The president of the St. John’s Great Books liberal arts college has announced he’s going to start a new private University of Austin in Texas dedicated to non-woke freedom of thought. He has a lot of famous centrist-rightist intellectuals like Steven Pinker and Niall Ferguson signed up as advisers (not as professors).
He doesn’t, yet, have any big name zillionaires publicly committed to forking over a ton of cash to make this happen at a scale big enough to matter.
On the other hand, rich guys are richer than ever right now, so it seems not impossible.
For example, John D. Rockefeller founded the U. of Chicago by donating $35 million between 1889 and 1910. Back then, $35 million here, $35 million there, pretty soon you are talking about real money. Wikipedia writes:
His personal wealth was estimated in 1913 at $900 million, which was almost 3% of the US GDP of $39.1 billion that year. That was his peak net worth, and amounts to US$23.6 billion (in 2020 dollars; inflation-adjusted).
The recent Forbes 400 2021 counted 18 individual Americans with at least $50 billion. If one of them gave proportional to what J.D. Rockefeller gave to the U. of Chicago, that would be at least $1.6 billion. That’s a lot of money, but there are 45 colleges with endowments that large (and for some reason, Wikipedia’s list doesn’t include that other college in Austin, which has a huge endowment funded by a tax on oil).
A big question is how do you avoid having U. of Austin grads blackballed by the rest of academia? For example, if you want to make a career in cultural anthropology, you’d probably be best advised to avoid having a free-thinking university on your resume.
Judging from comments by those involved in this start-up, they tend to be focused more on the humanities and social sciences than on pre-professional training of pre-meds and MBAs. That is admirable, but you need some way to attract bright students.
I could see making alliances with non-woke firms like Tesla, Palantir, and Coinbase and specializing in majors they need, like Comp Sci. It’s crucial to provide potential applicants with plausible career paths. As America becomes ever more like the Soviet Union in its ideological dumbing down, smart kids need to be shown a route to success. A college where the STEM stuff pays the bills and the humanities/social sciences aren’t insane sounds functional and appealing.
If I were starting a University of Austin, I’d go to tech and Texas billionaires (e.g., Michael Dell) for money with a plan to pay seven figure salaries to get the world’s best computer science professors to attract the world’s best comp sci students to make Austin into Silicon Valley 2.0.
Four decades ago, there were two Silicon Valleys: Silicon Valley and Route 128 outside of Boston. Michael Dukakis got the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination in large part because Route 128 firms like DEC, helmed by MIT and Harvard grads, were so prosperous. But when the minicomputer was crushed by the microcomputer, Route 128 was no longer a serious competitor (not that it’s impoverished today, but few at Boston colleges anymore believe they’ll launch their unicorn start-up without leaving town).
To attract the Larry & Sergey-quality grad students, who are a key to start-ups, I’d offer six figure stipends so they don’t have to live on ramen for five years. Currently, the stipend for Ph.D. students who teach classes at the lavishly funded Stanford Business School is $47,000, which is better than most, but doesn’t go far in the Palo Alto rental market.
Back in the 1980s, Route 128 outside of Boston was almost as famous a tech center as Silicon Valley. But that was a long, long time ago.
People have been talking big talk about starting another Silicon Valley since the late 1970s, but all that has happened is that its only competitor, Route 128, died.
Austin has long been presumably the most likely Silicon Valley 2.0, and a second S&E university would help.
