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| -Land of the Free |
| Built to battle ‘woke’ academia, a new Texas school takes on fresh relevance after Oct. 7 |
| 2024-09-01 |
Even as students and their parents are turning away from the elite universities because they’ve become forces of anti-education, new institutions arise to fill the need for a classical education. [IsraelTimes] With a notable contingent of Jewish students and faculty, the University of Austin private liberal arts college is about to launch its inaugural undergraduate class.The third floor of a historic high-rise in downtown Austin, Texas, with restricted elevator access may be an unexpected place to find a college campus, but it’s where America’s newest private university is preparing to open its doors to an inaugural undergraduate cohort this fall. According to founding president Pano Kanelos, the University of Austin, or UATX, aims to address the perceived decline in intellectual freedom and prioritization of knowledge at established universities, with an emphasis on open inquiry, critical thinking, respectful, vigorous debate, and persuasive writing. “Our core motivation is to renew the spirit of higher education,” explained Kanelos, a Shakespeare scholar who has become an outspoken advocate for classical education — study based on traditional liberal arts rooted in the canon of Western thought — following years of what he and other perceive as a retreat from the central purpose of higher education and academic scholarship. The school’s opening on August 26 — several years in the making — comes at what many see as an inflection point for higher education in the US, with college campuses protests over Israel’s war against Hamas focusing attention on wider cultural battles taking place in academia that UATX aims to address. The university was established in the wake of a number of watershed cultural events in American public life over the past few years that have affected how Americans converse and think about race, sexuality, gender, and a variety of other hot-button issues. In many places, the protests have been viewed within the lens of a wider cultural battle that has been brewing in higher education for years: the clash between academia’s embrace of efforts to create safe, inclusive spaces for students and teachers representing a wide diversity of views and backgrounds and those who view those efforts as the latest iteration of PC culture gone wild, muzzling speech by “canceling” any whose ideas are deemed insufficiently in line with progressive ideals. Those behind UATX are aiming to counter what Panelos described as the gradual but forceful introduction of “ideological protocols” at universities, which have ended up “distorting knowledge.” “Universities have historically been places where we do our own thinking, places we dedicate to thinking, to knowledge creation, to the transmission of knowledge, to the preservation of knowledge,” he told The Times of Israel in an on-site interview this spring. At traditional institutions, “all the evidence points to a kind of retreat from that commitment” and at “many, if not most, universities and especially… elite universities… the pursuit of knowledge is maybe not always prioritized.” While UATX was created years before the Israel-Hamas war turned antisemitism on campus into a major hot-button issue, Kanelos said one of the reasons it was founded was “because the very things that are causing that kind of antisemitic agitation at universities, the very kind of ideological positions that generate that, are the things that we’ve identified years ago as being problematic at universities.” “In many ways, we started this university to create an institution that wouldn’t be vulnerable to the kind of ideological strains that are generating some of the most atrocious behavior we’re seeing on campuses,” he told The Times of Israel, speaking a week before the first pro-Palestinian tent had been pitched on a college campus. The school’s first cohort will consist of about 100 students, some of them fresh out of high school, others with some university or higher education experience under their belt. The students were selected from about 2,500 applicants through what the University of Austin, or UATX, described as a rigorous admissions process — high SAT scores, various entrance exams on knowledge and ability, an essay and a personal statement. Kanelos said the institution sought to recruit students “the way you might recruit a professional football team – pick each student very carefully because they’re going to create the foundational culture.” That culture is of high importance to the newly accredited four-year university, whose motto urges faculty and students to commit to the “fearless pursuit of truth.” The school’s incoming undergraduates will study toward a BA in Liberal Studies, the only program offered. The first two years will focus on what the school calls Intellectual Foundations, offering programs diving into the works of Homer, Plato, George Orwell, Tocqueville, Confucius, and Descartes among others; readings will also include the Book of Genesis and the Gospel of John. UATX’s Intellectual Foundations is led by Prof. Jacob Howland, who serves as dean of the program and previously taught philosophy at the University of Tulsa. Howland was also a senior fellow at the Tikvah Fund, a conservative philanthropic foundation that invests in a range of educational initiatives in Israel and the US. In the third and fourth years, students will pursue fellowships and internships in their areas of study and work with scholars and researchers at UATX’s Center for Economics, Politics, & History, the Center for Arts & Letters, and the Center for Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics. “Our curriculum won’t be for the faint of heart,” the university has warned. “Courses will be purpose-driven, cohesive, and intellectually rigorous. That’s exactly what an education should be.” BIRDS OF A FEATHER Kanelos says the campus was founded as a pushback to the sort of groupthink and “atrocious behavior” that shuts down the free exchange of ideas on other campuses, though some have argued that the school is creating its own sort of echo chamber. Some of the students who spoke to The Times of Israel expressed a desire to be part of a select group of kindred spirits, while also being critical of the sort of peer pressure and ideological and political homogeneity they say exists on US campuses today. In NYC, Jewish school with focus on West’s achievements to open with 40 students [IsraelTimes] Tikvah Fund launches Emet Classical Academy, which eschews ‘woke’ educational values, as many Jews are disillusioned with progressive spaces often seen as less welcoming to them. |
| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #4 Bausch and Loam is still there also Rochester "experimented" with paying public school teachers starting @ $70/school year in the 1980s, and continued to pay top dollar to this day. My cousin taught there and said neither the schools nor the pupils improved at all. |
| Posted by: Regular+joe 2024-09-01 14:13 |
| #3 That article also lacks any mention of Xerox and Kodak, two companies with headquarters and factories in Rochester that are ghosts of their former selves, having failed to keep up with technology. The jobs are gone, the people are going. (And who's going to build a major industrial plant in blue state New York these days?) |
| Posted by: Nero 2024-09-01 01:34 |
| #2 That’s no NYC enclave, Skidmark — Rochester is in Western New York State on Lake Ontario. The Mail reporters are clearly not up on their American geography. Key paragraph from the article: Researchers attribute the drop to families switching to private schools - aided by an expansion of voucher programs in many red and purple states - and to homeschooling, which has seen especially strong growth. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2024-09-01 00:38 |
| #1 Family-friendly New York enclave is shuttering 25 percent of its schools for startling reason |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2024-09-01 00:15 |