December 15, 2023 - 10:00am
This hasn’t been a comfortable few weeks for America’s academic establishment. An escalating controversy around antisemitism on campus has already resulted in the resignation of Liz Magill, President of the University of Pennsylvania; and pressure on Claudine Gay, President of Harvard. But just when things can’t get any worse for the ivory tower progressives, it’s reported that that Elon Musk is planning to found his own university in Austin, Texas.
According to Bloomberg, a Musk charity called “The Foundation” has allocated $100 million in funding for a “STEM-focused primary and secondary school” with the aim of eventually expanding into higher education.
Musk is already investing big-time in Austin — for instance he moved Tesla’s headquarters there in 2021. However, there’s more going on here than the building of a company town. Though he hasn’t announced anything directly about the planned university, Musk clearly wants to disrupt the academic establishment. For instance, this week he highlighted a post from his fellow tech lord, Marc Andreessen. It was a list of “Ten books for understanding The Bonfire Of The Universities”.
Writing for UnHerd in 2017, I argued that conservative donors should “never forget that politics is downstream of culture” — and that with “universities across the western world being turned into Leftist madrassas”, new foundations dedicated to academic rigour were desperately needed.
So far, the attempts to challenge the status quo have been rather hit and miss. Peter Thiel, for instance, thinks it better to offer promising young people grants not to go university. Another high profile educational initiative — the Prager University Foundation (PragerU) — isn’t actually a university. As for Trump University, the less said the better. Then there’s the university system in Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis is using all the powers of his office to push through reform from the top-down.
A more promising bottom-up approach is the University of Austin (UATX), which though not connected with Musk’s embryonic project, appears to share a similar purpose. According to its website, the new university’s mission is to “fearlessly pursue the truth” and “champion academic freedom”.
Hopefully UATX is the first of many new counter-cultural universities. But while it would be understandable if they defined themselves in opposition to woke academia, they must be bigger than that. That’s because there’s a lot more wrong with the conventional universities than the creeping rot of wokeness. Contemporary higher education — and not just in America — is an economic bubble based on extracting ever-higher fees in return for inflated grades, pointless credentials and activism masquerading as scholarship.
If Musk really wants to disrupt academia then his university shouldn’t solely do away with the bureaucrat-ideologues, but also with unnecessary overheads of every description. He should build the leanest of academic models — and pass-on the savings to the students. Furthermore, he should give them the opportunity to work part-time in his various enterprises.
That way, Musk U could offer a top-class education at a fraction of the usual cost. If the established academic system is indeed a bubble, then his university should be the needle.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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SubscribeI really hope Musk pulls through on this one. Might be a first step to breaking the stranglehold that wokeness has on not just academia, but culture and institutions as well. Initiatives like this give me hope that all’s not lost yet.
It would take more than just one initiative to break the woke stranglehold. Wokeness is to Generation Z (and fellow travellers) what Rock’n’Roll / Hippy culture was to the Boomers.
That’s why Danny D referred to it as “a first step”.
Y’don’t say!
“It would take more than just one initiative to break the woke stranglehold.”
You don’t say…!
It might, if done correctly, also produce people with real educations and critical thinking skills for a fraction of the cost.
Maybe kids finally get value for their money.
But his university would actually be a trade school. By the way, the humanities are superior to the sciences when it comes to developing critical thinking. There is more debate, which fosters critical thinking.
Really?
Humanities confuse critical thinking with ‘being critical of’.
The sciences have given us the technological marvels we benefit from. The humanities have delivered woke dictatorship.
A journey of one thousand miles starts with a single footstep.
If we stopped pretending that higher education was a good idea for any but the top 10% of students, the whole woke bubble would burst within a generation.
Agreed. With an uneducated populace the workers will be less likely to question authority or any dominant narrative. Ignorance is strength after all.
Hilarious that your anti-woke anti-elitist argument involves restricting education to the top 10%. Bad news: the top 10% already dominate higher education and they invented the horror you call woke.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted for making a fairly obvious point. Upvote from me, but I don’t think it will stem the red tide.
Sadly, the top 10% is likely the only group even capable of getting anything out of college from an actual educational perspective. It seems that the rest are generally there for “the paper” and to party, which is reasonable since they left high school unprepared to do much else.
It’s not controversial to state that high schools of 100 years ago were more rigorous than most colleges are now. If we truly care about an educated populace, how about we get back to actual teaching at that level and get those schools out of the social justice business? Of course that would mean failing students who can’t handle the work, and we all know that would be deemed “racist” or “classist” or some other “ist”. Better to push kids through the system and falsely build up their sense of self worth than have them actually learn anything.
Actually, livid parents threatening to sue is the biggest reason for passing the student to the next grade. However, what you say is also correct, especially when race is a factor.
