There’s a marked trend down here of parents happily announcing their kids aren’t going to college. Which may be a greater threat to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
“I would add that right next door in Austin, The UT School of Civic Leadership looks like formidable competition.”
The School of Civic Leadership (formerly known as the Liberty Institute) at UT Austin almost didn’t happen due to intense faculty opposition. For those of us that support it, we can thank the Lt. Governor, the legislature and some heavy lifting from the founding faculty members for making it happen.
They should add some serious courses in Eastern Thought, Middle-Eastern thought, to give their students a more cosmopolitan grounding. They don't need to go as far as St. John's Santa Fe, but the modern enlightenment includes people like Max Mueller.
My new standard suggestion: get at least 30% of the professors registered Democrats, and at least 30% registered Republicans, and publicize that you are genuinely non-partisan.
I’d guess Arnold would be in the plurality of “independents”.
The reason UATX will be better is that it is deliberately non-partisan, and all the other Ivy+ colleges are partisan Democratic. Including MIT & Stanford. Naturally, they claim genuine viewpoint diversity is right wing, because they falsely claim to be non-partisan when they are Dem indoctrinators. Plan on how to disprove & discredit the critics.
This is also to be used for donors who want a conservative (Rep??) oriented agenda—the Dem Ivies are intellectually flabby because their main answer to conservatives is “Shut up, racist/sexist/ homophobe/ Islamophobe.” However Harvard criticizes UATX, should be music in the ears of donors who want more anti-woke or anti-Dem politics.
It remains a big hurdle to get excellent Rep professors after so many decades of anti-Rep discrimination, along with demonization in all academia. Closet conservatives, like the 23 Robby George knows at Princeton, of ~800, are likely not registered as Reps. Likely easy to get Dems, maybe even from Harvard now, maybe especially young white males.
Loosely related: I know you will teaching at UATX from a prior post. I am guessing you've seen the Seth Bannon tweet about the professor who "fought AI with AI -- an oral final exam run by a voice agent and evaluated by a council of LLM graders." Seth also posted a link to the professor's original disclosure. In the event that you are not aware, I am sharing the respective quotes below, and would be interested in your opinion - comment reply or maybe a separate post??https://x.com/sethbannon/status/2007161907392958806 **and** https://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2025/12/fighting-fire-with-fire-scalable-oral.html
Live recorded oral exams, graded by multiple aigents, should now be the default assumption of how to grade.
The Fighting Fire with Fire article, with 3 aigents conferring, seems an excellent implementation of your assessment ideas. Please consider working with Panos, you left no comment there.
My professor wife continues to do the usual, Slovak, oral exams of her students. Not ready to experiment until the latest new accreditation is complete.
I’m sure aigent examination of students is feasible now, and already here a bit, but needs more implementation success stories. Not so different from UATX.
Curiously Austin already had an institution that probably offers a classical - and liberal - education.
In fact, if you are unfamiliar with Austin and drive up the interstate from the south, which I suggest you do not because it is a hellish thing to do - you might mistake the campus you see first for the University of Texas.
Being a Catholic school, St.Edward’s is not selective. Which probably cuts out a lot of the nonsense from the get-go. Anyone can go there I believe. It’s nice and small. I don’t know much about it but it keeps out of the news for the most part. (Unlike UT, where performing student activism can seem to predominate.) It does very classically liberal things like managing the county-owned nature preserve on the west side, Wild Basin. (UT used to be strong in that conservation way, not now.) I recall its drama department typically put on old chestnuts.
One of my favorite books was published by St. Ed’s, Native and Naturalized Woody Plants of Austin and the Hill Country, by Brother Daniel Lynch. It’s a perfect little field guide.
I mean it’s Catholic and it’s more than half Hispanic so it’s probably tacitly woke, sure.
But the thing is when you get a Hispanic majority, the wokeness starts to lose steam, because they’ve got nothing to prove in that way. Not saying they are conservative or ever will be, except in that distant OG Catholic sense - no - that’s utterly mistaken - but “woke” not so much. There is thus room to think about other things.
If only these UATX people had been Catholic they could’ve focused their energy on St. Edwards, which would probably be glad of the dough, times being tough probably even for the church.
And there is not a secular organizing principle that will ever have a patch on it.
Oh yeah, the pols who set fire to the money to build the Civic leadership thingy at UT, won’t be following up on that in any meaningful way. Announced and built? - you’ll never hear from it again. I mean, how weenie is that, that UT already had the LBJ school of public affairs over which they have so little sway, being the bubbas they are, if they didn’t in fact graduate from it, they had to throw up an absurd duplicate across the way, on the same campus?! Embarrassing. Anyway intellect is suspect in their world. They wouldn’t have the first idea how to get on with that.
Doing a little querying online, it appears that by “old school approach,” UATX only means “a brick-and-mortar campus. Its classes will be almost exclusively in person.”
