American Thought Leaders - I Saw a Culture of Conformity in Universities. So I Started My Own: Pano Kanelos

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

Over the years, Pano Kanelos, the founding president of the University of Austin, observed a growing “homogenization” and “bureaucratization” of higher education. He saw school programs becoming more and more similar, administrators outnumbering students and young adults being taught that the pathway to success is dependent on censorship and adherence to the status quo.“We’ve created a culture of conformity at universities—a culture of conformity in higher education,” he says. “This just flattens out, I think, the potential for higher education to do great things and be dynamic.”So, in 2021, along with a group of similarly concerned individuals, he started the University of Austin, a private liberal arts university in Texas that emphasizes curiosity, risk-taking, and moral agency.“We’re trying to generate graduates who themselves are builders and creators. This is an important part of our curriculum,” says Kanelos.Three years later, he is the president of a fully operational freshmen class and a diverse faculty.“If anybody visits the University of Austin, they will see that it’s probably one of the most intellectually alive environments you'll ever encounter,” says Kanelos.The views expressed in this video are those of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect those of The Epoch Times.

A liberal arts education in its purest form is a comprehensive education that brings together all forms of human knowledge. Over the years, Pano Canellis, now president of the University of Austin, observed a growing homogenization and bureaucratization of higher education. He saw school programs becoming more and more similar, administrators outnumbering students, and young adults being taught the pathway to success is dependent on censorship and adherence to the status quo. We've created a culture of conformity at universities, a culture of conformity in higher education. So in 2021, together with a group of similarly concerned individuals, he started the University

of Austin, which emphasizes curiosity, risk taking, and moral agency. Three years later, Kanellos is the president of a fully operational freshman class and a diverse faculty. We're trying to generate graduates who themselves are builders and creators. This is an important part of our curriculum. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Pano Kanellos, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you for having me. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Well, let's start with the Department of Education. As we're filming here, just a day ago, there were rumors there was going to be an executive order signed by President Trump

to abolish the Department of Education. That didn't happen. But what are your thoughts in general? I would be shocked if there wasn't some action taken from the new administration regarding the Department of Education. I'll say, when it comes to higher education, I think the expectation is that there's going to be significant reform around accreditation in universities, possibly moving accreditation to the states as opposed to kind of the national creditors, probably making entry for new accreditors into the system a lot easier and a lot faster. And I'm all for that.

I think being America's newest university and going through the process right now of authorization and chartering and accreditation, the whole regulatory process of becoming a new university is extremely cumbersome and slow moving and challenging. And it really dissuades new institutions from taking shape. And I'm all for as many new institutions coming into the ecosystem as possible because I think that one of the great strengths of American higher education traditionally

has been the kind of heterogeneity of the ecosystem. That we have all different kinds of institutions at different levels doing different things with different missions, everything from vast research universities to Bible colleges and the Texas Panhandle. What we've seen over the past few years, past few decades really is a kind of homogenization of higher education, where institutions are becoming more and more like each other, programs

are sort of becoming more and more similar. And this just kind of flattens out, I think, the potential for higher education to do great things and be dynamic. So what I'm hoping to see, and this is one of the reasons we started this university, hoping to see new universities come forward with new dynamic models and to make that easier for new entries to join the race. So the motto of the University of Austin is dare to think. Are people not thinking? People aren't daring, I would say that. So dare to think, it goes all the way back to Immanuel Kant. And it was sort of the byword of the Enlightenment itself,

right, that thinking, real thinking, is to push the boundaries of knowledge, to think beyond what's received, to challenge the givens, to not accept orthodoxies at face value, to exercise the muscle of the mind through resistance. And that takes courage, right? Because it's easy to go with what's familiar. It's easy to accept the givens.

It's easy to accept whatever narrative you've been given. So I lean into the daring part of that. Another motto of ours is that we've built a university dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth, right? Not just pursuing truth, but doing it courageously. So I think the deepest sort of thinking, the deepest, most profound pursuit of truth pushes the edges and that's not always comfortable.

But you're basically saying that it's courage that's lacking in the academy right now. And that's the purpose of this new university? Absolutely. I would go even a step further. I would say it's not just that courage is lacking, but that we've created a culture of conformity at universities, a culture of conformity in higher education.