What you don’t seem to appreciate is that only, say, half those young people who go to university actually emerge educated. A 3rd in Marketing from the University of South Rutland does not equate to being educated, although it does equate to being very heavily in debt with no chance of earning enough to repay it.
Only a snob would assume that only those with a university education are able or willing to question authority or any dominant narrative.
Critical Theory was invented by a few exceptional minds, but appeals most strongly to the mediocre herd who arrive at university wanting to do something significant, but lack the heroic potential to do anything beneficial. Western civilization would be better off if most of the administrative jobs were automated out of existence.
Does that mean you’ll have to hand back your degree?
That would mean there would be no conservatives at all in higher education. Maybe not a bad idea….
What “woke bubble” are you referring too? Did John Cleese tell you about it on BG News?
Absolutely, universities in Europe especially the UK and Ireland have just become business enterprises selling degrees to overseas students. Our mission should be educating the brightest and the best (and that isn’t the whole top 50% either) of our own students. And now we’re being infested with DIE nonsense too.
I just encountered a Chinese student with a freshly minted English MBA. His English was so bad he could hardly order a beer
Could that have been the beer “not talking?”
If Musk succeeds in building a mean and lean university, more power to him. The fees at US universities are totally out of control, leading to disastrous levels of student debt. We can just hope that this is more than just another Musk vanity project.
A vanity project? Like Tesla, the rockets, the satellites? These were vanity projects?
Yep.
X?
Perhaps it was a public service, exposing contemptible bias encouraged, supported and mandated through indirect threats by our US government. As an immigrant he appears to value the 1st Amendment more than many of the native born.
Ubiquitous availability of low-interest student loans fueled tuition inflation and a market bubble in academia for decades, not vice versa. More, less-qualified students are graduating with inferior educations and fewer job qualifications — while being saddled by excruciating student debt. Elon Musk is just the man to burst this bubble the same way he broke the Progressive lock on free speech with Twitter. The impact of bursting the Education industry bubble will make that pale by comparison. Elites will have nowhere to land but flipping burgers at McDonald’s. No, even that is getting automated.
Who exactly are the elites here if they aren’t celebrity historian Niall Fergusson, billionaire Peter Thiel, Billionaire Elon Musk, millionaire Ron DeSantis? If you think these people are on your side you’re an Elon Mug.
There’s nothing wrong with elites. Every society has them. The problem in the west is too elites support progressive causes.
So then rather than liberating the common person what you actually want to do is replace the dominant elites with a new set? Presumably you believe yourself to be a part of the disenfranchised elite and wish to reclaim the spot for yourself and your peers?
And like Musk, Thiel and all the other anti-woke grifters (including the owner of this news site) you just want to leverage the legitimate concerns of the lower orders to wedge yourself into the new elite.
Bad news: you are actually in the lower order and they are using you.
Every society has elites – whether they are free or authoritarian. That’s just the way it is. I have no desire or pretension of being part of the elite class myself. I simply want a set of elites that are at least marginally competent, who actually recognize and reflect the interests of the masses, rather than the niche activist class that dominates the institutions today.
And you think that is Donald Trump and Elon Musk?
Genghis Khan maybe? Hard to choose. They’re all so wonderful.
Yes.
In your terms am I a grifter for believing that due process in universities for females but not males, that the feelings of minute part of the population outweighs the discomfort and demonstrated actual threat of inserting intact males into formerly women only spaces, and insisting that individuals born with male genitalia retained past puberty must compete with individuals born with female genitalia? I don’t know if you’re just a troll. If not, please explain.
It sounds like people want the elite to earn those spots through merit. I do not have a problem with that. Do you?
Get back down’t pit Jim where tha belongs.
I literally have no idea what this means.
How about political leaders who have never had a job outside of politics?
A certain M. Polievre comes to mind.
Say what you like about the current Canadian Prime Minster but he has interesting resume. Polievre is nothing but a dweeby and less stupid Trump.
Excuse me. Trudeau has an interesting resume? He’s a trust fund baby who did a little drama teaching. Same thing goes with Singh – trust fund baby with five minutes of real world experience. Polievre ain’t much better. He’s never had a real job either. I have no faith in any of Canada’s leaders. And if you think Polievre is anything like Trump, you’re not paying attention.
Two nations divided by a common language (I am guessing). A pit is a mine and miners were very working class (or the epitome of the “lower orders”). Mr Morley’s sarcasm does not seem to have crossed the Atlantic.
Thanks for that.
(And) the pit is usually (in the UK) a colliery (coal mine).
Actually the real problem is that the elites are suppressing all other voices and viewpoints.
“However, there’s more going on here than the building of a company town.”
