UATX: The Startup University

My "competitive excellence" priority as founding faculty

The Wall Street Journal published a big story over the weekend about UATX — the University of Austin where, as regular readers know, I am honored to be one of the founding faculty.

It’s a weird article in my opinion, not that it says anything wrong (that I know of), framing the first new university in America to emerge in a long time as something bordering on sinister. For instance, underwriting its splash photo of the exterior of our building at the heart of downtown Austin, WSJ describes the famous Scarbrough building as a “former department store.” That’s their lede? The authors might have quoted the guide to Austin architecture, which describes the Art Deco Scarbrough as “Austin’s first ‘skyscraper’ and briefly held the title of the tallest private building in Texas when it was completed in 1910.”

The title of the WSJ piece is similarly blunt in its framing, pointing to a half dozen wealthy folks that are convenient bogeyman in the political-culture war. Nonetheless the headline says:

“Billionaires Back a New ‘Anti-Woke’ University”

To be honest, I am not personally part of the fundraising efforts, so cannot confirm who has been so generous to help our university during its startup phase. I do know that Joe Lonsdale is involved because I bumped into him in Palo Alto a decade ago and then again at the UATX convocation ceremony; and I’m proud to be associated with him. I was willing to join based on the reputation of the founders - Pano, Bari, Joe, and Niall. Regarding the WSJ, I am writing this essay because you have to know that there will be a lot of misinformation about UATX in the coming years. What I want to offer is my perspective about the place, and why it is such an important, thrilling institution to be part of.

First, the students at UATX are breathtaking. Crazy smart. Ambitious. Hungry to make a difference. My classroom at UATX is crackling with raw intelligence. When details about how extraordinary the pioneering students emerge, they will shock and delight the nation.

Second, the faculty is a small, diverse, and committed team of amazing individuals. Two colleagues stand out as key partners to me personally - Morgan Marietta (Dean of the Center for Economics, Politics, and History) and Keri Waters (head of the Polaris Center). Keri likes to remind the academics on campus that we are a lot more like a startup than a university, and I think she’s right. We are placing the intellectual cornerstones this year — and that’s what makes it such an enticing project for me personally. There will come a time when the seminars, research papers, and distinguished guest lectures will be the vital essence of the institution, but now is the time for us founders to establish the institution itself.

This question haunts me: What stagnated and rotted in the mainstream American university over the past half century? I’m not an expert, but I ponder that question because UATX has to not only understand the forces that are disfiguring modern academia — we also have to establish core operating principles that overcome those destructive forces.

Consider the WSJ headline again: “a New ‘Anti-Woke’ University”.

Anti-woke? I don’t accept the label, and here’s why. It’s narrow, and also nobody can be really clear about what “Woke” means — a soft adjective that is halfway along its linguistic-cultural journey from rallying cry to joke. Advocates have constantly shifted its meaning. So it’s hard to pin down, and I think it’s a mistake to fight something ambiguous.

What matters to us are eternal principles. For me, that means we must define UATX around the principles the university stands for, not merely against. For me, again, those principles are the same that motivated me as a young man in the cloth of my country: liberty, equality, Constitutionalism. I mean it. We stand for a radical equality that inspired the poorest soldiers in the war for independence in 1776 and the infantrymen who fought for the liberty of strangers in Europe and Asia in 1915 and 1944 and 1951 and 1970 and 2019 and even today. We are all still fighting so that every American is measured by the content of their character, rewarded for their individual merit, free to say/write/broadcast whatever they want, at liberty to create, secure in their personal property. These are simple principles. These are radical principles.

It has been easy to rally around this radical equality - the first of UATX’s distinguishing principles - especially religious, ethnic and sexual equality. Judging people by their faith or skin tone has no place here, and I love that. It means a great deal to me, as anyone who has read my published works about my faith as “human” as the only race, period. Nevertheless, radical equality is not a big enough idea to serve as a cornerstone for a university that will help save American academia from its death spiral nor to brace the structure of an institution that will inspire the world centuries from now.

What is the cornerstone?

I am working to help implement programs at UATX that permanently establish meritocracy as a deeply embedded operational principle, not just a lofty ideal. Sadly, merit is a dirty word in modern academia, literally in some places. Middle schools and high schools are terminating gifted programs. Colleges are eroding admissions standards, notably standardized tests. Unbridled grade inflation in the Ivy Leagues and Land Grants debases merit, and now colleges are abandoning accolades altogether. For example, Inside Higher Ed reports, “Last fall, both Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania stopped releasing deans’ lists in an effort to reduce students’ academic stress.” I’ll handwave at that worthy rabbit hole, but will note the existence of a vast literature on the academic-bureaucratic war on merit — a good pointer is to search the excellent Marginal Revolution blog.

