Welcome back to the new thing for you. My name is David Barren with me as always. My good friend Alex Prive. How are you Alex?
Buenos stingongtias. As usual David, how are you? I'm well and our good friend Greg McBrayer. How are you?
Howdy. Yeah, you always have to do this kind of a weird Americana stuff. Greg, it really throws me off. But who is a distinguished guest?
Is that your task to introduce? Yeah, you said you specifically waited to start recording. So you could introduce them. Oh, I'm doing that.
No, no, I introduced Jake the snake howland last time. Oh, OK. Nobody watches wrestling anymore. So I do.
Our guest is Jacob Howland Provost and Director of the Intellectual Foundations Program at the University of Austin. We're here to talk about higher ed. It's current. Sorry.
Yeah. It's our back to school episode. This is our back to school episode. Yeah.
So we usually like to discuss an essay on education and tie it to actual practice and things like that. And we thought, I look around me at the university. It seems like every year it gets worse and worse. And with AI, especially, I'm like, especially despondent about what we're in for.
And what were you, Alex? You had a tweet about chat GPT. Basically, it'll just have to be in-class writing. That's where we can get into this.
But there are some causes for hope, for instance, if AI is writing papers outside the classroom, it looks like you'll have to do in-class papers in the old style, the way that it used to be, or even better oral exams of some kind. But we thought, who better to have on to discuss how higher education is broken than Jacob Howland, the prophet of the new educational order? In all seriousness, Jake has made a number of really thoughtful, interesting, compelling pieces about how higher education is broken and what he's doing with the University of Austin to help fix it or create a model for future institutions. And whenever this episode drops, just go to our Twitter.
We'll link to all those articles that Jake sent us. And yeah, we're happy to have you here. Greg, you want to jump in? Well, I was just going to say one can find many of those in City Journal right now, if you're listening.
And maybe you're not on the Twitter. Maybe you're a fully functioning mature adult human being. You're not on that child's toy. So they're all on City Journal.org.
You can find them. One on Henry Adams and the Crisis of Education. Another on intellectual community in the heart of Texas about his new university. Reach for your culture is the third and the fourth college of the future, which is again about the University of Austin.
By the way, it's so refreshing to actually talk about solutions. I think that, at least on the conservative side of the eye and the left, too, it's always been. IRED is broken for one reason or another. And it's just complaint, complaint, complaint.
But to really do something like found a new university and not just talk about it is, those are extremely interesting projects that I hope they succeed in more in a follow-up in their weeks. Yeah, I have to say it's been, first let me say, I'm really happy to be on the show again. Thank you for inviting me. It's actually been really important for me because as I'll discuss in just a couple minutes, my old university was destroyed academically.
And fighting against that really exhausted me. And then I found when I could be part of this new project and actually start to build something that had a rehabilitating effect on me, I mean, it really has lifted me up to feel that I'm a part of a potential solution anyway. So maybe we should just jump right into it. How is higher education broken?
And I don't just mean 30-something professors with man-buns. But in general, what's going on that's wrong with higher education? Maybe you can draw on your experiences and tell us a year. Yeah, I think I might want to draw on those.
Let me talk a little bit about my experience at the University of Tulsa where I talked from 1988 to 2020. So I was there for 32 years because I think the experience that I had there was a microcosm, not only of what's wrong with higher education and in some sense, what was to come for higher education in 2020 and thereafter, but also what we've experienced in the last few years in society as a whole. So I was very happy at the University of Tulsa. I had outstanding colleagues.
I had excellent students. The university was not the first university in which the liberal arts in particular were destroyed. But it was the first university that had over $1 billion at a $1.2 billion dollar diamond. And the first day was in the top 100 in US News and Will Report.
I think we were ranked around 80-5 something like that in 2019 when all hell broke loose. It's an interesting story. The story begins with a left-wing billionaire named George Kaiser, who left unchecked Kaiser, who made his money and taking over the Bank of Oklahoma during the savings of the early 80s, owned 54% of the outstanding shares in the Bank of Oklahoma. And the thing about the Bank of Oklahoma is that for a long time and to this day, they had held half of TU's endowment, which again at that time was about $600 million.
And the Bank quietly took over the university. They formulated some plans of like 30,000 feet that they then kind of sprung on us. The first thing they did is they eliminated the position of the individual trustee who represented the interests of the University of Tulsa. And in this, they broke their contract.
But they settled with their out of court, no doubt for some large sum. And they gained complete control over $600 million, this $600 million chunk. And then they maneuvered to install George Kaiser's college roommate and his personal lawyer as the chairman of the Board of Trustees. And he was joined on the Board of Trustees by the Chief Executive Officer of the Bank of Oklahoma and by two other individuals who were on the board of the Bank of Oklahoma.
So it was kind of a quiet takeover of the board. Then they maneuvered to install a new president at the University who came from OU Tulsa. This guy was in the debt of George Kaiser because Kaiser's foundation had given OU Tulsa $50 million when he was president there. And in 2019, the wife of the Chief Executive Officer of the George Kaiser Family Foundation, which is a $4 billion foundation, was installed as the Provost of the University.
So he had Chairman Board, Board Members, President of the University, Provost of the University. She had been the Dean of the Law School. So this was a quiet and kind of little noted takeover of the University. We sort of had our own deep state if you like at that TU.
And here's another analogy to our national situation. None of these leaders represented the interests of the people that they were supposed to serve, by which I mean the students of the University of Tulsa or the faculty of the University of Tulsa. Unlike every other top 100 university in the country, neither the president nor the Provost had a PhD and they never visited our classes. To all indications had really no idea of what we were doing and they didn't come from academic backgrounds.
But the interest that they did represent were corporate. Kaiser wanted to make the city of Tulsa the cybersecurity capital of the world. And what played out was a now all too familiar story of crony capitalism, okay, concealed under a veneer of social justice. So here's another point of similarity between those who led to you and those who now hold power in the United States.
