March 31, 2025 - Epoch Times
23:02
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| A liberal arts education, in its purest form, is a comprehensive education that brings together all forms of human knowledge. | |
| Over the years, Pano Kanellis, now president of the University of Austin, observed a growing homogenization and bureaucratization of higher education. | |
| He saw school programs becoming more and more similar, administrators outnumbering students, and young adults being taught the pathway to success is dependent on censorship, and adherence to the status quo. | |
| We've created a culture of conformity at universities, a culture of conformity in higher education. | |
| So in 2021, together with a group of similarly concerned individuals, he started the University of Austin, which emphasizes curiosity, risk-taking, and moral agency. | |
| Three years later, Kanellos is the president of a fully operational freshman class and a diverse faculty. | |
| We're trying to generate graduates who themselves are builders and creators. | |
| This is an important part of our curriculum. | |
| This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. | |
| Pano Kanellos, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. | |
| Thank you for having me. | |
| I'm really looking forward to this conversation. | |
| Well, let's start with the Department of Education. | |
| As we're filming here, just a day ago, there were rumors there was going to be an executive order signed by President Trump to abolish the Department of Education. | |
| That didn't happen. | |
| But what are your thoughts in general? | |
| I would be shocked if there wasn't some action taken from the new administration regarding the Department of Education. | |
| I'll say, When it comes to higher education, I think the expectation is that there's going to be significant reform around accreditation in universities, possibly moving accreditation to the states as opposed to kind of the national accreditors, probably making entry for new accreditors into the system a lot easier and a lot faster. | |
| And I'm all for that. | |
| I think being America's newest university and going through the process right now of authorization and chartering and accreditation the whole regulatory process of becoming a new university is Extremely cumbersome and slow-moving and challenging and it really dissuades new institutions from taking shape And I'm all for as many new institutions coming into the ecosystem as possible because I think that One of the great strengths of American | |
| higher education traditionally has been the kind of heterogeneity of the ecosystem. | |
| That we have all different kinds of institutions at different levels doing different things with different missions. | |
| Everything from vast research universities to Bible colleges and the Texas Panhandle. | |
| What we've seen over the past few years, past few decades really, is a kind of homogenization of higher education. | |
| Where institutions are becoming more and more like each other. | |
| Programs are sort of becoming more and more similar. | |
| And this just kind of flattens out, I think, the potential for higher education to do great things and be dynamic. | |
| So what I'm hoping to see, and this is one of the reasons we started this university, hoping to see new universities come forward with new dynamic models and to make that easier for new entries to join the race. | |
| 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 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 that we've built a university dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth, right? | |
| Not just pursuing truth, but doing it courageously. | |
| So I think the deepest sort of thinking, the deepest The 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. | |
| Yeah. That they have to | |
| 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 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 the 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. | |
| 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. | |
| Hence, daring to think, I guess. | |
| The other part of our motto is, dare to think, dare to build. | |
| 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. | |
| I know you've had an incredible marketing scheme for the 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 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. | |
| 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 scratch. | |
| Well, and we just seem to be relearning the same Lessons over and over. | |
| I mean, off the top of my head, nemesis follows hubris, right? | |
| It seems to be the perennial human lesson that for some reason, we don't learn. | |
| Well, I think because of hubris, right? | |
| Because there's this notion, and I think this is a side effect of a kind of enlightenment rationalism. | |
| There's a notion that The way that we think about things today, because we are further along chronologically than people in the past, is better than what has come before. | |
| That our ideas must be superior. | |
| Why? Because, you know, well, if we look at things like the development of science, well, technology does kind of iterate in one direction. | |
| It tends to get better and better over time. | |
| It doesn't mean human ideas get better and better. | |
| In fact, if you think about the conjunction of technology, we accomplish something I mean, miraculous in the last century, we split the atom. | |
| I mean, we've gone from Stone Age of splitting the atom at light speed, yet what did we do when we split the atom? | |
| We turned that into a weapon. | |
| So even though we might be advancing in terms of kind of technical knowledge, are we advancing in terms of human wisdom? | |
| Are we advancing ethically? | |
| And so it's that human knowledge, I think, that is perennial, that we have to kind of go back to the lessons of the past, not to simply, you know, Cut and paste things that people have said in the past, not that we have to be strict Aristotelians or that the ideas in the past are necessarily static models for us today. | |
| Because there's just so much that we can learn and then incorporate into our thinking today. | |
| One quick sec, we're going to take a break and we'll be right back. | |
| And we're back with the president of the University of Austin, Pano Kanellis. | |
| You mentioned something earlier—freedom of conscience. | |
| My ears always perk up when I hear someone mention it because I believe that the way a society approaches that question is a measure of the goodness of a society. | |
| I'm curious what your thoughts would be on that. | |
| A good society is a society which best enables people to be good people, and freedom of conscience is an essential component of that. | |
| Freedom of conscience recognizes that we have autonomous interior lives, that each human being is a, I like to use the phrase, a creature of logos, that we have our own experience of the world, that sort of internal experience of the world, and that is essentially who we are. | |
| Call it the soul, whatever you want to call it. | |
| The integrity of that individual autonomy is the integrity of humanity itself. | |
| Now, as individuals, we are part of a larger society. | |
| We are not independently self-sustaining. | |
| The relationships we have with others, the relationships we have with institutions, the culture at large, are very important. | |
| But if we don't have the freedom to live our life according to our own lights, then we don't have moral agency. | |
