“I shared the same enthusiasm,” said Nadine Strossen, former president of the American Civil Liberties Union. “I was immediately enthusiastic about the mission of the university.” So too was Harvard linguist Steven Pinker. “I thought that alternative models of a university could enrich higher education and challenge the legacy universities to rethink entrenched practices,” he told me.
Kanelos identified 32 people as trustees, faculty members and advisers to the new university including Jonathan Haidt, the NYU professor whose work Kanelos evoked in proclaiming that UATX would produce an “antifragile” cohort with the capacity to think “fearlessly, nimbly, and inventively”; Summers; Pinker; the playwright David Mamet; Glenn Loury, an economist at Brown University; computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman; authors Andrew Sullivan and Rob Henderson; the journalists Caitlin Flanagan, Sohrab Ahmari and Jonathan Rauch; Stacy Hock, an investor and philanthropist; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a conservative, Dutch politician-turned-writer known for criticizing Islam’s treatment of women, and who is married to Ferguson.
The list leaned right, to be sure. Loury, who is Black, zealously opposes affirmative action. Mamet had called Trump “the best president since Abraham Lincoln.” Hock served as chairwoman of an organization called Texas GOP 2020 Victory. Several of the academics had experienced backlash for taking conservative positions. These included Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist who’d had a planned lecture at MIT on extraterrestrial life canceled over his views on DEI; Peter Boghossian, who’d resigned from Portland State University in part because of the institution’s response to his sending hoax articles to academic journals; and University of Sussex professor Kathleen Stock, who’d faced protests over her allegedly transphobic views, which she disputed.
But Summers had served in Bill Clinton’s Cabinet and as Barack Obama’s chief economic advisor. Others were unconventional, independent thinkers, and several, including Haidt and Strossen, had made advocating for free inquiry and open dialogue a major part of their life’s work. It was possible to believe that the group had just enough viewpoint diversity, and a depth of commitment to civil libertarian principles, that it might transcend the virtue signaling, intellectual hegemony and inclination to cancel that had stalled many American colleges and universities.
The coming together of this unlikely coalition sparked widespread enthusiasm. “It was the easiest fundraising pitch ever — a very American project in the best way,” the former staffer told me. “I never had an easier time getting meetings with wealthy people.” UATX stated an ambitious goal of raising $250 million. Just eighteen months later, they reported being more than halfway there.
But the early successes masked significant, underlying conflicts. While the university leadership was largely united in the need to respond to cancel culture, there was no consensus around an affirmative vision for the university.
The core problem was simple but profound: It was clear what UATX was not but entirely unclear what it was.
It took only a week for the simmering conflicts to bubble into the public eye. On Nov. 15, 2021, Pinker announced on social media that he would be stepping off the board of advisers by “mutual & amicable agreement.” The same day, University of Chicago Chancellor Robert Zimmer announced that he’d resigned from the board four days earlier.
Zimmer’s resignation hinted at one of the fault lines: how much UATX would be defined by what it was against and how strongly it would make its negative case against the elite colleges it viewed as its competition. Several people I interviewed said that Lonsdale in particular was highly motivated to vanquish such rivals, including his alma mater Stanford University.
Indeed, some early statements had a bit of throwing-down-the-gauntlet vibe. Of administrators and professors who felt threatened by UATX’s disruption of the system, Kanelos said, “We welcome their opprobrium and will regard it as vindication.” Ferguson wrote that he’d taught at Cambridge, Oxford, New York University and Harvard and had come “to doubt that the existing universities can be swiftly cured of their current pathologies.” He’d later refer to UATX as “the anti-Harvard.”
The early resignations seemed to be in response to the aggressiveness of the negative rhetoric. “The new university made a number of statements about higher education in general, largely quite critical, that diverged very significantly from my own views,” wrote Zimmer, who died in 2023.
“Dissociation was the only choice,” Pinker told me in an email. “I bristled at their Trump-Musk-style of trolling, taunting, and demonizing, without the maturity and dignity that ought to accompany a major rethinking of higher education.” Furthermore, Pinker added, “UATX had no coherent vision of what higher education in the 21st century ought to be. Instead, they created UnWoke U led by a Faculty of the Canceled.”
