Tangle - The new 'anti-woke' university.

Episode Date: November 16, 2021

Last week, a group of donors, scholars, writers and political activists announced the launch of a new college: The University of Austin. The people behind the school say that fundamentally, it will be dedicated to free speech, citing concerns about “the illiberalism and censoriousness prevalent in America’s most prestigious universities.”The school will go by UATX for short, and is launching a noncredit program called "Forbidden Courses" as a kind of soft launch, which the creators say will encourage “spirited discussion about the most provocative questions that often lead to censorship or self-censorship in many universities," according to The New York Times.Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.You can support our podcast by clicking here--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I am your host, Isaac Saul, and today we are going to be discussing the University of Austin. Not the one at the University of Texas, but a new university, a new college being championed by some people who are free speech activists, maybe you'd say. I'm not sure exactly how to categorize them, but they are political for sure in nature. And there's a lot of interesting stuff coming out about this university and what it means

and what it says about this current moment in our country's history. And we're going to jump in and discuss it today. Before we do, as always, we'll start with some quick hits. First up, Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, the longest serving member of the Senate, announced that he plans to retire yesterday. He was first elected in 1974. Number two, President Biden signed his $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill into law yesterday. Number three, Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist host of InfoWars, was found liable on all counts for damages in a defamation lawsuit brought by the parents of eight victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting. Number four, the judge presiding over Ahmaud Arbery's murder trial has rejected a request

from all three defendants for a mistrial. Number five, U.S. journalist Danny Fenster, who was held in jail for six months of hard labor in military-ruled Myanmar, was suddenly released yesterday. Fenster, who was held in jail for six months of hard labor in military-ruled Myanmar, was suddenly released yesterday. Yesterday, a group of prominent authors, academics, journalists, and philanthropists announced they're starting a new university dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth called the University of Austin. Well, in their announcement, University of Austin founders denounced elite liberal institutions saying, quote, the reality is that many universities no longer have an incentive to create an environment

where intellectual dissent is protected and fashionable opinions are scrutinized. They went on to say at our most prestigious schools, the primary incentive is to function as a finishing school for the national and global elite. All right. Today's topic is the University of Austin. Last week, a group of donors, scholars, writers, and political activists announced the launch of a new college. The people behind the school say it will fundamentally be dedicated to free speech, citing concerns about the illiberalism and censoriousness prevalent in America's most prestigious universities. The school will go by UATX for short and is launching a non-credit program called Forbidden Courses as a kind of soft

launch, which the creators say will encourage spirited discussion about the most provocative questions that often lead to censorship or self-censorship in many universities. That's according to the New York Times. Pano Canelos, the former president of St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, said he was leaving his job there to run the university, a move he announced in former New York Times writer Bari Weiss's newsletter. Weiss is also a part of the university. Historian Neil Ferguson, Palantir Technologies co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and evolutionary biologist Heather Hying also helped Canales conceive the mission of the college. Other big names have also been cited as part of UATX's board.

Lawrence Summers, the former Harvard president, Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist, playwright David Mamet, and economist Glenn Lowry, according to the New York Times. On Monday, for what it's worth, Pinker and Robert Zimmer, the University of Chicago chancellor who was also named on the board, announced that they had stepped down. Details of that are still emerging. The school plans to expand to master's programs and then undergraduate courses after offering its initial launch course, and tuition is expected

to be about $30,000 a year once it is up and running, which is about half the average cost of a private university tuition. They've raised $10 million so far and hired seven full-time staff members and are hoping to raise $250 million to launch the school. They're also currently applying for accreditation and hoping to build a physical campus where undergraduate programs can begin in 2024. Below, we're going to take a look at some thoughts from the right and the left, and then my team. First up, we'll start with what the right is saying. So the right is supportive of the new school, saying it's great news for higher education. In Bloomberg, Neal Ferguson, who is on the board of advisors, wrote about why he's helping form the college. Something is rotten in the state of academia and it is no laughing matter, Ferguson said.

