I Saw a Culture of Conformity in Universities. So I Started My Own: Pano Kanelos

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW]  Over the years, Pano Kanelos, the founding 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 that 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,” he says. “This just flattens out, I think, the potential for higher education to do great things and be dynamic.”

So, in 2021, along with a group of similarly concerned individuals, he started the University of Austin, a private liberal arts university in Texas that emphasizes curiosity, risk-taking, and moral agency.

“We’re trying to generate graduates who themselves are builders and creators. This is an important part of our curriculum,” says Kanelos.

Three years later, he is the president of a fully operational freshmen class and a diverse faculty.

“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,” says Kanelos.

The views expressed in this video are those of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect those of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Pano Kanelos, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Pano Kanelos:
Thank you for having me. I’m really looking forward to this conversation.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s start with the Department of Education. Recently, there were rumors there was going to be an executive order signed by President Trump to abolish the Department of Education, but that didn’t happen. What are your thoughts in general?

Mr. Kanelos:
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 and universities, possibly moving accreditation to the states as opposed to kind of the national creditors, 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, the 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.

Mr. Jekielek:
The motto of the University of Austin is dare to think. Are people not thinking these days?

Mr. Kanelos:
People aren’t daring, I would say that. Dare to think goes all the way back to Immanuel Kant, and it was the byword of the Enlightenment itself.
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 thinking, the deepest, the most profound pursuit of truth pushes the edges, and that’s not always comfortable.

Mr. Jekielek:
Are you saying that courage is lacking in the academy right now, and that’s the purpose of this new university?

Mr. Kanelos:
Absolutely, and 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 and in higher education. 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 have a checklist of things, 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 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.

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. So it’s not just about courage, it’s about moving beyond the educational culture of conformity.

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s about acceptance of failure as part of the process.

Mr. Kanelos:
Absolutely, and that also takes courage. It is willing to be wrong, willing to invest yourself, finding out that choice wasn’t the best possible choice, learning how to change course, then maybe making a mistake again, and then getting back up. This is the time when young people need to be doing that. 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. 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 will encounter in life.

Mr. Jekielek:
Right. Hence, daring to think.

Mr. Kanelos:
Daring to think. The other part of our motto is dare to think, dare to build.

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s not just about thinking, it’s about doing. To be a builder, you have to be courageous. You have an incredible marketing scheme for the University of Austin. Let’s discuss the genesis of the idea, and then we’ll talk about the freshman class.

Mr. Kanelos:
A group of us got together, Ferguson, Barry Weiss, Joe Lonsdale, and Arthur Brooks. We were concerned about the state of higher education, the culture of conformity, the censorious nature of higher education, the
political asymmetry of higher education, all these things. We said, what does one do about that? 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, well, how do you know, what are we gonna 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.

We decided to jump in and start 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 and a wonderful faculty. The fact that we were able to launch this back-of-a-napkin idea into a living university in three years is a sign of the need for this kind of institution at this moment in time.

Mr. Jekielek:
Before we go any further, what does Shakespeare have to do with this?

Mr. Kanelos:
What you’re alluding to is my background 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 here. We don’t have enough time to start over, to start civilization from scratch. We have a civilization. Shakespeare is an example of the kind of essential figure that we’ve built into the curriculum

Mr. Jekielek:
We seem to be relearning the same lessons over and over. Off the top of my head, nemesis follows hubris. It could be the perennial human lesson that for some reason we don’t learn.

Mr. Kanelos:
Hubris 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?

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 accomplished something miraculous in the last century. We split the atom. We’ve gone from the Stone Age of splitting the atom at light speed.

Yet what did we do when we split the atom? We turn that into a weapon. So even though we might be advancing in terms of technical knowledge, are we advancing in terms of human wisdom? Are we advancing ethically? It’s that human knowledge that is perennial. We have to go back to the lessons of the past, not to simply 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, but because there’s just so much that we can learn and then incorporate into our thinking today.

Mr. Jekielek:
You mentioned freedom of conscience. The way a society approaches that question is a measure of the goodness of a society. What are your thoughts?

Mr. Kanelos:
A good society is a society which best enables people to be good people. And that is, and freedom of conscience is an essential component of that. Freedom of conscience recognizes that we have autonomous interior lives, that each human being as a, you know, I like to use the phrase a creature of logos, that we have our own experience of the world, that 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 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.

Mr. Jekielek:
The centerpiece of education, in a sense.

Mr. Kanelos:
Yes, that’s right. I think that’s why true education is liberal education. And, you know, and let me define that. Please. Oftentimes when we talk about liberal education, liberal arts, people have this very reductive sense of what that means. They say, oh, a liberal arts education, that means that you study the humanities 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.

