A week later
Hm, not going so well.
University of Chicago chancellor Robert Zimmer is distancing himself from the University of Austin, a newly announced institution that’s drawn scrutiny for its critiques of higher education and politicized nature, officials announced today.
Jeez. After a week?
Zimmer was initially listed as a member of the board of advisers when the website was launched last week, but he has since stepped aside, a U of C spokesman confirmed.
The school is being established to combat cancel culture and promote intellectual diversity, its founders say. They also lamented that higher education is fundamentally broken and that elite schools are failing students.
And Bari Weiss is front and center, which…
“University of Chicago Chancellor Robert J. Zimmer was asked to serve in an advisory role (without fiduciary, oversight or management responsibilities) to the newly formed University of Austin by its founding president, Dr. Pano Kanelos,” the U of C said in a statement. “Chancellor Zimmer informed Dr. Kanelos on Nov. 11 that he was resigning from the advisory board, noting that ‘the new university made a number of statements about higher education in general, largely quite critical, that diverged very significantly from my own views.’ The University of Chicago is committed to upholding the core value of free expression as articulated by our faculty and university leaders over many decades, most recently in the faculty committee Report of the Committee on Free Expression, now widely known as the Chicago Principles.”
In other words they carried on as if they were the first people ever to talk about the value of free expression, so it all seemed a little bit…Bari Weiss.
I hadn’t heard of this until you posted about it. Reading about it University of Austin sounded mildly intriguing until I got to the line that the current nonprofit temporarily supporting them seems to be a group that aims to: “create and distribute non-partisan documents recommending free-market based solutions to public policy issues,” and “produce and distribute non-partisan educational materials about the importance of preserving Texan policies, values and history”. That and the university president trying to forge connections with UT’s new libertarian think tank.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/11/08/university-austin-founders-college-culture/
Makes me worry it will just be a secular liberty university preaching their own brand of dogma. I suppose we will see. A bit surprised to see Kathleen Stock will be teaching in their proposed summer program. I feel like the currently prominent version of anti-cancel culture in the USA is so far to the right of the UK version. I can’t imagine she’s unaware of the difference.
Apologies for the double post. Reviewing their website makes it look more like a grift to be honest. No proposed undergraduate programs, only costly MA degrees. Already Steven Pinker backed out. Looks shady as all hell. Certainly a way to get donations. Guess we’ll see.
Really. I saw Bari Weiss was involved, and I read some of the information, and it was Intellectual Dark Web V2.0.
It’s an epidemic!
I may be weird in that I actually like Bari Weiss but also realize she’s deliberately stupid about Judaism/Zionism.
A university founded on what’s currently wrong in universities doesn’t offer much of a solution. Sounds like a gated community, which is fine if you need the kind of protection and isolation that provides; fences to keep the riff raff out, NIMBY rules, conforming structures and environment… A nice retirement plan from the messy world. :P
I must say, I am not really sure where vitriol for Bari Weiss comes from, outside of “she did some arguably-embarrassing campus activist things as an undergrad and it has become fashionable in the definitely-not-antisemitic Left to hate her for…reasons”.
The organisation FIRE, dedicated to protecting the freedom of academic expression for students and teachers, has investigated Weiss’ undergraduate activism and concluded that it was an exercise of free speech — she neither sought nor obtained the firing or resignation of any professors, for example; she simply protested what she perceived as some professors’ antisemitism. Such instances, according to her, include professors claiming that Jews have been deranged by the the Israeli occupation of Palestine to such an extent that one can identify it in how they walk, how they speak, how they greet and relate to one another. I’m not sure about you, but if I heard a professor of mine speaking in such a way, I might have a few thoughts about registering my disagreement with them in a public forum.
And sure, people can disagree over the whole thorny issue of Israel, but from what I can tell, Weiss’ position is “Israel has a right to exist and is beset on all sides by cynical state actors who keep thousands of Palestinians in their own open-air prisons rather than integrating them into their own societies, use Israel’s mere existence as an excuse for all kinds of malfeasance and failures to serve their own populations, and who all agreed up until very recently that the best development in the region would be to remove Israel from the map and remove all of the Jews from the Levant”. The first is an opinion, though one which is only commonly objected to in the particular case of Israel, and the latter are merely facts.