Grade inflation, spiraling costs, corruption and racial discrimination in admissions, junk content published in risable journals, above all the erosion of academic freedom and the ascendancy of a liberal successor ideology known to its critics as wokeism, which manifests itself as career-ending cancellations and speaker disinvitations, but less visibly generates a pervasive climate of anxiety and self-censorship. Having taught at several universities, including Cambridge, Oxford, New York University, and Harvard, I've also come to doubt that the existing universities can be swiftly cured of their current pathologies. In Heterodox Academy's 2020 Campus Expression Survey, 62% of sampled college students agreed that the climate on their campus prevented them from saying

things they believed, up from 55% in 2019, while 41% were reluctant to discuss politics in a classroom, up from 32% in 2019. Some 60% of students said they were reluctant to speak up in class because they were concerned other students would criticize their views as being offensive. Such anxieties are far from groundless. In City Journal, Jacob Howland wrote of finally getting some good news in higher education. As our elite universities sink into the muck of activism, demand increases for genuine teaching and learning, and the supply is growing of good professors who have left or been pushed out of dying institutions,

Howland said. Many, including me, have argued that the time is ripe to start a new university. The master plan for UATX describes it as committed to open inquiry, freedom of conscience, and civil discourse, and fiercely independent financially, intellectually, and politically. It draws inspiration from Yale's 1974 Woodward Report with its defense of the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the

unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable. Talk is cheap, but Canoa's plan is serious. UATX is backed by distinguished and independent minds, Hallin said. This group is long on courage. Hersey Ali lives under the threat of death from Islamists, while Weiss, Heather Hying, Peter Bogeson, and Kathleen Stock resigned from positions at the New York Times, Evergreen State College, Portland State University, and the University of Sussex, respectively, after weathering sustained and vicious attacks from their colleagues and students. In the Washington Examiner, Quinn Hillier said that the University of Austin could reawaken respectively after weathering sustained and vicious attacks from their colleagues and students. In the Washington Examiner, Quinn Hillier said that the University of Austin could reawaken true learning. The new University of Austin will stand against cancel culture, speech codes,

leftist indoctrinations, safe spaces for students who can't bear opinions different from their own, obsessions with race and sex to the exclusion of substance, racial preferences and admissions, and hugely expensive administrative staff, Hillier wrote. True open-mindedness, not ideological straitjackets, will be the norm. What the incredibly diverse board members all have in common is a commitment to the idea of a university as a place that doesn't force answers on students through ideological intimidation, but instead encourages queries aimed at rigorous, unfettered pursuit of truth. Note the word pursuit, which indicates a cast of mind favoring inquiry over the hidebound certainty you are likely to get on most campuses. All right, that is it for what the right is saying, and this is what the left is saying.

The left is opposed to the new school, saying it is the latest grift from people who overstate the threat of cancel culture and progressive politics. In Politico, Wesleyan president Michael S. Roth said new schools usually carve out a space for themselves by offering a novel idea. The University of Austin makes space for itself in this ecosystem, however, not with a bold new idea, but by attacking other species already out there, Roth said. Its own justification for launching is that other institutions suffer not from being adequately devoted to truth, but from a lack of civility, from a failure to protect free speech, and from being too tied to the elite liberal consensus that has been branded lately as wokeness. We've heard such complaints again and again from moderate and conservative

critics at odds with the students and faculty devoted to such things as rooting out racism, treating less conventional people with respect, and eradicating gender-based violence and discrimination. Most of the critics are themselves in favor of these things in principle, but they fear that through a combination of self-righteousness, hypocrisy, and groupthink, campus cultures have gone too far. I realize that the University of Austin is trying to raise money from donors whose wallets will open more quickly when they hear complaints about woke warriors or pronoun police, but you shouldn't misleadingly disparage higher education in general in order to make a place for yourself, especially when declaring one's own devotion to truth. In New York Magazine, Sarah Jones said, this is nothing new. In 1971, the televangelist