The liberal arts in the Middle Ages were composed of the trivium and the quadrivium, the arts of letters, the arts of numbers, quantitative, qualitative knowledge. You not only studied geometry, but you studied rhetoric, you studied music, you brought together the different ways of human knowing. 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, letters and numbers together, creates a more complex understanding of the world and ourselves. 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 are 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, the 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. A liberal education is that which helps us to understand the better argument from the worse argument, the better end from the worse end. 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.

Mr. Jekielek:
Can one be over-liberated?

Mr. Kanelos:
Yes, if one comes to understand liberty as unbounded human will, right? That, you know, and this is, in some sense, I think this is a very 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’s will, is itself morally justifying. Yes, in that case, you’ve gone from being someone who focused on liberty to being a libertine, somebody who is a worshiper of liberty. Ultimately, it’s a misconception of what liberty really should be aiming for.

Mr. Jekielek:
The University of Austin was just an idea. But you were very excited about the idea and effective at communicating the message and managed to do it in three years. Now, you actually have had a freshman class. How has that played out for you?

Mr. Kanelos:
It’s amazing. 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.

Putting your university education in the hands of a brand new university is says something about the character of these students they’re willing because they believe in the mission they’re willing to commit to that mission and with this high degree of self-sacrifice and and again risk-taking and because they’re here because they’ve chosen to be here they take this very seriously.

They’re here to learn, they’re here to discuss, and they’re here to debate. You go into one of the classrooms and the ideas are ricocheting all around. They’ve learned that the more they take their education to heart, and the more seriously they take it, the more reward there is.

Mr. Jekielek:
Please describe their degree program.

Mr. Kanelos:
Right now we have a single degree, Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts, but with a number of different branching pathways. And 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, weave 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 Plato’s Apology one week, and 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.

There’s that single foundation. 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, and STEM, or arts and literature. But they’re studying these in a cross-cutting, cross- pollinating, interdisciplinary way. It’s not like I have this thing called an economics major and there’s 12 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, and farther afield, with science and technology?

Again, we are trying to weave together the different disciplines. 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 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.

Mr. Jekielek:
You brought on Michael Schellenberger for censorship studies. That seems like an applied study as opposed to theoretical.

Mr. Kanelos:
That’s exactly right. He holds the CBR chair in politics, censorship, and free speech, and it is applied. That’s why we hired Michael, because Michael is not a traditional scholar, he’s a public intellectual. We believe that our university, and perhaps other universities should have a focus not only on what happens on campus, but what extends into the world. So we’re trying to synthesize thinking and doing, theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge. We’ve all learned over the past couple decades that what happens on campus doesn’t stay on campus.

How do we bring into our campus people who are public intellectuals to help synthesize real-world knowledge and the kind of philosophical or theoretical pursuits that tend to dominate a university? Michael is perfect for that. He is on the cutting edge of these issues. There’s no greater warrior right now for free speech in the world than Michael Schellenberger. The fact that he comes in and teaches our students and is one of our professors brings to life the kind of things that could be more abstract in terms of the ideas around speech and censorship and that.

Mr. Jekielek:
You have a copy of Free Speech and Liberal Education on your bookshelf here. Please explain to us why free speech is so central to a liberal education.

Mr. Kanelos:
Let me first say that speech is central to liberal education, because speech is the way that human beings express their ideas, things that we hold in internally. That’s why we express them externally. We are committed to Socratic pedagogy and to dialogue. What does dialogue mean? Via logos in Greek is two or more people sharing their logos, sharing their words, sharing their ideas. So speech itself is the platform for education.
We share these things together and we come up with better ideas. So speech is central.

So why free speech? Because we have to be able to express ideas in an unbounded way so that we can test the boundaries of ideas. And if we start delimiting what we can talk about or the ways that we can express ourselves or the things that are permissible or not, once you start doing that, what you find is you restrict more and more and more things, the aperture closes, and then you’re just left simply with something called ideology. So you have to push the boundaries out as far as possible.
In terms of the limits of those boundaries, the First Amendment is a relatively safe set of guidelines for speech that directly threatens somebody, for speech that is libelous or intends to cause harm.

Mr. Jekielek:
Threatens them physically, right? Because any type of speech could threaten people.

Mr. Kanelos:
Yes, that’s right. A true threat is the way that it’s defined in constitutional jurisprudence, like a true threat. Threatening somebody’s ego is not a problem. Threatening somebody’s settled ideas is not a problem. But threatening them in a way that is a physical or mortal threat, absolutely.
Again, boundaries are always really hard to define and are not clear cut, but the classroom should be maximalist in its approach to speech.

Mr. Jekielek:
We’ve seen a lot of campus protests over the past few years. The argument is that free speech is the reason to facilitate all levels of protest. At what point does it become not free speech?

