College of the Future: The University of Austin (UATX) is happening and it will help rescue American higher education. | City Journal
Our guiding principles are few but firm. We have faith in the process of liberal education in the capacity of individuals to discover truth and attain freedom through the unfettered examination and open discussion of fundamental human questions. We are committed to high standards of academic rigor. We believe that students can learn, and professors can teach, only if they are free to ask questions and share opinions without fear. We are committed to freedom of inquiry, freedom of conscience, and civil discourse, without which truth is eclipsed and education decays into indoctrination.
Free and open debate, however, is not a sufficient condition of teaching and learning. We are guided by a robust conception of human flourishing. We believe that a rigorous education reveals the basic stuff of our being and equips us to pursue what we love and do well. We seek to cultivate excellence as the condition of meaningful freedom: the power to do good, honor truth, and nurture beauty.
We want our students to understand the foundations and blessings of civilization and political life, to grasp the importance of law, virtue, order, beauty, meaningful work and leisure, and the sacred. We want them to appreciate the unique vibrancy of the American form of government and way of life. We want them to become conversant in the various languages of understanding and to learn to advance ideas and arguments logically and lucidly in speech and writing. We especially want them to develop prudence, which requires seeing things whole, making connections, and sorting signal from noise across multiple domains of experience.
We believe that politics should be a subject of study in a university, not its operating system. We reject partisan politics and the ideological invasion of the classroom and the laboratory. As an institution, we will not publicly endorse or promote political positions.
Students need a dedicated space in which to grow and ripen. They need to be disentangled from the urgencies of the here and now. We therefore embrace the idea of the university as a tower not of ivory but of glass. From within the tower, it must be possible to observe and reflect on society; and from without, to see what goes on inside it. Radical transparency, not a value of most universities, is essential to everything we do.
UATX aspires to revitalize American higher education as a steward of tradition and an engine of innovation. This combination, which recalls the Roman god Janus, who looks backward and forward simultaneously, makes for a creative tension. Tradition without innovation tends toward sterility; soil is fertile only to the extent that it is enriched by the decayed residue of new growths. Innovation without tradition is blind; it tends to repeat the mistakes of the past while falling short of its successes.
Hooray for UTAX. I hope it prospers. Meanwhile my own formerly cute university is spending (or so a student told me) $100 million on a new sports facility? That can’t be right. Where is the money coming from? And supposedly a new building for the law school is on the horizon too. Desperately needed that.