Jerry Falwell embarked on an ambitious new venture, she wrote. With the help of Elmore Townes, a Christian academic, he founded a new institution of higher education, Liberty University. Fowler had grand dreams for his new school, as his official biography on Liberty's website makes clear. Not only would it function as an ideological factory for churning out new conservative activists, it would do so on a grand scale. Liberty wasn't Falwell's first education experiment either. He previously founded a K-12 school as a segregation academy. Before wokeness entered the right-wing's lexicon, desegregation was the enemy of the hour. Decades later, the right remains fixated on education, agitating over the alleged prevalence of critical race theory in public schools and the hysterical

excesses of college liberals, Jones wrote. Kanellos is half right. There is a free speech crisis in higher education, but it exists on campuses like Liberty's, where students and faculty have long complained of censorship from zealous administrators. My alma mater, a Christian university much like Liberty, actively restricted the content we could publish in our student newspaper. A trustee once complained that I had used the phrase reproductive rights in an article. Nevertheless, Canelo ignores these examples to single out Yale and Stanford and Harvard. In MSNBC, Caitlin Burns said this might be the best cancel culture grift yet. The school purports to teach students unthinkable ideas that the founders say they are currently being persecuted for espousing in traditional academia. But the supposed university is unaccredited, and it doesn't offer any degrees.

Instead, it appears to be the latest and largest in the long line of cancel culture-related grifts, she wrote. On my podcast, Cancel Me Daddy, we call this cancel culture grift economy, the general idea that there are certain social rewards that come with being canceled. So-called controversial or forbidden ideas have a veneer of guilty pleasure. Things that are illegal or taboo have always been attractive to people. It's like having your first drink of alcohol when you're a teenager. It's this attractiveness that helps cancel culture grifts pay off, she wrote. There's no universally agreed-upon definition of getting canceled, and it's claimed for a wide variety of consequences for terrible speech or actions, from losing a job to getting doxxed to mild intellectual disagreement.

All right, that is it for the right and the left's take, which brings us to my take. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th,

only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Thank you. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca. So there's so much here to say, it's kind of hard to know where to start.

The most cogent criticism of the people behind this new university seems rather obvious, and I'm struck by how few people are pointing it out. While the group advocates heterodox thinking on the battlefield of ideas, they are a rather homogeneous group on two issues many of them spend most of their time incessantly talking about besides free speech, which is race and trans issues. Now, I'll confess, I don't know the views of every single person involved. Some two dozen people have been associated with the school's founding, but I've read much of the work of at least 10 involved. Some two dozen people have been associated with the school's founding, but I've read much of the work of at least 10 of them,

and I've taken cursory looks at the others, and their views on how our country should navigate racism and trans people, which are two of the biggest issues in the country, are nearly uniform. Bari Weiss, too, is a complex character. I'm a regular reader of her work and truly have enjoyed much of what she's written. I also struggle to understand why she has become such a pariah on the left, but as a Jew who often feels politically homeless, I see some of my own story in her. She is Jewish, right of center, pro-Israel, gay, a former New York Times writer who said she was shunned from her old job

and then launched an extremely successful newsletter on Substack, which I did too, thank you everybody, to get control over her own work. In short, she seems, as I often say about myself, politically incongruent, constantly changing her mind, and I think she would say legitimately invested in free speech, which I am also. But she also has a history seemingly at odds with the quest she claims to be on now. In college, Weiss ran an organization that worked to make it easier to file complaints against professors. She also targeted Arab faculty for speech she believed was hostile to Israel. Jewish Currents put it like this, Weiss has a long history of claiming to support free speech while trying to curtail the speech

of Palestinian rights advocates from her college days through her years at the Times. As I wrote in Friday's Subscribers Only edition, which you should go read if you haven't yet, I am exasperated by America's victimhood culture. Part of that victimhood is people claiming they are being silenced or canceled or celebrating their own bravery for speaking out about things that are not actually taboo. As Will Wilkinson recently pointed out, a cadre of these heterodox thinkers likes to pat each other on the back for selling the impishly defiant thrill that washes over a person when expressing a popular but slightly controversial opinion. Wilkinson says that an example of a plausible claim that is genuinely risky to express

