Billionaires fed up with destructive anti-Israel protests across U.S. college campuses are abandoning their elite alma mater and replacing it with a new one in Texas with just 92 students, according to a report. He is said to be supporting the “Anti-Awakening” university.
Wall Street trader Jeff Yass, real estate mogul Harlan Crowe, and investor Len Blavatnik are among the deep-pocketed donors who have so far poured about $200 million into UATX. This is just one example. According to the Wall Street Journal.
Yas alone has donated $35 million to the small school, which is currently housed in a former department store building, the newspaper said.
Crow, a major Republican donor and close friend of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, said he hopes the new university will promote ideological diversity.
“Many of today's institutions of higher education seem to want to completely negate the achievements of the West and the achievements of Western civilization,” he told the Journal. “A lot of people think it's a bad idea.”
Crowe and his wife, Kathy, host school events at their Dallas home and allow schools to use space in their office park for a summer program called Forbidden Courses.
The contrarian university received a flood of donations as conservative activists weary of unruly pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses across the country.
Billionaires threatened to withhold large donations from elite alma maters. Donors and politicians signed a petition calling for the ouster of the executive leadership.
This explains UATX's appeal as a nonpartisan “truth-telling” institution. The university welcomed its first freshman class last month.
First, the school offers three types of programs: Economics, Political Science, and History. English and creative writing. data science and computer science, According to an Austin-American politician.
Pano Canellos, the university's founding president and former president of St. John's University in Maryland, said each student will work on the Polaris Project, a four-year challenge that must respond to a need in society. .
A promotional video on the school's YouTube page shows pro-Palestinian camps at other universities, along with seminars at UT Austin.
“They burn, but we build,” says the message at the end of the video.
Plans have been announced for the school to open in fall 2021.
The school's founders include venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale and journalist Bari Weiss.
Lonsdale co-founded Palantir Technologies and donated to former President Donald Trump. Mr. Weiss previously worked at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and went on to found an independent newsletter, the Free Press.
“Competition is necessary in higher education,” Yas said in a statement. “The time has come for philanthropists to establish new universities after the way American institutions of learning were founded.”
Other donors include PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, who previously offered to pay students $100,000 to drop out of college and start businesses instead. . Billionaire philanthropist John Arnold and his wife Laura. Alex Magaro, co-president of Meritage Group, which donated $10 million to schools last month.
The war in Gaza and subsequent protests on college campuses across the country only increased donations.
Blavatnik, who is Jewish, donated $1 million to the school shortly after Hamas attacked Israel. He then stopped donating to Harvard University.
Kind Snacks founder Daniel Lubetsi, the son of a Holocaust survivor, has been donating to the school since it was in early discussions.
Niall Ferguson, one of the school's founders and a historian, said: “To convince people on Wall Street and Silicon Valley that there really is a problem in higher education, we have to do something on our main campus after October 7th.'' I needed what happened,” he said.
The school is currently awaiting accreditation, which can only be achieved after the first class graduates.
As an incentive for the first students to take the risk of attending a brand new, unaccredited school, UATX is giving every first-year student a full-tuition scholarship worth $130,000.
Almost half of the inaugural class is from Texas. One third of the students are women.
Executives from Elon Musk's SpaceX and the Boring Company support the school's engineering programming.
Mr. Lonsdale, the school's president, is donating several acres of land outside Austin to the school's science and technology center.
Meanwhile, UATX continues its search for a permanent main campus.
Although the new university claims to be nonpartisan, a significant portion of its founders are longtime Republican donors.
“Everyone who donates to us is a critic of higher education,” Kanellos told the Journal.