And if you think about it, you know, if you roll the tape back before students even become university students, in the competitive admissions world we live in for higher education, in order to get into elite universities or top tier universities, young people are told that they have to have a checklist of things, that they have to follow a certain pattern, that they have to take a certain pathway and that if they do the right things and they say the

right things and they get the right, you know, the stars, the gold stars at the right time, then they will be granted entry into an institution, an elite institution, a top institution that will help propel them forward in life. Well, what are they learning? They're learning that success is dependent upon conformity. And what happens when those students get to universities, that message is reinforced. Come here, don't say anything controversial. Don't challenge, you know, what the dominant narrative is. Don't be highly concerned about the things, the ideas that you express, because they might have a deleterious effect on your future So we we we create a culture of conformity to get them into universities

And then they get them I say and they learn that at the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow now That excellent entry-level job at Goldman Sachs or something is now also Dependent upon you keeping your head down and not ruffling feathers and that. That to me is the exact opposite of what a university should be doing. Universities should be fostering risk-taking, independent thinking. Universities should be places where ideas are interrogated,

where students aren't afraid to be wrong, because being wrong is how you get to what is right. And so it's not just about courage, it's about moving beyond educational culture of conformity. And it's about acceptance of, I guess, failure as part of the process. Absolutely. Yeah. And that also takes courage, to be know to be willing to to be wrong

the long to invest yourself in something and find out that it was that choice wasn't the best possible choice and then learning how to change course and Then maybe making a mistake again and then getting back up. This is the time when young people need to be doing that. I mean University the years at university the perfect time to make mistakes. It's the perfect time to be bold and to strive for things and then fall down and get up again. And if we're not encouraging that, if we're not incentivizing that, then we're not teaching students how to actually be prepared for what they're going to encounter in the rest of their life.

Right. Hence, daring to think, I guess. Daring to think. Daring to think. And the other part of our motto is, dare to think, dare to build. It's not just about thinking, it's about doing. And to be a builder, you have to be courageous. You've talked about this many, many times, right? I know you've had an incredible marketing scheme for University of Boston, which is how I think I first came across it. But just very briefly, the genesis of the idea, and then we'll talk about the freshman class.

A group of us got together, Ferguson, Barry Weiss, Joe Lonsdale, Arthur Brooks, and we were concerned about the state of higher education, the culture of conformity, and the culture, the kind of censorious nature of higher education, the political asymmetry of higher education, all these things. And we sort of said, what does one do about that?

If you identify a problem, and it's a significant problem, because universities are so central to the culture. Universities are the place where we do our thinking. Universities are the place where we create the future. And so we got together and said, well, how do you know, what are we going to do about this? We have identified a problem. Do we try to reform things from within?

Are there pathways to take existing universities and try to bring out what's best in them? And that seemed daunting. And so we thought, well, maybe starting in a university, maybe launching a university from the ground up will enable us to design it, to structure it in a way that accords with the principles that we think are at the heart of higher education,

which are open inquiry and freedom of conscience and civil discourse. I mean, that lays the groundwork for the kind of, you know, deep and profound thinking that one needs to do at a university. So we just decided that we were gonna jump in and begin a university in 2021. We announced it to the world.

The world responded. Here we are just three years later with a wonderful operating university in Austin, Texas, with our first class of freshmen, wonderful faculty. And the fact that we were able to launch from back of the napkin idea to living university in three years, I think, is a sign of the need for this kind of institution

at this moment in time. And before we go any further, what does Shakespeare have to do with it? What you're probably alluding to is that my background is as a Shakespearean scholar. That was my academic field when I was a professor. It's interesting, Shakespeare probably could have gotten

in the way of this project because it was very difficult for me to leave my passions aside to sort of focus intensely on being a university founder. But I will say that in the conception of the university, we believe wholeheartedly that we can't understand the world today and therefore we can't understand how we should act as human beings towards a better future if we don't have a sustained and serious encounter with what's come before. The great thinkers of the past, the great works of the past, the

great art of the past, the history of mathematics and science, that if we don't encounter those things, if we don't absorb their wisdom and also identify where certain ideas have gone wrong, then we have to begin again from scratch here. And we don't have enough time to start over, to start civilization from scratch. We have a civilization. So Shakespeare, I think, is exemplary of the kind of essential figure in the curriculum that we've built. We just seem to be relearning the same lessons over and over. Off the top of my head, learning the same lessons over and over. Off the top of my head, Nemesis follows hubris. It seems like it'd be the perennial human lesson that for some reason, we don't learn.

