60 Minutes Profile of the New ‘University of Austin’ Highlights Lack of Intellectual Diversity in Higher Ed
“Contempt for today’s campus culture – the trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggressions – helped swing the election”
This week, 60 Minutes profiled the new University of Austin, a school founded in opposition to progressive concepts in higher education, such as safe spaces, trigger warnings, and microaggressions.
The report highlights the ongoing problems associated with the lack of intellectual diversity on college campuses.
Curtis Houck reported at NewsBusters:
Filing this one for CBS in the better-late-than-never category (or perhaps decades late), Sunday’s episode of 60 Minutes led with a lengthy profile of the upstart University of Austin (UATX) and its classical liberal education and commitment to free speech as a way of realizing that, for lack of a better term, American universities are not only hot beds of chaos (as exhibited by the aftermath of October 7), but exhibit little to no ideological and political diversity).
Correspondent Jon Weretheim had quite the amusing opening, telling the elite, far-left audience something long apparent to the rest of us
These are not soaring times for higher education. Tuition costs rise unchecked. Contempt for today’s campus culture – the trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggressions – helped swing the election, and this past week, President-elect Donald Trump nominated former WWE executive Linda McMahon to lead the Department of Education, an agency that each year distributes billions to U.S. colleges, some that Trump has vowed to tax and sue for their “wokeness.”
Wertheim made the pivot to University of Austin, calling the school’s launch this fall an example of “innovation” and “conceived largely frustrated professors at schools like Harvard, Princeton, and Brown” that “tout[s] open debate, a shout-nothing-but-say-anything philosophy, and, for now, free tuition.”
“Will this be just another politicized campus swinging right? Or a true disrupter, resetting the marketplace of ideas,” he wondered.
Watch:
In another segment, the host speaks to Sir Niall Ferguson, one of the founders of UATX, who suggests that campus culture eventually spreads out into other areas. This is 100 percent correct. It’s why we now have newsrooms and corporate boardrooms full of people embracing woke culture and pushing it on the public. It’s why the Democratic party now sounds more like the College Democrats each day.
Ferguson’s quote, via CBS News:
I think if a university system starts to go wrong, then something is bound to go wrong for the society as a whole. The ideas that start on campus pretty quickly spread to corporations, to media organizations. University forms the way you think about the world for the rest of your life. If our universities are screwed up, and I believe they are, then that will screw up America as a whole quite quickly.
Professor Jacobson has suggested that higher education cannot be reformed from within. That is one of the reasons why it is important for the University of Austin to succeed and become a model for other new schools.
Featured image via NewsBusters video.
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Comments
I have been watching this school from the outset. Might be a good way to go.
Once college was where one went to learn a profession and along the way, pick up some courses of culture and history. Now they are for people to go and have their prejudices reinforced with like-minded courses and matriculate with no useable skills. Most colleges teach a negative view of American history and dwell on any mistakes made.
Here’s the reality, in 2024:
If you cannot think of anything better to do with yourself than to go straight from high school to an American college, then you’re a fekking loser.
A pathetic, lazy-ass, unimaginative, fekking loser.
And so are your parents.
I will disagree with you. You have a crappy attitude.
If you want to pursue certain professions such as science, engineering, mathematics, architecture, etc. then one will need to go to university to get the needed credentials. But it does not mean starting at a major university as one can start at a local community college to get prerequisite courses.
I won’t call you your pathetic low terms.
The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost
(1874 –1963)
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
[From The Poetry of Robert Frost by Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1916, 1923, 1928, 1930, 1934, 1939, 1947, 1949, © 1969 by Holt Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Copyright 1936, 1942, 1944, 1945, 1947, 1948, 1951, 1953, 1954, © 1956, 1958, 1959, 1961, 1962 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1962, 1967, 1970 by Leslie Frost Ballantine]
Source: Poets.org
Dear BillB52, If winners go to college — especially directly right out of high school — then why are Americans billions of dollars in debt for their college student loans?
It must be something that changed around the 1990s, because it was reasonably true for centuries before then.
Couldn’t have anything to do with the government taking over the writing of student loan debt for any wackjob who wanted the money, could it?
OK, and yes, we’ll get off your lawn.
Jacques,
You are completely wrong.
Here in Florida governor DeSantis has banned DEI in universities.
He is also waging a war on Wokeness.
Both of my conservative children went to FAU here in Boca Raton.
They got an excellent education, one in business, one in biology.
The business student is working as crew on tournament fishing boats, making great money.
The biologist is applying to anesthesia assistant school.
One went free on the bright futures academic scholarship, the other we paid the $8,000 per year in state tuition.
So both are debt free college graduates.
No leftist indoctrination in Florida state universities.
Good value for the money spent.
Dear docduracoat,
If I am “completely wrong” then why are Americans billions of dollars in debt for their college student loans?
PS Its not really my place to comment on your family or your choices or your kids or your kids’ choices — on the other hand, you did bring it up yourself, without my asking. And so
1. If the one child is “working as crew on tournament fishing boats making great money,” as you say, then what was the point spending time and money at FAU?
2. If the other child plans a career as an anesthesia assistant in Florida especially South Florida …….. but has not taken a year or two away from FAU to solidify intermediate-level Spanish, at minimum …….. then unfortunately you are proving me completely right, not “completely wrong.”
Just my opinion.
I’m sure the Leftists at Austin will solve this problem by hiring a clean, intelligent, diverse minority to be their next President: Harris.
This is not the University of Texas (Austin). This is a private university and knows Harris would be against their purpose. Harris is a leftist and these are classic liberals.
Exactly
Careful about getting excited about UATX. Among its founders are some good people. However, Bari Weiss is one of them and she is the founder of The Free Press and increasingly obviously a tool of the security state. She hired for TFP a guy from a German news rag that has been cited as CIA-adjacent. And she trashed Tulsi Gabbard – with as they say, zero evidence – as bing a toady for Assad. Google it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj9-cAxykmw
This new university in Austin is not accredited, and will not be eligible to be accredited until , at a minimum, until a class graduates.
Imho it’s a place for training bright young adults to be able to succeed as Talking Heads on TV, on Podcasts, on Radio, on YouTube. In other words, an Influencer Preparation Institute.
I wish them well, but I wouldn’t send my own kids there.
The university which houses the medical school where I formerly taught will not be reformed from within, because there is no impetus by an entrenched ideologically lazy, do-nothing, and politically moribund faculty and administration. Add to that mix a governing board that is too afraid to use its voice. It all has to come from taxpayers and the state’s legislature to wear the steel-toed boot.