In New York Times article from 2016, included the following statement. This was a quote, if Kaiser could change one structural aspect of the country, he said that he would eliminate the attitude that centralized control is inherently evil. Now, so fast forward to April 2019. A plan for true commitment was sprung us.
And that plan eliminated 40% of all academic programs, mostly in liberal arts. Among other things, it eliminated all languages, not only this, most languages including Latin and Greek, the majors in French, in Russian and German. It eliminated the theater major, the bachelor of music, programs in physics, chemistry, and, and this is close to home for me, the majors in philosophy and in religion, leaving my department with just a combined minor. And there were many other academic programs, I mean, the list goes on and on and on, but I'm just sort of giving you the highlights.
They planned, although these were never implemented, these steps, they planned to raise the teaching load from five courses per year to eight to eliminate all academic departments and to establish these big divisions, including a division called Humanities and Social Justice. But they beefed up programs in cybersecurity and other technical fields. And all of this was done by way of deception and outright fraud. And I'm not gonna go into details, but you can read my article, Storm Clones Over Tulsa, which was published in the city journal.
So I found myself at the tip of the sphere in fighting this takeover. And I did some crazy thing because I was really enraged. So for example, one day I found on the internet a glossy brochure advertising, or rather calling for investment in a cybersecurity, in cybersecurity facilities, in a new economic development zone, in this neighborhood, alongside the University of Tulsa, was a poor neighborhood. And I had heard, and this was quite telling, I had heard years before that, maybe as many as 10 years that the big boys in Tulsa were buying up property in this poor neighborhood, which to me as an indication that this plan was again, half to 30,000 feet in the kind of sprung on us.
So when I found this out, I found this on the internet, I wrote to the president of the board and the provost, and the president of the university, and I copied all the faculty members, and I said, do you guys think this is your personal piggy bank? You know, and my wife of course was like, what are you doing, this is a city. Well, so we organized successful no-conference votes in the president and the provost. And we held protests, including students, and engaged in other actions and demonstrations, but leaders in the university of Tulsa, and I would say here, like the authoritarian governments, many authoritarian governments in the West, we're saved by COVID, because the students were planning no-conference votes in the president and the provost, and then COVID hit.
Canvas cleared out, all the steam went out of these protests and votes, and they sort of skated. The university engaged in the various actions. They took my computer from my office without my permission. They surveilled me and followed my post on Facebook.
They hired the services of a big Kansas City law firm to try to get me fired, and I had to pay thousands of dollars in legal fees to defend myself. And I spent the year basically in this kind of crazy state, I wrote maybe a dozen articles, was on all kinds of podcasts and radio shows and so forth. And then I essentially quit. I mean, I took early retirement.
They were very happy to get me out. And the good news, and then I'll stop about to you here, is that all this publicity put me on the radar, all the folks at UATX commonly known as the University of Austin, I have to say it this way, because we can't even call it. The university until we are authorized by the state of Texas. Oh.
And we're in this process right now. I can come back to that if you like. And in addition, I have to say we scored some successes. While I was there, we drove out the president.
The provost took over. She was then driven out after a year, and many of the other major players in this chemical were fired. And another piece of good news, the new president of the university of Tulsa, he is trying to repair the damage. So he has reinstated the bachelor of music.
He's re-instated the major of philosophy and religion. He's stated physics, chemistry, is starting to do honors college, but it's gonna take years for the university to overcome these self-employed wounds. So I see this kind of combination. We don't have to go into this, but I think it's, and I know the opinions that I'm expressing are not, the opinions of your show, but I just wanna say I see this connection between kind of corporatism, crony capitalism on the one hand, and a kind of veneer of social justice.
I don't think any of these guys really believed in that stuff. But this kind of combination sort of sweetness, bitter pill to make it go down with faculty, rather unsuccessfully in this case. I see that as sort of symptomatic of larger trends in our society. Yeah, I mean, you see this.
I mean, that's a really powerful story. Thank you for sharing that. I've read that a longer, really circle. And it's harrowing to see what happened, but you see this in a lot of places where the social justice stuff is at best a kind of, you know, like a kind of moral, what's the word, you take like a sugar pill.
Yeah. What does that call it, like a placebo? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't do anything, but it's like makes you feel like you've done something.
While you go and you join this like large, corporate bureaucracy that commits all sorts of moral atrocities or really morally problematic things, and pursues, I mean, I'm speaking now from somebody teachers in the College of Engineering, but you join a corporate that's a corporation that's gonna pursue technologies without any regard to its benefit to individualized, merely for the sake of making money. And that's just the reality of the situation. So at best, it's like bringing you to terms and making you feel like you're not part of the problem. At worst, it's just a thin veneer, as you said.
Yeah, it's interesting. I'm reminded of in the Captain of Mind, just about me, in his first chapter, he talks about how the intellectual wants to feel like he or she is making a difference. And I would say that the allure of communism, I mean, this is an ideology that is sort of much more front and center than let's say social justice is today, but this is a kind of watered down version of that, right? Like you are actually doing something good and you can kind of look aside and not notice that what you're really doing, well, in the case of the University of Tulsa, you're shifting training costs from businesses to the university, which benefits by the way, business people.
I mean, in the city of Tulsa, for example. So, but anyway, it's an interesting phenomenon. Yeah. And as I say, yeah, go ahead.
I was gonna ask if you're gonna, because I follow, is it Jennifer, or Fray, or Face? Yeah. Are you hopeful? I mean, I'll take years like you said, but.
Yeah, look, I mean, I think it's a good start. I think the university, I had a conversation with the former director of the honors program. Now, this was not an honors college, but one of the jewels in the crown of the university, Tulsa, while I was there, was our honors program. That allowed me to teach a kind of a great books program that started with the ancients and medievals and early moderns and contemporary and so forth.
