Prof: Administrators Brought Down the Conservative ‘Liberty Institute’ at UT-Austin
“No other recent effort that I know of has boasted the same combination of ambition, near success, and, ultimately, abject and total failure.”
The Liberty Institute was supposed to be a conservative/libertarian think tank at the school, intended to broaden intellectual diversity.
Professor Richard Lowery explains where things went wrong. He writes at the James G. Martin Center:
How UT-Austin Administrators Destroyed an Intellectual Diversity Initiative
By now, only the most dishonest or intentionally ignorant observers deny the existential crisis facing higher education. Universities no longer even maintain the pretense of dispassionate rational and free inquiry, focusing instead on a particularly toxic and frankly absurd form of “social-justice” activism, increasingly even in the hard sciences.
Why does this situation persist? Here, I can contribute to our understanding, having had a front-row seat to perhaps the most spectacular failure of a higher-education reform effort in recent memory: the “Liberty Institute” at the University of Texas at Austin.
No other recent effort that I know of has boasted the same combination of ambition, near success, and, ultimately, abject and total failure. The effort was undone not through the machinations of the campus Left but through weakness on the part of supposed conservatives, a lesson that anyone else wading into reform efforts should learn.
Our story starts with a small group of faculty in the business school at UT-Austin, who recognized the need to push back against the growing dominance of left-wing social-justice activism on campus. One of us, Carlos Carvalho, was given an opportunity to lead a small, policy-focused center within the business school. Over a few years, we built the Salem Center for Policy into one of the most active centers on campus.
As these activities built up, we developed an increasing network of supporters who encouraged us to pursue more ambitious goals. This was the genesis of what became known as the “Liberty Institute.” We drafted a brief proposal for an independent academic unit that could house faculty with perspectives and research agendas that would disqualify them from employment elsewhere on campus.
What we saw at UT-Austin was a huge gap in the study of the fundamentals of how free societies function, as well as the relationship between freedom and human flourishing. Virtually all other areas on campus where such ideas were explored effectively required that teaching or research take a perspective that such societies are, in fact, oppressive; that radical social change is necessary; and that activism designed to undermine the traditional foundations of free societies is a moral imperative. Beyond the obvious inappropriateness of presupposing such conclusions, such criteria were also clearly at odds with easily observable facts. Thus, effort was needed to restore sensible analysis to UT-Austin.
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Comments
This is a really bad sign:
“The effort was undone not through the machinations of the campus Left but through weakness on the part of supposed conservatives, a lesson that anyone else wading into reform efforts should learn.”
Weakness on the part of donors, who didn’t want to turn all their friends into enemies and hurt their businesses I guess. The university was making it very hard for the donors to get what they thought they were paying for, and heroic efforts would have been required to have any chance of success, still probably very small. Maybe they should have simply withdrawn their offer of money.
Because over the determined machinations of the university president, I doubt that could have been established as a conservative entity. He was going to the mat to beat it.
“Ultimately, it was conservative politicians and donors, not Marxist faculty, who brought it down out of their unwillingness to confront a supposedly prestigious Texas institution.”
“Prof: Leftist Administrators Brought Down the Conservative ‘Liberty Institute’ at UT-Austin.”
Fixed that for you. I needed the redundancy for effect…
“The free world” hasn’t vanished, it’s onlymoved. According to Weiying Zhang, economics professor at Beijing University in China:
“In the market, no one can force someone else to buy anything. The buyer must agree to pay a certain price. That price will not be more than the value the buyer will receive from that product or service. Therefore, liberty is the first priority. Without liberty, the market cannot operate. We could even say that liberty and markets are two sides of the same coin. Respect for the system of private property is a guarantor of liberty. The property rights system includes material things, human rights, and intellectual property. If everyone’s rights and liberties are fully respected, then one can attain happiness only by making others happier.”
https://www.amazon.com/Logic-Market-Insiders-Chinese-Economic-ebook/dp/B00TXXJGF0/
Selling liberty in higher education is like selling chastity rings in a bathhouse.