That’s the crux of the article. But no, there ISN’T more going on here, really; it’s just Musk wanting to control everything again (as you say, he’s not on our side), even though he probably doesn’t actually know much about universities, no matter how many tweets he likes which give lists of books about universities which he hasn’t read..
The End Of The University As We Know It has been predicted in each of the 30 years I’ve worked in universities, and it hasn’t happened yet. Hands up anyone who can remember how MOOCs were going to revolutionise tertiary education!
Having worked those 30 years, I know quite well that there are lots of things wrong with universities. “Wokery” is a comparatively minor problem, despite the endless snivelling about it here and elsewhere. Other problems (mentioned by other commenters here) are far more serious, e.g. the dependence on foreign students and other sources of foreign income, huge fees and the associated loans, over-enrolment of the not-very-bright, and the proliferation of administrators over teachers and researchers. But Musk doesn’t have the monopoly on how to fix those problems. And if and when he gets his schools and his university going in Austin (note that the university is a longer-term plan, although almost all the commenters here are keen to move into this castle in the air), he’ll probably lose interest in doing anything (although not in tweeting).
They live right next door to the patriarchy on conspiracy avenue.
There is the real elite (all those with money, power and influence) and then there is the “elite” of narrative. For many people “elite” is just shorthand for “rich, powerful people who disagree with me” (real or imagined). This latter “elite” often behaves in most peculiar ways.
Go Elon!
Isnt there a non woke college already in London? And the private University of Buckingham, now with a medical school?
The University of Buckingham gave us ‘Dr. Shola’, so not entirely free from this rubbish.
Doesn’t MIT offer some tutor-free online courses free of charge already ?
This would be truly revolutionary if rolled out but then, of course, all our inner cities with their thousands of units of student accommodation and pointless courses lacking any academic rigour would collapse in a heap .
If the bubble were ever truly to burst, we’d all go down with it.
” if rolled out but then, of course, all our inner cities with their thousands of units of student accommodation and pointless courses lacking any academic rigour would collapse in a heap”
Do you think any of the kids who are in city schools and cant do grade level work would suddenly be able to start taking MIT online courses????
I can’t help rooting for Musk.
Or I should say, if I were a betting man I would bet on him. Starlink is the most significant entrepreneurial techno advance in decades. Teslas, despite everything, are the best selling electric vehicles. Space X rocket launches are constant; that’s how all those little satellites get up there.
I can’t imagine that any of this is not losing buckets of money, but, somehow, he gets richer every minute. And it’s kinda funny that everyone hates him just because he doesn’t care what we think.
I should be so lucky!
My concern with all of these projects is that they’ll just become as closeted and bubbled as the current institutions but in the anti-woke vein. They aren’t setting these up as places to speak freely but rather as a place where they can air their pre-existing opinions freely and find a safe space for them.
Will they genuinely discuss in good faith whether, for example, there are or can be more than two genders? Or will they – just like many of the free-thinking free-speakers here – just enter the debate with their prejudices with no intention to change their ill-founded opinions?
And why does any of that matter anyway if you’re studying one of the more “rigorous” disciplines like STEM? If they were actually dedicated to their field and didn’t waste so much time on social media or watching TV and playing video games the culture wars bs wouldn’t touch them.
You go, Elon. Again. Save us from ourselves. Please.
“Contemporary higher education — and not just in America — is an economic bubble based on extracting ever-higher fees in return for inflated grades, pointless credentials and activism masquerading as scholarship.”
That sentence is worthy of Orwell in its simplicity and exactness.
The challenge, of course, is to maintain academic freedom while at the same time avoiding ideological drift.
It is about time that we remind ourselves of the main purpose of higher education: it is still teaching skills and competencies to become a productive professional. Everything else is just noise that serves to appease egos, corporate ideologues, and various social tribes organized along sexual orientations, skin pigmentations, gender, climate change outlook, etc, none of which matter one iota to a patient, business owner seeking an accountant or a lawyer’s client.
What an incredibly miserable vision of what a university education is all about, as well as being completely inaccurate. I actually feel sorry for people like you with a complete lack of any kind of intellectual curiosity.
You clearly did not go to university and are not in a profession.
Fortunately no one listens to misanthropes like you. You have nothing to add.
And the proposed primary and then 2ry school to focus on STEM subjects , Dyer ready to put up many millions, rejected by the local council?
The key to this is credible assessment.
If we created a system of assessment, open to all, which tracked the best universities, we would disrupt the whole system. Any other university, or other form of learning, could then produce students guaranteed (by assessment) to match the best in the world – regardless of price point.
If we have to wait for the graduates of Musk’s primary and secondary school to enter Musk University – we will have to wait 12 years. Hardly something to get excited about yet.