would be to say something like, tons of our brave troops are guilty of literal murder. Meanwhile, Weiss and others celebrate the bravery of saying things like, men and women are different, a belief the vast majority of American public believes, and 99 out of 100 people you stop on the street would affirm. I think he has a pretty good point there. There's not a ton of actually controversial or daring things being said by some of these people who are forming this university. But don't misunderstand me. I am very happy about this news,

truly and unabashedly. I am so tired of people in our country complaining about things from the peanut gallery and then refusing to do anything besides whine on social media about it. Well, I don't think the group behind UATX are heroic warriors saving the country with unrelenting courage, I do think they're right that many of America's best-known colleges are increasingly censorious, illiberal, and uniform in thought. The dangers of that reality shouldn't be understated. And kudos to this group for leaving their jobs and focusing on trying to build something better instead of just complaining about it from the sidelines. There is far too little of that today. In fact, I'll take

it a step further. The school seems so interesting to me, and interesting enough to me, that I'm going to try and enroll in a class or two. I am, in no uncertain terms, very intrigued to see what a forbidden course is, and very curious to know how this college looks and feels differently from the Pennsylvania State School I attended. I'd pay a couple thousand bucks to find out. It may very well be that these folks fall on their faces. Starting a college seems incredibly hard, but they deserve some credit for trying, and they're clearly sincere in their convictions. Anyone viewing them as a threat must implicitly understand the weakness of higher education as they exist now. And even if UATX fails, the demand and attention it's getting may push the colleges we already have

towards a more liberal, in the literal sense, future. All right, so today's reader question comes from an anonymous reader in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They wrote, I am getting frustrated on both sides about the idea of election tampering fraud. It doesn't seem like it's an issue that's going away anytime soon before 2022 and beyond. How do we get to a point where people believe election results again? Man, I really don't know. Obviously, I've written a lot about election fraud or the lack thereof, and I've stated repeatedly my belief that the 2020 election was free, fair, and above board, despite the madness of mail-in balloting and the many initially semi-plausible conspiracy theories that have percolated online about how the election was stolen.

Many of you have found me through my writing about election fraud, which was debunking, for lack of a better word, many of the claims that were out there. But so far, I've yet to find a good way to talk anyone out of their beliefs en masse. I have debated people on radio shows live. I have tweeted hundreds of explanations. I've gone down the rabbit hole of just about every fraud claim I could ferret out. I've talked to people in bars.

I've talked to friends on the phone. I've Skyped with strangers who I didn't even know just to have an hour-long video chat about claims of fraud. And from all that work, I've maybe had a half dozen readers and followers tell me that I've changed their mind. So I'm not really sure what the best answer is. I mean, in this week's This American Life podcast, producers followed around Ed McBroom, who is the Michigan Republican who produced a report on his state's elections that debunk

claims of election fraud. Every time McBroom leaves his house, he's confronted by people claiming fraud, and he actually takes the time to stop and explain every single suspicion they have. This is a Michigan elected official. And each time, the conversation ends not with their minds changed, but with them feeling suspicious of McBroom just for having an answer for everything they bring up. And the only reason he has an answer is because the complaints, the suspicions, are so redundant. They're the same across nearly every person. So he's looked in all of them and figured all of them out. And yet even that doesn't work. In one instance in the podcast, it's truly mind blowing. A resident with no stated election training, no political background whatsoever, just someone who's a constituent of his,

says at the conclusion of McBroom explaining away every single allegation this guy has, I mean, they spend 30 minutes talking to each other, that he just didn't believe that McBroom explaining away every single allegation this guy has. I mean, they spend 30 minutes talking to each other that he just didn't believe that McBroom, the man who helps run Michigan's elections, had the expertise to find the fraud. So this resident who has no background, no expertise, gets all these things explained to him and then settles on this idea that the person who just explained it to him doesn't actually know what he's talking about. And the resident goes on believing that their internet sleuthing uncovered actual fraud that overturned the election. I'm not sure how to operate in that world. I mean, it's a dichotomy I don't know how to break. Of course, it's not just Trump supporters. Plenty of people on the

