Four years ago, Pano Kanelos left his post as president of St. John’s College, in Maryland. He wanted to start a college that stood in stark contrast to the rest of higher education, which Kanelos and the project’s wealthy backers felt was veering dangerously toward illiberalism. That bold experiment, the University of Austin, is finishing up its first academic year this week.
The private, start-up college currently has 92 students, 30 faculty members, and 41 staff members. It does not receive federal funding and says it uses a “merit-first” approach to admissions. It’s trying to earn accreditation, a process the university expects to complete between 2028 and 2031. Kanelos will step down Wednesday as president to become chancellor. Carlos Carvalho, a professor of statistics in the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, will take over the presidency.
The college has styled itself as opposed to ideological orthodoxy, a mission that has drawn praise in some circles. But it has also drawn criticism, with some observers arguing the institution is not as tolerant as it claims to be.
In an interview with The Chronicle, Kanelos shared his vision for the years to come and responded to a former staff member who recently argued that the institution had betrayed its founding principles. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The University of Austin captured considerable media attention during its first academic year. 60 Minutes produced a feature and students have sat for interviews with The Wall Street Journal and Fox News. But is there a moment from this past academic year that wasn’t captured by national media that made you proud of the university you helped build?
In February, I think, I got an invitation from some of the students to a winter ball that they were organizing. It said black tie. They were having it at this historic hotel nearby called The Driskill. I thought I should go, but I had very low expectations. I thought there’d be a bowl of punch and some cookies, and we’d hang out. I walk into this event and the young women are wearing ball gowns and the men all have tuxedos on. They brought all these guests from other places in. There’s a four-piece string quartet playing, and there’s an ice sculpture. They have this fabulous dinner, and then we all proceed into this room and there’s ballroom dancing. It was the most elegant and fun event I had been to in years. It said something about the spirit of this particular group of young people. It speaks to a larger culture that the students have created here — the taking into their own hands the formation of university culture.
One reason why UATX was founded was because of your dissatisfaction with the culture of other universities. When you announced the university back in 2021, you wrote in The Free Press that higher education might be “the most fractured institution of all.” Universities are cultures largely shaped by their people, who can bring in their vices and flaws. One reason why UATX is fascinating to me as a reporter is that it’s a university built from scratch, and that makes me wonder — how do you protect a clean slate from the ills that you think have plagued other institutions?
What we’re all bringing is our incompleteness, our brokenness — the things that we don’t do as well as we’d like to, alongside the things that we do really well. One of the things that’s really helped us cultivate a real culture of openness, open inquiry, and truth-seeking is the fact that we incentivize making mistakes. In the classroom, we try to push one another to say: What’s the wildest thing that you can think of? What do you think might be right or wrong? We’re drawing out of each other not our own closely guarded, deep-seated opinions, but the things that we’re processing as we’re thinking about difficult issues. When you start to do that, it becomes about the ideas. It creates a more objective way to think about dealing with the complexities of human questions and life. You laud people who are boundary breakers. You reward students and faculty for going outside their own comfort zone as opposed to penalizing them.
Our natural state of being at universities has historically been to be a place where people can have strong opinions lightly held. The closing of the aperture for the expression of ideas is a relatively recent phenomenon. That’s why I think it’s fixable. In the past three weeks, I’ve had one Ivy League president, one Ivy League dean, and one top-20-school president reach out to me to come talk about how we foster civil discourse at University of Austin. They look at us as a grand experiment. Of course, we make mistakes too, but we course correct. Everybody’s assenting right now to the need to get back to intellectual pluralism and civil discourse. The challenge is that it’s really hard to unravel at existing institutions the pathologies of how they got there in the first place. It’s much easier to do that at a start-up institution.
A few weeks ago, a UATX staff member named Ellie Avishai published an essay in Quillette with the headline “Is the University of Austin betraying its founding principles?” She alleges that the university cut ties with the center she directed, the Mill Institute, because of a LinkedIn post she made sharing an article about diversity, equity, and inclusion. She wrote in her post: “We can have criticisms of DEI without wanting to tear down the whole concept of diversity and inclusion.” UATX does not endorse diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and practices. Is Avishai’s post the reason the university ended its partnership with the Mill Institute?
