Billionaires who are disgusted by disruptive activities Anti-Israel protests on American college campuses According to a report, they’re ditching their elite alma maters — and instead supporting a new, “anti-woke” university in Texas that has just 92 students.
Wall Street trader Jeff Yass, real-estate tycoon Harlan Crowe and investor Len Blavatnik are among some of the deep-pocketed donors who have given nearly $200 million to the University of Austin, or UATX, to date. According to the Wall Street Journal,
The Journal said Yass alone has given $35 million to the small school — which is currently housed in a former department store.
Crowe – a major GOP donor and close friend of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas – said he hoped the new university would encourage ideological diversity.
“It seems that much of higher education today wants to completely reject Western achievements and the achievements of Western civilizations,” he told the Journal. “A lot of people think it’s a bad idea.”
With his wife, Kathy, Crowe has hosted events for the school at his Dallas home and allowed the school to use space in his office park for its “Forbidden Courses” summer program.
The controversial university was flooded with contributions as conservative activists grew fed up with uncontrolled pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses across the country.
Billionaires threatened to stop large-scale donations from their elite institutions. Donors and politicians signed petitions to remove administration leaders.
This explains the appeal of UATEX as a non-partisan, “truth-telling” organization. The college welcomed its inaugural class of first-year students last month.
To start with, the school is offering three types of programmes: Economics, Politics and History; English and Creative Writing; and data science and computer science, According to the Austin-American Statesman,
Pano Kanellos, the university’s founding president and former president of St. John’s College in Maryland, said each student will work on a Polaris project – a four-year assignment that must address a societal need.
A promotional video on the school’s YouTube page shows a seminar at the University of Austin as well as pro-Palestine camps at other colleges.
A message at the end of the video says, “They burn, we build.”
Plans to open the school were announced in the fall of 2021.
The school’s founders include venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale and journalist Bari Weiss.
Lonsdale co-founded Palantir Technologies and is donating to former President Donald Trump. Weiss previously worked at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and has since founded the Free Press, an independent newspaper.
“Higher education needs competition,” Yass said in a statement. “Now is the time for philanthropists to start new colleges in keeping with the way American educational institutions were founded.”
Other donors include PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, who previously offered to pay students $100,000 to skip college and start a business instead; billionaire philanthropist John Arnold and his wife, Laura; and Alex Magaro, co-chairman of Meritage Group, who donated $10 million to the school last month.
The war in Gaza and subsequent protests on college campuses across the United States only led to an increase in donations.
Blavatnik, who is Jewish, donated $1 million to the school shortly after Hamas attacked Israel. Later, he stopped his donations to Harvard University.
Daniel Lubetzky, founder of Kind Snacks and son of a Holocaust survivor, has donated to the school since it was in its early stages.
Niall Ferguson, one of the school’s founders and historian, said, “To convince Wall Street, to convince people in Silicon Valley, that there really was a problem with higher education, what happened on October 7 at the major campuses was , he had to.”
The school is currently awaiting accreditation, which it can receive only after the first class graduates.
As an incentive for its first students who are taking the risk of attending an unaccredited, brand-new school, UATX is offering a full-tuition scholarship of $130,000 to all of its first-year students.
Nearly half of the inaugural class comes from Texas. One third of the students are women.
Executives from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and The Boring Company are behind the school’s engineering programming.
Lonsdale, the school’s board president, is donating a few acres of land outside Austin for the school’s science and technology center.
Meanwhile, UATX continues to search for a permanent main campus.
While the new college claims to be non-partisan, a significant portion of its founders are longtime GOP donors.
“Everyone who gives us that is a critic of higher education,” Canelos told the Journal.
