> Academia has a fairly rigid status hierarchy that has proved extremely hard to disrupt. Look at the list of top schools and you’ll find most were founded before 1900, and some of the most prestigious before 1800.

—[Megan McArdle](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/12/university-austin-founders-challenge-creating-college-another-time/)

  


[The University of Austin](https://www.uaustin.org/) (UATX) is a start-up university. Its leader, Pano Kanelos, took to Bari Weiss's popular Substack to write a [pugnacious essay](https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/we-cant-wait-for-universities-to) on the new venture. Backed by two dozen members of an elite “Board of Advisors,” Kanelos promises to build a brand new prestigious institution of higher learning grounded in old-fashioned values of free inquiry and truth-seeking.

Clicking on “programs” on the UATX web site, one finds that for the summer of 2022 it will offer a program called “Forbidden Courses,” which 


> invites top students from other universities to join us for a spirited discussion about the most provocative questions that often lead to censorship or self-censorship in many universities. Students will become proficient and comfortable with productive disagreement. Instructors will range from top professors to accomplished business leaders, journalists, and artists.

Then, in the fall of 2022, UATX will inaugurate a graduate program in entrepreneurship and leadership.


> In this 12-month program, UATX will recruit elite students from top schools, teach them the classical principles of leadership and market foundations, and then embed them into a network of successful technologists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and public-policy reformers. Students will then actively apply their learning to the most urgent and seemingly intractable problems facing our society, both in the private and public sectors.

The question is: Will these programs attract students?

As Bryan Caplan points out in [The Case Against Education](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07T3QRNLC/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1), a degree often does not convey value because of what students supposedly learn. Rather, it serves as a signal that the graduate has cognitive ability, diligence, and a willingness to adopt institutional norms. Because the value comes from an intangible signal, a university's reputation as a prestigious institution is crucial. But as McArdle points out, prestige is highly path-dependent. A prestigious university will attract students with the qualities that employers and others admire. This will in turn sustain the prestige of the university. 

This poses a challenge for a start-up university that aspires to elite status. It cannot become prestigious until it has high-quality students; and it cannot attract high-quality students until it attains prestige. The fact that UATX is thumbing its nose at established prestige institutions makes the challenge even greater. Students and faculty may fear that going to UATX will send a *negative* signal, making someone who attends UATX unwelcome at other institutions of higher education or at corporations that rely on a pipeline of graduates from the existing elite universities.

The idea of starting a new university has many fans. The cost of college tuition and the burden of student loans have received a lot of notoriety. The extreme disparity between the high salaries of tenured professors and the dismal pay of the adjuncts and graduate students who do much of the teaching is indefensible.

Perhaps most disturbing of all are the findings that students do not seem to learn much in college. [John Etchemendy, a former provost of Stanford University, said](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/04/17/advocates-student-learning-assessment-say-its-time-different-approach) that 


> whenever we try to directly measure what students have learned, what they have gotten out of their education the effect is tiny, if any.

Caplan says that this is not an accident. He notes that students are happy when class is canceled, which would not be the case if they were focused on learning. There seems to be a tacit agreement that if college will confer a degree, that is all that the student needs to compete in the job market. No actual education is required.

AEI scholar Yuval Levin has been outspoken on the situation at universities today. [Levin says that](https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/notes-from-first-seminar-meeting) “this is the moment to create new universities.” He points out that there is both continuity and discontinuity in what has happened on campus in recent years. On the one hand, faculty have always leaned more to the left than the general population. And colleges have always had a religious character, even though modern religious fervor has a secular character. But, he says, in recent years college administrators have taken it upon themselves to push social and political causes. 

Recently, the very purpose of the university has changed. [Levin says](https://albertmohler.com/2020/04/22/yuval-levin),


> there's always been an academic culture that says, "The purpose of the university is to seek the truth wherever it leads." But all of those have tended to agree that this has to be done by teaching and learning, that the purpose of the university is ultimately teaching and learning, opening our minds to the truth and pursuing it.  
> We are now in a place where a lot of people in the university start from a different assumption, which is that the purpose of the university consists in a political activism, to transform our society in the mold of a progressive sense of what justice looks like. And that teaching and learning might be incidental to that, it might not be, but that's not the purpose. And this is in line with a larger transformation of institutions I have been talking about here, which is, people have come to see the university not as a mold of character in mind but as a platform for political expression. 

It is easy to sympathize with the desire to re-orient higher education toward the pursuit of free inquiry rather than a narrower conception of social justice. But it is difficult for me to see how UATX will attract students to its programs.

For this summer, here's my prediction for how many students at UATX complete the “Forbidden Courses” program: 

—and for this fall, here's my prediction for how many students at UATX complete the "Entrepreneurship and Leadership" program: