Welcome back, everyone. Jacob Howland joins us now, Provost, Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Intellectual Foundations at the University of Austin. So, of course, it's an important time to have a university provost on. But what makes it really special is this college university is like no other, and they're starting their first on-campus semester right now. And it's a lot different than you would think.
Well, most colleges typically are. Jacob, welcome to The Brian Kilmeade Show. It's great to be here, Brian.
Thank you. So, Jacob, tell me what makes the University of Austin special? Okay, well, we are unlike other universities because other universities have really lost the thread. The purpose of a university is to pursue truth and to preserve, transmit, and extend knowledge. Now, I think most universities, or at least many, have turned into sort of joyless centers of indoctrination. And there are, you know, statistics that support that in terms of, let's say, the rate at which a university is going to go.
The ratio of conservatives to liberals on campus, which is a kind of index of intellectual pluralism. But the main point I would make is that in the contemporary universities, students are afraid to make mistakes. And you can't learn if you make mistakes. They're afraid to make mistakes because they don't want to be censored.
They don't want to be canceled. If I told you you had to learn how to ride a bike, but you couldn't fall off, you wouldn't be able to do it. So what we're doing is founding a university on the principles of open discourse, civil discourse, you know, the pursuit of truth. We are not going to have ideology in the classroom and students will not be biting their tongues, nor will professors. But we are not going to be able to agree and vote for the same people, right?
Yeah, that's right. I think there is intellectual pluralism and diversity of viewpoints on the board. But we are not interested in being, let's say, a university of the right. We're interested in transcending politics. So we're not going to be another Hillsdale. That already exists.
It does really well. God bless them. We want to be a place where all views are representative and we can have open discourse. And we want to be a place where we can have collective inquiry into the fundamental problems of human existence.
How many, how hard was it to get this off the ground? What was the greatest hurdle? Well, I'll tell you, I would say the greatest hurdle has been regulatory capture. There's been no new secular or nonsectarian university in Texas in over 50 years, and there are good reasons for that. It's very hard to start a new university.
until you graduate the first class of undergraduates. You cannot advertise your university at college fairs at high schools. You cannot accept federal money in terms of financial aid, no Pell Grants.
Parents can't use their 529 savings plans. So it's a big risk to say that your son or daughter is gonna start at this university. And it's a big risk for faculty and frankly for the administrators and staff. We've all joined this project because we're all on board in the belief that universities need to be rebuilt. They've been central to the lifeblood of the American economy, to developing leadership, to developing American citizens.
They're not doing that anymore. Give me an idea, some of your staff and some of the courses that you guys offer. Sure, so we have a very interesting curriculum.
The way we look at education is like rowers, you gotta look backward in order to look forward. And we are very forward-looking. That's by the way why we're building our university in Austin. Tocqueville in the 1830s came to the United States and was amazed at the civic entrepreneurship. Americans would look at a problem, they'd form a committee and they'd tackle it.
That's what Austin is like, it's a big startup city. So our university has three real dimensions in the curriculum. One is intellectual foundations, which I designed, which is studying the best that has been thought and said, focusing on fundamental human questions like what is civilization, what is politics, why do we need law?
So there's that part. And then students have the opportunity after their freshman and sophomore years to develop 21st century techniques, tools, intellectual tools to focus on contemporary problems that are related to computing and AI and so forth. But the sort of through line that connects this backward-looking and forward-looking curriculum is our Polaris Project, named after the North Star. And the idea is that once you do intellectual foundations and you come to understand the conditions of human flourishing, what is a human being, what do human beings need? You then develop a project to attend to the needs of human beings today in 2024. And so you're actually applying your liberal education. So that's, I think, a very distinctive feature of our curriculum. And it's an interesting and creative tension between this preservation, the grateful reception of the knowledge and wisdom of our ancestors and applying it looking forward to make the world better. Jacob Hallin, our guest provost, senior VP for academic affairs, Dean of Intellectual Foundation at the University of Austin about to launch.
How much does it cost? What kind of students are you looking for? Well, we're actually scholarships our students this year and next year. So we're giving them full tuition. Because frankly, Brian, there are tens of thousands of students who want to attend the University of Austin.
They just don't know that we exist. And they're taking a big risk coming here. So, but we've pegged our tuition at 32,500, which is less than half of what a major elite institution charges. And the students, not only that we're looking for that, but that we have attracted are outstanding. We have students who have started multiple businesses, students who have produced films dealing with cancer, students, and incidentally, these students, before we've even started, the first class is on September 9th, they've gotten together to write, direct, and produce a film, to start a sub stack, to form reading groups. So they're very bold and ambitious in terms of their education. And we are gonna continue attracting those students. And also we've attracted faculty who really match those students in terms of their capabilities and interests. I imagine some of them have to be frustrated with the current system right now.
