University of Austin Draws over 3k Employment Inquiries in Four Days | Hacker News Reader

University of Austin Draws over 3k Employment Inquiries in Four Days

thetexan.news

53 pointsmissinfo63 comments

It’s not obvious to me that this reflects anything special about this particular model for a university. Instead, I think it reflects the utter horrow-show that is the academic job market and, to some extent, the terrible matching in the rest of the job market as well.

Individual job postings at “regular” mid-tier universities attract hundreds of applicants, many of whom are extremely qualified.

> Individual job postings at “regular” mid-tier universities attract hundreds of applicants, many of whom are extremely qualified.

But if this is an order of magnitude more job inquiries than average, might that not reflect something different about the model? Maybe something as banal as "it attracted a lot of attention", but surely a 5x or 10x difference is indicative of something.

They’re presumably hiring for multiple jobs though, which knocks that number right back down.

I’ve heard of individual tenure-track jobs attracting 750 full applications. Low hundreds is probably more typical, depending on the school, year, and field (and 2020-1 has been absolutely bonkers), but it still wouldn’t take many to get to 3k total. This is especially true if counting informal “inquiries” rather than a complete application, which often involves quite a bit of customized writing (research plans, teaching statement, etc).

I imagine the prospect of not having to author Maoist style diversity statements and other indignities will be quite a draw. Universities have become inhospitable and intolerant places for even politically moderate folks.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/11/19/mathematician...

To keep the parent comment honest, the word "Mao" doesn't appear once in this article; and in fact, near the top they use McCarthyism as an example of the type of "indignity" spoken of. Why a phenomenon identified in western society in the article needs to be made into some jab at maoists is beyond me though.

It's because the current illiberal bias on the university campus comes from the left so folks on the right are tying it to Maoism.

Thanks for flagging that McCarthy mention though because this type of illiberalism can certainly come from either direction

Sincerely, much respect.

>“I had one Texas mom email me who said she was crying at the possible opportunity for her children, and a very successful businessman who said, ‘my children may now have a place to go to school.”

Not a single university in the world is acceptable for their families? Are they looking for an education or a club to join?

A lot of people have been fooled into believing that traditional universities are places that brainwash their children to become marxists. These people are then unwilling to send their children to these institutions and instead seek out places like Liberty that market themselves as alternatives. Liberty bills itself as explicitly conservative. This one markets itself as focusing on "free speech", but that means something very clear to the target audience.

Well don't keep it a secret. What does it mean to the target audience?

I think one could argue that the main benefit of attending a university is indeed "joining a club".

> DOESN'T IT TAKE SOME UNIVERSITIES A DECADE TO RECEIVE ACCREDITATION?

> Our conversations with our accredited partners lead us to believe that we'll have a much shorter time frame than that. But we're not waiting for accreditation to get started on our programming. Until it is accredited, UATX will offer ...

If you are graduating high school soon, I'd recommend not betting on this University until/unless they're accredited.

They aren’t offering degrees.

“…committed to ideological diversity and academic freedom.”

I mean… isn’t that a way to describe the charter of many universities? It’s practically a definition of the tenure model. Perhaps they are arguing that’s been lost in many universities, to which I would question why they believe a new university is a) the answer to the question and b) likely to somehow do any better. Smacks of someone who simply has a different perspective on diversity and freedom rather than a goal of increasing it.

Have you been asleep for twenty five years?

Yes, that's the usual ideals of universities. The difference is that usually it comes along with not being allowed to make extremely hateful or racist or sexist comments. There's a certain part of american society that has lost their ability to see this distinction and thinks that they should be able to attack other people, say they are not legitimate humans. They think, wrongly in my view, that they aren't free if they can't attack people in this way.

Do you find the Yale Trap House email [1] "extremely hateful or racist"? What about physicist Dorian Abbot's views on Affirmative action?

1. https://freebeacon.com/campus/a-yale-law-student-sent-a-ligh...