Other departures followed. University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone left the advisory board in October, telling Fortune that participation with UATX wasn’t a good fit since he believed universities should be non-ideological. In an email, Stone told me, “I had no time to be involved, so I resigned.” Photos of Tufts political science professor Vickie Sullivan and journalist Lex Fridman were removed from the website, as was mention of the journalist Andrew Sullivan and University of Sussex professor Kathleen Stock. Neither Fridman nor Vickie Sullivan nor Stock responded to requests for comment. In an email, Andrew Sullivan wrote, “I just didn’t have the time or energy to do it justice.”
On Dec. 2, 2022, Heying resigned from the board, saying that it was “better to separate myself from the University, than to have my name be attached to an institution that does not represent my scientific and pedagogical values.” In a letter published on her Substack, “Natural Selections,” Heying wrote that she didn’t think her colleagues’ vision was “sufficiently revolutionary.” To fix higher ed, UATX needed to address the root causes of “academic fragility,” which she argued, would require “tolerance for a great deal more risk than I think there is appetite for in this group.” Except for their reservations about DEI and cancel culture, Heying wrote, “It seems that others on the Board have trust in existing elite institutions.”
Heather Heying stands for a portrait in Los Angeles in 2018. | Damon Winter/The New York Times via Redux Pictures
Indeed, for a college committed to disrupting the status quo, UATX would come to rely quite heavily on traditional markers of merit for admissions. Today, UATX guarantees admission to anyone scoring at least a 1460 on the SAT, a 33 on the ACT or a 105 on the CLT. According to a UATX Substack, applicants below that threshold are evaluated on the basis of test scores, results on advanced placement and international baccalaureate exams, and three verifiable achievements, “each described in a single sentence.”
“There was no thinking expansively about whom to admit,” Heying told me. “This was just going to be another elite institution — anti-woke Stanford 2.0.”
Almost everyone I interviewed shared Pinker’s view that UATX lacked a unifying, coherent vision in its early days. But that’s not to say that individual leaders didn’t have their own, coherent visions. Soon, factions began to emerge.
In one corner was Kanelos and his supporters. While Kanelos had engaged in some challenging banter with the establishment, he’d also staked out some high ground. “We wanted to be able to bring together students and faculty from across ideological boundaries and throw in front of them some of the most vexing questions of the day,” Kanelos said in a 2022 interview. “Questions around empire, or gender, or race, and create a circle of trust where these students and faculty, who differ in so many ways, find what I call the highest common denominator.” Kanelos also emphasized UATX’s intellectual diversity. “Our backgrounds and experiences are diverse,” he wrote. “Our political views differ.” Heying echoed the sentiment. “The people who started Austin were not the alt right,” she told me.
“Pano is a decent, honorable person,” Heying said, echoing a view I heard from many others. She recalled having conversations with Kanelos about alternate pedagogies and ways to build something “not just like all of the other elite institutions out there.” But, she said, “those conversations withered on the vine.”
A faction competing with Kanelos’ included Lonsdale and several of his allies. Their view is difficult to categorize, and no two people described the lines of division the same way. Some framed it as a battle between the conservatives and the libertarians. Others saw it as the classicists versus the tech bros. But one name came up far more often than any other: Leo Strauss.
A German-Jewish emigrant, Strauss spent most of his career at the University of Chicago. An impactful teacher and prolific writer, Strauss criticized modern liberalism for undermining the influence of religion and natural law and advocated a return to teaching the ancient Greeks, who he said had deep insights into human nature and society.
Leo Strauss, seen in New York in 1939. | Monozigote via Wikimedia Commons
Strauss isn’t a household name, but he’s deeply influential on the modern right.
One can draw a straight line from Strauss to his student Allan Bloom, author of the 1987 bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind, which sounded an early alarm against identity politics, moral relativism and the decay of the university. From there one can make a direct connection to the prominent conservative intellectual Patrick Deneen, who has argued that liberalism’s emphasis on individual rights degrades authority, community and place. Deneen, who reportedly modeled himself on Bloom, won the American Political Science Association’s Leo Strauss Award in 1995 for best dissertation in political theory. Strauss was also the subject of a symposium at UATX in early January 2026, hosted by Loren Rotner, who received his PhD from Claremont Graduate University — a key institution for fueling what was known as West Coast Straussianism.
Kanelos’ view of the academy emphasized pluralism and the individual’s search for truth. On the other side, the Straussians weren’t quite so agnostic. They had a view of the common good they wanted to assert.