I think because of hubris. Because there's this notion, and I think this is a side effect of enlightenment rationalism. There's a notion that the way that we think about things today because we are further along chronologically than people in the past is better than what has come before. That our ideas must be superior. Why? Because you know, well if we look at things like the development of science,

well technology does kind of iterate in one direction. It tends to get better and better over time. It doesn't mean human ideas get better and better. In fact, if you think about the conjunction of technology, we accomplished something miraculous in the last century. We split the atom. I mean, we've gone from stone age of splitting the atom at light speed, yet what do we do when we split the atom? We turned that into a weapon.

So even though we might be advancing in terms of kind of technical knowledge, are we advancing in terms of human wisdom? Are we advancing ethically? And so it's that human knowledge, I think that is perennial, that we have to kind of go back to the lessons of the past, not to simply cut and paste things that people have said in the past, not that we have to be strict Aristotelians or that the ideas in the past are necessarily static models for us today, because there's just

so much that we can learn and then incorporate into our thinking today. You mentioned something earlier, freedom of conscience. My ears always perk up when I hear someone mention it, because I kind of believe that the way a society approaches that question is a measure of the, perhaps even the goodness of a society. Curious what your thoughts would be on that. A good society is a society which best enables people to be good people.

And that is freedom of conscience is an essential component of that. Freedom of conscience recognizes that we have autonomous interior lives, that each human being is a, I like, I like to use the phrase a creature of logos, that we have our own experience of the world, that sort of internal experience of the world, and that is essentially who we are. I mean, call it the soul, whatever you want to call it. And the integrity of that individual autonomy is the integrity of humanity itself. Now, as individuals, we are part of a larger society.

We are not independently self-sustaining. The relationships we have with others, the relationships we have with institutions, the culture at large are very important. But if we don't have the freedom to live our life according to our own lights, then we don't have moral agency. And if you don't have moral agency, you can't be a full human being. Wow. So I mean, the central piece of education, in a sense, really. Yeah, that's right. I think that's why true education is liberal education.

And let me define that. Please. Oftentimes when we talk about liberal education, liberal arts, people have this very reductive sense of what that means. You say, oh, liberal arts education. Well, that means that you study like the humanities or something and not the sciences and that.

A liberal arts education in its purest form is a comprehensive education that brings together all forms of human knowledge. So the liberal arts in the Middle Ages was composed of the trivium and the quadrivium, the arts of letters, the arts of numbers, quantitative, qualitative knowledge. You not only studied geometry, but you studied rhetoric, you studied music, you brought together the different ways of human knowing, with the idea is that in each area of human knowing, you can learn a lot, but nothing is complete unto itself.

So bringing the arts and sciences, letters and numbers together, creates a more complex understanding of the world and ourselves. So the liberal arts are first of all comprehensive and why what's also liberal about liberal arts is that they're liberal in the sense that they are intended to free human beings,

to create free human beings, to liberate human beings. Because the more that we understand the world, the more that we understand ourselves and those things are interlocking, the better life we can live, the more moral agency we have. In order to make better choices, in order to live a life ethically or morally, we need to be attuned to what's better and worse in the world. And so a liberal education is that which helps us to understand the better argument from the worse argument, the better end from the worse end. And again, no human being will ever understand that in its totality, we're all flawed, broken creatures. But the point of liberal education is to move us in the right direction. As you're describing the purpose of being this liberation, I can't help but think about Icarus. Can one be over-liberated?