She was very, very good. She got pushed aside. I mean, she was an outstanding director. She now, by the way, has landed in the department of philosophy and religion, and I was larger than it was when I was there.
Now, because I was there, her husband is there, my old colleague, Steve Gardner, who's a long time friend of mine, I'm an excellent Gerard scholar and just a terrific guy. He has, he left also in 2020 or 2021. I can't remember, but he's back now because he sort of realized it's good to be teaching. And I actually call President Carson.
It's interesting. And sort of asked him like, what's your thinking here? Right? I mean, you're doubling down on liberal arts now.
You wanna build this honors college. It's gonna cost tens of millions of dollars. I'm hopeful. I think they might have to made a couple of missteps.
So what they're trying to do now. So what happened is they plunged in the rankings. Okay, I mean, you'd be hard to find another university that fell as fast after 2020. I think they were at 125 or something.
Like they fell like 40 places in a year. And they were essentially admitting anybody who applied. Now they're trying to really up the level of students. So what they're doing, I'm told, is essentially buying national merits on my finalists.
So in the deal that they made with these kids and they're giving them full scholarships and stuff, is that you're automatically admitted to the honors college. Okay, if you take their deal. So next year I got it, it'll be like all of a sudden, 150 students coming in from 30 or something like that. I might be wrong, maybe off by 10.
The difficulty is scoring very high on the, was it PSAT, I guess you do for the National Mayor, that doesn't necessarily mean that you are suited for a great books type of program. So the worry is that the number of students will kind of, be in classes, they won't work very hard, they'll drop out and so forth. However, all that said, I'm really encouraged by the developments. The recent developments present cards has been there for about two years, maybe three years now.
He's fought against sort of remnants of the old guard that were in favor of true commitment. They're definitely moving in the right direction. But look, these are self-inflicted wounds. And it's a lot easier to tear stuff on their days to build them up.
Yeah, absolutely. So I think you've kind of set the stage with this example for some of the larger questions we want to talk about, which is some of the ways in which our education is broken. The fact that there seems to be some demand for real education, which you can see from this program. And I see it from students as well, like who stop in my class, like, oh, this was actually a challenging, interesting open question class where you could just have a conversation.
And you get a sense that they just feel like that's missing from their life. And then on top of the, I was broken in the demand, what we can do, right? Both within existing institutions and as you're doing in starting an institution. So maybe you want to talk about some of the, you've seen some of the bullet points about things are, it's wrong and it's, I mean, this is all the things that I see every single day, right?
Like institutional drift, bloated administrations and the expense that comes along with that. I saw an article the other day that claims that the reason education costs so much nowadays is these university professors getting paid so much. So what are you getting that from? It was completely bonkers.
And obviously some, somebody cowed down to admin somewhere. But, yeah, that's, you know, it's interesting because I mean, look, there's been a lot of discussion, as you know, about the use of adjuncts. And, you know, as a kind of lower class, almost a little bit proletariat, not quite, right? Compared to regular professors, but then there's another difference.
You look, the salaries of sort of top people in the elite schools are of certain professors in certain areas like business and so forth are insane. I mean, you know, if you teach where top business school, you're making half a million bucks a year. But nonetheless, look, there are 4,000 plus universities in colleges in the United States. I found in just looking at the publicized salaries from New York City Tulsa that they were clearly inflated because they would even break them down into college where I decided you could look and say, I'm an associate professor, I don't make anything like that sort of thing, right?
But the fact is that the administrators were making huge amounts of money. I mean, as I recall, you know, the director of admissions was making $350,000 or something like that. You know, by the way, university is also, I mean, again, they're a pretty good example because their ratios were really bad. There was an economist, a guy named Matthew Hendricks, who also landed on his feet like me.
He, what he did is he started developing metrics to compare our university with other universities. And then he started selling these, he would do analyses of other schools. And he started selling to other schools. And now he works full time with this kind of model that he's developed.
Anyone who found out that our administrative, our administrative costs were in the mid 90s percentile and our instructional expenditures were something like in the 13th percentile. And that made the ratio between the two of them. You can purchase the 700 other schools similar to ours. And we were essentially at the bottom of the barrel, right?
So the massive, I mean, the average is, I think the average is something like 30% of all the money is spent at an instruction at a university. And, you know, I mean, we, now we're talking about blooded administration. So look, Harvard, Yale, they have more administrators than they do students. I read somewhere that the University of California, you know, California State System anyway, or State University, it's a similar situation to the University of California, as many administrators as they do students.
And, you know, that's a very serious problem. But I'm happy to talk about it. I mean, you know, there are a number of things that are wrong with the universities. I think that if your listeners already know about these things, I guess I'd say the first huge problem is institutional drift, which you mentioned, Alex.
And again, this is a problem across our institutions, you know, schools are meant for teaching and learning. Government is meant to serve the people, representative government is meant to represent the individuals who go for certain parties. Museums are meant to preserve great works of art and display them. No, we could just go across the board.
There's been a kind of regapfulness of what our institutions are about. And that's certainly the case in universities. And look, I don't need to, I mean, no one who's listening to this podcast will be surprised when I mentioned the ideological takeover of universities. And, you know, we've just sort of put it together with a couple of things.
And this relates to the administrative blow. I mean, I read recently that the cost of college education increased by 180% inflation adjusted, right? From 1980 to 2020. And I would insist, and we can show it using various metrics, that the quality of education at the same time declined, sort of universally related.
But here's the thing, you know, I started college in 1976. And at that time, yeah, I would say that faculty lead left. They always have, at least in my lifetime. But speech wasn't equivalent violence.
You could freely share your opinions in the classroom. Professors could say what they thought. Students could speak up. I never recall it by my time in class.
I mean, if you said, and this is important too. I'm sure I have a lot of stupid things. I think that's a habit of mine. But how are you going to learn if you can make a six, right?