Sad.
One must mourn the seeming impossibility of returning to an older, old school approach. Take for example, Harvard College’s admissions policies prior to the colonial revolt:
“For 1642 the requirement for admission was found: ‘When any Schollar is able to Read Tully or such like classical Latine Authour ex tempore, & make and speake true Latin in verse and prose suo (ut aiunt) Marte, and decline perfectly the paradigmes of Nounes and verbes in ye Greeke toungue then may hee bee admitted into ye Colledge, nor shall any claime admission before such qualifications.’ In 1734 one record shows in addition to the above, ‘Whoever shall be able to read, construe & parse ordinary Greek, as in the New Testament, Socrates or such like, and be skilled in making Latin verse and in the rules of Prosodia; Having withall good Testimony of his past blameless behaviour, shall be looked upon as qualified for Admission into Harvard College.’”
Then consider that that greatest of American patriots and populists, John Hancock, who graduated Harvard College in 1754 at the age of 17, and went on to become the longest-serving president of the Continental Congress, and serving as the second president of the Second Continental Congress, becoming a principal financier of the revolt, and then first and third governor of Massachusetts, before his sad decline in his late years. Will a UATX alumni ever deliver as great a speech as Hancock’s Boston Massacre Oration? (https://www.famous-trials.com/massacre/200-oration )? Is such greatness still a possibility?
Perhaps. It is gratifying to see Cicero (the “Tully” referenced in the admissions requirements quote) being read by UATX students. https://uatx.substack.com/p/52-texts-our-students-are-reading And perhaps we might hope that the rules for life that Cicero sets forth may well indeed provide that many “may live in magnificence, dignity, and independence, and yet in honour, truth and charity toward all” and that grow in moral stature so that we will heed Hancock’s imprecation and no longer “tamely suffer this country to be a den of thieves.” But one might be forgiven for suspecting that such a miracle will only occur if the books are actually read and not consumed via AI pre-digestion.
If you'd be interested in how the Other Side looks at UATX, TechDirt's Karl Bode: https://www.techdirt.com/2025/12/31/bari-weiss-tiny-fake-austin-college-sees-mass-staff-advisor-exodus/
(TechDirt often abandon's the "Tech" part of its name, just going for the Dirt.)
Wow, such a small endeavor really rattled people.
There’s a marked trend down here of parents happily announcing their kids aren’t going to college. Which may be a greater threat to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
“I would add that right next door in Austin, The UT School of Civic Leadership looks like formidable competition.”
The School of Civic Leadership (formerly known as the Liberty Institute) at UT Austin almost didn’t happen due to intense faculty opposition. For those of us that support it, we can thank the Lt. Governor, the legislature and some heavy lifting from the founding faculty members for making it happen.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/09/22/university-texas-austin-liberty-institute/
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/06/08/ut-austin-professors-liberty-institute/
The AI comments sounded like standard issue internet comments section drivel, which somehow seems appropriate.
I'm way past university age, but if I was young, I'd be trying to get into UATX.
They should add some serious courses in Eastern Thought, Middle-Eastern thought, to give their students a more cosmopolitan grounding. They don't need to go as far as St. John's Santa Fe, but the modern enlightenment includes people like Max Mueller.
Assuming you want to be (A- diverse)
My new standard suggestion: get at least 30% of the professors registered Democrats, and at least 30% registered Republicans, and publicize that you are genuinely non-partisan.
I’d guess Arnold would be in the plurality of “independents”.
The reason UATX will be better is that it is deliberately non-partisan, and all the other Ivy+ colleges are partisan Democratic. Including MIT & Stanford. Naturally, they claim genuine viewpoint diversity is right wing, because they falsely claim to be non-partisan when they are Dem indoctrinators. Plan on how to disprove & discredit the critics.
This is also to be used for donors who want a conservative (Rep??) oriented agenda—the Dem Ivies are intellectually flabby because their main answer to conservatives is “Shut up, racist/sexist/ homophobe/ Islamophobe.” However Harvard criticizes UATX, should be music in the ears of donors who want more anti-woke or anti-Dem politics.
It remains a big hurdle to get excellent Rep professors after so many decades of anti-Rep discrimination, along with demonization in all academia. Closet conservatives, like the 23 Robby George knows at Princeton, of ~800, are likely not registered as Reps. Likely easy to get Dems, maybe even from Harvard now, maybe especially young white males.
Loosely related: I know you will teaching at UATX from a prior post. I am guessing you've seen the Seth Bannon tweet about the professor who "fought AI with AI -- an oral final exam run by a voice agent and evaluated by a council of LLM graders." Seth also posted a link to the professor's original disclosure. In the event that you are not aware, I am sharing the respective quotes below, and would be interested in your opinion - comment reply or maybe a separate post??https://x.com/sethbannon/status/2007161907392958806 **and** https://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2025/12/fighting-fire-with-fire-scalable-oral.html
I suggested something like this a while back. https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/student-assessment-in-the-age-of
Live recorded oral exams, graded by multiple aigents, should now be the default assumption of how to grade.