No. The decision to [cut ties with] the Mill Institute was made well in advance of that, and we shared that with Quillette. We showed them our board had made a decision. It was in our strategic plan that we were going to discontinue the Mill Institute primarily because every one of our institutes has to be self funding. If they’re not raising enough money to perpetuate what they’re doing, then our constitution says that we shut them down. The funding trend wasn’t working for the Mill Institute. The decision was made well in advance.
[After this interview, the university sent The Chronicle its strategic plan, which does not mention the Mill Institute. “The Mill Institute is not included in the plan because it was decided that we would not continue to support it — it wouldn’t make much sense to include the things that you are not going to pursue in a strategic plan,” Kanelos wrote to The Chronicle in a follow-up email.]
Ellie Avishai is a remote employee who’s rarely been on our campus and doesn’t really understand the culture. Her impression of what’s going on, if you match that up against Boris Fishman’s article [in The Free Press], you’ll see that it’s inaccurate. I don’t mean to say she was malicious or anything like that, but I’m just saying it’s not really accurate.
[The Chronicle reached out to Avishai for a response to Kanelos’s remarks. She wrote in an email: “As one of the early hires at UATX, I’ve been privy to dozens of conversations with UATX leadership both in person and remotely for almost three years and have observed (and spoken with many others) about the way the culture has changed. I also participated in weekly leadership meetings with Pano and his top team for more than a year. Moreover, since the Mill Institute had not yet come close to spending down the generous gifts already donated to support it, the notion that this was largely a financial concern is questionable at best. I stand by everything I wrote in my article and sincerely wish the university well in pursuing its founding mission.”]
Avishai writes in the essay that an unnamed colleague shared with her that a major funder was upset over her post. Did a donor threaten to pull money because of the opinion Avishai expressed online?
That is categorically untrue. We would never allow a donor to influence anything that we’re doing at the university, academic or otherwise.
One of the core tenets of institutional neutrality, which UATX endorses, is that a university should host critics but not be the critic itself. A few of UATX’s leaders are openly critical of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and practices. Two of the university’s founders, Joe Lonsdale and Niall Ferguson, are featured in a video posted on the university’s X account with the caption “DEI, ESG, and BS are out.” Do these remarks from university leaders betray institutional neutrality?
Where universities have a responsibility to speak on potential contemporary issues is where they intersect with the operations of the university. We believe very strongly that the tenets of DEI actually interfere with the core function of a liberal, open university community. We want to be very clear that we think that applying DEI to a university community is a category error and that it will disrupt the functioning. As an institution, we don’t speak out on political issues unless they directly impact a university. What other people who are affiliated with the university say or don’t say — that’s a part of the chorus of voices that are out there in the public. I can’t control someone and tell them not to say something or do something. If it’s not coming from the university itself, I think we’re still abiding by institutional neutrality.
When high-profile people affiliated with the university take a public stance on an issue, is that toeing the line?
The university is clear when we’re speaking in the university’s voice, and the university doesn’t speak for other members of the community. They speak for themselves. The one person whose voice is unequivocally coterminous with the university is the president. The president has to be even more disciplined about what is said in public because that’s really where confusion comes from. If you go to any university, the boards of trustees at Harvard or Hopkins, they’re all saying different things online and making public statements. That’s their prerogative. They’re speaking for themselves.
The University of Austin’s social media accounts have a spunk to it that’s not seen at other colleges. For example, this post on X roasts the University of Austin’s neighbor, the University of Texas at Austin:
High school seniors,
If these college courses sound interesting to you...
• “Latinx Sexualities”
• “Queer Television”
• “Chicana Feminisms”
• “Black Queer Art Worlds”
• “Queering Black Religions”
...there’s a really good option for you across town.
When the university’s account pokes fun at these topics, do you think that has the potential to stifle speech about those issues?
Sometimes we want to be maybe clearer than most universities are about how those sorts of things might have a negative impact on the intellectual enterprise. Maybe we’re a little bolder to make the point. We really do believe that DEI initiatives stifle speech, compromise intellectual pluralism, and really undercut the core mission of the university. We feel that we should say that, but I’m not going to make a comment about what’s happening in Ukraine, right? Or about legislation out of D.C. that has nothing to do with universities — that’s not our business.