Let’s just focus on grades.

A chart appeared in a 2011 New York Times article showing 200% A-grade inflation at American colleges since 1940, thanks to research by Stuart Rojstaczer. “What accounts for the higher G.P.A.’s over the last few decades? The authors don’t attribute steep grade inflation to higher-quality or harder-working students. In fact, one recent study found that students spend significantly less time studying today than they did in the past.” Amazingly, grade inflation has accelerated since this data was assembled, a trend I consider the alpha and omega of scholarly rot.

A 2023 report in the Yale Daily News exposed the problem there: “Even before the pandemic, the percentage of A-range grades was climbing — it reached 72.95 percent in the 2018-19 academic year, up from 68.97 percent five years prior. But in 2020-21, that share jumped to 81.97 percent.” The Yale data revealed something deeper — the disparity across disciplines. Eighty-plus percent of grades assigned in Humanities and “Studies” majors are As, compared to Mathematics (55%) and Economics (52%).

Competition & Merit at UATX

There is no shortcut to greatness. Rather, competition on an equal playing field is the essential ingredient from which excellence emerges. And appreciation comes from something achieved with difficulty. When the faculty assembled over the summer to define the grades policy at UATX, we wanted to pour some institutional concrete to forever guard against grade inflation. We recognized that we could establish a policy at a “startup” college that is all but impossible at an existing college with entrenched interests and bureaucracies. What we came up with is an elegant policy that frees professors to assign a variety of grades across whatever distribution of student effort in their own classrooms, so long as they abide by one equalizing principle:

Each UATX course has the same maximum average grade. Consequently, each UATX professor and each UATX major also have identical maximum average grades. The Deans decided to set the max UATX grade average at 3.2 (B+) on a 4-point scale. The implication is that a student can score “perfectly” on the course rubric and will earn a B+ because at UATX that is the norm. An A or A- grade above B+ is reserved for genuine excellence above the norm. As a result, students will spend more time working to achieve excellence on academic studies. The downstream implications are even more profound:

1. There is no “easy class” at UATX, so students will be free to enroll in courses on difficult subjects of genuine interest, rather than opting for lazy classes to pad an inflated GPA.

2. There is no “easy professor” at UATX, so professors are freed from feeling artificial pressure to give inflated grades that will pad their student feedback ratings.

3. At UATX, there is no uneven playing field (bias) against STEM courses with objective learning metrics such as chemistry, engineering, anatomy, and econometrics. Indeed, students who concentrate in STEM are finally on equal footing for accolades like valedictorian.

4. Grades need not be curved to fit a normal distribution. One section might be given bimodal grades (half A+, half C+) whereas another section could have every student given a B+.

5. An individual’s GPA at UATX has real value, unlike the inflated sheepskins printed at Brown, Harvard and Berkeley. Will Austin graduates suffer by comparison? No. Consider the handful of colleges that resisted the 1960-2024 inflationary trend, notably U Chicago and MIT. Their graduating students are consequently highly respected, even the ones with Bs and Cs on their transcripts. As graduate schools know, reputation matters, so Chicago and MIT students place very well in elite law, medical, and PhD programs. UATX students will launch with a strong reputation thanks to its grades policy.

The challenge for us now is to find the other competition cornerstones. Where else in a university can the principle of competitive excellence be embodied? Course selection is one area we are working hard to build with a marketplace for real preferences to be revealed using student tokens and bids (the forthcoming ARES system). Another is our nascent faculty-course assessments at the end of each term. How should those be designed? What about paying instructors more for teaching more students? Or paying large bonuses to some faculty for teaching excellence based on meaningful performance metrics : student assessment and (gulp) value-added? Things that are anathema to the anti-competitive ethos elsewhere are on the table here. And we need your help thinking deeply about how to pursue and promote excellence better than anywhere, ever, so share your thoughts in the comments (or email me directly).

Come to think of it, a former department store may be the perfect metaphor for what UATX offers that other colleges won’t. This is a marketplace for ideas. We serve the customer who wants an excellent product in a competitive world, at the heart of the greatest, growing city in America. If you want a propaganda factory stamping foreheads with homogenized, inflated virtue signals, you won’t find it at UATX.

Here beginneth the lesson!

Professor Kane and three UATX students (Merrick Meardon, Eli Crowder, and John Manuel) at the USMNT soccer friendly in Austin on October 12, 2024.