60 Minutes Profile of the New ‘University of Austin’ Highlights Lack of Intellectual Diversity in Higher Ed

60 Minutes Profile of the New ‘University of Austin’ Highlights Lack of Intellectual Diversity in Higher Ed

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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