Mr. Kanelos:
It’s not that difficult for a university to define the boundaries, which is anything that disrupts the fundamental purpose of the university, which is education, if it disrupts the process, if it disrupts operations and that, that’s not permissible. Anything that moves to being directly threatening is not permissible. Ideally, what a university stands for is not monodirectional speech. So protest just tends to shout.

Ideally, what a university stands for is dialogue so that your ideas can be expressed forcefully, expressed passionately, and then encounter another set of ideas that may push back and challenge so that we can stress test that set of ideas. So I don’t think protests are part of the educational process, but should they be permissible in a free society? Well, we do live in a free society.

Mr. Jekielek:
But not to shut down someone else’s speech, basically. That’s what I hear you saying.

Mr. Kanelos:
Yes, of course. That’s axiomatic, right? Free speech is not free speech if it limits somebody else’s free speech.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’re taking on a new role. You’ve been the president of the university for some time and now you will become chancellor. What does that mean?

Mr. Kanelos:
Yes, it just sounds fancy, and I wanted a fancier title. No, actually, this summer I will transition to my role as chancellor. The intention in that transition is to allow me greater latitude and flexibility to work on nationally focused issues in higher education, education generally, to be an advocate for the kind of principles that we stand for as a university, and speaking, writing, and engaging with other organizations. There’s just so much work to be done.

When we started the University of Austin, we wanted to create the world’s next great university. We also began this university because we really believed that it was time for a renaissance or renewal in higher education. We’ve been called into that space with great frequency, and I’m often the one who is called to be an advocate for the principles we have. What we’ve realized at the university is that in order for us to fulfill our kind of total mission, which is both the institution itself and, let’s say, reform across higher education, we really need somebody working at that level. =I talked to my board and I said, guys, I can do that, or I can run the day-to-day operations of the university. But I’m not going to do either effectively unless you tell me where I can best serve. We decided that I will move into that chancellor role and focus on the meta-issues in higher education. I will still be involved in important ways with the university here, but the operational side will move to my successor.

Mr. Jekielek:
At the University of Austin, you have a constitution. Please explain that for us.

Mr. Kanelos:
Yes, why do we have a constitution and not just a set of governing documents like most institutions have? What a constitution is predicated upon is the sense that there are inalienable rights that adhere to an institution. And the rights that adhere to a university are distinct from the general rights we have in the U.S. Constitution. There’s a lot of overlap.

But you have to define what the purpose of the university is and therefore what rights adhere to somebody who’s a member of that institution. First and foremost are the things we talked about; academic freedom, freedom of conscience, and the right to engage in discourse in a civil fashion. You build your governing documents up from those principles and then you protect those principles in the Constitution.

Mr. Jekielek:
Will you be advocating for this in your new role?

Mr. Kanelos:
Absolutely. I’m certainly going to be sharing the success we’ve had with our constitution, which has actually provided a very stable and preservative foundation for the institution. There are things that we have initiated here that are already kind of making their way out to other universities. And I’ll give an example. way out to other universities. And I’ll give an example.

In order for us to have vibrant vigorous discussion in the classroom, we understood that there had to be a fundamental and core level of trust. Students and faculty are only willing to share their ideas in a kind of unbounded way if they’re not afraid that they’re going to be significant consequences for that. You have to create a space for this free-flowing speech that doesn’t happen organically, because there are so many things that threaten it in society. You have to create a space where that can happen.

One of the things we instituted from the get-go was that we’re an institution where the classroom is dedicated to the Chatham House Rule. Under the Chatham House Rule, it means that you can say whatever you want in that setting, but nobody who’s there can share what’s said outside the setting with any attribution. As soon as I identify somebody, I’ve made them vulnerable because of the world in which we live, the social media jungle that’s out there. By adhering to the Chatham House Rule as part of our pedagogical set of boundaries, it really opens up and enlivens conversation.

Guess what? Harvard is now establishing the Chatham House Rule. I don’t know if it’s across the entire institution, but I know in certain areas of the university they’re doing that. It’s starting and this idea is already taking root. It’s something that originated here.

Mr. Jekielek:
That’s very interesting, because in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression [FIRE] index, Harvard doesn’t score very well.

Mr. Kanelos:
They’re just getting started. Harvard is a very complex organization, but it seems some people are aware that they need to be working with greater intentionality on issues around intellectual pluralism and speech.

Mr. Jekielek:
With the freshman class, how many applied, and how many were accepted?

Mr. Kanelos:
To be totally honest with you, I’m not directly involved in admissions. I don’t have those numbers in my head. I can tell you where we ended up. We were 92 freshmen. I know that our selectivity was equal to the selectivity of most elite universities. The stat that my admissions people shared was that our students performed the 92nd percentile or higher compared to other students at other universities. We purposely decided to keep that first class very small because it’s our first run through. We want to get it right. We want to create the culture.

