University of Austin Takes On Higher Ed | City Journal
A few years ago, I m told, the president of Dartmouth College remarked to a professor that we have to get out of the knowledge game. Mission accomplished. The self-destruction of the American academy its repudiation of education, the core business of universities since their inception a millennium ago is well under way. But American higher education got some rare good news today, with the establishment of the University of Austin (UATX).
Pano Kanelos, who formerly headed St. John s College in Annapolis, will be the university s president. Kanelos maintains that all education is either liberal or illiberal; if it is illiberal, it isn t even education. Plato s Republic makes this clear. Before we are educated, Plato famously teaches, we resemble prisoners chained to the bottom of a cave, watching shadows play across a wall. We trust the shadows and the stories they tell because they are the only things we know. We have no idea that they are cast by unseen puppeteers competing for power and wealth, much less that higher realms of truth and existence lie above and beyond us.