Now we have an atmosphere of fear, right? And, you know, students and professors are worried about being canceled or ostracized. And another problem is that really the flood of toxic ideologies that are sort of spilling over the campus walls. And that time goes to travel, right?
So that's a big problem. Along with expense, and listen guys, jump in at any point here, but I can't do this last. The public is becoming convinced that college is not worth the cost. OK, that's a really serious problem.
And while much of this is explained by administrative blow, I want to point out another deleterious effect. When you pay this much for college, the students begin to act like consumers. They want to know, what can you give me? What can you give me?
So it increases the passivity that I'm afraid to say is already sort of drunk into them through poor high school teaching, poor farmers, school teaching, and so forth. And that's a bad thing, because in order to obtain an education, you have to be active. And you have to be responsible for your own learning in some way. Another problem is the sense that there's a kind of irrelevance, higher education is somehow irrelevant.
Look, I think it was clearer and it was truer years ago that universities added value to society. Today, frankly, a lot of parents are worried, you said you could get to college and it gets good up. Yeah, Alex. OK, let me jump on this, because this ties to a point you're making a few of the pieces you wrote.
And that's something that is just very near-keterior to my heart, which is in a way the question of what the end of an education is or what a particular education is to be. And it seems like, at some point in the 19th or 20th century, that changed from a queen team one with the great debates of the past, the great tax, the great works. And then in a reasoned, open, debating critical way, not just in a sort of passive, just worship because it changed from that into an idea of moral, social, political progress, which of course should be an important element of any education. How can we improve things?
Where do these thinkers go wrong, et cetera? We always want to be trying to improve. But that became the end to the point that it seems like people were searching for something new, or searching for new things. And so you see this.
It almost seems like poorly thought out fads. Whereas you can look at the civil rights rule and say, oh, this is an application of our founding principles of human equality. You then move forward to the present day. And some of the issues are just beyond bizarre and seem to lose sight of the fact that one of the purposes of government of education is to create free and thoughtful citizens.
And so one way in which I think public distrust is lost is that you look around and you say, well, these professors aren't trying to acquaint them with how to think and how to debate. And the great ideas of the past and to think critically, they're just trying to force feed them the next thing that they're supposed to care about, that their parents and grandparents are horrified about or something like that in an undubating and sort of dogmatic way. And when you see that happening, you realize that the root of the issue is not merely, it is ideological on the one hand, but it's deeper than ideology. It's really about what the purpose of an education is or what the relationship is between thought and the community.
It's not about debating these eternal questions, right? Or figuring out what you stand on these big questions. It's about achieving or implementing progress. And I could talk a bit about how this is affected law schools and stuff like that.
I mean, I think there is especially pernicious, where students really only learn how to win court cases now, not what the statutes are and what they're reasoning behind them might be. But it seems like there's this deep nagging issue that's lurking behind a lot of this kind of ideological bent and therefore distrust. And if I can just back this up with one little anecdote, and I'll stop here, it used to be. I've not been teaching nearly as long as you have, though.
You look much younger than me. I just don't look back. I can't say that. I've been teaching since, I mean, I guess about 15 years, something like that.
And it used to be that every semester, during parents' weekend or something, a student would bring a parent or a couple parents would come to every class. They wanted to sit in on the college course. That's less and less. I don't know if that's just because of COVID or engineering students or something like that.
But it does feel like parents are less interested in the education. They're maybe more interested in what they're getting their money, whether they're getting their money's worth, whether they might just be generally distrustful and annoyed that their kid has to go to this place, that might ruin them. But I don't know. Is that the New York experience Greg?
You live in a more, I think, like you live in the heartland. So you should be having different experience. I mean, teaching in the Ashbrook Center, it's a unique program. And so I think it is kind of a special place.
Like parents still come visit. They sit on classes. We interview every student that comes into the Ashbrook Scholar program and we insist that they sit on classes. So it's a little different.
But I mean, this was my experience and everywhere else I've taught as well, though. So I mean, I don't know how much we can grow something like this. I mean, we are trying to grow it currently. And I don't know how replicable it is around the country.
Maybe that's something we can talk about as well, as far as solutions. But I've been following UATX very interestingly. And I have had this problem in my entire life. I've been teaching 20 years.
And you sort of think, well, what's the solution? And I only see one of two. And it's like reform from within or do something entirely new. And the ambitious part of me that loves it, go big, do something new.
I love what you guys are doing. And I wonder how successful something like what we're trying to do at Ashbrook can be where we try and form an impressive program within. And it seems like that can only be done at small places. I know that there are, maybe Jakey wants out about this as well.
They're a number of these institutes being formed at state institutions. I see, I'm interested to see how those will be. I actually, I don't know. Because I mean, these are sort of, for folks at home, we don't know.
So a number of state legislatures, including Texas, Tennessee, Florida, I think is on the map, Iowa, I think is in the long term Louisiana. Arizona is the first one. Arizona is the first one. So the state legislatures have looked at universities and said, you guys are a mess.
This ideological thing that Jake was talking about earlier, like it's 12 to one, Democrats to Republican, that's insane. You clearly can't hire in a responsible way. You become ideological silos. And so in response, somewhat reasonably.
And I think somewhat unreasonably, they've said, well, let's just start sort of basically the right wing version of this on college campuses. So will those be successful? I mean, they're basically, it's basically the same thing on the other side, which I don't like, which is why I like what University of Austin is trying to do, state nonpartisan. I'm in history of public science, right?
So how will, let's say Ohio State actually, actually, my state legislature in Ohio, I don't know if you know this, Jake. They just passed five of these in Ohio, just a couple weeks ago. So there are going to be five of these state mandated institutes at state public universities coming up in Ohio. So you start at this place, you start Ohio State, and like there is a history of public science from out there.
They're already existing. How are they going to receive you? What classes are you going to get to teach? How are you going to have access to students?
