Today, August 12, 2024, is the birthday of the University of Austin. This is the very first meeting of the assembled faculty and the first day of the first faculty orientation in the history of UATX. Today we begin to form our academic culture and to prepare for the arrival of our first class of undergraduates.
“Don’t you know,” Socrates asks when he first takes up the subject of educating the young in Plato’s Republic, “that the beginning is the most important part of every work?” We who are building the University of Austin do know this, and we recognize that the word arche, beginning, also means origin, first principle, and sovereign power. We trace our origin to the bold vision of our founders, who believed that universities should be dedicated to the pursuit of truth and the preservation, extension, and transmission of knowledge. The first principle of the University of Austin is our Mission, to “prepare thoughtful and ethical innovators, builders, leaders, public servants and citizens through open inquiry and civil discourse.” And when it comes to the core work of education, it is we professors who are sovereign.
Our students and faculty are of one mind in believing that truth is accessible, in part and in principle, to those who seek it.“A people,” Saint Augustine wrote, is “a multitudinous assemblage of rational beings united by concord regarding loved things held in common.” The same could be said of the University of Austin. We, too, are rational beings united by the shared love of truth. Our students and faculty are of one mind in believing that truth is accessible, in part and in principle, to those who seek it. We collectively affirm that truth is best pursued under conditions of intellectual pluralism, open inquiry, and civil discourse. And we take our stand on the solid and, in academia, exceedingly rare ground of a Constitution and a Bill of Rights. This combination of intellectual passion and principled concord promises to make our community of teaching and learning a genuine universitas: an abiding whole.
It would be hard to overstate the importance of the work we undertake today. Since October 7, some part of all the major stakeholders in higher education—donors, administrators, faculty, students, and parents; public intellectuals, corporate leaders, legislators, congressmen, and senators—have expressed alarm at the illiberalism that has overtaken American universities. People across North America, Europe, and the Anglophone countries of the Pacific, from university presidents and faculty to foundation directors and leaders in education policy, are looking to UATX as a beacon in darkness. They see us as the leader in higher-education reform, whose foresight, courage, and not-so-dumb luck put us in the right place to rebuild our imploding universities: a solemn and humble calling that is our joyful labor. Ours is an awesome responsibility, not least because everyone associated with this audacious start-up has incurred significant risk—especially our faculty, our students, and their parents. We are and must be bound together by substantial trust in one another and in the institution we are building. Let us never betray this sacred trust!
Fortunately, the University of Austin is uniquely poised to address the crisis of higher education. Business CEOs are desperate for graduates who can work in teams to analyze, synthesize, and communicate relevant information in accurate, economical, and perceptive speech and writing. Serious academics seek institutions where their scholarship and teaching need not conform to ideological imperatives. Liberally educated parents long to know that the happy education of their college days—which taught them the pleasures of learning for its own sake and provided them with marketable knowledge and skills—is still available to their sons and daughters.
We are prepared to deliver all of these things. We’ve assembled a faculty that prizes outstanding teaching and scholarship. You are intellectually and creatively ambitious and enterprising, and your culture is alive and vibrant. You greet any new branch of knowledge with generous and open minds, and, however prudent it might be career-wise, you have no interest in slavishly adhering to academic fashion or constraining your thought to the safe confines of a single discipline. What is more, you bring vast reserves of energy and enthusiasm to the task of building a new university from scratch.
We must help our students to see things whole.Much the same is true of our founding students. We’ve drawn our matriculating freshmen from a self-selected pool of adventurous applicants with significant academic promise and demonstrated capacities for leadership and creativity. Their academic preparation and performance on standardized exams rivals that of undergraduates at the nation’s most elite universities. Quite a few have started their own businesses. Many—perhaps the majority—have taken our in-person high-school seminars, where their infectious delight in meeting like-minded peers and engaging in wide-ranging intellectual discussions has energized the entire UATX community. They have already come together to form reading groups; write, direct, and produce an original seven-minute film, “Please Be Sad”; and launch The Austin Beacon, a Substack journal whose first issue will focus on the theme “What is a university?”
Our overarching goal in the coming year is to build a thriving academic culture and deliver to our students a rich, exciting, and joyful experience, one that combines good humor and intellectual play with academic seriousness. If we are to succeed as a university, it is absolutely essential that we do these things. We must help our students to see things whole, to connect ideas in meaningful and imaginative ways, and to develop the virtues and practices that make for well-lived lives. We must strengthen their powers of reasoning, argumentation, calculation, writing, and speaking.
The slow and careful work of leading young men and women into the light in which things can be seen for what they are—the light that is the sole measure of civilizational darkness—will require prudence, concentration, and patience. Some of our students are academically advanced, having already completed a few years of college or, in some cases, earned a bachelor’s degree. Others will have graduated early from high school. Some students are already working on their Polaris projects, while others have as yet no idea where to begin. All are distracted, in degrees small and large, by their smartphones. Many are anxious and unself-confident. We must meet our students wherever we find them. Whether this involves disciplining their fiery passions or kindling a bright flame of curiosity from the embers of neglected interests, the ultimate aim is to teach them how to burn, in Walter Pater’s words, with a hard, gemlike flame.
Jacob Howland is provost and dean of the Intellectual Foundations program at the University of Austin.