This conflict came to a head for the first time in September 2023 when Rotner, then the assistant provost, and Hillel Ofek, then the vice president of communications, engaged in what was described to me by several people as “a coup attempt.” They were critical of Kanelos’ leadership and believed that UATX had been neither aggressive enough in criticizing the universities with which they were in competition nor establishing UATX’s own identity. Another former staffer, who was granted anonymity out of fear of retaliation, said, “They attempted to persuade the UATX board that everything was heading in the wrong direction.”
The rebellion failed. Ofek and Rotner left UATX. Ofek took a position as director of strategy at Lonsdale Enterprises. Rotner became director of the Cosmos Institute, a nonprofit aimed at using AI for human flourishing. UATX did not make Rotner and Ofek, who have since returned to UATX as associate provost and chief strategy officer respectively, available for interviews or to provide comments.
Kanelos survived. UATX moved forward and began recruiting its first class.
In May, 2024, they hit a bump in the road when Jonathan Yudelman, a recent hire from Arizona State University, confronted a woman in a hijab in a video that went viral. But Yudelman was mostly associated with ASU, rather than UATX. The incident was handled internally and soon blew over. Yudelman remains at the university. UATX did not offer a comment on the episode, and Yudelman did not respond to a request for comment.
On Sept. 2, 2024, UATX opened its doors, presenting a united front to the world. In the morning, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott met with the inaugural class of 92 students at the state capitol. Down the block, in the Capital Ballroom of the Royal Sonesta Hotel, the students donned dark blue robes, signed the University of Austin register and, in return, received a copy of The Odyssey. Kanelos, clad in regalia, delivered a rousing address.
“History is not a story unfolding; it is an epic being written. And its authors are those bold enough to exercise their agency in the pursuit of higher things,” he said. According to Kanelos, UATX was returning to the Platonic ideal — to the “olive grove on the fringes of Athens called the Akademia,” where students came together to ask “fundamental human questions.”
There were other schools in Greece, but Kanelos said Plato’s stood above them all. “What distinguished Plato’s Academy,” he told the students, “was doctrinal pluralism and a variety of intellectual approaches. There were no easy answers. Every discussion branched outward with ever-greater complexity.”
The pluralists had won. At least for the moment.
In a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction turn of events, UATX’s commitment to its founding principles would be tested on the school’s first day of operation by an incident of alleged sexual harassment that would dominate the campus’ freshman year.
The anti-woke founders of UATX hated every aspect of cancel culture, but they had a particular, visceral enmity for the procedures surrounding the adjudication of sexual misconduct allegations under Title IX.
In December 2023, Ferguson published a manifesto of sorts in The Free Press — the “Treason of the Intellectuals.” Over his long career, Ferguson wrote, he’d witnessed “the politicization of American universities by an illiberal coalition of ‘woke’ progressives, adherents of ‘critical race theory,’ and apologists for Islamist extremism.” Still, he reserved some of his harshest language for the “armies of DEI and Title IX officers,” who, he said, seemed, at many colleges, to outnumber the students. Because these universities are rich, Ferguson said in an interview shortly after the article’s publication, “they’re allowed to grow these enormous bureaucracies of non-academics, people not engaged in research or in teaching, purely engaged in administration. They’re a huge part of the problem.”
Again, many, many people in academia would concede that Ferguson and his colleagues were onto something. In 2014, a group of 28 current and former Harvard Law School professors published a letter in the Boston Globe arguing that the university’s procedures for deciding sexual misconduct claims lacked basic due process and were stacked against the accused. In 2024, FIRE harshly criticized new regulations from the Biden administration which, among other things, eliminated an accused’s right to a live hearing, threw out their right to cross-examine their accuser and witnesses, and allowed a single administrator to act as prosecutor, judge and jury.
UATX didn’t plan on accepting federal funding and hence wouldn’t be strictly constrained by Title IX. So, they were free to innovate. They took the novel step of drafting a constitution, which created a system of checks and balances. The Board of Trustees acted as the legislative branch, the president as the executive, and an external adjudicative panel as the judicial branch, with the power to enforce a bill of rights that protected academic freedom and other student and faculty rights.
Morgan Marietta, a former professor, credited Ferguson for developing this innovative structure. “This vision of constitutionalism, once you hear it, you realize, oh, that’s it,” he told me. “That is the great American idea that we should have realized should have been governing universities for the last 200 years. It should all be honest and open and transparent.”