Are you viewed as a welcome addition or a parasite? And so I don't know. Yeah, I mean, look, I think both what Alex said and what you said, Greg, these are really interesting subjects. I want to address what you said and then go back to something Alex said.
I think it's really, really important. Look, yeah, there have been a bunch of initiatives aimed at fixing higher education, right? So the UNC Chapel Hill, right, they started what they call School of Civic Life and Leadership. As you mentioned, Florida, ASU that was founded in 2017, the school of the Pacific and Academic, so called Leadership.
Come on, something. Yeah, I'll see. That's the T.L. Right.
Yeah, School of Academic, Academic, Academic, Leadership. Yeah. University of Texas has a School of Civic Life now, or Civic Leadership. Yeah.
Well, they have a student in the school, but they also just started a School of Civic Life who's going to independent. Yeah. So these are good developments. And by the way, four states now have passed anti-DEI measures.
So they're like, for example, Texas, you can't. And I don't know, 20 or 30 more are currently considering it. OK, so there are these movements out. You raised some really interesting questions, which is, I mean, there's going to be a battle.
We know that when it was announced in North Carolina, SAC, SOC, which is the accreditation. Criding body. Oh, yeah. The city was uni.
So those guys didn't even, like they just said, well, this is not right. We're going to have trouble with this and so forth. And then the head of that organization sort of backed off. But what you have to do in those cases, by the way, is to actually establish independent schools, not just enough to have a program that have control over their own hiring and their own tenure and stuff like that.
I mean, otherwise you're sort of fighting this uphill battle. We can come back to this question. But I want to go back to something Alex said. And I really appreciate your bringing this up.
I think, for example, the civil rights movement is excellent. Because as you said, what's happening there is you have founding principles of the United States. You read the Constitution. You read the Declaration.
You look at the history. And the civil rights, so you could do that in university. And then you can say, this will inform the civil rights movement, so you're something coming out of an academic setting. And now you're applying these principles to improve the country.
Or look at Martin Luther King, right? He's extremely well-schooled in the Bible. He's using the teachings there. He's bringing them out.
So what we see in those cases is a connection between genuine liberal education, which looks back to the precious inheritance of the past, and the hard one wisdom of the past, and the founding principles, and so forth. And then taking that knowledge out beyond the campus walls, and trying to improve society and make it better. That's our model at UATX. It's also my own belief of what universities are about, and what they're for.
Look, in the beginning of the second book of the Republic, Socrates mentions the three kinds of good. They're things that are good for their consequences, but not themselves. I always used to have flu shots or prostate biopsies or something like that. Alex actually think it was a good in himself.
Yeah, right. Well, that was actually funny because I was talking to the doctor recently. And I said, you know, you said something like, well, you know, the line for the prostate biopsy experience that Disney World is a very short one, you know, people will do it for a reagent. But it might be a good thing to do, right?
It might be a good thing to do, right? It's a good thing to treat you, right? So then there are things that are good only in themselves. And by the way, this is the line that's a John Henry Newman text in the idea of university.
It's actually, particularly, we're sort of like argumentally a really good line, right? Like, don't talk to me about, you know, what good is the university? Like, that way, you're just going to get in all these problems. I'm just going to tell you that this is good in itself, right?
And we're not here to make gentlemen and stuff like that. Well, my own belief is that universities are in the highest category of the order of the societies. That is, liberal education is good in itself and different consequences. And, but this is a very difficult thing.
And it's sort of what we're trying to articulate here is how you can take what is learned, right? Real education. And then take it out into society. Now, you know, I let you were talking about sort of this transformation of education is kind of progressive ideal.
Look, let's go back to John Dewey and the sort of perspective that we, you know, we're forward looking. We don't really need to know the history of the past and so forth. But when you detach these things, you get these weird situations. So like in the United States now, most universities are going to be further toward that side of the spectrum of, well, what's the utility of the education, right?
And on the most basic level, you can get a job, you can get a job in engineering or something like that. There are a few holdouts like St. John's College, which suffers away from the other side, right? Like you read these great books, but there's not necessarily a clear path forward.
Although I'm kind of optimistic about liberal education. I think that kind of education will prepare you, you know, to live a good life and to know how to learn and to think clearly. And that's very useful as well. But to sort of put these two things together is the essential thing.
And I agree that these things have really fallen apart. It's a rather serious problem. So look, I mean, as I was saying, universities, so there was a poll in 2015, 57% of Americans had confidence in higher education eight years later today, 36%, and nobody's going to go down, right? Now, another thing is just on the most functional level, if you ask potential employers, people own businesses, and if you ask students, the majority of both groups agree that students are not prepared for their careers, from their education, college students are not prepared.
Employers don't think so, and even the students don't think so. So that's kind of failure to educate. Another problem I want to mention, and this is a really big one, and it doesn't get a lot of attention. And that is the loss of joy in learning.
You know, I do not, I was lucky to go to a very good liberal arts college, and I was surrounded by people who were bright and who took pleasure in reading and discussing and thinking. I don't think campuses are very happy places today. And I say that because we see students upset and frustrated and, you know, trying to block speakers or demanding safe spaces or whatever. You know, I get the impression that, you know, one group of students is trying to snitch on others and the others are trying to protect themselves.
And it's just not a very healthy situation. So how do we restore that wonder and joy in education? I think that's really, really important. And, you know, I mean, again, you know, being afraid of being formed by people on social media and stuff like that, that's not a good situation.
Yeah, on that issue, another thing I see is aside from activism is just like these students who seem like they're just like sticks floating down a stream to a waterfall unaware of what they're doing with their lives. And, you know, I think this in a way gets back to the progressive education versus, you could say, an education and the bigger questions. I mean, if you go to the ancients, the education for them is always twofold. On the one hand, moral and political and therefore education towards a regime.