We’re going to do that for the next few years. Each class that we’re going to bring in, because right now we have only freshmen. Next year we’ll have freshmen and sophomores and then a class each year. We want to keep it pretty symmetrical as we move forward so that for the first few years, we’re going to stay relatively small and tight and then, you know, and then decide what we want to do about scaling outward from there.

Mr. Jekielek:
After one year, are there any big lessons or any disappointments?

Mr. Kanelos:
One of the lessons we learned concerns an important part of our curriculum called the Polaris Project. Every student has to do this moonshot project that spans all four years that they’re with us. It has to be something of an entrepreneurial nature. It doesn’t have to be a business, but it could be an arts project, cultural project, or something for the social good.

We’re trying to generate graduates who are themselves our builders and creators. This is an important part of our curriculum. One thing we learned from our first Polaris class is that we need to give them more time to breathe as brand new freshmen, before we ask them to dream up the ultimate moonshot world changing project.

That’s something we learned, that we should let them ease into their education before we start to challenge and to think about that project. One of the things that is disappointing is that we have so many thousands of faculty at other institutions who are reaching out to us because they want to be part of this institution and we can accommodate so few right now. One of the lessons we learned is that the hunger for the kind of institution that we’re building from those who are within other institutions is acute. We need to take that very seriously as we decide how we will scale this institution.

Mr. Jekielek:
You mentioned Harvard changing in a positive direction. Has your thinking changed about the possibility of reform in other existing institutions?

Mr. Kanelos:
I’m withholding my judgment on that. I’ll explain why. I think most universities have realized that they have neglected important things and maybe overshot in certain areas. What I hear from the community of college presidents that I engage with is that there’s a kind of realization that they have to recommit to things like intellectual diversity and pluralism and institutional neutrality and the kind of things that have traditionally been embedded in things like the Chicago Statement. This is coming from trustees and donors and the top level leadership an understanding that these things are important and that they cannot be neglected. There are significant initiatives at institutions to try and reinvigorate or re-embed those principles into the institution.

But what I also hear from these leaders at other institutions is the culture can’t change as long as the culture remains politically and ideologically monochromatic, and that the faculty and administrators that are there who have committed to a set of principles are always going to be highly resistant to this kind of change. So it’s going to take a long time to reseed universities with a broader range of ideas, people, perspectives that will allow these ideas to truly take hold.

There’s a willingness, there’s a desire, at least from the top, but it has to be a multi-generational movement towards intellectual pluralism. It’s not as simple as everybody in universities is on the left and therefore we hire some conservative people and there’s some magic balance that happens. Universities should be committed to hiring people who are, you know, heterodox from the kind of dominant ideology that most universities are guided by. I think it’s important to the whole enterprise.

But even more than that, universities have to recommit to the notion that all this political stuff is actually secondary to their purpose. That what they really need to do is bring together a community of truth seekers who aren’t primarily shaped by their politics, or aren’t primarily shaped by any kind of ideology, who are intellectually acrobatic, who are there not to promote an agenda, but they’re to actually question everything including their own ideas, their own kind of core beliefs. That’s the job of a university. Universities have to be truly liberal in that way. Universities are particular kinds of institutions within society that play a particular kind of role. If we don’t fulfill that role, then society as a whole suffers.

Mr. Jekielek:
There is a criticism of certain elite institutions concerning the proportion of administrators to educators.

Mr. Kanelos:
Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
Do you have a sense of how that compares at the University of Austin versus some of the other big ones?

Mr. Kanelos:
I’ve spoken publicly quite a bit on this administrative metastasizing that we see now at institutions. It is a bureaucratizing of institutions, where you create such a clerical class of administrators who start to actually exercise authority over areas they should have no business in, like the classroom, academics, and the curriculum. You see this happening at many, if not most, institutions.

One of the ways to attend to that is to make sure that you run as lean as possible, with as few administrators as possible, and that those administrators understand that they have a really narrow set of responsibilities at the university. The university isn’t theirs, they are support staff. This includes presidents as well. I am here to support what’s primary at the institution, which is what happens in the classroom. So, you know, we’ve built our entire model of the university around those assumptions.

Mr. Jekielek:
If people are interested in applying and learning more about what a liberal education means, where do they go?

Mr. Kanelos:
We have a website, uaustin.org. We have links to tremendous information about the university, but we also have a wonderfully informative set of content, including 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. It’s a real clearinghouse for information about the university, but also information about the things that the university should really be concerned with—the renewal of a robust intellectual life in the culture.

Mr. Jekielek:
Pano Kanelos, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Kanelos:
Thank you, Jan. Pleasure to speak with you.