March 20, 2025 - Epoch Times
08:10
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| So the motto of the University of Austin is dare to think. | |
| Are people not thinking? | |
| People aren't daring. | |
| I would say that. | |
| So dare to think goes all the way back to Immanuel Kant. | |
| And it was sort of the byword of the Enlightenment itself, right? | |
| That thinking, real thinking, is to push the boundaries of knowledge, to think beyond what's received, to challenge the givens, to... | |
| Not accept orthodoxies at face value. | |
| To exercise the muscle of the mind through resistance. | |
| And that takes courage, right? | |
| Because it's easy to go with what's familiar. | |
| It's easy to accept the givens. | |
| It's easy to accept whatever narrative you've been given. | |
| So I lean into the daring part of that. | |
| Another motto of ours is we've built a university dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth. | |
| Not just pursuing truth, but doing it courageously. | |
| So I think the deepest sort of thinking, the deepest, most profound pursuit of truth pushes the edges, and that's not always comfortable. | |
| But you're basically saying that it's courage that's lacking in the academy right now. | |
| And that's the purpose of this new university? | |
| Absolutely. | |
| I would go even a step further. | |
| I would say it's not just that courage is lacking, but that we've created a culture of conformity at universities, a culture of conformity in higher education. | |
| And if you think about it, if you roll the tape back before students even become university students in the competitive admissions world we live in for higher education, in order to get into elite universities or... | |
| You know, top-tier universities. | |
| Young people are told that they have to have a checklist of things, that they have to, you know, follow a certain pattern, that they have to... | |
| Take a certain pathway and that if they do the right things and they say the right things and they get the right, you know, the stars, the gold stars at the right time, then they will be granted entry into an institution, an elite institution, a top institution that will help propel them forward in life. | |
| Well, what are they learning? | |
| They're learning that success is dependent upon conformity. | |
| And what happens when those students get to universities, that message is reinforced. | |
| Come here. | |
| Don't say anything controversial. | |
| Don't challenge, you know, what the dominant narrative is. | |
| Don't be highly concerned about the things, the ideas that you express, because they might have a deleterious effect on your future. | |
| So we create a culture of conformity to get them into universities, and then they get them, and they learn that at the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow now, that excellent entry-level job at Goldman Sachs or something is now also dependent upon You keeping your head down and not ruffling feathers. | |
| That to me is the exact opposite of what universities should be doing. | |
| Universities should be fostering risk-taking, independent thinking. | |
| Universities should be places where ideas are interrogated, where students aren't afraid to be wrong, because being wrong is how you get to what is right. | |
| And so it's not just about courage. | |
| It's about... | |
| Moving beyond educational culture of conformity. | |
| And it's about acceptance of, I guess, failure, right? | |
| As part of the process. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And that also, that takes courage, right? | |
| You know, to be willing to be wrong. | |
| To be willing to invest yourself in something and find out that that choice wasn't the best possible choice. | |
| And then learning how to change course. | |
| And then maybe making a mistake again and then getting back up. | |
| This is the time when young people need to be doing that. | |
| I mean, the years at university are the perfect time to make mistakes. | |
| It's the perfect time to be bold and to strive for things and then fall down and get up again. | |
| And if we're not encouraging that, if we're not incentivizing that, then we're not teaching students how to actually be prepared for what they're going to encounter in the rest of their life. | |
| Right. | |
| Hence, you know, daring to think, I guess. | |
| Daring to think. | |
| Daring to think. | |
| And the other part of our motto is dare to think, dare to build. | |
| You know, it's not just about thinking, it's about doing. | |
| And to be a builder, you have to be courageous. | |
| You've talked about this many, many times, right? | |
| I know you've had kind of an incredible marketing scheme for University of Boston, which is how I think I first came across it. | |
| But just very briefly, the genesis of the idea, And then we'll talk about the freshman class. | |
| A group of us got together, you know, Ferguson, Barry Weiss, Joe Lonsdale, Arthur Brooks, and we were concerned about the state of higher education, the culture of conformity and, you know, the culture, the kind of censorious nature of higher education, | |
| the political asymmetry of higher education, all these things. | |
| And we sort of said, what does one do about that? | |
| If you identify a problem... | |
| And it's a significant problem because universities are so central to the culture. | |
| Universities are the place where we do our thinking. | |
| Universities are the place where we create the future. | |
| And so we got together and said, what are we going to do about this? | |
| We have identified a problem. | |
| Do we try to reform things from within? | |
| Are there pathways to take existing universities and try to bring out what's best in them? | |
| And that seemed daunting. | |
| And so we thought... | |
| Well, maybe starting in a university, maybe launching a university from the ground up will enable us to design it, to structure it in a way that accords with the principles that we think are at the heart of higher education, which are open inquiry and freedom of conscience and civil discourse. | |
| I mean, that lays the groundwork for the kind of deep and profound thinking that one needs to do at a university. | |
| So we just decided that we were going to jump in and begin a university in 2021. | |
| We announced it to the world. | |
| The world responded. | |
| Here we are just three years later with a wonderful operating university in Austin, Texas, with our first class of freshmen, wonderful faculty. | |
| And the fact that we were able to launch from back of the napkin idea to living university in three years, I think is a sign of the... | |
| Of the need for this kind of institution at this moment in time. | |
| And before we go any further, what does Shakespeare have to do with it? | |
| What you're probably alluding to is that my background is as a Shakespearean scholar. | |
| That was my academic field when I was a professor. | |
| It's interesting. | |
| Shakespeare probably could have gotten in the way of this project because it was very difficult for me to leave my passions aside to sort of focus intensely on being a university founder. | |
| But I will say that in the conception of the university, we believe wholeheartedly that we can't understand the world today, and therefore we can't understand how we should act as human beings towards a better future if we don't have a sustained and serious encounter with what's come before. | |
| The great thinkers of the past, the great works of the past, the great art of the past, the history of mathematics and science, that if we don't encounter those things, if we don't absorb their wisdom, and also identify where certain ideas have gone wrong, | |
| then we have to begin again from... | |
| We don't have enough time to start over, to start civilization from scratch. | |
| We have a civilization. |
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