College can help open your mind or close it. College can push you toward a spirit of curiosity, or it can reaffirm your pre-existing convictions and confirm your blinkered worldview.
I don’t want to overstate what a college can do. It’s not as if college students are mere lumps of moral and intellectual clay that can be shaped and formed at will by professors and administrators, or by one another.
Ask a professor, and he or she is likely to tell you that students usually arrive on campus with strong pre-existing ideologies and theologies. Students interested in politics, in particular, often come to campus as committed activists.
Professors, however, still have influence, I know that I arrived on my college and law school campuses with a host of fierce convictions. My best professors urged me to question my assumptions, to test them against the new facts I was learning and to ask whether new information (and better reasoning) might change my mind.
But that’s not the only kind of college experience. Many students walk into college echo chambers, and very little about their education causes them to question their beliefs, much less change their minds. Instead of gaining humility, they increase their pride. And this arrogance and sense of certainty have contributed immeasurably to our national enmity and polarization.
The story of the University of Austin gives us a glimpse of both the problem and the solution. New institutions can be an answer to the failures of the old, but they’re still subject to the same temptations and can easily slide into the same mistakes.
The University of Austin, or UATX, was launched with much fanfare in 2021. The goal was to create a new highly selective university that would be free of the maladies and pathologies that plagued so many legacy universities.
The founders of the new university included Niall Ferguson, a leading historian; Bari Weiss, formerly of The Times, the founder of The Free Press, and the current head of CBS News; and Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire co-founder of Palantir Technologies.
It would be a mistake to describe the new university as merely a right-wing institution. Among its early advisers were Nadine Strossen, a former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, and famous centrist academics such as Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt.
Indeed, if you peruse the entire list of early founders and advisers, the word you’d use to describe the vast majority of them isn’t necessarily “right-wing” or “left-wing” but rather “liberal,” in the classical definition of the term — committed to free expression, the rule of law and open inquiry.
Their very presence on the list of UATX’s early founders and advisers was an indictment of elite legacy institutions, all too many of which had become deeply illiberal as a matter of policy and of culture.
So much has happened over the past year that it’s easy to forget the persistent problems of the American academy. For example, a majority of students in a national survey reported feeling intimidated about voicing their true opinions on hot-button political topics.
It can understand why. I teach at a college. I speak at many colleges across the country. And when I ask students why they don’t speak up more, or why they don’t debate their peers in class, I hear the same reason again and again: They don’t want to lose friends. They don’t want to risk their grades.
And these aren’t the fears of closet Klansmen but rather of people who hold thoughtful, mainstream positions that differ from the progressive orthodoxy on campus.
If ideological orthodoxy were enforced only through peer pressure, that would be troublesome enough. But campus illiberalism had long ago moved far beyond social pressure and into the realm of university policy.
Speech codes and bias response teams have chilled speech on many campuses. Some universities have required job applicants to articulate their views on diversity, equity and inclusion — in effect creating formal ideological litmus tests for hiring and promotion.
Why did so many classical liberals from the right and left join UATX? Because campus illiberalism requires a response, and one of the best and most productive forms of response is to build new and better institutions, to offer students a choice.
But Steven Pinker is no longer affiliated with UATX. Neither, reportedly, is Jonathan Haidt or Nadine Strossen. Nor are many others among the leading liberal writers and thinkers from the left or right. By the end of last summer, close to half the original cohort of prominent supporters had parted ways with the school.
Earlier this month, Politico Magazine published a long and fascinating account of the divisions at UATX, by Evan Mandery, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
As Mandery writes, a key moment occurred on April 2, 2025, when professors and staff gathered to hear from Lonsdale, a member of the board. According to the writer and academic Michael Lind, who was a visiting professor at the time, Lonsdale told the gathering that every member of the faculty and staff had to subscribe to four principles — anticommunism, antisocialism, opposition to identity politics and anti-Islamism.
Defenders of the university labeled Mandery’s article a “hit piece”; Lonsdale himself doubled down. “If you’re on a university board and are not attacked for purging commies,” he posted on X, “or making sure commie-adjacent bureaucrats don’t screw up your institution, then you’re not doing your job.”
To be clear, in right-wing America, the word “commie” does not refer exclusively to actual communists (of whom there are very few in the American academy) but often to the whole kaleidoscope of American progressivism. Ideas or people whom populists don’t like constantly find themselves labeled socialist, communist or Marxist — at least when the term “woke” is deemed insufficiently derisive.
In other words, according to Mandery’s account, UATX wasn’t creating a true alternative to legacy elite institutions but rather their mirror image — a place that imposes its own ideological boundaries and that is proving inhospitable to dissenting voices. Rather than answering illiberalism with liberalism, it was threatening to respond in kind.
The story of UATX isn’t yet written. The college is new, and there are still a number of outstanding individuals on the faculty and in leadership, but the red flags are flying. The school may already be at a crossroads.
The longer our nation slogs through this terrible political moment, the more I’m convinced that the real national conflict isn’t between left and right — it’s between liberal and illiberal, decent and indecent.
And that brings us back to the clash between curiosity and conviction. I like to tell people that in the course of my education I attended two religious institutions — Lipscomb University, a Christian college in Nashville (where I teach classes today), and Harvard Law School, an ostensibly secular and diverse professional school.
But when I was at Harvard in the early 1990s, it felt more like an ideological boot camp than Lipscomb had. The vast majority of my professors were of one mind. So were the vast majority of my peers. Although there were certainly liberal-minded students and professors, much of my education felt like training for activism more than inquiry.
This spirit of activism wasn’t new. It had developed steadily after the tumult of the 1960s, and by the 1980s it was bearing bitter fruit in the form of the university speech code. After all, what value is free speech if you’ve figured out the most important answers to the most important questions in life? How can we implement our vision of social justice if we’re divided by dissent?
Over time, this mind-set results in a startling ideological monoculture, in which almost everyone around you is broadly in your ideological camp. When almost every smart person you know agrees with you to some important degree, then it’s very easy to slide to the conclusion that your opponents aren’t just wrong but potentially even stupid or evil.
And who wants stupid or evil people on campus?
The best colleges, by contrast, take the opposite approach. They don’t teach you to double down on your convictions but rather to approach the world with a spirit of curiosity. It’s not that curious people shouldn’t have convictions; but their convictions should be tempered by humility.
I’m an imperfect person. I don’t know everything. I will never know everything. Therefore, I should approach the world with an open heart and an open mind.
In an institution committed cultivating curiosity, speech codes are anathema. The last thing it wants to do is to stifle discussion.
This type of institution isn’t trying to train and mobilize young ideological shock troops, cannon fodder in the culture wars. Instead, it uses its influence to cultivate people who will remain curious their entire lives.
The preservation of our Republic requires us to be double-minded. We have to respond to the emergency of the moment — whether we’re facing threats against a NATO ally or systematic constitutional violations in the streets of Minneapolis — and, at the same time, rethink and rebuild the institutions that put us in this terrible place.
And that means using whatever influence that colleges do have to introduce a single important thought into even the most ideologically and religiously committed young minds: What if I’m wrong?
It is that recognition that can change a life. It is that recognition that can open a heart. And it’s that recognition that allows us to turn to a friend, a neighbor and even an ideological opponent and sincerely ask one of the most important questions you can ask — what do you think?
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