidden Courses program, said that enrolling in UATX is an opportunity for students to do something different.

"It's just a very non-traditional school approach," he said. “It was just awesome being there and being able to get informed perspectives from every angle.” 

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