WHY SHOULDN'T THE rIGHT HAVE ITS OWN SAFE SPACE U?:

Harvard's Pinker has kept quiet about why he's ending his affiliation, but the University of Chicago chancellor Zimmer made it clear: He's all for free expression, but not the direct attack on existing higher education that attended the university's launch, saying in his statement 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." West Virginia University president Gordon Gee, another adviser, kept his affiliation but said even more directly: "I do not agree other universities are no longer seeking the truth nor do I feel that higher education is irreparably broken."

The discord reflects the inconvenient contradiction at the heart of an ambitious project: Despite the University of Austin's claim to independence from the political minefield that is higher ed in 2021, it's almost impossible to see the project as anything but political in its own right. Kanelos, a former St. John's College president, announced its launch on the Substack of Bari Weiss, another founding fellow who is not an academic, but a journalist who specializes in lancing the liberal consensus. Co-founder and trustee Joe Lonsdale, also a co-founder of the data analytics company Palantir with Peter Thiel, defended the project in the conservative New York Post, and Ferguson wrote acidly in Bloomberg that "academic freedom dies in wokeness."

The University of Austin's explicitly stated ideological commitment is to a pluralistic, classically liberal freedom of expression. But as Zimmer and others have pointed out, the university's project as constituted today rests on an inherently political critique of schools as they are. And for an intellectual vehicle so committed to diversity of thought that it can't even exist in the current academic landscape, its affiliated thinkers comprise a near-monoculture in their own right: They're nearly all icons of the same confrontational, non-"progressive" liberal rationalism.

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