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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to K Beyond Liberty. I'm actually filming at the Universidad de la Libertad in Mexico City talking to Pano Canales, the chancellor at the University of Austin. We're going to talk about their disruptive model and what they're doing to take on the higher education cartel. Check it out. Welcome to Kibby on Liberty. Pana, how's it going?
- [00:55]
B
Fantastically well.
- [00:57]
A
We are at the Universidad de la Libertad in Mexico City and you are now the chancellor of the University of Austin in Texas. And there's some similarities, I think, between these two institutions. And we'll get into that. I want to introduce the University of Austin to people that don't know what you guys have been up to the last. How long has it been now? Three years.
- [01:19]
B
We started in 2021, so four and a half years at this point. Sort of the process of starting the university. We've been operating as a university officially since fall of 24.
- [01:31]
A
Okay. So not that long, but long enough to have some battle scars along the way. And I want to get into the accreditation industrial complex, the cartel that makes it very difficult to reform universities, all that stuff. But I just want to acknowledge because of where we are and what happened yesterday, Charlie Kirk was murdered on a college campus in the U.S. the timing for us couldn't have been worse because Terry and I were literally walking up on stage at this university to give a talk. And it's important to acknowledge it because it's created a sense of melancholy at best, maybe even some anxiety here. But for you at the University of Austin, as kind of someone that was fighting the fight for more speech and opposing views and conversation instead of violence, it strikes me as a metaphor for what we have to fix.
- [02:37]
B
Yeah. No, I mean, among the tragic elements of this murder is the fact that it took place during an event at a university. Wow. Charlie Kirk was engaged in trying to generate open dialogue with students and with others. So it feels like this attack was directed not just at him, but at that very process of that very phenomenon, at the very. To sort of dampen the hope that we might find ways to civilly disagree or to exchange ideas in a productive manner. It just feels like it was a dagger right into the heart of that.
- [03:23]
A
Yeah. Just endless escalation.
- [03:26]
B
Yeah.
- [03:28]
A
But you were telling me earlier that when the University of Austin first opened its doors, Antifa came after you guys.
- [03:38]
B
Yeah, it was the first. It was really interesting because it was the. We had just announced that we were going to build the university in Austin and. And we had some Offices in the sort of center of Austin. We hadn't even moved in yet or anything like that. And within a couple days of our announcement, the offices were vandalized. Graffiti spray painted, obscenities, windows broken, telling us to get out of the city. And it was certainly a moment of intimidation, purposefully so. But, you know, I just told our team, I said, you know what? Clean up the, clean the walls, replace the windows and just keep going.
- [04:17]
A
Yeah. It's interesting this. It seems like a pretty bright choice between violence and intimidation to prevent people from speaking and thinking for themselves versus what, what, what you call classically liberal education.
- [04:33]
B
Yeah.
- [04:34]
A
Which is representing all sides and having arguments and actually working through things.
- [04:40]
B
I mean, the, the civilization itself is built upon the premise that coercion is not the way to interrelate. Persuasion is. And liberal education is built on that premise that, that persuasion is the way that human beings come together and, and better understand the world and each other. Coercion is what interrupts that process.
- [05:02]
A
Yeah.
- [05:03]
B
And that's. And that's what intimidation and violence is all about. You could be coercive verbally as well and politically in that, but we've just seen some really just raw and immaterial acts of coercion lately.
- [05:18]
A
Yeah. Thinking about. So Charlie obviously was a conservative. He was a Republican. He had very strong views on things that could be quite divisive on a college campus. But I thought that the American ethos was one that, that very much welcomed that battle of ideas. And that used to be the case in the university system. I feel like even universities that would skew in one direction or the other, respecting that dialogue and that intellectual diversity was a thing. When did we lose that?