On the other hand, philosophic and therefore education in the questions, the great and during questions, what is virtue, what is a human being, what is the whole? Is there a God, et cetera, et cetera. And it strikes me that to the degree that education or higher education in the United States is suffers from ideological capture and sort of a progressive ideological crap capture. It is so deeply embedded in the cave that in a way, it's most effective when students just kind of float through, have their opinions confirmed and then float out and precisely what they need, which is a sort of alternative, a sort of deeper questioning or just and it doesn't have to be, you know, you don't need to have Socrates and like, you know, glock in an eye to man to sit in every class.
But a teacher who appreciates, you know, why these questions are worth asking and can show them that they matter for their lives, it has the potential to wake them up. So on the one hand, you have these board or disaffected students who feel like they can't talk on the other hand, you have these activist students encouraging to become the teachers pet and they're sort of get to price up the ranks of the educational system. And all in all, it's just horrible for the regime, right? Because you have no awful questioning about how to improve it or what the good life is or even or even just an education and why the principles behind it might be sensible, you're just sort of having these opinions still.
Yeah, it just seems to me to all feedback to this. And so the the the emotional reactions or lack thereof and the sort of general sort of withdrawal of trust and interest, even among students and parents and the general public is utterly predictable, right? Yeah, you know, we just be sort of the demand that's you see out there. Yeah, it's it's even disaffected.
They want something else. They don't want this thing that you've got. Yeah, it's a strange thing, you know, so so universities maintain general education requirements. Now, we know these have been watered down, you know, I mean, you can point to programs that were very successful, but are really sort of becoming a little bit, how can I put it?
They've sort of lost the thread and are being watered down, like direct to studies at Yale or Columbia, you know, the great books, program and so forth. And what happens is students don't really know why they're doing this stuff. It's just something that, you know, they need to get through the funny thing about the cave. So here's a very strange thing.
I agree with you that it's all taking place inside the cave. You don't get outside the cave. But what happens in universities is people believe that they have gotten out of the cave because what you're taught is, hey, this is a system of power relations where the powerful manipulate and control things, right? So you get this kind of a deconstructive analysis of these relationships.
And now you feel like you're on the inside, right? Now, you know how this stuff works. But at the same time, there's a kind of awareness that this is a false consciousness because what you're actually learning in a university, the stuff that people want is the stuff that's going to be useful to them in taking their role as polynters or something like that, the gate, right? That is to say, you know, there's with one eye, you sort of look and you say, isn't this a deplorable system?
Because we've got these, you know, imbalances of wealth and power and so forth. And we see the powerful people are manipulating things. On the other hand, you really want to have the abilities and the knowledge that will let you take your place and this kind of knowledge economy and be a symbolic analyst and stuff like that. So there's a kind of it's really not a good system.
And so you're sort of winking with the other eye at the same time as you like, I discern the truth, right? But left out of that is the notion that there might be an actual set of measures or criteria of what is true beyond this system that could actually liberate you from this. And you know, it's that's that's what needs to be revived, it seems to me, is some kind of understanding that we don't have to be trapped in this, in this kind of dishonest game. But you know, as you say, I think there are very strong demand signals before we get to that.
I just want to mention one other thing that often gets left out. And then as we have this system of accreditation, it used to be we had regional creditors, there were seven regional creditors. They are now, although the Bush of the Bush of the truck, the Biden administration, I'm trying to think of who the guy is, might overturn this. But what happened is that under Trump, the rule was changed so that the people who were in a particular region, like higher than the commission in the side of the country could now offer their services to anyone.
Right. One of those national creditors deals with only community colleges. The other six, and I did a sort of study of this recently, have all committed to infusing DEI throughout universities. Now, and you mentioned, you mentioned administrators are increasingly not people with PhDs, this group.
It's even more concentrated with these people who have these higher education credentials that aren't in traditional academic disciplines. Exactly. And I've heard these folks say like, we're the ones who actually know what happens in university and professors don't know, I literally was at a one of these accrediting body meetings where a guy gave a talk in front and said, professors don't have to reach students because they don't know who students are. We're the real people who know how to teach the whole room's nodding.
Yes. I'm like, I'm sorry. How many of you actually teach classes? No hands.
This is a great point. And this is part of what you could call the corporatization of the academy. Yeah. I mean, look, you know, in the 1960s, the dean and the president of Cornell University, where my dad taught, you know, these guys were academics.
Right. Yeah. And today we have this administrative class that kind of comes in. They're, you know, they're very highly paid.
And they don't really have an academic background, academic consultants, as I mentioned in my order of these people. These guys are really mentioned consultants. And the thing about the administrators too is that so they exercise much more power now. It's been taken out of the faculty.
And the fact is that these guys are behind a lot of the problems at universities. I mean, many things have been handed over to them. And the university is also, by the way, Greg, you know, something you said, just remind me this. I remember the president of the university, it's also at one point.
There was a kind of confrontational meeting when everything was falling apart. And somebody said, like, what gives you like the authority to make these kinds of decisions. And he said, because we know what the future of higher education is. Right.
That kind of stuff. You know, and this is an example of what what Eva Braun calls future bullying, right? This is to say, the only reason they know, quote unquote, what the future is, is that they're going to make that future. It's kind of like, you know, we are, we are willing that future to being it's almost like this.
So that's a real problem. And the administrators, incidentally, are are, if anything, more ideologically slanted than than the faculty. I mean, in 2022, only 6% of administrators identified as conservative and 71% were identified as liberal or very liberal. And they just don't really know the business.
I mean, again, I was, I was mentioning the natural situation. I mean, I'm certainly not the only person who believes that neither of the two major parties in this country particularly represent the people who vote for them. They have their own, you know, so there's a kind of detachment of the people who are in charge and the people who are just there supposed to serve. And if you ask a university president, no doubt if they're a good president, they'll say, look, you know, I'm a servant of the university.
