Billionaires who have grown disgusted by disruptive anti-Israel protests across US college campuses are abandoning their elite alma maters — and instead backing a new, “anti-woke” university in Texas that has just 92 students, according to a report.
Wall Street trader Jeff Yass, real-estate tycoon Harlan Crow and investor Len Blavatnik are just a few of the deep-pocketed donors flooding the University of Austin, or UATX, with about $200 million so far, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Yass alone has given $35 million to the tiny school – which is currently housed in a former department store, the Journal said.
Crow – a major GOP donor and close friend of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas – said he expects the new university to encourage ideological diversity.
“Much of higher ed today seems to want to reject Western accomplishments and the accomplishments of Western civilizations in their entirety,” he told the Journal. “Many people think that’s a bad idea.”
Along with his wife, Kathy, Crow has hosted events for the school at their Dallas home and has let the school use space in an office park he owns for its “Forbidden Courses” summer program.
The contrarian university received a flood of contributions as conservative activists became fed up with unruly pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses across the country.
Billionaires threatened to withhold sizable donations from their elite alma maters. Donors and politicians signed petitions to oust administrative leaders.
It explains UATX’s appeal as a nonpartisan, “truth-telling” institution. The college welcomed its inaugural class of first-years last month.
To start, the school is offering three types of programs: economics, politics and history; English and creative writing; and data science and computer science, according to the Austin-American Statesman.
Pano Kanelos, founding president of the university and former president of St. John’s College in Maryland, said each student will work on a Polaris Project – a four-year assignment that must address a societal need.
A promotional video on the school’s YouTube page shows pro-Palestinian encampments at other colleges alongside a seminar at the University of Austin.
“They burn, we build,” a message says at the end of the video.
Plans to open the school were announced in fall 2021.
The school’s founders include venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale and journalist Bari Weiss.
Lonsdale co-founded Palantir Technologies and is donating to former president Donald Trump. Weiss previously worked at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and has since founded the Free Press, an independent newsletter.
“Higher education needs competition,” Yass said in a statement. “It is time for philanthropists to start new colleges in keeping with the way American learning institutions were founded.”
Other donors include PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, who has previously offered to pay students $100,000 to drop out of college and instead start a business; billionaire philanthropist John Arnold and his wife, Laura; and Meritage Group co-president Alex Magaro, who donated $10 million to the school last month.
The war in Gaza and subsequent protests on college campuses across the United States only ramped up donations.
Blavatnik, who is Jewish, donated $1 million to the school soon after Hamas attacked Israel. Later on, he halted his donations to Harvard University.
Daniel Lubetzy, founder of Kind Snacks and son of a Holocaust survivor, has donated to the school since it was in the early talking stages.
“It took what happened in the wake of Oct. 7 on the major campuses to convince Wall Street, to convince people in Silicon Valley, that there really was a problem” with higher education, said another of the school’s founders and historian Niall Ferguson.
The school is currently awaiting accreditation, which it can only receive after its first class graduates.
As an incentive for its first students, who are taking a risk going to an unaccredited, brand-new school, UATX is granting full-tuition scholarships to all of its first-year students worth $130,000.
Nearly half of the inaugural class comes from Texas. A third of the students are female.
Executives from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Boring Company are behind the school’s engineering programming.
Lonsdale, the school’s board chair, is donating a few acres of land outside Austin for the school’s science and technology center.
Meanwhile, UATX continues to search for a permanent main campus.
While the new college claims to be nonpartisan, a significant portion of its founders are longtime GOP donors.
“Everyone who gives to us is a critic of higher education,” Kanelos told the Journal.
