Why America Desperately Needs New Universities: Pano Kanelos

a liberal arts education in its purest form is a comprehensive education that brings together all forms of human knowledge over the years Pano Canelis now president of the University of Austin observed a growing homogenization and bureaucratization of higher education he saw school programs becoming more and more similar administrators outnumbering students and young adults being taught the pathway to success is dependent on censorship and adherence to the status quo we've created a culture of conformity at universities a culture of conformity in higher education so in 2021 together with a group of similarly concerned individuals he started the University of Austin which emphasizes curiosity risk-taking and moral agency three years later Canelis is the president of a fully operational freshman class and a diverse faculty we're trying to generate graduates who are themselves are builders and creators this is an important part of our curriculum this is American Thought Leaders and I'm Ya Kell and Canelos such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders thank you for having me i'm really looking forward to this conversation well let's start with the Department of Education as we're filming here just a day ago there were rumors there was going to be an executive order signed by President Trump to abolish the Department of Education that didn't happen but what are your thoughts in general i would be shocked if there wasn't some action taken um from the new administration regarding the Department of Education i'll say when it comes to higher education I think the expectation is that there's going to be significant reform around accreditation in universities um uh possibly moving accreditation to the states as opposed to kind of the national creditors probably making entry for new accredititors into the system a lot easier and a lot faster and I'm all for that i think you being America's newest university and going through the process right now of authorization and chartering and accreditation the whole regulatory process of becoming a new university is extremely cumbersome and slowm moving and challenging and it really dissuades new institutions um from taking shape uh and I'm all for as many new institutions coming into the ecosystem as possible because I think that the one of the great strengths of American higher education traditionally has been the kind of heterogeneity of the ecosystem that we have all different kinds of institutions at different levels doing different things with different missions everything from vast research universities to Bible colleges in the Texas panhandle um what we've seen over the past few years past few decades really is a kind of homogenization of higher education where institutions are becoming more and more like each other programs are sort of becoming more and more similar um and and this just kind of flattens out I think the the potential for higher education to do great things and be dynamic so what I'm hoping to see and this is one of the reasons we started this university hoping to see new universities come forward with new dynamic models and to make that easier for new entries to join the race so the motto of the University of Austin is dare to think um are people not thinking people aren't daring i would say that uh so dare to think uh it comes all goes all the way back to Emanuel K um and uh it was sort of the the byword of the enlightenment itself right that that thinking real thinking is to push the boundaries of knowledge to think beyond what's received to challenge the givens to not accept orthodoxies at face value to to exercise the muscle of the mind through resistance uh and that takes courage right because it's easy to go with what's familiar easy to to accept the givens it's easy to to accept whatever narrative you've been given so so I I lean into the daring part of that you know another uh motto of ours is that we've built a university dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth right not just pursuing truth but doing it courageously so I think you know I think the the deepest sort of thinking the deepest most profound pursuit of truth um pushes the edges and that's not always comfortable but you're basically saying that it's courage that's lacking in the academy right now um and that's the purpose of of this new university yeah absolutely um I would go even a step further um I would say it's not just that courage is lacking but that we've created a culture of conformity at universities a culture of conformity in higher education if you think about it you know if you roll the tape back before students even become university students in the in the competitive um admissions world we live in for higher education in order to get into elite universities or you know top tier universities young people are told that they have to have a checklist of things that they have to you know follow a certain pattern that they have to take a certain pathway and that if they do the right things and they say the right things and they get the right you know the stars the gold stars at the right time then they will be granted entry into an institution an elite institution a top institution that will help propel them forward in life well what are they learning they're learning that success is dependent upon conformity and what happens when those students get to universities that message is reinforced come here don't say anything controversial don't challenge you know what the dominant narrative is um don't be highly concerned about the things the ideas that you express because they might have a delotterious effect on your future so we we we create a culture of conformity to get them into universities and then they get them they and they learn that at the the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow now that excellent entry level job at Goldman Sachs or something is now also dependent upon you keeping your head down and not ruffling feathers that that to me is the exact opposite of what a university should be doing universities should be fostering risk-taking independent thinking universities should be places where ideas are interrogated where students aren't afraid to be wrong because being wrong is how you get to what is right and so it's not just about courage it's about um moving beyond educational culture of conformity the years at university are the perfect time to make mistakes it's a perfect time to to be bold and to strive for things and then fall down and get up again and if we're not encouraging that if we're not incentivizing that then we're not teaching students how to actually be prepared for what they're going to encounter in the rest of their life right hence you know daring to think I guess daring to think daring to think and daring and the other part of our motto is dare to think dare to build you know it's not just about thinking it's about doing and to to be a builder you have to be courageous you've talked about this many many times right um I know you've had an kind of an incredible marketing uh scheme for University of Boston which is how I I think I first came across it