University of Austin President Pano Kanelos pitches Texas’ newest university as a place dedicated to free inquiry

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Pano Kanelos, the founding president of a new private university in Texas called the University of Austin, believes polarization on university campuses today reflects a “hardening” of empathy within American culture.

Speaking at a Texas Tribune event Wednesday, moderated by the Tribune’s Managing Editor Matthew Watkins, Kanelos said he wants to create a classroom experience where students feel comfortable “taking intellectual risks” and can hone their opinions through dialogue.

“I don't think at a university, one opinion plus another opinion should equal two opinions, one winning out in the end,” he said. “One opinion plus another opinion should equal better opinions.”

Kanelos laid out his vision for the new private university, set to launch in fall 2024. He believes it can be a champion for free speech and open inquiry.

“We're just living in a moment where things seem to be coming apart, where people seem to be pulled away from each other, where institutions seem to be shaking in their foundations,” Kanelos said. “The best response is to build new things.”

Two years ago, Kanelos and the university’s co-founders announced they were starting the school in response to their belief that college campuses were no longer a place where students and faculty could openly exchange ideas.

The announcement received national attention due to the school’s board of advisors, which includes former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss, historian and Hoover Institution fellow Niall Ferguson and Austin entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale. Critics panned the announcement as a reactionary response by a group of people who had previously been at the center of controversies on and off college campuses around the country.

But Kanelos said he feels the issues he and the school’s founders raised with American higher education have only become more evident over the last two years, and particularly in recent months, as universities across the country have been heavily criticized for their handling of protests and debates on campus regarding the war between Israel and Hamas.

“The very things that we pointed out at that moment in time — the need to recommit to open inquiry, intellectual pluralism — have really come to the fore in this particular moment,” he said.

When asked how UATX would handle these types of debates on campus, Kanelos said speech should be free unless it becomes threatening or incites violence.

“The line is clearly crossed when someone is advocating for genocide. That’s unambiguous,” he said, though he added that he felt it’s essential for a university to allow space for unpopular ideas and radical dissent to exist.

Kanelos described higher education as an “overly bureaucratized” space and pitched UATX as a unique university specifically targeting students who want to be the next big entrepreneurs, innovators and creators.

He described the college classroom today as a place where students are afraid to share their own opinions or discuss ideas with their fellow classmates because they are concerned something they say might make it onto social media and impact them negatively.

“We have the advantage of being able to create a culture really from scratch, we have our own sandbox,” he said. “So making sure that we're attending as much as possible to intellectual pluralism, civil discourse, open inquiry, and putting in place both the kind of cultural pieces that will preserve that and the governance pieces that will preserve that is really essential.”

Kanelos said UATX is adopting the Chatham House rule in the classroom, under which students agree that nothing that’s said as part of a classroom discussion will be repeated outside the class with attribution. The school also plans to create a “judicial branch” as an additional checks-and-balances tool on academic freedom issues. It would be composed of constitutional law experts who volunteer to handle instances when faculty, students or staff members believe someone has transgressed on their academic freedom.

Given the criticism that UATX was founded by and for people who feel shunned in academia, Watkins asked if Kanelos is concerned classroom conversations at UATX will become their own echo chambers of people who are “fed up with the way the discourse is going on the elite universities now.”

“No one wants to create a college of the canceled,” Kanelos said. “That's not the point.”

So far, Kanelos said, the students who enrolled in UATX’s summer programs and events have represented a wide variety of belief systems and backgrounds.

“You have to maintain that,” he said. “If this is your mission, you have to ensure that you are going to cultivate that kind of community.”

Last month, UATX started accepting its first group of applicants to enroll in the fall of 2024. They are enrolling 100 students and hiring 15 faculty for the first year.

The Texas Tribune partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

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