The art of grifting, scamming and swindling is the primary American product these days, as there is nothing left of real value to produce. As such, everything is a grift now.
Cryptocurrencies, Non-fungible tokens, the pure $250,000 tungsten cube you touch once a year in Illinois, are all obvious grifts, yet people invest all the same. For the goal is to get in soon enough that you can be the grifter for some other poor griftee.
This truth can now be extended to the academic world, as Texas’ new University of Austin promises to “fight back against censorship on campuses.”  But, of course, the founding grifters need your donations to do it.
UATX brands itself as a fortress in the so-called war against the departure of free and open discussion that is happening on every other campus. This institution was created by a group of concerned administrators and professors that for some reason keep losing their jobs at all those other universities. However, if these people can start a new university on a whim, they are not being censored.
This project has the same ideology and all the academic rigor of a suburban mother yelling at a school board about critical race theory mixed with a Twitter user with a roman statue profile picture vomiting about protecting “western civilization.”
If you read any of the promotional material for this university you will find an abundance of what I would call “American exceptionalism platitudes”: a dedication to the “the fearless pursuit of truth” and whatever “the wind of freedom” means. Yet for all UATX website’s promotions about freedom of speech, the University never actually says anything, no specifics about degrees, professors or tuition. Even the unique “forbidden courses” that promise information too provocative to be taught elsewhere are left tantalizingly vague.
Then you inevitably discover that UATX will not offer an undergraduate college until 2024, and the physical address listed is a real estate law firm operated out of a Texas townhouse. The firm’s sole Google review is positive, but that doesn’t exactly make it an institution of higher learning.
At least Trump University had an actual campus, but hey, the UATX’s donations page works fine.
Also if I can find photos of your founder with Jeffery Epistein, you do not have a foundation for an accredited academic institution.
I also find it curious that UATX calls out the skyrocketing cost of higher education in America, acknowledging a systemic problem but centering a cultural shift as the solution. I’ve written about the phenomenon of conservative grifters co-opting real societal issues before, as there is genuine populist discomfort as college becomes more inaccessible. Of course this new con will not solve anything but give an empty shell for one side of the political divide to dump money into.

Related: “Opinion: Conservative grifters exist because we allow them to”

It does not even matter if UATX was set up to explicitly be a grift; the end effect will be the same for the university and any rubes that donated. Academic grifters will peddle reactionary responses to whatever they dislike in popular culture until it shuts down. Because who is going to attend a college that does not offer degrees?
I predict that if the University of Austin doesn’t disappear with all the donation money by summer, Jordan Peterson will be teaching a course on skull sizes fall term.