The recent announcement of the establishment of the University of Austin, whose mission is to pursue a truly liberating education against a backdrop of cancel culture and the ongoing silencing of ideas across many colleges and universities, has set the world of education and the media aflutter. Some have welcomed this news calling it the most “hope-giving event in higher ed in years,” while many others have ridiculed and the mocked the project, calling it a fraud and a grift.

What has been particularly disturbing — but unsurprising — to me as a professor is seeing so many in the academy immediately denouncing the new project with inflammatory statements such as, “UAustin is not an intellectual project, it is a political one. For masquerading as the former, it deserves its ridicule, and it deserves to be iced out.”

These anti-academic criticisms reveal just how important it is to have
competition for students in the world of higher education. The University of
Austin is just getting off the ground and has the desire to disrupt the status quo
with the idea that universities must be “fully committed to freedom of
inquiry, freedom of conscience, and civil discourse.” Attacking an institution
with such a simple and appropriate goal is petty and runs against the entire
enterprise of research and teaching.

Moreover, those in the academy who denounce a new institution with
no track record to date only reveal just how dangerous it can be for students
and faculty who dare to challenge the entrenched and illiberal norms that limit
viewpoint diversity and the debate of heterodox ideas. In reality, anyone in
the academy should welcome the competition for both students and ideas; that is
how social and intellectual progress is made, and good ideas should be vetted
and reconsidered regularly. One can meaningfully evaluate the school on its merits
and its faults only after the University of Austin starts teaching and
producing research and scholarly output; it is impossible to legitimately
critique a proposed institution within hours of its public establishment. These
harsh, illiberal, and simply ignorant responses show the need for new
institutions that have not been hijacked by woke administrators and faculty.

Of course, there is no guarantee that the University of Austin
will succeed and flourish even with funding and smart and thoughtful people at
the helm. But it is worth noting that it is possible to establish new colleges
and universities in the current era that can join elite schools around the
nation. Certainly, some of top schools like Harvard College (1636), the College
of William and Mary (1693), and Yale University (1701) pre-date the
establishment of the nation, but others such as Stanford University (1891) and
the University of Chicago (1890) are considered peers to the earlier schools.

While the United States has not seen a wave of new schools created
in recent decades, there have been more than a handful that have succeeded
recently and entered the elite as Austin hopes to do.

Consider Soka University, whose current campus in Aliso Viejo, California was established in 2001. It is a world-class liberal arts college and has the second-highest endowment per student of any college or university in the nation. Soka focuses on liberal arts and human rights and is ranked 29th in the US News rankings — just behind Barnard, Smith, and Wesleyan.

Or look at Florida International University (FIU), which was founded in 1965 and is now the fourth-largest research university in the United States by enrollment and the youngest American university with a Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society chapter. Or turn to the University of California-Irvine (UCI) which was also established in 1965 and is ranked 36th by US News next to other elite schools like NYU, Tufts, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. UCI enrolls more than 30,000 students, is considered a “public ivy,” and has highly selective admissions. And there are many other cases of less elite schools from the University of Texas at Dallas to the University of Maryland-Baltimore County that are thriving.

There is precedent for establishing new elite schools in the
nation, and the world of higher education certainly needs a new school to
jostle the cartel-like, mimetic behavior present at elite schools whose
administrators, activist-scholar faculty, and diversity/equity/inclusion
offices decide not only what is taught and how, but who can speak and even what
can be uttered. The University of Austin rejects this paradigm entirely and will
hopefully offer a real alternative for students and faculty who desperately
crave the safe spaces to question, debate, and hear a multitude of ideas even
when they disagree or find them upsetting. This introduces competition and the
marketplace of ideas back into elite higher education, which should be embraced
by everyone because truth and a better society will emerge when ideas,
prejudices, and biases are critically evaluated and not simply accepted as
true.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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