Niall Ferguson speaks at the Centre for Policy Studies conference in London, England, on March 17, 2025. | Ben Whitley/PA via AP
But a theoretical commitment to constitutionalism was one thing. Its practical application to a sharply disputed campus incident was quite another.
For UATX’s inaugural freshman class, the first week of September 2024, was — in the words of a current student — “insane and fully booked.” They met donors, went on hikes, pitched businesses, had a pool party at Lonsdale’s house and read The Odyssey — with 60 Minutes filming many of the proceedings for a segment that would air in November.
The new students were a tightly knit group. Everyone lived in two floors of the Union on 24th, an apartment building, and took a private shuttle to cover the two miles to the Scarborough Building, the former department store where the college made its home. Most people didn’t think much of it when the university dean, Ben Crocker, called a student named Dan into his office on Monday, Sept. 9, the first day of classes. But at 7:44 in the evening, they received an email from three administrators saying that Dan had been removed from campus, “transported to his home out of state,” and barred from further access to the university.
(Dan is a pseudonym. POLITICO has granted him anonymity so he would speak candidly about the situation and about allegations that have not been proven in a court of law.)
The nature of the allegations concerned, at their core, a pair of charged statements Dan allegedly made that would be familiar to any Title IX officer. The first was a general statement implying that UATX girls carried themselves physically in a way that invited sexual assault. The second was a suggestion to a specific female student that she had carried herself in a way that invited sexual assault. Dan had already been the subject of some negative attention on campus because of provocative statements he’d made in a UATX-based Discord “introductions” chat. These included a challenge — “If I catch any of you guys in my stuff, I’ll kill you” — which was a reference to the 1981 movie “Stripes” and likely misunderstood by fellow students. In another exchange, a discussion of transgender issues, Dan expressed reservations about hormone treatment and said that he couldn’t wait “to play devil’s advocate for legalizing pedophilia.”
Between 8:30 and 9:00 p.m., Crocker visited the dorms, where he hosted a meeting on the roof to discuss the issue with students. Crocker’s message was that Dan’s conduct had been evaluated to be a “credible threat” — a phrase that would be repeated by the administration many times over the following days. Crocker then faced what one student attendee recalled as a “firing squad” of questions. Some students said that Dan had seemed off, but others saw his hasty removal as an example of the very cancel culture to which UATX was supposed to be the antithesis.
The following day, at lunch, Kanelos addressed the student body. He explained that he’d had to make calls in his career as a university president about how to protect students, that he took his commitment to student safety seriously, and that, in his view, the extraordinary circumstances called for Dan’s temporary removal. Students asked whether Dan would be appointed a lawyer and granted a hearing. “We were told, ‘yes and yes,’” said one student who attended the presentation.
I have spoken multiple times with Dan, who adamantly denies the allegations and says that he was appointed a faculty advocate but not a lawyer. Several students with whom I spoke and who were present at the gathering said that Dan had never directed a comment at a specific student.
“I’ll swear on the Bible that it didn’t happen,” said one student who, like several other students, was granted anonymity for fear of reprisal from the university.
McKenna Conlin, a current UATX student and former resident advisor, told investigators that Dan hadn’t said what he’d been accused of saying and that the affair had been a misunderstanding. She, Dan and others had been discussing the Title IX training that UATX had provided to the resident advisors, which was viewed as outdated and ineffective. They’d joked that better training might have prevented some inappropriate comments they’d heard from other male students — including the offensive comment Dan was accused of making. The comments on Discord had also been misunderstood, Conlin and others said, and were better understood as the product of an apparently neurodivergent mind embracing the college’s pro-speech mission than as sinister.
The student who allegedly issued the complaint did not respond to an email from POLITICO Magazine.
In any event, what divided the campus was not so much the truth of the allegations as the speed and process by which they were decided. Dan told me that while the community was told that his suspension was temporary, he was told on the first day of class that he was being expelled.
“The first day was a huge gut punch,” said a former student. “A week before, we’d got grandiose speeches about how we were done with the Title IX bullshit, and they even spoke about, you know, what happened to Brett Kavanaugh was terrible. The entire culture just eroded in the blink of an eye.” The former student pointed to it as the principal cause of his decision to withdraw from UATX at the end of his freshman year.