Yes, if one comes to understand liberty as unbounded human will. In some sense, I think this is a very modern, maybe even postmodern conception of human autonomy, that the greatest good isn't that we're free so that we can seek the greatest things, but that freedom itself is the highest good. Just being able to achieve one's ends, one's desires, one's will, is itself morally justifying? Yes. I think in that case, you've gone from being someone who focused on liberty to being a libertine, somebody who is a worshiper of liberty. It's a misconception, I think, ultimately, of what

liberty really should be aiming for. Fascinating. I want to find out how things have played out. As conception, I think, ultimately of what Liberty really should be aiming for. Fascinating. I want to find out how things have played out. As you know, I was learning about University of Austin, it was just an idea, right? But you were incredibly excited about the idea and I think incredibly effective at communicating the message, which is why I think you managed to do it in three years, I guess, as you were alluding. But now you actually have had a freshman class. So

how has that played out for you? It's amazing. I mean, as we said here, if you turn the corner around, how the classes are going on, the students are engaged in discussion in the seminar rooms. If anybody visits the University of Austin, they will see that it's probably one of the most intellectually alive environments you'll ever encounter. We brought together a freshman class. These are students who are naturally curious students, risk takers. Putting your university education in the hands of a brand new university is, says something about the

character of these students. They're willing because they believe in the mission. They're willing to commit to that mission and with this high degree of self-sacrifice and again risk-taking and because they're here, because they've chosen to be here, they take this very seriously. I mean they're here to learn, they're here to discuss, they're here to debate. You go in one of the classrooms, it's like ricocheting around the ideas and all that. What they've learned is that the more that they take their education to heart, the more seriously they take it, the more reward there is. Very briefly, just describe the degree they're taking. Yeah. So right now we have a single degree, a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts, but with a number of different branching pathways. And the reason it's a single degree now is

the first part of that experience is what we call the intellectual foundations program. So everybody starts with the same foundation, a series of classes that is intended to do what we were talking about earlier, to provide a liberal education, philosophy, literature, the arts, foundations of mathematics, sciences, and to kind of weave together mostly looking at great works from the past, weave together a comprehensive understanding of the world, or at least a foundational one. That's what the students mostly do for the first two years. So almost half of their experience is this joint curated curriculum.

They'll take the same classes at the same time in the same sequence. So they're all reading the same books at the same time, which creates a common intellectual journey. So they might be reading Plato's Apology in one week, or another week they're reading Dostoevsky's Brothers Kermodsov. And the fact that they're reading that and discussing on class, but they're all doing it together,

means when they go back to their dorms, or they're hanging out at a cafe, the same questions are swirling around that whole cohort. And so the classroom actually expands beyond the formal classroom into the institution itself. So there's that single foundation and then from there we have what we call centers of academic inquiry which are broad interdisciplinary areas of focus in the humanities, the social sciences, and STEM disciplines, where students study things like economics, politics, and history,

and STEM, or arts and literature. But again, they're studying these in a kind of cross-cutting, cross-pollinating interdisciplinary way. So it's not like I have this thing called an economics major, and there's 12 classes I have to take, and I check the boxes, and I've mastered this thing called an economics major and there's 12 classes I have to take and I check the boxes and then I and I've mastered this thing called economics. The question is how does economics intersect with history with politics, farther afield with science, with technology. Again trying to weave together the different disciplines. So what we the reason we have a single

degree right now is no matter what kind of focus students have, what kind of emphasis they lean towards, because everybody eventually has to lean into something, what they're really pursuing is, let's say, the whole picture, the totality of human knowledge. You have brought on Michael Schellenberger, and I forget the name of the position he has, but it has to do with some kind of censorship studies. That seems like an applied study as opposed to theoretical. That's exactly right. So he holds what's called a CBR chair in politics, censorship, and free speech. And it is applied. That's why we hired Michael, because Michael's not a traditional scholar. He's a public intellectual. He's a public intellectual. And we believe that our university,

and maybe other universities, should have a focus not only on what happens on campus, but what extends into the world. So we're trying to synthesize thinking and doing theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge. I think we've all learned over the past couple decades that what happens on campus doesn't stay on campus. And so how do we bring into our campus people who are public intellectuals, practitioners

in that, to help synthesize real world knowledge and the kind of philosophical or theoretical pursuits that tend to dominate a university. And Michael's perfect for that. I mean he is on the cutting edge of these issues. I mean there's I think no greater warrior right now for free speech in the world than Michael Schellenberger. And the fact that he comes in and teaches our students and is one of our professors, brings to life the kind of things that could be more abstract in terms of the ideas around speech and censorship.