I'm here for you. I'm, you know, this, this kind of kind of rhetoric. But the thing about the creditors is they, it's been noted they do not stand up for freedom of speech, for example. Why are the creditors saying to universities, hey, wait a minute, you guys are canceling people, you guys are eliminating speakers.
You know, this is not what a university is about. And now, you know, they're very much behind these DI initiatives. One of the things that happens there is this is part of the push to eliminate the SAT and so forth. And I read recently something like 80% of all colleges and universities in the country now are no longer required for these kinds of standardized tests.
So there's something very strange going on. Let's talk about the demand signals though. There's drawing demand signals of the part of students and their parents, the American public really wants education. But as I say, it's not just the administrators, it's also a promise faculty.
And this is something I found out at the University of Tulsa. I was very disappointed by the lack in general of faculty response to the destruction of university. And what I sort of realized is first of all, it's in the interest of the administrations to get rid of the older professors, which is part of the reason, by the way, I think they targeted my department because we were kind of older faculty and you know, and replace them with younger people, you say money that way. But the other thing is that the younger people don't really have a sense of the dignity and the nobility of the professorial, right, of this profession.
I mean, I'm old enough to kind of, you know, to remember professors who were always in suits and ties and would come in and it was a very dignified thing. And you know, you felt it was very important. I always teach a cone to that's good. You drop that powdered wiggy used to where?
Well, you know, in spite of Alice's comment, both of you are still look quite young and I have to tell you, when I, for the first 15 years, like I always taught in the coat and tie. Yeah, because when I started when I was 28, I mean, I looked like a student. So, but there's something else there. I mean, I think that when you, you know, that these under faculty, especially, but it's not just the under faculty.
It's not like I was also very disappointed. And Dow chairs and stuff wouldn't stand up. They just didn't seem to care about these things, whereas there were some assistant professors who were gambling their own careers by the very public in their opposition. So it's not, it's a general role, but it's not.
So I think that this is, this is a real problem. And let me also say something else here. I'm sure you guys have had to undergo these training videos where you got like sexual harassment and all this kind of stuff. Have you noticed the following thing?
All the professors in these videos are like 30 something dudes who I just remember seeing where a young female student comes in that talked to the professor, it's a sexual harassment video. And the professor gets up and he fist bumps the student, Hey, what's up? Man. And the whole presentation is like, where's the dignity?
Where's the nobility? Where's the sense of seriousness? You know, like the presentation of what it is to be a professor has been altered in a way. It's a kind of cool hip thing.
You know, so, but I've noticed that when I, I used to teach in way more casually and then I was like, okay, I'm getting to the age where I need to start just a little bit, but maybe the reverse of you. And then when I started wearing a coat and a button down and dressed up and everything like that, the amount of respect I got. Oh my God. That the students took things seriously.
Oh, yeah. It just has a friend of mine recalled when he was T E teachers every summer in room, he shows up to his first class and he's wearing, you know, a suit, he's got a tie in the jacket and everything. The second class, two of the young men in the class came in button down shirts. They were like, Oh, I should actually be dressed probably for this.
It's an actual education, it's just a vacation or something. Yeah. But yeah, there's casual, casual quality. That's fantastic.
You know, we have in my last years at TU, there were there were twins, a guy named Walker and I think his brother was named Weaver, Womack. Okay. And these two kids would wear bow ties and suits all over campus for you. And because I finally got a couple of names like that, you got it.
Yeah. Right. And they were like Southern gentlemen, right? But I love that kind of thing.
First of all, it's working. It's unusual. And it kind of, you know, it lifts things up. Elevates.
But but so we've already talked about what the universities can can be fixed from within. But let's talk about this, this other solution of founding new universities, right? Which we have, University of Austin, UATX. I think that the task is for the university for us to show that universities can contribute to the common good.
And I can tell you a little bit about how we propose to do that. But let me first tell you that there are obstacles, right? So what are the dimensions of starting a university? Well, I cannot imagine trying to reform, for example, the university of Tulsa from within.
Let's just start with, for example, a very simple thing, a mission statement. Now, what is the purpose of a mission statement? Well, actually, it's really, really, really important. We visited a university that is we at the University of Austin visited a university called, who you guys see the Francisco American in Guatemala.
One of the reasons we visited now, they're 50 years old is they have a very good organization and their mission is front and center. They were founded in like 1970 or something during civil war between communists and, you know, anti-communists in Guatemala. The guys who founded it had to be like bodyguards and wear disguises and stuff and alter their past the university because they were found out the principles of Austrian economics. When you walk around this campus, you see pictures of melted freeman.
And you see pictures of Hayek and you see mission, you see statements all over campus. And they never let you forget what the mission of the school is. And that's very important. And what I realized in my job at UITX is if you've got a good mission and everything needs to be oriented toward that mission, now you have a response.
When people say to you, why are you doing this? Why are you doing that? You can say this is our mission, right? And this follows from the mission.
And then by the way, when you get these arguments, like you guys shouldn't do that. You can then say, I guess you don't like our mission, right? This is what we're in existence to do. Hey, guys.
By the way, going back to accreditation, you don't care about your mission. They got their own agenda. They want to do DE and stuff. What accreditation should do is come in and say, oh, you're a Catholic school.
You have these values. You have this mission. OK, what we're here to do is to turn what you are actually living up to that mission. That's their job.
I'm on the faculty senate here at Ashland University. We've had some budgetary woes and I wrote, I should send you this, Jake. You might enjoy it. I was tasked with giving a talk in front of the board and I sort of said, look, what we need is a distinctive mission.
Like look at the places that are succeeding. Like we need to be able to say who we are and we need to pursue that in an excellent way. And the only places I see around the country that are succeeding, other than places that are so well, they're not to worry about it or places with a clear, distinct identity that is pursuing that in an excellent manner. And we can do that.
