A Game Changer for Higher Education

How many times have we heard “if you don’t like it here, go somewhere else”?  That presents a problem for colleges and university faculty as higher ed in America is uniformly woke.  A group of academics has a promising solution—start a new college. 

The University of Austin (UATX) is a new university.  UATX is dedicated to free inquiry, free speech and innovation in instruction and curriculum.  At the same time, UATX plans to keep education affordable by keeping administrative and overhead costs down. 

The founders of UATX are established academic and public policy leaders including historian Niall Ferguson, author Bari Weiss, former AEI president Arthur Brooks and economists Larry Summers, Glenn Loury and Tyler Cowen. 

Universities were once places of discovery and excitement.  As Niall Ferguson writes, UATX seeks to restore the campus environment to that he experienced in his student days. 

“Those of us who were fortunate to be undergraduates in the 1980s remember the exhilarating combination of intellectual freedom and ambition to which all this gave rise. Yet, in the past decade, exhilaration has been replaced by suffocation, to the point that I feel genuinely sorry for today’s undergraduates.”

Ferguson is right. I too was an undergraduate in the 1980s. The freedom and excitement of undergraduate and graduate college life that I experienced is rare today.

  Study after study have show that cancel culture and conformity have taken over academic life in the United States and other Western countries. 

Universities are not just failing to live up to their ideals regarding academic freedom.  They are also failing to provide value to students.  The cost of attending the typical college has almost tripled since 1980 while earnings of college graduates have remained flat. 

UATX promises to provide a home for scholars and students disaffected by the current college climate.  It also provides an alternative business model for students and parents fed up with funding bloated university bureaucracies with the tuition and tax dollars.    

The Generational Unfairness of COVID Restrictions: European Edition

 

Young people in Europe increasingly view the never-ending lockdowns and COVID restrictions as unfair to their generation.  Young Europeans have sacrificed their careers and education to address a virus that only presents a risk to the very old. 

Moreover, the restrictions and lockdowns have made no difference in fighting the virus.

Laure Mandeville lays out the reasons that young Europeans are angry.  Ms. Mandeville is the chief U.S. correspondent for Le Figaro and a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council.

Below is a clip from Ms. Mandeville’s appearance on Feudal Future podcast with Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky.

You can see the whole podcast here.

He’s Not Wrong: Vladimir Putin Knocks Woke Culture

 Social justice warriors in the modern West are no different that the Bolsheviks of the old Soviet Union says Russian Leader Vladimir Putin. 

If Putin is right, modern progressives are ushering in a world that is very dark indeed.  Young people should take note.    

Speaking at the Valdai Discussion Club, Putin laid bare the parallels between the old oppression of the Soviet past and the now oppression of the woke progressives in the modern West.

Putin calls out the erasure of the great works in art and literature: 

“Looking at what is happening in a number of Western countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices, which we, fortunately, have left, I hope, in the distant past. The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past – such as Shakespeare – are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”

Citing Martin Luther King, Putin call out the obsession among the left in dividing people on racial lines:

"Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause, but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into ‘reverse discrimination’ that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin colour.”

Putin also cites the parallels between modern progressive ideologies on sexuality and gender and those of the old Soviet Union:

“Zealots of these new approaches even go so far as to want to abolish these concepts altogether. Anyone who dares mention that men and women actually exist, which is a biological fact, risk being ostracised. “Parent number one” and “parent number two,” “'birthing parent” instead of “mother,” and “human milk” replacing “breastmilk” because it might upset the people who are unsure about their own gender. I repeat, this is nothing new; in the 1920s, the so-called Soviet Kulturtraegers also invented some newspeak believing they were creating a new consciousness and changing values that way. And, as I have already said, they made such a mess it still makes one shudder at times. Not to mention some truly monstrous things when children are taught from an early age that a boy can easily become a girl and vice versa. That is, the teachers actually impose on them a choice we all supposedly have. They do so while shutting the parents out of the process and forcing the child to make decisions that can upend their entire life.”

It has often been said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  Putin’s discussion of the parallels between the old Soviet Union and modern Western progressive ideologies is a good one.  One question remains.  Is it that modern progressives have failed to learn from the old Soviet Union or are using the old Soviet Union as a “how to” manual?