Behind you, I noticed there's a book, Free Speech and Liberal Education. Well, that formed a great question in my mind. Explain to me why free speech is so central to a liberal education. Let me first say that speech is central to liberal education, because speech is the way that human beings express their ideas, things that we hold in internally. That's why we express them externally. We are committed to Socratic pedagogy, right, to dialogue.

What does dialogue mean? The logos in Greek is two or more people sharing their logos, sharing their words, sharing their ideas. So speech itself is the platform for education. We share these things together and we come up with better ideas. So speech is central, so why free speech?

Because we have to be able to express ideas in a kind of unbounded way so that we can test the boundaries of ideas. And if we start delimiting what we can talk about or the ways that we can express ourselves or the things that are permissible or not, once you start doing that, what you find is you restrict more and more and more things. The aperture closes, and then you're just left simply with something called ideology. So you have to push the boundaries out as far as possible. And in terms of the limits of those boundaries, I mean, the First Amendment is a relatively, I think, safe set of guidelines. Speech that directly threatens somebody, speech that is

libelous, that is intended to— Threatens them physically, right? Because all sorts of speech threatens people. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, I mean, a true threat is the way that it's defined in constitutional jurisprudence, like a true threat. So I think that's right. Yeah, threatening somebody's ego is not a problem. Threatening somebody's settled ideas is not a problem, but threatening them in a way that is a physical or moral threat, absolutely.

And again, even there, everything is- What do you mean by moral threat? Mortal, I said. Oh, mortal. Okay, got it. Yeah. That's it. Not moral. And so, yeah, I think, and again, boundaries are always really hard to define, not clear cut, but I think the classroom should be maximalist in its approach to speech.

And so at what point, we've seen a lot of campus protests over the past, however many years, and the argument always is that free speech is the reason to facilitate all levels of protest. At what point does it become not free speech? It's not that difficult for a university to define the boundaries. Anything that disrupts the fundamental purpose of the university, which is education. If it disrupts the process, if it disrupts operations and that, that's not permissible. Anything that moves to being directly threatening is not permissible.

Ideally, what a university stands for is not monodirectional speech. So protest just tends to shout. Ideally, what a university stands for is dialogue so that your ideas can be expressed forcefully, expressed passionately, and then encounter another set of ideas that may push back and challenge so that we can stress test that set of ideas. So I don't think protests are part of the educational process. But should they be permissible in a free society?

Well, we do live in a free society. But not to shut down someone else's speech, basically, that's what I hear you say. Yeah, of course. I mean, that's axiomatic. Free speech is not free speech if it limits somebody else's free speech. So you're taking on a new role. You've been the president of the university for some time. Now you're going to become chancellor. What does that actually mean? Yeah, it just sounds fancy. I wanted a fancier title.

So this summer, I'm going to transition and enroll as chancellor and the intention in that transition is to allow me greater latitude and flexibility to work on nationally focused issues in higher education, education generally, to be an advocate for the kind of principles that we stand for as a university in public fora and speaking, writing, engaging with other organizations. There's just so much work to be done. When we started the University of Austin, we wanted to create the world's next great university.

But we also began this university because we really believed that it was time for a renaissance or renewal in higher education. And we've been called into that space with great frequency. And I'm often the one who is called to be a kind of advocate or witness for the principles we have. What we've realized at the university is that in order for us to fulfill our kind of total mission, which is both the institution itself

and let's say reform across higher education, we really need somebody working at that level. And so I talked to my board and I said, guys, I can do that, or I can run the day-to-day operations of a university, but I'm not gonna do either effectively unless you tell me where I can best serve. So we decided that I'm going to move in that chancellor role and focus on the meta issues in higher education.

