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University of Austin Draws over 3k Employment Inquiries in Four Days
- chrisseaton 5y agoTitle completely misses the actual key part of it: > Newly-Announced Free Speech-Focused University of Austin Draws Over 3,000 Employment Inquiries in Four Days
- jdhn 5y agoI'm really curious to see if this experiment works out. Looking at their website, it seems that they don't have any land whatsoever, so does that mean this is going to be 100% virtual for now? They also don't offer degrees, so is this basically a glorified Khan Academy for the time being? Also, it remains to be seen if they can resist the same forces that they say have overrun other universities in the country.
- blagie 5y agoIt's planning to be 100% in-person. They are looking into acquiring land. My own opinion is they should buy a large (university-scale) plot of land far enough from Austin that land is cheap.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- chrisseaton 5y ago> they don't have any land whatsoever Vast majority of organisations don't own any land - they lease office space.
- djbusby 5y agoUniversity generally has some land they built on, granted by the State (UCB, UW, UMass, VT) or some rich guy (Stanford, Harvard, Yale, etc)
- chrisseaton 5y agoRight but you don’t need any of that really - you just need normal office space.
- dragonwriter 5y ago[flagged]
- tmh88j 5y ago>“I had one Texas mom email me who said she was crying at the possible opportunity for her children, and a very successful businessman who said, ‘my children may now have a place to go to school.” Not a single university in the world is acceptable for their families? Are they looking for an education or a club to join?
- UncleMeat 5y agoA lot of people have been fooled into believing that traditional universities are places that brainwash their children to become marxists. These people are then unwilling to send their children to these institutions and instead seek out places like Liberty that market themselves as alternatives. Liberty bills itself as explicitly conservative. This one markets itself as focusing on "free speech", but that means something very clear to the target audience.
- scruple 5y agoWell don't keep it a secret. What does it mean to the target audience?
- UncleMeat 5y agoThe "free speech in higher education crowd" are reacting to perceived leftist influence in traditional universities. This means conservative belief systems about labor, colonialism, race, gender, and sexuality.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- finite_jest 5y agoI think one could argue that the main benefit of attending a university is indeed "joining a club".
- kome 5y agogood luck to them.
- spoonjim 5y agoI don’t think these guys have enough money to make it as a university. Where’s their anchor billionaire? Are they doing this Lean Startup style?
- blagie 5y agoThe US has around 5000 universities. Not all of them were started by anchor billionaires.
- dragonwriter 5y agoIts not a for-profit business, its a donation driven — funded by a 501c3 and seeking its own 501c3 status — entity leveraging political tribal identity to target small donors and with large donors motivated by its political propaganda aims. The main risk it faces is that entities with similar propaganda mission and appealing to similar tribal identity are already thick on the ground, but that hasn't seemed to be a major problem for new entities in the space recently, so I wouldn't bet against them succeeding to the extent of creating an durable operation, even if its never anything credible as a university.
- chmod600 5y agoAt universities, ideas which were once countercultural and revolutionary have become the mainstream orthodoxy. I'm not sure anyone has quite confronted that reality yet. It seems almost like an army that won much more easily than they expected, and now doesn't quite know what to do off the battlefield. I hope this university is able to balance these ideas into more of a discussion and less of a battle.
- seoaeu 5y ago> ideas which were once countercultural and revolutionary have become the mainstream orthodoxy In the abstract, isn't this a good thing? Like this true of lots of scientific advances. Germ theory or whatever initially being seen as a fringe idea, eventually being adopted as the leading explanation
- seneca 5y ago> In the abstract, isn't this a good thing? Like this true of lots of scientific advances. Germ theory or whatever initially being seen as a fringe idea, eventually being adopted as the leading explanation This is a cultural revolution, not a scientific one. Scientific ideas replacing proven-false ones is a good thing. Cultural crusades, especially those spread through intimidation and bullying, have next to nothing in common with that though.
- seoaeu 5y agoIt sounds like you're saying that new scientific ideas replacing old ones can be good, but new cultural ideas replacing olds ones is always bad? That's a position, but I don't quite see why I should agree with it. There are aspects of any society that can be improved!
- seneca 5y agoI said nothing of the kind. I said comparing a cultural revolution to a scientific one is nonsense.
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- fearfulofview4 5y agoThere’s a grifter born every minute.
- mattkrause 5y agoIt’s not obvious to me that this reflects anything special about this particular model for a university. Instead, I think it reflects the utter horrow-show that is the academic job market and, to some extent, the terrible matching in the rest of the job market as well. Individual job postings at “regular” mid-tier universities attract hundreds of applicants, many of whom are extremely qualified.
