In 2021, a crew of self-described free speech martyrs announced they were founding a university to save American higher education from the scourge of cancel culture. They called it the University of Austin, or UATX — and though it lacks accreditation, they boasted that it would be a place where controversial ideas could breathe free, and students wouldn’t live in fear of the woke mob.
Pretty much from the jump, critics of UATX suspected the project was less about “freedom of speech” and more about building a right-wing echo chamber for aggrieved libertarians. It operated out of a former retail store in downtown Austin, with funding from “anti-woke” philanthropists like Palantir co-founder Joseph Lonsdale.
Over the next few years, those critics would be proven correct in spectacular style. According to comprehensive reporting by Politico, in April of 2025 Lonsdale called an all-staff meeting that threw the entire project into a tailspin. Per the reporting, the billionaire told faculty and staff they must all subscribe to the “four principles of anti-communism, anti-socialism, identity politics, and anti-Islamism.” Anyone who didn’t toe the line would be frozen out.
In other words, the school supposedly founded to buck political litmus tests was issuing its own extremely stringent political litmus test — and threatening anyone who didn’t get on board with cancellation.
After that, everything changed. Staff and advisors began fleeing in droves. Students became disillusioned with the “university’s” mission. The founding president, Shakespeare scholar Pano Kanelos, stepped down from his role to take a largely ceremonial position as “Chancellor,” from which he would resign just a few months later.
One student told Politico: “I’ve never felt my speech was so chilled as it was in the classroom at UATX.”
Though a constitutional charter supposedly laid out a democratic process to resolve differences of opinion, these seemed to melt away at the request of figures like Lonsdale. The institution, as one staffer put it, had been “building the plane while we’re flying it.”
UATX, built to save students from the evils of cancel culture, has now become exactly what it claimed to oppose: an institution where the administration can end your academic career on a whim, where dissent from right-wing orthodoxy is not to be tolerated — and where the people most obsessed with cancel culture can finally do the cancelling.
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