um but just very briefly the the genesis of the idea and then we'll talk about the freshman class a group of us got together uh you know Ferguson Barry Weiss Joe Lndale Arthur Brooks and we were concerned about the state of higher education the culture of conformity and you know the culture the kind of sensorious nature of higher education the the the political asymmetry of higher education all these things and we sort of said what what does one do about that if you identify a problem and it's a significant problem because universities are so central to the culture universities are the place where we do our thinking universities are the place where we create the future and so we got together said well how do you know what are we going to do about this we have identified a problem do we try to reform things from within do we are there pathways to take existing universities and and try to bring out what's best in them uh and that seemed daunting uh uh and so we thought well maybe starting in a university maybe launching a university from the ground up will enable us to to design it to structure it in a way that accords with the principles that we think are at the heart of higher education which are open inquiry and freedom of conscience and civil discourse i mean that's that lays the groundwork for the kind of you know um deep and profound thinking that one needs to do at a university so uh so we we just decided that we were going to jump in and begin a university in 2021 we announced it to the world uh the world responded here we are just three years later with a um a wonderful operating university in Austin Texas with our first class of freshmen wonderful faculty and uh the fact that we were able to launch from you know back of the napkin idea to living university in three years I think is a sign of the uh of of the need for this kind of institution at this moment in time and before we go any further what does Shakespeare have to do with it what you're probably alluding to is that my my background is as a Shakespearean scholar that was my academic field when I was a professor um uh it's interesting i Shakespeare probably could have gotten in the way of this project because it was very difficult for me to leave my passions aside to sort of focus intensely on being a university founder um but I will say that you know in the in the conception of the university we believe wholeheartedly that we can't understand the world today and therefore we can't understand how we should act as human beings towards a better future if we don't have a sustained and serious encounter with what's come before the great thinkers of the past the great works of the past the great art of the past the the the the history of mathematics and science that if we don't if we don't encounter those things if we don't absorb their wisdom and also uh identify where they where certain ideas have gone wrong then we have to begin again from from scratch here and you know we don't have enough time to start over to start civilization from scratch we have a civilization so so Shakespeare I think you know is exemplary of the kind of um you know sort of essential figure in the curriculum that we've built well and we just seem to be relearning the same lessons over and over i mean off the top of my head uh nemesis follows hubris right it seems like be the perennial human lesson that for some reason we don't learn well I think because of hubris right because there's this notion and I I think this is a a side effect of uh of a kind of enlightenment rationalism there's a notion that the way that we think about things today because we are further along chronologically than people in the past is better than what has come before that our ideas must be superior why because you know well if we look at things like the development of science well technology does kind of iterate in one direction it tends to get better and better over time doesn't mean human ideas get better and better in fact if you think about the conjunction of technology we we we um accomplish something I mean miraculous in the last century we split the atom i mean you know we've gone from stone age of splitting the atom at light at light speed yet what did we do when we split the atom we turned that into a weapon so even though we might be advancing in terms of kind of technical knowledge are we advancing in terms of human wisdom are we advancing ethically and so it's that human knowledge I think that is perennial that we have to kind of go back to the lessons of the past not to simply you know um cut and paste things that people have said in the past not that we have to you know be strict aristoilians or you know uh you know that that that the ideas in the past are necessarily static models for us today because there's just so much that we can learn and then incorporate into our thinking today uh one quick sec we're going to take a break and we'll be right back and we're back with the president of the University of Austin Pano Canelis you mentioned something earlier freedom of conscience my ears always perk up when I hear someone mention it because I I kind of believe that the way a society approaches that question is a measure of the perhaps even the goodness of a society curious what your thoughts would be on that a good society is a society which best enables people to be good people and that is and freedom of conscience is is an essential component of that freedom of conscience recognizes that we have uh we have autonomous interior lives that each human being as a you know I like to use the phrase a creature of logos that we have our own uh experience of the world that sort of internal experience of the world and that is essentially who we are i mean call it the soul whatever you want to call it and um the integrity of that individual autonomy is is the integrity of of humanity itself um now as individuals we are part of a larger society um we are not independently self- sustaining the relationships we have with others the relationships we have with um institutions the culture at large are very important but if we don't have the freedom to live our life according to our own lights then we don't have moral agency and if you don't have moral agency you can't be a full human being wow so I mean the central the central piece of education in a sense really yeah i think that's right i think that's why true education is liberal education and you know and let me define that please often times when we talk about liberal education or liberal arts people have this very um reductive sense of what that means they you say "Oh a liberal arts education." Well that means that you study like the humanities or something and not the sciences and that um a liberal arts education in its purest form is a comprehensive education that brings together all forms of human knowledge so the liberal arts in the middle ages was composed of the trivium and the quadriium the arts of letters the arts of numbers quantitative qualitative knowledge you know you not only studied you know geometry and you know but you studied rhetoric you studied music you you you brought together the different ways of human knowing with the idea is that