- karaterobot 5y ago> Individual job postings at “regular” mid-tier universities attract hundreds of applicants, many of whom are extremely qualified. But if this is an order of magnitude more job inquiries than average, might that not reflect something different about the model? Maybe something as banal as "it attracted a lot of attention", but surely a 5x or 10x difference is indicative of something.
- mattkrause 5y agoThey’re presumably hiring for multiple jobs though, which knocks that number right back down. I’ve heard of individual tenure-track jobs attracting 750 full applications. Low hundreds is probably more typical, depending on the school, year, and field (and 2020-1 has been absolutely bonkers), but it still wouldn’t take many to get to 3k total. This is especially true if counting informal “inquiries” rather than a complete application, which often involves quite a bit of customized writing (research plans, teaching statement, etc).
- mercy_dude 5y agoAh the good old fashioned ways to increase the administrative bureaucratic arms of university. And then we wonder how university education cost has ballooned over 150% inflation in 10years.
- jitl 5y agoIt’s frustrating how much culture wars content is posted and upvoted on Hacker News these days. I feel like we can’t go a single day without these dog-whistle style articles.
- evgen 5y ago[flagged]
- kodah 5y ago... alt-right? Would that not be pretty neo-nazi and white supremacy esque? This story hardly seems that. I do get tired of low-key culture war content, but we're always surrounded by it. The left or the right trying to push their perspectives on the masses. It's gross, annoying, and probably bad in the long run but people love the left and the right like it's their favorite football team. They get buzzed on how the decisions the other has made disproportionately affect each other's groups. They love calling out the gotchas, embarrassing their opponents, and brewing on how short-sighted and stupid they are. It weirdly gives some people a sense of community, and they rally around it. It's like fusion in that way. It feeds itself.
- ianleeclark 5y ago> alt-right? Would that not be pretty neo-nazi and white supremacy esque? I don't really want to engage in the shit-slinging that this thread will inevitably turn into/has turned into, but: alt-right, by many accounts, is a response of neo-reactionary thought and neo-reactionary writers were a common part of online silicon-valley-adjacent communities. It's not just tiki torches. > I do get tired of low-key culture war content, but we're always surrounded by it. I would suggest you log off then because: > They love calling out the gotchas, embarrassing their opponents, and brewing on how short-sighted Android stupid they are. Not even you can control yourself. This is the culture war: people burning their Nikes on Twitter, people posting their RBJ commemorative mugs on Insta, and you falling into the vortex yourself to kvetch about both sides--no doubt someone will show up to say how their _not like those other people_. None of us can help ourselves. We love to post
- seoaeu 5y agoThe article claims the university has a "diverse board of founding trustees and advisors", but amusingly the actual page has photos in black-and-white which is a frequent trick to obscure the lack of (racial) diversity Edit: It also says that "UATX will ... eschew federal and state funding to maintain independence from government-imposed programs and excessive regulation" which sounds like it might be related to dodging Title IX?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago[flagged]
- seneca 5y ago> Seems like right-wing speech will be the most free there. It's insane to me that "we won't mandate ideological orthodoxy" is some how a right-wing idea.
- alphabettsy 5y agoIt’s not. It’s something they claim as if right-wing institutions allow any sort of ideological diversity.
- evgen 5y agoIt is not a right-wing idea, what is a right-wing idea is the notion that other universities do mandate ideological orthodoxy.
- UncleMeat 5y agoIt isn't a right wing idea. Instead, it is plainly obvious what a university that says this actually means.
- jimmygrapes 5y agoAnd what might that be? I've seen a lot of comments from you in this thread with similarly vague references, but you seem averse to saying exactly what ideology you expect this university to espouse.
- UncleMeat 5y agoI'll repeat another comment. This means conservative belief systems about labor, colonialism, race, gender, and sexuality.
- toiletfuneral 5y agoFor real. Whenever I hear "diversity of ideas" I know for a fact there won't be any Polanyi, Marx or Bakunin etc...
- wyldfire 5y ago> DOESN'T IT TAKE SOME UNIVERSITIES A DECADE TO RECEIVE ACCREDITATION? > Our conversations with our accredited partners lead us to believe that we'll have a much shorter time frame than that. But we're not waiting for accreditation to get started on our programming. Until it is accredited, UATX will offer ... If you are graduating high school soon, I'd recommend not betting on this University until/unless they're accredited.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- shukantpal 5y agoThey aren’t offering degrees.
