On Resigning from the Board of the University of Austin

From the letter, and their podcasts, I think their chief concern is probably more that UATX is going to be structured along the lines of a traditional university system and merely continue some of the same flaws. I tend to agree with her, but it may be that too fundamental changes might not attract the same prestige and fundraising that such an institution needs.

Her words not mine.

There is probably more specific interpersonal drama - possibly she feels the politics of the rest of the board will be bad for this institution in some form.

Getting rid of these blights would certainly make the university more liberal in the truest sense of the word. However, you have to go deeper and clean the rot from within. Once the top has been scraped clean you now need to go into academia itself and root out the same problems. Not just the problem of what can be called "militant diversity initiatives" but even more so the problems that exist in research, grant funding, choices for tenure, election procedures for positions of power, etc. Not only do these suffer from the same "surface wokeness" but they also give large amounts of money based on so-called diversity quotas. To be truly a liberal institution this must be stopped. Worse, that is just simply the start.

It sounds like the current board liked the idea of scraping the wokeness off the surface but otherwise wanted to keep the same ole system in place. I tend to agree with the author. With the core rot left in place, the surface will become blighted again. Academia is basically a matryoshka of pseudo-intellectual progressive virtue signaling today. Academic politics resembles a twitter argument more than a meeting of the minds to advance humanity. To decompose this matryoshka it'll take more than just a wave of a wand.

I barely remember hearing about this

I'd say she has some sensible things to say where it concerns redefining the concept of a university although she also - in my not so humble opinion - approaches the subject from a utopian standpoint stemming from the concept of the Evergreen State College as imagined by her and (seemingly to a lesser extent) Brett Weinstein. The "new university" as she imagines it would quickly fall prey to the next iteration of critical theorists intent on fomenting revolution just like Evergreen State College was taken over.

As I see it the real problem lies with the concept of ideology - or the lack of it. The critical theory inspired "faculty yahoos" (Heying's words) who took over the faculty and spread a thick layer of "woke" over everything did so because they were - and are - driven by an ideology as surely as Scientologists or Jehovah's witnesses are driven by one, the former just leave out the concept of a supernatural being and replace it with prophets searching for some ephemeral "truth". While they do not have a supernatural being on top they do have a concept of an "adversary" like most other religions, this being the WEIRD [1] world in which they grew up. Whether driven by their image of a god or one pushed by revolutionary pamphlets, both groups have a strong drive to push their ideologies as far as they can go in as many places as they can. When universities were driven by their own ideology - usually in the form of the Christian religion [2] - they had a defence against other ideologies intent on taking over as the dominant factor but when they moved away from these they left themselves open for invasion by competing ideologies.

What then is the solution? Should universities return to their religious foundations to once again become resilient against attacks from invading ideologies? Some would loudly call for this but I don't see this as a good solution for a number of reasons. The first reason is that religion and rationality don't mix all that well while the scientific method depends on rationality to function. The second is that the Christian religion itself is vulnerable to takeover by competing ideologies and has in some cases already been taken over, viz. Liberation theology [3] which is an amalgamation of Catholicism and Marxism.

What, then, could guard institutes of learning and dissemination of knowledge from being invaded by these types of intellectual parasites without this defence wholly taking over the institutes? To me this is an open question waiting for a good answer. Until a good one is found and implemented it is probably a good idea for these institutions to take a step back and pick up some of the tenets of their own lost ideologies lest they be taken over entirely and with that, lost. Realise that this problem is mostly if not wholly confined to "the west", e.g. Chinese and Russian universities will continue on their own paths while their western counterparts get mired into the modern version of the search for how many angels can find a place to stand on a pinhead.

[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/WEIRD

[2] e.g. Harvard (named after a Christian minister) and Yale (originally Puritan, started by clergymen) and Princeton (originally Presbyterian). Princeton’s crest still says “Dei sub numine viget” which is Latin for “Under God she flourishes.” In the UK Oxford University was established by various religious orders. Likewise, Cambridge University was established in 1209 by Christian leaders. Saint Andrews, Scotland’s oldest university, was founded principally for the teaching and study of theology.

[3] https://www.academia.edu/38221258/Liberation_Theology_A_Crit...