I find their definition of "trap house" to be entertaining.

>Once associated with inner city crack dens, "trap house" has also become generic slang for any place where young people can score beer.

Seems like they pulled that from urban dictionary [1] and changed a few words to make it more "professional".

> Originally used to describe a crack house in a shady neighborhood, the word has since been abused by high school students who like to pretend they're cool by drinking their mom's beer together and saying they're part of a "traphouse".

1. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=traphouse

They cite/hyperlink that urban dictionary entry.

It doesn't just smack of it. It is nakedly obvious. The selling point is that it is a conservative-focused institution. Yes, college professors tend to vote blue. But the traditional university is going to be far more ideologically diverse than this place.

It isn’t conservative at all, it’s a bunch of liberals.

The marketing is "classical liberal." But I'd put money on it having a very specific sort of ideology once it gets started.

> Smacks of someone who simply has a different perspective on diversity and freedom rather than a goal of increasing it.

One only needs to look at the comment sections - if they even still exist - of various websites to notice that by nature of the perspective being different, it usually does inherently increase it.

Say what you want about conservatives, and they may get angry and offended just as anyone else, but they do enjoy engaging in debate. But its an an open “secret” that the opposite end of the spectrum is much more eager to silence and ban opposition, both directly, and indirectly through the invention of new and use of existing words and phrases to character-assassinate even when the shoe doesn’t actually fit. You know, like “domestic terrorist” for parents who dare want to have a say in what the schools they pay taxes for teach their own children.

I regularly post in NYT comment sections, and over half of my comments - which I make sure to keep as civil as is reasonably possible - are not approved, while extremely incendiary comments in line with the NYT’s bias are in full abundance.

They can’t prove you wrong if you don’t let them speak.

Title completely misses the actual key part of it:

> Newly-Announced Free Speech-Focused University of Austin Draws Over 3,000 Employment Inquiries in Four Days

I'm really curious to see if this experiment works out. Looking at their website, it seems that they don't have any land whatsoever, so does that mean this is going to be 100% virtual for now? They also don't offer degrees, so is this basically a glorified Khan Academy for the time being?

Also, it remains to be seen if they can resist the same forces that they say have overrun other universities in the country.

> they don't have any land whatsoever

Vast majority of organisations don't own any land - they lease office space.

University generally has some land they built on, granted by the State (UCB, UW, UMass, VT) or some rich guy (Stanford, Harvard, Yale, etc)

Right but you don’t need any of that really - you just need normal office space.

It's planning to be 100% in-person. They are looking into acquiring land. My own opinion is they should buy a large (university-scale) plot of land far enough from Austin that land is cheap.

I don’t think these guys have enough money to make it as a university. Where’s their anchor billionaire? Are they doing this Lean Startup style?

The US has around 5000 universities. Not all of them were started by anchor billionaires.

Its not a for-profit business, its a donation driven — funded by a 501c3 and seeking its own 501c3 status — entity leveraging political tribal identity to target small donors and with large donors motivated by its political propaganda aims.

The main risk it faces is that entities with similar propaganda mission and appealing to similar tribal identity are already thick on the ground, but that hasn't seemed to be a major problem for new entities in the space recently, so I wouldn't bet against them succeeding to the extent of creating an durable operation, even if its never anything credible as a university.

Ah the good old fashioned ways to increase the administrative bureaucratic arms of university. And then we wonder how university education cost has ballooned over 150% inflation in 10years.

They could even get some wealthy and politically sympathetic billionaires to fund them. I'm betting a Koch-Musk University will have them salivating.

At universities, ideas which were once countercultural and revolutionary have become the mainstream orthodoxy. I'm not sure anyone has quite confronted that reality yet. It seems almost like an army that won much more easily than they expected, and now doesn't quite know what to do off the battlefield.

I hope this university is able to balance these ideas into more of a discussion and less of a battle.

