They Wanted a University Without Cancel Culture. Then Dissenters Were Ousted.
The founders included Kanelos, who’d resigned the presidency of St. John’s College in Annapolis to run the new university, Weiss, Ferguson, Lonsdale and Heather Heying, an evolutionary biologist.
“Niall was the mind, Bari was the media and Joe was the money,” a former faculty member told me.
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In a Bloomberg op-ed, Ferguson declared, “academic freedom dies in wokeness.” Lonsdale penned a piece for the New York Post, boldly promising that UATX would “prepare a new generation of leaders to think for themselves about all sides of an issue, speak truth to power, and take power back from ideologues.”
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In December 2023, Ferguson published a manifesto of sorts in The Free Press — the “Treason of the Intellectuals.” Over his long career, Ferguson wrote, he’d witnessed “the politicization of American universities by an illiberal coalition of ‘woke’ progressives, adherents of ‘critical race theory,’ and apologists for Islamist extremism.” Still, he reserved some of his harshest language for the “armies of DEI and Title IX officers,” who, he said, seemed, at many colleges, to outnumber the students. Because these universities are rich, Ferguson said in an interview shortly after the article’s publication, “they’re allowed to grow these enormous bureaucracies of non-academics, people not engaged in research or in teaching, purely engaged in administration. They’re a huge part of the problem.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/01/16/civil-war-university-of-austin-bari-weiss-00729688The thing about that long article detailing the pathetic dump that the "University of Austin" is, is that it was written by someone sympathetic to it at first. Ferguson just makes his money by spouting endless attacks on "the woke". He's given up being an academic. He's a walking Trump regime talking point.
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