in each area of human knowing uh you can learn a lot but nothing is complete unto itself so bringing the arts and sciences you know letters and numbers together creates a more complex understanding of the world and ourselves so that's so the liberal arts are first of all comprehensive and why what's also liberal about liberal arts is that they're liberal in the sense that they are intended to free human beings to create free human beings to liberate human beings because the more that we understand the world the more that we understand ourselves and those things are interlocking the better life we can live the more moral agency we have in order to make better choices in order to live a life ethically or morally we need to be attuned to what's better and worse in the world and so a liberal education is that which helps us to understand the better argument from the worse argument the better end from the worse end and again no human being will ever understand that in its totality we're all flawed broken creatures but the point of liberal education is to move us in the right direction you know as you're describing the purpose of being this liberation I I can't help but think about Icarus right is there is it can one be over liberated yes if one comes to understand liberty as um unbounded human will right that you know and and this is in some sense I think this is a very um modern maybe even postmodern conception of human autonomy that the greatest good isn't that we're free so that we can seek the greatest things but that freedom itself is the highest good that it doesn't you know that just being able to achieve one's ends one's desires one's will is itself morally justifying um yes i mean I think in that case uh you you've gone from being someone who focus on liberty to being a libertine somebody who is a worshshiper of liberty and um you know I mean you know it's a misconception I think ultimately of what liberty really should be aiming for fascinating i I want to find out how things have played out as you know I was learning about University of Austin it was just an idea right but in and you were incredibly excited about the idea and I think incredibly effective at communicating the message which is why I think you managed to do it in three years I guess as you were alluding but now you actually have had a freshman class so how has that played out for you it's amazing i mean as we sit here you know if you turn the corner around here the classes are going on the students are engaged in discussion in the seminar rooms there's uh uh there if anybody visits the University of Austin they will see that it's probably one of the most intellectually alive environments you'll ever encounter we brought together a freshman class these are students who are um natural um naturally curious students risktakers i mean starting putting putting your your university education in the hands of a brand new university is says something about the character of of these students they're willing because they believe in the mission they're willing to commit to that mission and with this high degree of self-sacrifice and and again risk-taking and because they're here because they've chosen to be here they take this very seriously i mean they're here to learn they're here to discuss they're here to debate you know you go in one of the classrooms and it's like ricocheting around the ideas and all that and what they've learned is that the more that they take their education to heart the more seriously they take it the more reward there is um very briefly um just describe the degree they're taking yeah so right now we have a single degree uh Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts um but with with a a number of different branching pathways and the reason it's a single degree now is the first part of that experience is what we call the intellectual foundations program so everybody starts with the same foundation a series of classes that is intended to do what we were talking about earlier to provide a liberal education philosophy literature uh the arts foundations of mathematics sciences and kind of weave together mostly looking at great works from the past weave together a comprehensive understanding of the world or at least a foundational one that's what the students mostly do for the first two years so almost half of their experience is this joint curated curriculum they all take the same classes at the same time in the same sequence so they're all reading the same books at the same time which creates a common intellectual journey so they might be reading you know Plato's Apology uh in one week or another week they're reading Dostki's Brothers Kodzoff and the fact that they're reading that and discussing on class but they're all doing it together means when they go back to their dorms or they're hanging out at a cafe the same questions are swirling around that whole cohort and so the classroom actually expands beyond the formal classroom into the institution itself so there's that single foundation and then from there we have what we call centers of of academic inquiry which are broad interdisciplinary areas of focus in the humanities the social sciences and STEM disciplines where students study things like economics politics and history and STEM or arts and literature but they're again they're studying these in a kind of cross cutting cross-pollinating interdisciplinary way so it's not like I have this thing called an economics major and there's 12 classes I have to take and I check the boxes and then I and I've mastered this thing called economics the question is how does economics intersect with history with politics farther a field with science with technology again trying to weave together the different disciplines so what we the reason we have a single degree right now is no matter what kind of focus students have what kind of emphasis they lean towards because everybody eventually has to lean into something what they're really pursuing is let's say the whole picture the totality of human knowledge so as we finish up you know if there's people that are interested in applying um and learning more about what a liberal education means and what the possibilities are at the University of Austin where do they go uh not surprisingly we have a website it's uh U Austin letter u austin.org um and if you go to that website you'll see that we have links to tremendous not just information about the university but we have a a wonderfully informative set of um content there lectures we have a substack we have uh articles published not just by our own people but by the people that we think are important voices in the world around education and other topics and that so it's a real clearing house for a lot of um information about the university but also information about the things that a university should really be concerned with which as we said before the kind of which is called the renewal of uh a robust intellectual life and the culture well Pano Canelos it's such a pleasure to have had you on thank you pleasure to speak with you thank you all for joining Pano Canelosi on this episode of American Thought Leaders i'm your host Ya Kellik [Music]