The Fighting Fire with Fire article, with 3 aigents conferring, seems an excellent implementation of your assessment ideas. Please consider working with Panos, you left no comment there.
My professor wife continues to do the usual, Slovak, oral exams of her students. Not ready to experiment until the latest new accreditation is complete.
I’m sure aigent examination of students is feasible now, and already here a bit, but needs more implementation success stories. Not so different from UATX.
Nasty McKenzie wins 2026 early award for “best consulting brand”.
Curiously Austin already had an institution that probably offers a classical - and liberal - education.
In fact, if you are unfamiliar with Austin and drive up the interstate from the south, which I suggest you do not because it is a hellish thing to do - you might mistake the campus you see first for the University of Texas.
Being a Catholic school, St.Edward’s is not selective. Which probably cuts out a lot of the nonsense from the get-go. Anyone can go there I believe. It’s nice and small. I don’t know much about it but it keeps out of the news for the most part. (Unlike UT, where performing student activism can seem to predominate.) It does very classically liberal things like managing the county-owned nature preserve on the west side, Wild Basin. (UT used to be strong in that conservation way, not now.) I recall its drama department typically put on old chestnuts.
One of my favorite books was published by St. Ed’s, Native and Naturalized Woody Plants of Austin and the Hill Country, by Brother Daniel Lynch. It’s a perfect little field guide.
I mean it’s Catholic and it’s more than half Hispanic so it’s probably tacitly woke, sure.
But the thing is when you get a Hispanic majority, the wokeness starts to lose steam, because they’ve got nothing to prove in that way. Not saying they are conservative or ever will be, except in that distant OG Catholic sense - no - that’s utterly mistaken - but “woke” not so much. There is thus room to think about other things.
If only these UATX people had been Catholic they could’ve focused their energy on St. Edwards, which would probably be glad of the dough, times being tough probably even for the church.
And there is not a secular organizing principle that will ever have a patch on it.
Oh yeah, the pols who set fire to the money to build the Civic leadership thingy at UT, won’t be following up on that in any meaningful way. Announced and built? - you’ll never hear from it again. I mean, how weenie is that, that UT already had the LBJ school of public affairs over which they have so little sway, being the bubbas they are, if they didn’t in fact graduate from it, they had to throw up an absurd duplicate across the way, on the same campus?! Embarrassing. Anyway intellect is suspect in their world. They wouldn’t have the first idea how to get on with that.
Doing a little querying online, it appears that by “old school approach,” UATX only means “a brick-and-mortar campus. Its classes will be almost exclusively in person.”
Sad.
One must mourn the seeming impossibility of returning to an older, old school approach. Take for example, Harvard College’s admissions policies prior to the colonial revolt:
“For 1642 the requirement for admission was found: ‘When any Schollar is able to Read Tully or such like classical Latine Authour ex tempore, & make and speake true Latin in verse and prose suo (ut aiunt) Marte, and decline perfectly the paradigmes of Nounes and verbes in ye Greeke toungue then may hee bee admitted into ye Colledge, nor shall any claime admission before such qualifications.’ In 1734 one record shows in addition to the above, ‘Whoever shall be able to read, construe & parse ordinary Greek, as in the New Testament, Socrates or such like, and be skilled in making Latin verse and in the rules of Prosodia; Having withall good Testimony of his past blameless behaviour, shall be looked upon as qualified for Admission into Harvard College.’”
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1914/9/29/when-greek-and-latin-ruled-pthe/
Then consider that that greatest of American patriots and populists, John Hancock, who graduated Harvard College in 1754 at the age of 17, and went on to become the longest-serving president of the Continental Congress, and serving as the second president of the Second Continental Congress, becoming a principal financier of the revolt, and then first and third governor of Massachusetts, before his sad decline in his late years. Will a UATX alumni ever deliver as great a speech as Hancock’s Boston Massacre Oration? (https://www.famous-trials.com/massacre/200-oration )? Is such greatness still a possibility?
Perhaps. It is gratifying to see Cicero (the “Tully” referenced in the admissions requirements quote) being read by UATX students. https://uatx.substack.com/p/52-texts-our-students-are-reading And perhaps we might hope that the rules for life that Cicero sets forth may well indeed provide that many “may live in magnificence, dignity, and independence, and yet in honour, truth and charity toward all” and that grow in moral stature so that we will heed Hancock’s imprecation and no longer “tamely suffer this country to be a den of thieves.” But one might be forgiven for suspecting that such a miracle will only occur if the books are actually read and not consumed via AI pre-digestion.