> ideas which were once countercultural and revolutionary have become the mainstream orthodoxy

In the abstract, isn't this a good thing? Like this true of lots of scientific advances. Germ theory or whatever initially being seen as a fringe idea, eventually being adopted as the leading explanation

> In the abstract, isn't this a good thing? Like this true of lots of scientific advances. Germ theory or whatever initially being seen as a fringe idea, eventually being adopted as the leading explanation

This is a cultural revolution, not a scientific one. Scientific ideas replacing proven-false ones is a good thing. Cultural crusades, especially those spread through intimidation and bullying, have next to nothing in common with that though.

It sounds like you're saying that new scientific ideas replacing old ones can be good, but new cultural ideas replacing olds ones is always bad? That's a position, but I don't quite see why I should agree with it. There are aspects of any society that can be improved!

I said nothing of the kind. I said comparing a cultural revolution to a scientific one is nonsense.

That's true in biology or physics where actual facts - or things very close to facts - are being discovered, but not so in culture.

Culture doesn't "advance" like science, although it does change, and inevitably so, and in unexpected directions. Having flexibility and tolerance for heterogeneity is important, IMO. For example, look at how much China has changed from the cultural revolution of the 60s to the present. Instead of masses of kids waving a little red book arguing for "perpetual revolution" and going to work in a collective, the best ambition for many today is to be a small business owner or real estate investor, and virtually no one wants to work in a collective.

That's not good or bad in the abstract. It's good for good ideas and bad for bad ideas.

What is bad is that the tactics seem to still be battlefield-like tactics. Not literally of course, but major downsides for saying the wrong things, which has a chilling effect on intellectual discourse.

Has this actually happened?

My experience has been that if you walk around a campus, you can find people studying all sorts of ideas. Some of that might even involve intellectual exercises where one tries to make a strong case for a “revolutionary” idea.

However, at their core, universities are fundamentally conservative big businesses: they want more money and less controversy. There aren’t any actual Marxists in the Dean’s Office.

> There aren’t any actual Marxists in the Dean’s Office.

Certainly not in the Bursar's Office!

> The first named members of the UATX founding faculty include philosopher and outspoken feminist Kathleen Stock, who as a professor at the University of Sussex sparked controversy for stating that transgender women are not biologically women and for her support of a ban on transgender women in women’s bathrooms and giving puberty blockers to minor children.

Bigots always can't help but give themselves away.

"Caution about giving medical treatment to children?" Seems reasonable by default.

"Transgender women are not biologically women?" Well people disagree on what the definition of what a biological woman is but I understand what you're trying to say and sure there are of course relevant biological differences. Trans women can get prostate cancer. Some biology is relevant.

"Ban transgender women in women's bathroom?" Errr. You've given yourself away. This makes absolutely no sense. I don't go look at people's genitals when I go to the bathroom. Are you? Are butch lesbians supposed to go to men's bathrooms? We should do away with gender segregated bathrooms entirely and make inclusive privacy-focused spaces where you do your private business behind closed doors and interact at communal sinks and mirrors that do not require gender separation. But including this in your agenda reveals yourself as an illogical bigot, and the motivation for the rest of your arguments becomes invalid.

Deep breath.

Which is exactly the situation with the University of Austin.

"We are committed to these long-held ideals of the pursuit of truth, academic freedom, open inquiry, and spirited debate." That sounds fantastic! I agree with these concepts too! But...the people you now hire are going to speak volumes about what these words ACTUALLY mean to you.

If your pursuit of truth and open inquiry means exploring various justifications for restricting the lives of trans people, exploring only evidence that doubts climate change, and twisting data to try to establish risks of vaccinations, well...

Ya, it seems way too political from the onset, I suspect it'll grow into more of a partisan train wreck then something truly about the objective truth. But hey, I hope not, and awesome if it can be a really objective place, but it definitely is not starting as one from what this article mentions.

good luck to them.

University of Austin sounds a lot like a safe space.

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