- v3rt3x 5y agoI imagine the prospect of not having to author Maoist style diversity statements and other indignities will be quite a draw. Universities have become inhospitable and intolerant places for even politically moderate folks. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/11/19/mathematician-comes-out-against-mandatory-diversity-statements-while-others-say-they https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/11/19/mathematician...
- sharklazer 5y agoYou aren’t down to sign another Great Loyalty Oath. You can put your Washington Irving right there.
- gatlin 5y agoTo keep the parent comment honest, the word "Mao" doesn't appear once in this article; and in fact, near the top they use McCarthyism as an example of the type of "indignity" spoken of. Why a phenomenon identified in western society in the article needs to be made into some jab at maoists is beyond me though.
- redwood 5y agoIt's because the current illiberal bias on the university campus comes from the left so folks on the right are tying it to Maoism. Thanks for flagging that McCarthy mention though because this type of illiberalism can certainly come from either direction
- gatlin 5y agoSincerely, much respect.
- deanCommie 5y ago> The first named members of the UATX founding faculty include philosopher and outspoken feminist Kathleen Stock, who as a professor at the University of Sussex sparked controversy for stating that transgender women are not biologically women and for her support of a ban on transgender women in women’s bathrooms and giving puberty blockers to minor children. Bigots always can't help but give themselves away. "Caution about giving medical treatment to children?" Seems reasonable by default. "Transgender women are not biologically women?" Well people disagree on what the definition of what a biological woman is but I understand what you're trying to say and sure there are of course relevant biological differences. Trans women can get prostate cancer. Some biology is relevant. "Ban transgender women in women's bathroom?" Errr. You've given yourself away. This makes absolutely no sense. I don't go look at people's genitals when I go to the bathroom. Are you? Are butch lesbians supposed to go to men's bathrooms? We should do away with gender segregated bathrooms entirely and make inclusive privacy-focused spaces where you do your private business behind closed doors and interact at communal sinks and mirrors that do not require gender separation. But including this in your agenda reveals yourself as an illogical bigot, and the motivation for the rest of your arguments becomes invalid. Deep breath. Which is exactly the situation with the University of Austin. "We are committed to these long-held ideals of the pursuit of truth, academic freedom, open inquiry, and spirited debate." That sounds fantastic! I agree with these concepts too! But...the people you now hire are going to speak volumes about what these words ACTUALLY mean to you. If your pursuit of truth and open inquiry means exploring various justifications for restricting the lives of trans people, exploring only evidence that doubts climate change, and twisting data to try to establish risks of vaccinations, well...
- didibus 5y agoYa, it seems way too political from the onset, I suspect it'll grow into more of a partisan train wreck then something truly about the objective truth. But hey, I hope not, and awesome if it can be a really objective place, but it definitely is not starting as one from what this article mentions.
- dryst 5y agoThey could even get some wealthy and politically sympathetic billionaires to fund them. I'm betting a Koch-Musk University will have them salivating.
- poulsbohemian 5y ago“…committed to ideological diversity and academic freedom.” I mean… isn’t that a way to describe the charter of many universities? It’s practically a definition of the tenure model. Perhaps they are arguing that’s been lost in many universities, to which I would question why they believe a new university is a) the answer to the question and b) likely to somehow do any better. Smacks of someone who simply has a different perspective on diversity and freedom rather than a goal of increasing it.
- newaccount2021 5y agoHave you been asleep for twenty five years?
- NotSammyHagar 5y agoYes, that's the usual ideals of universities. The difference is that usually it comes along with not being allowed to make extremely hateful or racist or sexist comments. There's a certain part of american society that has lost their ability to see this distinction and thinks that they should be able to attack other people, say they are not legitimate humans. They think, wrongly in my view, that they aren't free if they can't attack people in this way.
- ergot_vacation 5y ago"that usually it comes along with not being allowed to make extremely hateful or racist or sexist comments" Unless that hatred, racism and sexism is targeted at white males. Then it's "punching up" (even though those doing it are usually far better off than those targeted) and is perfectly ok! Both the left and the right reject "illegitimate humans." They just define legitimacy differently.
- rkk3 5y agoDo you find the Yale Trap House email [1] "extremely hateful or racist"? What about physicist Dorian Abbot's views on Affirmative action? 1. https://freebeacon.com/campus/a-yale-law-student-sent-a-lighthearted-email-inviting-classmates-to-his-trap-house-the-school-is-now-calling-him-to-account/ https://freebeacon.com/campus/a-yale-law-student-sent-a-ligh...
- alphabettsy 5y agoUniversity of Austin sounds a lot like a safe space.