| And if you don't have moral agency, you can't be a full human being. | |
| Wow. So, I mean, the central piece of education, in a sense, really. | |
| Yeah, I think that's right. | |
| I think that's why true education is liberal education. | |
| And let me define that. | |
| Please. Oftentimes, when we talk about liberal education and liberal arts, people have this very Reductive sense of what that means. | |
| You say, oh, a liberal arts education. | |
| Well, that means that you study, like, the humanities or something and not the sciences and that. | |
| A liberal arts education, in its purest form, is a comprehensive education that brings together all forms of human knowledge. | |
| So the liberal arts in the Middle Ages was composed of the trivium and the quadrivium, the arts of letters, the arts of numbers. | |
| You know, you not only studied, you know, geometry, you know, but you studied rhetoric, you studied music, you brought together the different ways of human knowing, with the idea is that in each area of human knowing, you can learn a lot, but nothing is complete unto itself. | |
| So, bringing the arts and sciences, you know, letters and numbers together, creates a more complex understanding So, the liberal arts are first of all comprehensive. | |
| And why? | |
| What's also liberal about liberal arts is that they're liberal in the sense that they're intended to free human beings, to create free human beings, to liberate human beings. | |
| Because the more that we understand the world, the more that we understand ourselves, and those things are interlocking. | |
| Better life we can live the more moral agency we have in order to make better choices in order to live a life ethically or morally We need to be attuned to what's better and worse in the world And so a liberal education is that which helps us to understand? | |
| The better argument from the worse argument the better end from the worse end And again, no human being will ever understand that in its totality. | |
| We're all flawed Broken creatures, but the point of liberal education is to move us in the right direction. | |
| As you're describing the purpose of being this liberation, I can't help but think about Icarus. | |
| Can one be over-liberated? | |
| Yes, if one comes to understand liberty as unbounded human will. | |
| you know, and this is in some sense, I think this is a very, um, modern, maybe even postmodern conception of human autonomy, that the greatest good isn't that we're free so that we can seek the greatest things, but that freedom itself is the highest good that it doesn't, you know, that just being able to achieve one's ends, one's desires, one will is itself, uh, morally justifying. | |
| I mean, I think in that case, you've gone from Fascinating. | |
| I want to find out how things have played out. | |
| As I was learning about University of Austin, it was just an idea, right? | |
| But you were incredibly excited about the idea and I think incredibly effective at communicating the message, which is why I think you managed to do it in three years, I guess, as you were alluding. | |
| But now you actually have had a freshman class. | |
| So how has that played out for you? | |
| It's amazing. | |
| I mean, as we sit here, if you turn the corner around here, the classes are going on, the students are engaged in discussion in the seminar rooms. | |
| If anybody visits the University of Austin, they will see that it's probably one of the most intellectually alive environments you'll ever encounter. | |
| We brought together a freshman class. | |
| These are students who are naturally curious students, risk takers. | |
| I mean, putting your university education in the hands of a brand new university is, says, | |
| Yes. Very | |
| briefly, just describe the degree they're taking. | |
| Right now we have a single degree, Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts, but with a number of different branching pathways. | |
| The reason it's a single degree now is the first part of that experience is what we call the Intellectual Foundations Program. | |
| So everybody starts with the same foundation. | |
| A series of classes that is intended to do what we were talking about earlier, to provide a liberal education. | |
| Philosophy, literature, the arts, foundations of mathematics, sciences, and kind of weave together, mostly looking at great works from the past, We've together a comprehensive understanding of the world or at least a foundational one That's what the students mostly do for the first two years. | |
| So almost half of their experience is this joint curated Curriculum, they'll take the same classes at the same time in the same sequence So they're all reading the same books at the same time which creates a common intellectual journey So they might be reading, you know, Plato's Apology Uh, in one week, or another week they're reading Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov. | |
| And the fact that they're reading that and discussing it in class, but they're all doing it together, means when they go back to their dorms, or they're hanging out at a cafe, the same questions are swirling around that whole cohort. | |
| And so the classroom actually expands beyond the formal classroom into the institution itself. | |
| So there's that single foundation, and then from there, We have what we call Centers of Academic Inquiry, which are broad, interdisciplinary areas of focus in the humanities, the social sciences, and STEM disciplines, where students study things like economics, politics, and history in STEM, or arts and literature. | |
| But again, they're studying these in a kind of cross-cutting, cross-pollinating, interdisciplinary way. | |
| So, it's not like I have this thing called an economics major, and there's two or three Twelve classes I have to take, and I check the boxes, and I've mastered this thing called economics. | |
| The question is, how does economics intersect with history, with politics, farther afield, with science, with technology? | |
| Again, trying to weave together the different disciplines. | |
| So, the reason we have a single degree right now is no matter what kind of focus students have, what kind of emphasis they lean towards, because everybody eventually has to lean into something, What they're really pursuing is, let's say, the whole picture, the totality of human knowledge. | |
| So as we finish up, if there's people that are interested in applying and learning more about what a liberal education means and what the possibilities are at the University of Austin, where do they go? | |
| Not surprisingly, we have a website. | |
| It's letteruaustin.org. | |
| And if you go to that website, you'll see that we have links to tremendous, not just information about the university, but we have a wonderfully informative set of content there, lectures, we have a substack, we have articles published not just by our own people, but by the people that we think are important voices in the world around education and other topics and that. | |
| So it's a real clearinghouse for a lot of information about the university, but also information about the things that a university should really be concerned with, which is called the renewal of a robust intellectual life in the culture. | |
| Pano Kanellos, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. | |
| Thank you, Jan. | |
| Pleasure to speak with you. | |
| Thank you all for joining Pano Kanellos and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. |
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