The most talked about issue in the past week has been the disgraceful conduct of US universities in the face of overt anti-Semitic activity under the guise of concern for the residents of Gaza. Liz Magill, the president of Penn University, has already been forced to step down after repeatedly justifying harassment and threats against Jewish students at a U.S. congressional hearing — let alone general calls for Israel's destruction.
This worrying trend at the world's most prestigious universities is attracting students and investors to a younger higher education institution, founded just two years ago. This institution is called the University of Austin Texas (UATX, not to be confused with the University of Texas at Austin, UT-Austin, which is a completely different institution that has existed for 130 years), and according to its president, Pano Canelos, since October 7 and the reaction (or rather lack thereof) of recognized universities to the situation in Israel, interest in it from donors and students has soared sharply. We used Perplexity, Forefront, and ChatGPT to tell you about the university that supporters of Israel are now flocking to, confident that its leaders, unlike their peers, know where the line lies between free speech and anti-Semitism.
The University of Austin was founded in 2021 by a group of academics who are dissatisfied, to say the least, with the trends at the major institutions of higher education, and they strive to create a freer alternative, in which research is not limited by political perceptions. It emphasizes opposition to the "safe spaces" of the large universities, which assumes that students are too delicate to deal with more than one view (the progressive one), and favors conflicts between opposing views. She purchased a building in Austin, Texas, and plans to open her first year there at the end of next year.
Even before it raised funds or students, its founders and teaching staff alone had already attracted fire and controversy, as they were prominent academics, each of whom had been ejected from some respected institution in recent years after refusing to surrender to the culture of political correctness and progressiveness. Among the names are lesbian Jewish journalist Barry Weiss, who resigned from The New York Times after being humiliated by colleagues for daring to argue that it was illegitimate to refuse to publish a column by an American public figure (Representative Tom Cotton) for disagreeing with his views; British historian Niall Ferguson, who supported Brexit and Trump; Economist Larry Summers, who has been caught up in controversy over his remarks that the paucity of women in scientific professions stems from their natural inclination towards more humane occupations and his opposition to regulation of certain types of trade; Peter Bogosian, who made headlines at the end of the previous decade after proving that scientific magazines published stupid "studies"—including one based almost verbatim on a chapter of Hitler's Mein Kampf; venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, partner of conservative Austrian-American investor Peter Thiel; Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somalia-born feminist activist who grew up in the Netherlands and fled to the United States after Muslim immigrants who murdered filmmaker Theo Van Gogh left a note on his body announcing that she was next; and Michael Shellenberger, a former environmental activist turned nuclear energy activist who was the main signatory to the disclosure of the Twitter Files (records provided to Shellenberger, Weiss and Matt Taibbi to expose political bias in Twitter's conduct before acquiring it). Heather Heing, who along with her husband Bret Weinstein had to flee Evergreen College in Washington for their lives after students attempted to assassinate Weinstein, originally joined the staff, but had already quit on the grounds that the institution only treats the symptoms and not the problem itself.
As mentioned, the new university is now attracting pro-Israel people who are fed up with far-left-leaning universities, and according to Bloomberg, the son of local tycoon Paul Hobby recently enrolled in the institution, who decided to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to the institution.
Wrong? We'll fix it! If you find a mistake in the article, please share with us