Don’t forget the rising fortunes of non-traditional universities that operate primarily through the Internet. Grand Canyon, University of Phoenix, University of Southern New Hampshire. They’re already building an alternative business model. They may well be just as leftist as other schools, but even so, it’s much harder to inculcate ideologies when you don’t have a 24 hours a day captive audience and complete control over their environment.
Interesting anecdote. When I went to school way back in the late 90’s, I attended a local university and lived at home until I could afford an off campus apartment. I had more than one school ‘advisor’ lament this condition and push very hard for me to live on campus, despite the significant cost savings of living at home and convenience for my parents since I could help out with errands, yard work, etc. I found it curious that intelligent people could make such a flimsy and seemingly illogical argument. I now understand that they really did see it as their duty to guide the next generation down the ‘right’ path, and having everybody together made that easier. They knew living off campus I wouldn’t get the ‘full college experience’. I didn’t know what they meant at the time, but I do now. Fortunately, I was a stubborn ass as a teenager and not easily swayed once I had decided on a course of action.
“I had more than one school ‘advisor’ lament this condition and push very hard for me to live on campus”
Another fantasy.
At least try to make your stories a little bit believable.
So you decided that the most effective argument you could make was to question my recollection of my own experiences? That’s…. I honestly don’t know how to respond to that, therefore I concede to your superior mind. Clearly I have no business arguing with you. If you possess such omniscience that you have a perfect memory of things that happened to other people, you are clearly a superior being quite beyond my comprehesion.
For people concerned about the direction America is taking, Musk is an asset, albeit an imperfect one. But surely Mr Trump has made us used to this.
A strategy to combat the Left in academia is critical, and having one or two genuine universities from which to do so would be very handy — although ultimately, the fight must be taken to where the enemy is at.
Hopefully, such a university (or universities) will not be dedicated to teaching conservative values as such, but will be defined by their adherence to the now-dead ideals of academic freedom and intellectual diversity. Thus, they would be a joint venture between people on the Right, and non-Rightist academics and intellectuals who share our commitment to academic freedom and genuine intellectual freedom.
My question is: why is Musk not cooperating with the fledgling University of Austin?
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Austin ]
“But surely Mr Trump has made us used to this”
Made you used to being led by the dumbest people on the planet?
Strange choice but not unusual for conservatives.
US University education is a Rip Off. Hourly fees for hundreds of teachers to verbally repeat the same courses, year after year? It’s teaching that could be delivered enormously more cheaply to everyone, at home, from a very few teachers in the whole US, via recorded videos delivered by the internet, maybe updated every few years. Mr Trump saw a great opportunity to join in that rip-off…. and why not, since all universities were already doing it? But it was to his discredit, just as it remains even more to the discredit of the brick universities who are continuing the same rip off. Maybe Mr Musk can break the Rip Off system. I hope he can.
The fundamental problem here is that all human organizations evolve over time to service their own needs over their ostensible purpose. The universities that today are hives of self-serving bureaucracy were originally lean, mean and focused on preparing their students for intellectual life.
In order for his university to make a lasting difference, Musk should create a governance model that incorporates occasional forest fire events, laying off large chunks of its organization (the good with the bad) and replacing them fresh from the ground up. The genius of democracy is less the process of choosing new overlords than that it allows us to throw out the old ones as power inevitably corrupts them.
Part of the solution might be to structure the university as a flotilla of separately-incorporated colleges, each of which would be wound down at staggered intervals, taking all its union contracts with it. Each college would rent space from a lean-and-mean central organization whose headcount and function is capped.
We know where Musk stands on the “antisemitism as free speech” issue but will his university differ from the US elite colleges by suppressing it?
Maybe he’ll bring in the intellectual heavyweights of the right?
Andrew Tate as a visiting professor? Alex Jones? Tucker Carlson? Marjorie Taylor Greene and the other brainless one from Colorado, Lauren Bobert? Maybe Liz Truss and Lee Anderson? Piers Morgan?
Quite the lineup you guys have!!!! LOL!
Let’s add Rudy Giuliani to the list – sounds like he’ll be looking for work to pay off some of those damages!!!!
The references to Prager U and Trump University had me giggling!
Musk’s track record at Twitter isn’t exactly encouraging for you, is it? Promoting literal Nazis and various other bigots while losing billions of dollars – awesome business model, Elon!!!!
By the way, what is the look Musk is going for in that picture? The plugs, the grotesque complexion and the Top Gun jacket? Can’t he afford a stylist? Or maybe just wear a decent shirt and a jacket?
Why do conservatives insist on worshipping people who look (and act) like clowns?
I don’t take anything Elon Musk’s says at face value, Like everything else he says and dose, its just a desperate cry for attention. He is a raging narcissist.
O o
he speaks highly of you, too
I don’t CARE if they are a raging narcissist if they can do some good for society.