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Editor's Note, November 26, 2021

When notable articles come to our attention weeks after they were published, we sometimes precede them with an editor’s note dated when written, as above, to get them onto our homepage. The below commentary is notable because it details the thinking of a group of distinguished scholars -- much reviled by many other academics -- who plan to create a new college because “something is rotten in the state of academia.”

Excerpt: Something is rotten in the state of academia and it’s no laughing matter. Grade inflation. Spiraling costs. Corruption and racial discrimination in admissions. Junk content (“Grievance Studies”) published in risible journals. Above all, the erosion of academic freedom and the ascendancy of an illiberal “successor ideology” known to its critics as wokeism, which manifests itself as career-ending “cancelations” and speaker disinvitations, but less visibly generates a pervasive climate of anxiety and self-censorship.
Some say that universities are so rotten that the institution itself should simply be abandoned and replaced with an online alternative — a metaversity perhaps, to go with the metaverse. I disagree. I have long been skeptical that online courses and content can be anything other than supplementary to the traditional real-time, real-space college experience.

However, having taught at several, including Cambridge, Oxford, New York University and Harvard, I have also come to doubt that the existing universities can be swiftly cured of their current pathologies. That is why I am one of a group of people announcing the founding of a new university — indeed, a new kind of university: the University of Austin.

Excerpt: Recruiting for a research study on the effectiveness of antiracism training for white children is on hold at the University of Texas at Austin. This follows a complaint to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights that the project is racially discriminatory, among other criticism.

The university is now reviewing the study. Numerous professors are asking the university to allow the research to proceed during the internal and external reviews, arguing that UT Austin’s institutional review board previously approved the project, as did peer reviewers during a competitive internal funding process. These professors warn that halting research due to outside complaints threatens the integrity of the study at hand and, more generally, chills free inquiry into timely subjects such as antiracism.

GoKAR!, or Kids Against Racism, recently began recruiting up to 200 pairs of children and their caregivers, advertising opportunities to “engage in dialogue about anti-Black racism with their preschool-aged children at home.”

Excerpt: The woman in the video is about the same age as my mother. She is speaking at a school-board meeting in Virginia as a concerned parent.

“I’ve been very alarmed by what’s going on in our schools,” she reads from prepared notes. “You are now teaching, training our children to be social-justice warriors and to loathe our country and our history.” Her voice is soft but stern. She recounts her youth in Mao Zedong’s China and the political fanaticism she witnessed firsthand, before calling critical race theory “the American version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.” At the end of her remarks, the audience bursts into cheers. “Virginia Mom Who Survived Maoist China Eviscerates School Board’s Critical Race Theory Push,” blares the headline on Fox News.

As a Chinese academic working in the U.S., I watched the video and was disconcerted by its familiarity. The speaker’s views are not uncommon among many first-generation Chinese immigrants, who are grateful to their new country and eager to assimilate.

Excerpt: Discrimination. Censorship. Elizabethtown College is quickly gaining a reputation for disregarding student rights. FIRE recently covered the college’s hosting of a racially segregated event. Now add to the college’s missteps its refusal to approve a student group’s guest speaker because of the speaker’s political views.

On Oct. 5, FIRE wrote privately to Etown, calling on the college to recommit to its strong promises of free expression after it notified the campus chapter of a student organization, Turning Point USA, that it could not host conservative political commentator Joe Basrawi.

The college ignored our letter, just as it remained silent when we called out its decision to endorse racial segregation. If Etown won’t defend its actions to FIRE, the college at least owes its student body and the public an explanation for why it continues to trample on the rights it promises — or that it is required by federal law to respect, as in the case of nondiscrimination on the basis of race — to its students.

Americans are beginning to seek alternatives to our established menu of colleges and universities. In fact, not just Americans. Students from other countries are also choosing alternatives to studying in the US. The combined effect has been a sharp drop in American college enrollment, which is down overall by about 8 percent over the last two years, and more than 14 percent at community colleges. Enrollment of new foreign students fell last year by 46 percent.

Some of this, of course, is due to Covid. And some of it is due to a demographic shift: fewer babies born 17 to 20 years ago. But other contributing factors are more mysterious. Why has there been a precipitous drop in the number of males who choose to go to college? Why have so many colleges declared themselves “systemically racist”? Why have colleges turned campus life into a pressure cooker of ideological conformity?

The recent formation of a new institution, the University of Austin (UATX), which intends to break with the herd mentality, was met with met with high praise in many quarters, and with extreme disdain by many supporters of the legacy institutions.