Just talking to Jordan Peterson, they used to teach at, I think Harvard. You just said they didn't even recognize the place. They used to have a great faculty in the 90s and be able to talk and banter about issues. Now, if you have a conservative point of view, you're ostracized.
They really just want you out. And Austin is an enclave of Texas. It's known to be very liberal, homeless problem, things that just don't exist in other areas of Texas. Is Austin welcoming to you? Austin has been pretty welcoming. We have a lot of supporters from Austin.
You're right that it is sort of a, let's say blue or purple enclave in Texas, but Texas as a whole has really welcomed us. There's a lot of wealth here. We've gotten a lot of donors. We've raised almost $200 million and we're also getting national support as well, especially a lot of interest from some of the folks who are alumni of Harvard and Columbia and places and are not interested anymore in donating to those schools. But I do think that Austin is an excellent place for us to start.
There's just so much vibrant energy here. So Jacob, what type of professors wanna teach there? And are you competitive salary wise where you could get quality?
We certainly are competitive salary wise. Now, Austin is an expensive town, but we are paying, for example, at the entry level of assistant professor 90,000 a year and listeners who happen to be in academia will know that that is a very good salary. And the faculty that we've been attracting, some have left institutions where they've been canceled or they're just upset about the ideological invasion of the classroom. But others are coming to Austin, for example, because they're interested in opportunities to extend their research in ways that aren't available elsewhere. So we have a professor, her name is Elia Overby, who's coming from Cornell and her field is bio-astronautics. She studies the effects on the human body of being in space for a long time.
She's in Austin because this is where SpaceX is, this is where Elon Musk is, this is where the future of technology in terms of space exploration is situated. And so she has opportunities that she doesn't have at Cornell and that's the kind of professor we're getting, folks who are not interested in being able to say, I'm at a top university, look at how much honor and prestige I have. They're interested in what they're studying and what they're teaching.
But that could be the case in a few years where people thought are going to look at your place and it will have that reputation. And it's important for, I guess you get off on the right foot. So when you look at the students, what student body do you have now to start? What did you discover in the summer in your trial run? Are there dorms on campus for them to live in?
Lots of good questions. So we're starting with 90, maybe 92, 93 students where students are still interested in applying. We decided to set a target of a hundred or thereabouts because if you launch a university and you say, oh, we're gonna have a thousand students to begin with. Well, you've got to hire hundreds of faculty and you're actually gonna have lost the game right there because we're very selective.
We wanna make sure that the faculty we are bringing in are mission aligned, that they buy our notion of restoring intellectual pluralism, civil discourse, asking questions and making mistakes in the classroom so students can learn. Students do have dorms. They're actually, they're gonna be living about a mile and a half from campus in the region of the University of Texas, which as you know, is also in Austin.
But we're gonna have shuttle buses to bring them down. They're in a lovely building. Actually, some of our faculty are envious of their accommodations. So, you know, what's important to remember is that we've got great students, we've got outstanding faculty whom I've chosen because they're outstanding teachers.
We have a campus, we have accommodations, you know, but the procedure is kind of chunky because we ourselves are a startup. And if you talk to anybody who's a startup, you know, you make mistakes, but we've got students and faculty who are on board with us. They're gonna help us build this institution and we're gonna constantly correct.
We're very lucky to have these excellent people joining us. All right, so do you, you know, we have this whole protest movement going on, the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian movement. Do you expect that on your campus? I don't actually expect it on our campus, but if it were to occur, we would shut it down immediately because, you know, the condition for pursuing truth and for teaching and learning is having no interruptions of those intellectual activities and we're simply not gonna tolerate it. My bigger concern, Brian, is there might be some folks in Austin at the University of Texas, for example, who were protesting Palestinian protesters and some of that might spill over sort of into our vicinity, which is downtown.
But I'm not very concerned about that at this point. All right, Jacob, exciting time. Good, you're first, everyone will always remember the first class of professors, first class of students. And I look forward to checking in with you again to see how everything progresses. Thanks so much, Brian. I really appreciate being on your show. From the Fox News Podcasts Network. I'm Ben Domenech, Fox News contributor and editor of the transom.com daily newsletter.
And I'm inviting you to join a conversation every week. It's the Ben Domenech Podcast. Subscribe and listen now by going to foxnewspodcasts.com. Listen to the show ad free on Fox News Podcasts Plus on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music with your prime membership or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