left still believe Trump was the one who is an illegitimate president and that he stole the 2016 election. Liberals have leveled quite a few baseless allegations of stolen elections just in the last decade alone. When extensive audits, even by the aggrieved party, news reporting, and the many court rulings and publicly available evidence can't rebuild voter trust, I really don't know what can. So I don't know how to answer your question. It's a scary thought. But yeah, I think the sentiment of distrust in our elections is growing. It's going in the wrong direction right now. All right. That brings us to our story that matters today. This one is about the Biden

administration, which is expected to begin the process of expanding COVID-19 booster shots, according to Axios' Caitlin Owens. Just 36% of Americans 65 and up have gotten their booster shots, according to the CDC, and the Biden administration wants to get more people shots before the holiday season arrives. New York City, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and West Virginia, and Arkansas have already approved boosters for all adults, which experts say should be taken some six to eight months after initial inoculation to maintain immunity. Dr. Anthony Fauci said, I believe it's extremely important for people to get boosters, and I am hoping very soon we will see a situation where there won't be any confusion about who should and should not get booster shots. You can see the whole story from Axios. out who should and should not get booster shots. You can see the whole story from Axios. There's a link to it in today's newsletter. All right, next up is our numbers section. This one's related

to our main story. 48.3% is the percentage of college student Republicans who said they would be somewhat or very reluctant to give their views on a controversial topic in class. 31.5% is the percentage of college student Democrats who said they would be somewhat or very reluctant to give their views on a controversial topic in class. 31.5% is the percentage of college student Democrats who said they would be somewhat or very reluctant to give their views on a controversial political topic in class. 47.1% is the percentage of seniors across 100 universities who said their political leanings had changed during college. 30.3% is the percentage of those students who said they became more liberal. 16.8% is the percentage of those students who said they became more liberal. 16.8% is the percentage of those students who said they became more conservative. All right, that is it for our numbers section. That brings us to our final section.

I should do drum rolls more. This is the have a nice day section section and it's just a goofy one that i found i loved uh a new zealand couple has dug up what they believe is the largest potato ever found i want you to guess how big this potato is i'll be honest actually when i saw this headline i was imagining the potato was bigger than it actually is but it's still huge When they put the potato on a scale, it was a stunning 17.4 pounds. We couldn't believe it, Donna Craig Brown, who found it while weeding her garden, said it was just huge. I think the coolest part of this, I should say, by the way, is that this potato is not like genetically engineered to be giant. These people just accidentally dug it up in their own garden. The couple's potato has garnered them global acclaim, and they're

awaiting a Guinness Book of World Records ruling on whether it's the largest potato ever found. The current heaviest potato on record is 5 kilograms, but this couple's potato weighed in at 7.8 kilograms. In the meantime, Donna's husband Colin said he is parading the potato around town in a toy dump truck for their neighbors to enjoy, basking up the glory of now having the most famous potato in the world. This guy apparently is also like an amateur vodka maker. So he's talking about maybe brewing the potato into vodka, which I have to admit is pretty cool. NPR anyway has an awesome story about that. If you want to check it out, the links in today's newsletter. All right, that's it for our Have a Nice Day story. That is it for

today's podcast. Before you go, you know what I'm going to say. Just actually do it today. You know, I tell you this every day. Make today the day where you go do it. Just open the app, click the link in the app, go support our podcast. Or if you've already done that, give us a five-star rating. Or if you've already done that, give us a five-star rating. Or if you've already done that, just go tell somebody. Just send today's podcast to somebody and say, hey, I love this political podcast. You should check it out. We need you guys to help us spread the word. Thank you so much for your support. As always, if you want more information, you can go to readtangle.com or you could just email me, Isaac, I-S-A-A-C, at readtangle.com.

I respond to every email that comes into my inbox. That's my guarantee. All right, everybody. See you tomorrow. Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle's social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who also helped create our logo. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com. Thanks for watching! Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural

who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease.

Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad

and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucelvax.ca.