I’m also interested in how UATX maintains staying power. When you look to the future, what’s your fund-raising strategy? Are you confident that you’ll be able to maintain financial support through donors, without a large endowment or federal funding?
Because there’s been so much enthusiasm around this project and so much support, we have a really robust runway to move forward. We have substantially more funds than we need to operate the university year over year. That gives us time to go from being a small, compact institution to grow and double and double and double. And as you do that, you’re multiplying your revenue streams, and you’re creating a stable financial model. Having a stable financial model is essential to building an institution that’s independent. One of the reasons so many schools feel at times that their independence is impeded is because they’re not financially independent. When you’re an institution that is needy, when you can’t turn away funds, whether it’s from a donor or the government, if you can’t turn those things away, you’re not independent intellectually. We’re building a model that will be stable over time. We have great momentum.
Harvard University is one example of an institution that’s feeling the pressure of having a close financial relationship with the government. A few weeks ago, Ferguson, one of UATX’s founders, gave a talk titled “Why UATX is the Anti-Harvard.” Do you agree with that statement? If so, how is UATX the anti-Harvard?
We’re the opposite of what Harvard is now. Harvard — a stand-in for a broader swath of elite higher education — is a bastion of entrenched elite interests. Harvard is a place that is primarily concerned with the distribution of power and influence, and that’s the promise they make to students. We’re an institution that is looking for talent and merit. Where Harvard is about networks and connections, for UATX, our goal is the transformation of young people. If you think about a place like Harvard, they built an institution to kind of perpetuate generational privilege. Maybe they’re opening the doors a little wider, but that’s really what it’s about. Our students are like the mavericks, the first-generation students, the ones who think outside the box, the ones whose goal isn’t the entry-level job at Goldman Sachs, but who want to build a hydrogen engine for Formula One cars before they leave here. We think of ourselves as having built an institution to prepare the next generation of builders, creators, and innovators. (A Harvard spokesperson did not answer a message seeking a response to Kanelos’s characterization.)
Networking and connections is also a core part of UATX. The university’s Talent Network boasts big names in technology and entrepreneurship like Peter Thiel and Chase Koch.
This is a different kind of networking. The synapses that connect here are synapses of talent. The companies that are hungry to bring our students on, it’s not because the student came from somewhere or has a certain name or certain backgrounds, but it’s because this kid’s actually really super interesting and super bright. One of the challenges I’m having right now is keeping them from hiring our students away before they finish their freshman year. The demand for our students is really intense.
You’ve spoken about your disapproval for sprawling administrative bureaucracies at universities. The UATX careers page lists two new positions for hire: a student-success coordinator and senior vice president for advancement. Where do you draw the line on new administrative hires? How big is too big?
One of the places you draw the line is that there’s some positions you just have to hire, according to the accreditors. You have to have somebody who assesses student success in one capacity. For us, it’s basically, Is somebody serving the core purpose? Are they in the classroom teaching a student? Are they student-facing? Are they essential? Yes, we’re hiring a VP for advancement. You can’t raise over $200 million unless somebody is leading the charge. To put that in perspective, most schools that have raised $200 million would have an advancement team of several dozen people. We have, like, three. We stay very lean. We’re running an entire university with just a few dozen people. Next year, we’re doubling our student body, but we’re not doubling the administration. Administration is basically staying the same. We might have to have one or two people. The faculty are increasing appropriately because we have more classes.
When you look ahead, what’s keeping you up at night?
This first year has been a dream for us. It’s gone so much better than we even hoped. The students are just amazing, and the atmosphere is electric. Over the course of a couple weeks, Alex Karp from Palantir, Peter Thiel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Jordan Peterson showed up to hang out with the students. People are just popping in because of the interest that they have here. We’re at a very special moment in time, the first year of the new institution. So the question I have myself is: How do we continue to cultivate that maverick-pioneer culture as we go forward? How do you keep your edge? That’s something we think a lot about.