Now perhaps Weiss has written or said things I’ve missed which paint her as a Greater Israel-style Zionist, which I would happily agree is a foolish opinion whose effectuation would be worse even than the status quo. And those facts above do not absolve Israel for the crimes against humanity it has perpetrated and allowed (which also include forcibly removing Jewish families from Gaza against their will), nor do they justify Jewish fundamentalism and Greater Israel Zionism. But from what I have read, Weiss is *not* such a Zionist; she is a Zionist of the type that asserts Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation-state, in the same way Kurds assert Kurdistan’s right to exist as a Kurdish nation-state or the French assert France’s right to exist as a French nation-state.
Now, you can argue that the nation-state idea is outmoded or harmful or should be abolished, but then what counts for Israel also counts for all the others.
DD@7,
The relevance of Weiss’s actions as a student activist is that she’s a scorching hypocrite. She doesn’t believe, as you apparently do, that anything that FIRE says is not an attack on academic freedom is ok. She has repeatedly criticized students and other activists as enemies of free speech and academic freedom for doing the same kind of advocacy that she did.
And like most of her IDW-aligned brethren, her concerns with freedoms seem curiously focused on one part of the political spectrum. The fact that Sohrab Ahmari, a theocratic fascist who, in his own words, said ” I don’t, in fact, believe that the university can or should enshrine mere free speech or free inquiry as its highest ideal” was still invited to be part of the advisory board for this sham university speaks volumes.
I liked Katie Herzog’s thoughts on the matter; but I also liked and agree with Dan Kaufman’s critique.
Der Durchwanderer @7 – What vitriol do you mean? Do you mean here? I’m not seeing any vitriol. Non-affection, yes, but vitriol, no. I for one don’t know enough about her to be vitriolic, mostly because so far I’ve found her too boring to learn enough about her to be vitriolic, if you see what I mean. She sort of appeared out of nowhere as a Fully Formed Victim of The Intolerant Left, and it was just too generic for me to want to read up on her. Shorter: she’s not a Katie Herzog.
My attitude towards this University of Austin “project” is mostly one of bemusement. I mean, I think the entire thing is a mess of contradictions — the idea that you’re going to create a more liberated university by having faculty appointments be subject to strict scrutiny from the funders seems rather flawed, for reasons that Dan Drezner has pointed out at WaPo — and I suspect it’s never going to get off the ground in any serious way (perhaps it will end up as some series of online lectures rather than an actual degree-granting institution).
But it’s no skin off my nose if they “succeed.” If some rich folks want to throw money at this group to establish an alternative to “woke universities,” they can knock themselves out. If anyone wants to leave a position at an existing university to go work for these guys, that’s their choice. And if anyone wants to spend their time and money enrolling in this place, well, that’s their choice too, assuming the marketing is forthright about their accreditation status or lack thereof. There are plenty of accredited degree programs that are probably bigger mistakes.
@Diogenes@#9
Both are interesting takes, thanks for pointing then out.
Ophelia,
No, I don’t think I’d call comments on this thread vitriolic (though I do recall some other post where someone called Weiss “odious”, which I found odd at least). I have seen a general miasma of vitriol directed at Weiss on Twitter and in the odd column by the same sorts of (and often the very same) blue-checks who get deranged about Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog, something out of all proportion to anything I’ve actually read or heard from the woman.
More generally, this is (at least) the second time you have responded to one of my comments as though it were casting aspersions at you specifically or at the commentariat here. In the interests of avoiding becoming the new Skeletor around these parts, I feel I should clarify that I do not intend my tangential comments to be oblique references to you or other posters here; when I disagree with someone or something directly and feel it worthy of comment, I will say so explicitly (and hopefully respectfully enough to remain engaging). That means if I have written about something generally, as here with “…where vitriol from Bari Weiss comes from”, I hoped it could be taken as read that I had not meant “…where all this/your vitriol from Bari Weiss comes from”, though I can understand the implied accusation.
I will try to properly qualify such generalities in the future to reduce uncertainty, but I hope it is understood that if there is a good measure of doubt about whether I am accusing someone of something, it almost certainly means I am not.
I rather like Bari Weiss, and even if she is a little too preoccupied with religious Holy War foolishness for my taste, I find her writing/interviews interesting and very readable/watchable. I don’t see the hypocrisy that Screechy noted @8 either, it looks to me like she has matured and moved on. Who of us are in agreement with our 20 year old selves anyway. Not me.