I mean, still be involved in important ways with the university here, but the operational side will move to my successor. You just reminded me, at the University of Austin, you have a constitution that's incredibly important. I mean, more important than, well, I guess, than it might be in other places. And just explain that to me. Yeah. Well, if you think about why do we have a constitution and not just a set of governing documents like most institutions have? Because what a constitution is predicated upon

is the sense that there are inalienable rights that adhere to an institution. And the rights that adhere to a university are distinct from the general rights we have in the US Constitution. I mean, there's a lot of overlap, but you have to define like, what's the purpose of university?

And therefore what rights adhere to somebody who's a member of that institution. And, you know, I mean, first and foremost are the things that we talked about, you know, economic freedom, freedom of conscience, the right to engage in discourse in a civil fashion. And so you build your governing documents up from those principles

and then you protect those principles in the Constitution. And so I suppose this is something you're going to be advocating in your new role. Absolutely. Well, I'm certainly going to be sharing the success we've had with our Constitution, which has actually provided a very stable and I think preservative foundation for the institution. So certainly sharing that. There are things that we have initiated here that are already kind of making their way out to other universities and I'll give an example. In order for us to have you know vibrant vigorous discussion in the classroom,

we understood that there had to be a fundamental and core level of trust, right? Students and faculty are only willing to share their ideas in a kind of unbounded way if they're not afraid that there are gonna be significant consequences for that. So you have to kind of create a space, significant consequences for that. So you have to kind of create a space for, you know, this kind of free-flowing speech doesn't happen organically because there's so many things that threaten it in society. So you have to create a space where that can happen. So one of the things we instituted

from the get-go was that we're an institution that in the classroom is dedicated to the Chatham House Rule. The Chatham House rule. Chatham House rule, as you probably know, you go to meetings for organizations, we say we're under the Chatham House rule, it means that you can say whatever you want in that setting, but nobody who's there can share what's said outside the setting with any attribution.

Soon as I identify somebody, I've made them vulnerable because of the world in which we live, the social media jungle that's out there. So by adhering to Chatham House Rule as part of our, let's say pedagogical set of boundaries, it really opens up an alive conversation. Well, guess what? Harvard is now establishing Chatham House Rule.

And I don't know if it's across the entire institution, but I know in certain areas of the university they're doing that. This idea is already taking root. It's something that originated here. It's very interesting because in the fire index, Harvard doesn't score very well. Well, they're just getting started. And they're aware. I think, well, I shouldn't say they, I mean, Harvard is a very complex

organization, but it seems some people, they're aware that they need to be working with greater intentionality on issues around intellectual pluralism and speech. Sure. Very briefly, with the freshman class, how many applied, how many got in? I am, to be totally honest with you, I'm not directly involved in admissions. I don't have those numbers in my head. I can tell you where we ended up. We have 92 freshmen. I know that our selectivity was equal to the selectivity of most elite universities. I think what the stat that my admissions people shared

was that our students performed in the 92nd percentile or higher compared to other students at other universities. And we purposely decided to keep that first class very small because we want to just, it's our first run through. We want to get it right, we want to create the culture. And we're going to do that for the next few years. At each class that we're going to bring in. Because right now we have only freshmen.

Next year we'll have freshmen and sophomores, and then a class each year. We want to keep it pretty symmetrical as we move forward so that for the first few years we're going to stay relatively small and tight and then decide what we want to do about scaling outward from there. So of course there was the dream. know, after the one year of reality. Any big lessons? Any disappointments? One of the lessons we learned, we didn't talk about this, but an important part of our curriculum

is what we call the Polaris Project. Every student has to do this like moonshot project that goes, spans all four years that they're with us and has to be something sort of entrepreneurial in nature. It doesn't have to be a business, but it could be an arts project or cultural projects, something for the social good, business tech, whatever it is.