Like, so we're at Ashland University, a little old D2 school. We have we had like half a dozen gold medallists at the world Olympics and track and feel like why do we have one of the best track and field teams in the country? We don't have to have that. We had a guy here who happened to be good and we built around him and this.
We can do the same thing in academics. We have a good history of science firm and build around it, like, have a mission and go for it. Like and all they want everyone. I mean, this is typical of every place I've worked is they want to chase students and they feel like having any kind of an identity or mission alienates some students.
And I'm like, if you're everything to everybody, you're nothing to anybody. You got it. You got to do something that's different. So I mean, this program, I'm successful.
Why is Ashland successful? Like people know like there's pictures of Reagan on every wall, right? Like there's American flag everywhere. There's a Gettysburg Address and other wall people know what this place is.
And yeah, it's not for everybody, but we get a consistent batch of students in every year. Yeah. I mean, that's what happens when they chase students, they end up turning every school into like nursing an education program, like justice. And then it just becomes like a college service, a scholarship professional, which is fine.
But that's not the highest ideal for an education. A friend of mine, I won't mention his name because I don't want to get him in trouble. He told me that he had these he was on a committee. They were they were working up a D.
I statement. They had to put a D. I statement up on the ground and they were over the summer, all these faculty members coming to every single meeting by just working over everywhere to make shows perfect. And then he was tasked with coming up with the sort of mission statement of the program and what the kind of questions and topics that they cover.
And there was not a single meeting. People just threw out some ideas around of comments and that's it. It really shows you. And this is one of the things that I think makes a UATX sound interesting.
Right. Often times my only interaction with administration will be about professional matters like contracts, things like that, or D. And and okay, it's important. But it often feels like that's all that's cared about.
Meanwhile, when it comes to what are you doing in the classroom? How does this fit in? Very little interest in that. Right.
They mean one, make sure that you hit the D. I stuff in the classroom and they evaluate that in your teaching, but they don't really have that same sort of curiosity. And you wonder, you said, what am I doing here? Like, okay, the relationship with students can be good and with some of your colleagues can be good.
But what is the purpose of this whole institution? And you start to realize that there's this weird disconnect between administration and the people of power and then the faculty in the classroom, unless you're like a toady to these administrators or an aspiring administrator yourself, which, you know, yeah. Well, I mean, look, you know, so imagine trying to come up with a concise, clear, robust mission at an existing university. You've got in trench forces, you've got inertia, you've got big committees, you're going to have a bunch of you.
It's very hard to do. It's hard enough. I mean, even at the University of Austin, right? You've got board members and you've got faculty.
And so, you know, there's going to be debate and so forth, but it's manageable because you have small number of people and you're starting from a clean slate. This is crucial. So you can build everything up. Now, we know there is, you know, like there's entropy, right?
You like you have to keep putting energy into the system, but at least you can construct a good system to begin with. I think that would be extremely difficult. But, you know, so, I mean, just very briefly, some of the things we intend to do is first of all, we want to tackle the administrative costs thing. And so, you know, our founding president, Pano Canela has said that he wants to reverse the ratio of 70% other stuff, 30% instructional, and sort of turn around to try to make two thirds of the expenditures code.
Our initial tuition, I mean, we're proposing to be, you know, a top university. We're going to charge $32,500 tuition. And I can tell you right now that our administrative costs, I mean, right now they're very high because we have no students on the ratio between administration. Right.
So we can like say, oh my God, it's like infinite or something. But, but the fact is that we are, you know, we have a very modest compensation as administrators, and that says it should be relatively speaking. And then the curriculum itself, right? We've got this intellectual foundations program, which is basically two thirds of all the courses that students take in the freshman and sophomore year are, you know, beginning, so you know, chaos and civilization, beginning of civilization, beginning of politics, a course called knowing, doing, making wisdom that explores the languages of understanding and the difference between different approaches to knowledge and objects of knowledge and masses and so forth.
And wisdom, on the other hand, of course, I'm running a course on the American experience, of course, on the origins of modernity and what modernity is about. We integrate the Hebrew scriptures, the Christian scriptures, the Quran, right? So we're setting the major religions alongside the Greeks has a kind of historical arc. We've got a course on uses and abuses of technology.
We have a course on ideological experiments with 20th century. We have a course on mortality and meaning in art, right? And sculpture and painting and things like this and music. And, you know, other stuff, we have two course on quantitative reasoning, a course on physical sciences, a course on life sciences, a course on the intellectual funding, the economics.
So it's a pretty broad thing. But then we have a thing called the Polaris project. What's that named after the North Star? The idea is you take this liberal education and you use it to identify some human good, some pressing human need that can, you know, you're concerned with human flourishing.
So you're starting with human flourishing as you study the ways that you can get screwed up in the production of human flourishing in the contemporary situation. What is called for? Right. Do we need a new medical instrument?
Do we need to reform K through 12 education? Do we need a new kind of documentary film? Do we need it? Could be a purely academic thing?
Do we need a translation of Penn dark? I just made that up, right? But that could be a conceivable thing. But here's the point.
In order to do this, you have got to explain how it relates to your intellectual foundations studies, right? Because you got to know what human being is. You have to have to conceptally human good in general, sort of general level. Then in particular, what are you interested in?
How does it relate to this larger picture? How are you going to contribute to human flourishing? Why are you the person to do it? And then you refine this over the four years.
You got to get a high standard. We also have something called the talent network, which is dozens of companies across different industries have agreed so far. And we're building up to mentor our students, to give them apprenticeships, to give them critical feedback on their projects. So this is a way for them to connect with potential employers.
We're going to hand responsibility for the students. So if you want to do a certain kind of project, great. What are the precedents? Who are the likely mentors?
Okay, you identify them. You contact them. How do you do that? You want to know how to write an email, present yourself.
You got to know how to make a phone call. You got to have a basic skill. So they want students graduate from the University of Austin. They will be job ready.