American universities stopped optimizing for students a long time ago. The University of Austin was built as a direct counter to that failure. Carlos Carvalho, its president, brings a statistician's precision to the diagnosis, tracing the causal chain from dropped standards to credential collapse while building an institution with no tuition and no government money, staking its survival entirely on student outcomes 20 years out. The conversation moves from the financial architecture of a university, through a curriculum that starts with Plato before it touches Python, to the deeper question of what a university owes a civilization in the age of AI and whether Austin is the right place to answer it.

Agenda
0:00 Intro + Three Years In
9:42 The $300M Bet
15:42 The Conglomerate Problem
21:42 Western Canon First
28:42 What AI Changes About Teaching
34:42 The Bastrop Lab
41:42 UATX in the Austin Ecosystem
48:42 Atoms vs Bits in Texas
53:42 American Exceptionalism as Mission
59:42 The Hit Pieces
1:06:42 The UCSD Math Collapse
1:11:42 Grade Inflation as Decay
1:14:42 AI and the Soul Problem

Guest Bio
Carlos Carvalho is the President of the University of Austin. Prior to taking on this role, he spent 15 years as a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business, where he held the La Quinta Centennial Professorship and founded the Salem Center for Policy. A native of Brazil, Dr. Carvalho earned his doctorate in statistics from Duke University and has also taught at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His research focuses on Bayesian statistics in complex, high-dimensional problems with applications ranging from economics to genetics to public policy. At UATX, he is leading a bold effort to build a new university that stands for American principles and academic excellence.

Guest Links
University of Austin: Website, Substack, Instagram, X, LinkedIn

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Austin Next Links: Website, X/Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn
Ecosystem Metacognition Substack