Another former faculty member who was closely involved with Dan’s situation expressed similar disillusionment with the process. Indeed, when the UATX adjudicative panel — comprising outside legal experts — reviewed Dan’s expulsion, it found that the procedures had violated the school’s constitution in several regards by, among other things, depriving him of his right to a public hearing and failing to include students in the jury that reached an initial determination on the expulsion decision. UATX argued that these provisions violated Texas law. The university thus took the highly unusual position that its own constitution was illegal, but Dan didn’t challenge this, and so the panel accepted the university’s argument. However, the panel also found that Dan had been deprived of his right to obtain witnesses in his favor.
The adjudicative panel’s decision — which POLITICO Magazine has obtained — referred to the procedures surrounding Dan’s case as “shambolic,” and said that UATX’s counsel had said of the procedures that they’d been “building the plane while we’re flying it.” “It was cobbling together handbooks, policies, and procedures,” the decision quotes UATX’s lawyer as saying. “There were a lot of cooks in the kitchen. The judicial handbook from what I understand was coming together kind of as a live document for a long time.”
The panel ultimately recommended that the school’s constitution be revised to conform with Texas law and that Dan effectively be retried under the new procedure and with the right to call witnesses.
According to the former faculty member, the university disregarded the panel.
“It was like, ‘Lord give me constitutionalism, but not yet,’” the former faculty member said. “It’s too bad. It would have been glorious.” Many faulted Kanelos for the departure from UATX’s founding charter.
UATX did not respond to a request for comment about the matter and did not make Crocker available for comment.
Dan confirms that a rehearing that might have allowed him to clear his name was never scheduled. He was, however, offered to reenroll at UATX, though with neither a guarantee of continued financial aid nor clarity as to the specifics of how to manage a return that would be “clearly uncomfortable for everybody,” and he ultimately did not return. (Tuition at UATX is free, but students bear the costs of housing, food and textbooks.)
Nearly ten months passed between the incident and when the adjudicative panel reached its decision in June 2025. It lingered so long that most students viewed it as the defining issue of their freshman year.
“The mood was strange, and I can’t honestly say it ever became normal,” said Conlin. “For many of us, there was immediate and irreparable damage of trust with university administrators that has stayed to this day.”
With Dan’s case lingering in the background, UATX students settled into college life, which most students with whom I spoke found — Kanelos’ claims of revolutionary disruption notwithstanding — to be similar in many regards to any other campus.
UATX did not grant my request to visit, and classes operate under the Chatham House Rule, which prevents students from identifying speakers in the classroom — a prohibition respected by every student with whom I spoke. But several students had previously pursued degrees or taken classes at other colleges and thus had relevant points of reference. They said many campus dynamics would be familiar at any college — students ate together, dated their classmates and worried about exams. At the same time, several differences stood out.
The first is that UATX is not yet accredited (and under Texas law cannot call itself a college). It operates under a Certificate of Authority, awarded by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, on which Hock serves as chair. UATX is seeking accreditation from the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. Generally speaking, a college must graduate at least one class as a prerequisite for accreditation. UATX’s first class is scheduled to graduate in 2028.
Several students noted a lack of diversity. Consistent with its emphasis on “merit-based admissions,” UATX doesn’t publish demographic data. The students with whom I spoke said their classmates — and the college’s leadership — were overwhelmingly white, disproportionately came from wealthy families and had an overrepresentation of apparent neurodivergence. They found ideological diversity to be particularly lacking. “I didn’t realize exactly how conservative it would be,” one current student told me. “You know, when I hear free speech and open debate and all that jazz, I assumed that there was going to be a more equal amount of political views, and there wasn’t.”
Classes weren’t as innovative as most students expected. “Year one was exceptionally boring,” the student said. “They did great books, they just didn’t do it in a great way,” said another student, who lamented the amount of memorization required. “I thought we were going to be intensely debating,” he said.
Several students shared course syllabi with me. Most are easy enough to imagine being offered on any campus — with the notable exception of math and science. “The math classes go over algebra you learned in ninth grade,” a student told me. “There was just nothing there.” He described the offering as “schizophrenic” and described a class he’d taken at University of Texas at Austin as “exponentially more important.”
Indeed, the syllabus I reviewed for a class called “Intellectual Foundations of Science II” covered a range of topics unusual for a science class including “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.” A student who’d taken the course shared a slide with me on “ensoulment” — the principally religious question of when a soul enters the human body — and said that the class had been told that IVF but not abortion could be consistent with the Catholic belief about ensoulment.