Because we're trying to generate graduates who are themselves our builders and creators, this is an important part of our curriculum. I think one thing we learned was we had our first Polaris classroom the students first arrived. And we need to give them a little bit more time to breathe as brand new freshmen before we ask them to dream up the ultimate moonshot,

world-changing project. So I think that's something we learned. Like we should let them sort of ease into this, their education a little bit before we start to challenge them to think about that project. One of the things that is disappointing is that we have so many thousands of faculty at other institutions who are reaching out to us because they want to be part of this institution, and we can accommodate so few right now. So I think one of the lessons we learned is that the hunger for the kind of institution that we're building from those who are within other institutions is acute. And we need to take that very seriously as we decide how we're going to scale this institution

and in what ways. We used Harvard as an example of something where some change, and you would certainly see in a positive direction, is happening. And indeed, this is part of the promise, at least of this new administration. Do you feel like your thinking has changed about the possibility of reform of existing institutions versus the genesis of University of Austin in the first place? I'm withholding my judgment on that. I'll explain why. I think most universities have realized that they have neglected important things and maybe

overshot in certain areas. So what I hear from, let's say, the community of college presidents that I engage with is that there's a kind of realization that they have to recommit to things like intellectual diversity and pluralism and institutional neutrality and the kind of things that have traditionally been embedded in things like the Chicago statement. So at the top level, and I think this is coming from trustees and donors and the top level leadership, I think there is most institutions as a kind of understanding that these things are important and that they cannot be neglected.

And I think there are significant initiatives at institutions to try and reinvigorate or re-embed those principles into the institution. But what I also hear from these leaders of other institutions is like, the culture can't change as long as the culture remains politically and ideologically monochromatic. That, you know, the faculty that are there, the administrators that are there who have committed a set of principles are always going to be highly resistant to this kind of change. And so it's going to take a long time, I think, to reseed universities with a broader range of ideas, people, perspectives that will allow

these kind of ideas to truly take hold. So I think there's a willingness, there's a desire, at least from the top, but it has to be this kind of like, you know, multi-generational movement towards intellectual pluralism. And it's not as simple as everybody in universities is on the left and therefore we've hired some conservative people and there's some magic balance happens. I mean, it's, I think universities should be committed

to hiring people who are heterodox from the kind of dominant ideology that most universities are guided by. I think it's important to the whole enterprise. But even more than that, universities have to recommit to the notion that all this political stuff is actually secondary to their purpose. What they really need to do is bring together a community of truth seekers who aren't primarily shaped by their politics or aren't primarily shaped by any kind of ideology, who are intellectually acrobatic, who are there not to promote an agenda but they're to actually question everything including their own ideas, their own kind

of core beliefs. That's the job of a university. Universities have to be truly liberal in that way. Universities are particular kind of institutions within society that play a particular kind of role. And if we don't fulfill that role, then society as a whole suffers. One of the critiques that I've heard from multiple critics of the existing, especially elite institutions, is the proportion of administrators to educators. Do you have a sense of how that compares at the University of Austin versus some of the other big ones? Yeah, look, this is something I've spoken about quite a bit publicly, this kind of administrative metastasizing that we see at institutions, the bureaucratizing of institutions, where you create such a clerical class of administrators who start to actually exercise authority over

areas they have no business in, like the classroom, academics, curriculum, that we see this happening at many, if not most institutions. And so the way to, one of the ways to attend to that is to make sure that you run as lean as possible, as few administrators as needed, and that those administrators understand that they have a really narrow set of responsibilities at the university.

University isn't theirs, they're support staff. It includes presidents. I was going to say that. It does. I am here to support what's primary at the institution, which is what happens in the classroom. So we've built our entire model of the university around those assumptions. entire model of the university around those assumptions. So as we finish up, you know, if there's people that are interested in applying and learning more about what a liberal education means and what the possibilities are at the University of Austin, where do they go?

Not surprisingly, we have a website. It's uaustin, letter u, austin.org. And if you go to that website, you'll see that we have links to, it's uaustin, letter u, austin.org. And if you go to that website, you'll see that we have links to tremendous, not just information about the university, but we have a wonderfully informative set of content there, lectures, we have a sub stack, we have articles published not just by our own people, but by the people that we think are important voices in the world around education and other topics and that. So it's a real clearinghouse for a lot of information about the university, but also information about the things

that the university should really be concerned with, which as we said before, the kind of, what's called the renewal of a robust intellectual life in the culture. Well, Pano Canellos, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you, Jan. Pleasure to speak with you. Thank you all for joining Pano Canellos and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.