Substack University
That's the real analogy to what the University of Austin is about
The School of Athens by Raphael (1509–1510), fresco at the Apostolic Palace, Vatican City
Everybody is talking about the project announced today on Bari Weiss’s newsletter: a new university, dedicated to free inquiry, the pursuit of truth, and resistance to the rising tide of bad ideas that Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt described and criticized in their book, The Coddling of the American Mind. Called the University of Austin, and headed by Pano Kanelos, the outgoing president of St. John’s College, what appears to be aborning doesn’t sound much like a traditional university. But it also doesn’t sound like a Trump University-style grift, which is what it’s being roundly mocked for being.
It doesn’t sound like a normal university for a host of reasons. The program doesn’t sound like it will offer traditional degrees in academic departments. They don’t plan to wait for accreditation to offer programming, which means people who sign up at least initially won’t be getting a “degree” with any market value. Nor does it sound like the institution will be researched-focused in the manner of a traditional university; it’s not even clear whether they will have a proper dedicated faculty. Rather, what it sounds like they’re going to offer is a program that brings various luminaries in who have other, full-time positions—as academics, journalists, entrepreneurs, what-have-you—to do stints teaching classes, with a staff whose function is to plan a slate of such offerings and an advisory board from whom a starting lineup of tutors could be drawn.
It doesn’t sound like Trump University though because it’s quite clear that they’re not trying to sell you on the monetary value of their offering, which is a pretty weird choice for a scam to make. Trump University claimed it would teach you how to get rich in real estate. The University of Austin is promising that it will give you experience in learning how to think, in the company of and tutored by already-accomplished thinkers. That might turn out to be a glorified TEDx or an even less-edifying intellectual circle jerk—it’s too soon to say. But it’s less obviously a scam aimed at separating marks from their money than many accredited masters programs at legitimate academic institutions are.
What it really sounds like is Substack.
It’s not just that the mission as described is all about criticism of existing academic institutions, much as too many newsletters are focused on criticism of existing media. The first faculty—Peter Boghossian and Kathleen Stock—are both academic refugees who were hounded out of the universities that employed them, much as a key contingent of Substack writers are successful journalists who were hounded out of their newspapers and magazines. A number of those very Substackers have joined their board of advisors, in fact. But most importantly, the value proposition is very similar to the Substack value proposition: that people will pay—in time and, presumably, money—for an intellectual product that is far more bare-bones than its traditional competitors, because the content is so distinctively compelling.
Will that pan out? I wouldn’t bet on it, but I wouldn’t have bet on Substack either. Disintermediation is a powerful thing. People already pay enough for the leading Substack subscriptions to compete with the cost of many magazines, for a fraction of the overhead. If it turns out that they can offer a compelling educational product at a remarkably low price point, because they don’t have nearly any of the expenses associated with running an actual university, and you can attract marquee names to teach, maybe people will pay for it. They certainly pay for online master classes, and this program offers far more substantial interaction, and in person too. Even if it changes nothing about higher education, it could be a perfectly exploitable niche.
Could it actually change higher education, though? Again, I think Substack provides a useful analogy. What Substack—along with podcasting and other mechanisms by which creators can reach their audiences directly—has done is make it clear to legacy media that their “stars” can always pack their bags if they aren’t happy and strike out on their own. That dramatically reduces those stars’ incentives to play things the company way when push comes to shove. Indeed, it reduces their incentive to make any investment in the institution at all. It’s less clear, though, that Substack has created a viable career path for very many new creators. Similarly, I can see how a semester teaching at the University of Austin might seem like fun to Steven Pinker, and it’s at least conceivable that the program’s existence, if it succeeds, could give him more leverage vis-a-vis Harvard than he already has. But it’s less obvious to me that it offers a viable career path for people who want to teach college students who aren’t already marquee names in the “heterodox academy.” And, again, since it appears to be all about teaching, not research, it’s never going to be a “university” as we have come to understand it.
But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be something. In principle, I applaud efforts to create diversity among institutions and not just within institutions. The University of Tulsa as it has been transformed sounds like no place I would want to study or teach, but it is certainly trying to become something specific, and in my view the more honest it is about that specificity the better. I feel the same way about this experiment, which looks like it aims to be Tulsa’s diametric opposite. Let a hundred flowers bloom, as it were. The world of education could use quite a few more folks like Lucien Lucan Nunn with idiosyncratic ideas that they aim to impress firmly on the institutions they found. That’s the only way to get out of a local maximum and discover new ways of doing things that are vastly better than what we’ve got now. It’s also the best way to serve a genuinely diverse world full of different kinds of people who would thrive in very different environments. But mostly it just makes the world a whole lot more interesting. Indeed, if there’s anything that disappoints me about the announcement, it’s the degree to which it doesn’t sound that weird or different, or like it aims to create a distinct and thick culture, one that didn’t rely on the cachet of its journalistically buzzy board.
All of which is to say: I’d be a lot more curious if it sounded less like a Substack.
(But don’t get me wrong: I’m happy you’re subscribing. Please tell you friends to subscribe too!)