Right-Wing "University" Already Bleeding Board Members
Right-Wing "University" Already Bleeding Board Members
Steven Pinker took flight Monday, days after Robert Zimmer resigned
The University of Austin Texas, an unaccredited “school” based in an office building owned by oil and gas lawyers RashChapman, is losing board members a week after publicly announcing itself on Bari Weiss’s blog.
On Friday, Robert Zimmer—the chancellor of the University of Chicago known for sending incoming students in 2016 a sternly worded letter warning there would be no trigger warnings or safe spaces for them on campus—said in a statement he was leaving due to the positions of the new so-called “school.”
Steven Pinker followed on Monday, deplaning from his role on the board “by mutual and amicable agreement.” Pinker added he wouldn’t “be speaking on this further.”
In the week since it was founded, the “university” has received outsized media attention and claimed it has 3,000 applicants for teaching positions. But the “school” lacks accreditation, classes, faculty, and a physical campus.
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UATX, in a statement addressing both departures, explained that the “school” had not sufficiently made explicit the division between the organization’s advisors and trustees.
“As is often the case with fast-moving start-ups, there were some missteps,” UATX said. “In particular, our website initially failed to make clear the distinction between the Founding Trustees and the Advisory Board.”
That led to “unnecessary complications,” apparently, because the lack of distinction “conflated advisors, who were aligned in general with the project but not necessarily in agreement with all its actions and statements, and those who had originated the project and bear responsibility for those things.”
The Founding Trustees are now made up of “school” president Pano Kanelos; bumbling pro-empire historian Niall Ferguson; censorious anti-free speech activist and blogger Bari Weiss; anti-vax conspiracy theorist Heather Heying; and bankrolling Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale.
The Board of Advisors—now two seats smaller—includes arch-theocratic extremist Sohrab Amari, race theorist Andrew Sullivan, West Virginia University President E. Gordon Gee, and others. Gee’s involvement sparked criticism at WVU, with accusations that he was splitting his time and tacitly endorsing the noxious views of others on the board.
Zimmer referred to the lack of firewall between the two groups as the impetus for his departure.
“I resigned from the Advisory Board on November 11, noting that the new university made a number of statements about higher education in general, largely quite critical, that diverged very significantly from my own views,” Zimmer said.
The confusion and lack of distinction between advisors and trustees doesn’t bode well for the future of the “school.”
Nor are Zimmer and Pinker’s departures good for the reputation of the “university.”
“Everything is a grift nowadays,” the Washington Post’s Molly Roberts wrote on Saturday, singling out the UATX hustle as one example.
It’s hard to argue the point. Let’s hope the “university” disappears like right-wing scams usually do, having swindled right-wing rich people out of some money but produced little of note. The alternative means we’ll have to be hearing from this “school” for years.
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Fergie Ferg doing damage control from the deck of the titanic was particularly fine schadenfreude.
https://twitter.com/nfergus/status/1460384406980501513?t=c1w5A3nHrlBUgMj31zNbCA&s=19
typo:
> race theorist Andrew Sullivan
race-and-penis theorist Andrew Sullivan