The Founding Faculty Have Entered the Arena.

Orientation brought them together on campus for the first time. PLUS: Read Dean of Arts and Letters Patrick Gray on what the humanities should teach us.

Good morning from the heart of Austin, Texas! It’s Monday, August 19—just under two weeks from student move-in day on September 1.

Amid the round-the-clock preparations for the Class of 2028, the UATX Founding Faculty gathered last Monday for the first University of Austin faculty orientation.

“Orientation made something clear,” said Assistant Professor of Literature Clay Greene:

The student experience at UATX will not be boilerplate. The faculty are committed to rethinking taboos and creating an educational experience that will evoke a sense of wonder in students. Everything is open for consideration. The UATX classrooms will be alive with the spirit of Socratic discussion and entrepreneurial innovation.

I was also surprised to see the spirit of open dialogue truly respected. I watched faculty and administration discuss university policy with an open-mindedness I’ve seen at no other university. In our meetings, there was a sense of possibility, as if the next good idea could permanently influence our policy.

I've never been surrounded by so many fierce, bright minds eager to build the university anew. It's inspiring to see a faculty that begins at the fundamentals of education—the formation of the soul of the student—and builds from there to the possibilities of an uncertain future.

On Monday morning, President Pano Kanelos greeted Professor Greene and his colleagues with words from Theodore Roosevelt's famous 1910 speech “Citizenship in a Republic.”

“You are the men and women in the arena,” President Kanelos told them—striving with great enthusiasm and devotion to build something new.

---

Our Provost and Dean of Intellectual Foundations, Jacob Howland, wrote that the University of Austin “is especially pleased to have recruited public intellectuals—faculty who are able and willing to make their knowledge accessible to educated amateurs.”

Here’s Howland:

UATX students will learn the craft of writing with an award-winning novelist. They will read classic works of political philosophy with one of the hosts of The New Thinkery, a highly successful weekly podcast. They will explore the origins of modernity with the managing editor of the Genealogies of Modernity Project, which hosts a journal as well as a podcast. They will study with the former chief economist for the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, a scholar who has appeared on programs such as Fox News, BBC World News, and National Public Radio. And they will be introduced to techniques of quantitative reasoning by a scientist who has analyzed genomic changes in astronauts from the SpaceX Inspiration4 mission, and who is currently working on data analysis and sample collection for the Axiom-2 and Polaris Dawn missions.

In the coming weeks, we’ll tell you much more about the extraordinary scholars and thinkers who make up our founding faculty.

But today, we bring you one of UATX’s original public intellectuals: Dean Patrick Gray.

Dean Gray has advanced degrees from Yale, Oxford, and the Sorbonne, yet his teaching philosophy departs from the academic norm.

For most humanities professors today, teaching “is an opportunity to reshape human nature and to teach people what they ought to think…to draft them into a particular way of thinking,” he says.

“Instead,” Gray says, “I see the purpose of the humanities as allowing students to come to a better understanding of what human nature is.”

Over the past few hundred years, we have seen astounding technological advances made possible by research in mathematics and the natural sciences. Feats such as driving to work or talking on a mobile phone that we take for granted every day would have seemed to our ancestors like the sheerest magic. And new horizons are still coming to light: fields such as quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and genomic medicine.

In light of such tantalizing possibilities, why study history or philosophy? A new world awaits if we can only figure out the right machinery. Through the power of engineering, no one will have to want for anything. Everyone will enjoy health care, a universal basic income, and unlimited virtual entertainment.

As history teaches us, however, technological innovation on its own is not enough to secure any such utopia. The same new tool, splitting the atom, for example, can build a better bomb just as easily as a better power plant. Progress in science itself, like the growth of a hot-house flower, depends on socioeconomic conditions. How many geniuses were lost to WWI and WWII? How many resources have been wasted in our own time on initiatives such as DEI?

All to say, culture matters. Ideas have consequences. Argentina’s decline in the early twentieth century and more recent turnaround under Javier Milei is a good example of the effect of politics on economics. One can only hope that similar bloodless but effective revolutions will take place soon in Europe, England, Venezuela, and California.

Not all of us want to live, moreover, like the NPCs (“non-player characters”) in a video game, milling about aimlessly, or like the Lotus-eaters in Homer’s Odyssey, adrift in a sea of abundance and apathy. “Is there not a side of the human personality that deliberately seeks out struggle, danger, risk, and daring?” After arguing that we may have reached “the end of history,” political theorist Francis Fukuyama concedes that some of us, nonetheless, may refuse to live quietly as what Nietzsche calls “men without chests.”

Living life to the fullest requires taking risks. But which? And how? And most crucially, with whom? As ambitious young people are quick to discover, no amount of individual fearlessness, talent, hard work, or good luck is sufficient to secure any lasting happiness. In the words of the English poet John Donne, “No man is an island.” We all live at the mercy of each other: every human endeavor, ranging from a successful business to a happy marriage, requires collaboration and compromise with other people.

Technology can extend our power to manipulate the physical world as well as each other. But it cannot answer fundamental questions about ethics and politics. As the French essayist Montaigne observes, “there is no use in our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our own legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump.”

How should we organize ourselves as a society? No amount of data can answer this question for us. When it comes to good and evil, those of us who want to be PCs (“player characters”) cannot expect a computer to tell us what to do, any more so than we would a hammer, an anvil, or any other inanimate object. Instead, our best bet is to turn to the wisdom of our ancestors. Great works of literature such as Shakespeare’s plays and Dostoyevsky’s novels help us understand what it means to be human.

A roundup of this week’s published faculty perspectives.

→Dean of STEM David Ruth describes what attracted new faculty to UATX:

Elsewhere in higher education, there is concern that universities are not as committed to the pursuit of truth as they say they are. Simply asserting our commitment to the truth has attracted many people. I also think it’s clear that we are committed to being engaged and relevant and producing builders, leaders, innovators, and creators.

→Assistant Professor of Classics Isabella Reinhardt reflects on a new interpretation of Circe, the mythical sorceress from Homer’s Odyssey who seduces its hero and turns his men into swine:

In the world that novelist Madeline Miller has crafted, it’s not that Circe, the god-witch, has the ability to do whatever she wants. What she has the ability to do is find the inner essence of a person and bring that to the entirety of their being. It’s not that she’s altering the nature of the person; she’s amplifying the nature of the person.

→Assistant Professor of Political Philosophy Alex Priou argues in Newsweek for banishing tech from seminar classrooms:

An old-school classroom gives students no choice but to read more closely, discuss more carefully, and think more boldly. It encourages them to face who they are and what they might become as human beings. And in orienting them primarily to themselves and one another, rather than toward the authority and temptation of screens, it emphasizes the humanity at the heart of all learning.

---

Want to signal your commitment to renewing higher ed? We’ve got you covered with shirts, hats, sweatshirts, and more.

---

We’re seeking extraordinary individuals to join us in building the University of Austin. View all jobs.

---

What would you like to see Inside UATX? We want to hear from you. Email us at media@uaustin.org. 

See you next Monday!

Maggie Kelly is the editor of Inside UATX. Follow her on X @margaretbkelly.