- [05:58]
B
I mean, that's a good question. I think the. I think there are a couple factors that have led to the diminution of what's called intellectual pluralism over time. One of those is the kind of increasingly monochromatic politicizing of universities. So for various reasons, the tenure process, the way that PhDs are produced and professionalized over time, we're just seeing the faculty ratchet in one direction. So you have this kind of, this monolithic political, an ideological entity based at the, at the center of, of universities. And I, and I will say I don't think that most faculty are there to proselytize or be political, but I think what happens is that they have created this kind of fishbowl where their opinions sort of become the only acceptable opinions, and everything outside the fishbowl is sort of, you know, alien and Unfamiliar and therefore threatening. And that fishbowl is what the university has become over time. I think it's partially that. I think it's also the fact that universities have become increasingly under pressure to just be job training institutions so that the exchange of ideas isn't really that important. The core purpose of a university should be the pursuit of truth, the of pursuit, the pursuit of knowledge. If the purpose of the university just is the pursuit of a job at Goldman Sachs, then the exchange of ideas actually isn't that important in the scheme of things.
- [07:40]
A
When did that shift? When did it become a job training program?
- [07:46]
B
It's a good question. I mean, these things are hard to pinpoint. I will say you could probably track the intensity of that phenomenon to the increasing expense of attending a university. So as the price of university attendance rose and continues to rise precipitously, the expectation that there has to be something on the other end to pay for all this increases as well. So you could probably produce a graph that would layer those two trends on top of each other.
- [08:17]
A
Yeah, I think that's probably right. At some point you have to run the ROI and say, can I afford to do this?
- [08:24]
B
Yeah. And if, you know, and one of the things our universities don't do is they don't have variable pricing. So, you know you're going to pay the same in almost every case, whether you're going to be a social worker or you're going to be in finance. Well, when that price is really, really high, what's going to happen? People are going to drift towards those fields that they think might be more capable of providing income over time so they could pay back the loans that they took out in school. It just, it warps the whole system.
- [08:54]
A
Yeah. As you say that I probably should have gotten a discount as a philosophy minor and a major in Austrian economics because the Austrians are not mainstream and accepted in the profession. So yeah, yeah, I should have gotten a discount.
- [09:11]
B
Look, I think one of the things we could do to reform higher ed as we talk about those issues is I think there should be, depending upon what one studies, there should be different lengths for degrees, different pricing for degrees. If we made those kind of modifications, I think we could bring balance back to the university.
- [09:31]
A
Yeah. And competition, I suppose. So let's talk about the inflation of the price of a college education. It's pretty dramatic to the point where it's probably a barrier to entry for a lot of students that would benefit from a liberal arts education. Is it driven by all of the money that government puts into it so that you get this natural ratchet effect.
- [10:01]
B
You know, I mean, that's a common trope, right? That, you know, this sort of the subsidized loans, the Pell grants and that have driven up the price. I think that's a part of it. The truth is, and this is where this is kind of inside baseball piece, those sky high tuition, like nobody pays that, right? There's this bizarre price like a hospital bill, like a hospital bill and tuition set that high so that they have lots and lots of variable, flexible pricing points below that. And when you apply to a university, this is not public, because public has fixed pricing. But private universities, they have these elaborate matrices that say, okay, Matt got this on the sat. He had a three point on his gpa. Pretty good student. His family makes this much money and then they put it all into some, I don't know, magic hat and it spits out a number. And the number says, we think if we offered Matt a $30,000 discount, we can get him. But if you hadn't done quite as well on the SAT, maybe it would have been a $20,000 discount. And it's a really complex. I mean, there are consulting firms that do all this for these universities. It's really quite complex. So the pricing is mysterious, and I think that's a problem. Not transparent. But when people think the price of college has gone really high, the actual amount that you pay to go to college hasn't risen as much as you'd think. So, for example, I'm going to anonymize schools because this is private information, but I know schools that when their tuition was $60,000 a year less tuition, the average net tuition that they actually collected per student was about 24,000.
- [11:57]
A
Yeah.
- [11:58]
B
So that's what the average student is paying, not 60. So it's complicated. And so how does government money fit into that? I'm not sure. So that's one piece of the other reason, material reason the price is going up is the expansion of administration. And I'm certainly not original in saying that, but it's just true. You have places that have more administrators than students now, and where faculty has not really risen. The administration has sort of metastasized. And that's because we treat universities now as like all inclusive luxury resorts. Right. You go there and you expect to have everything, entertainment, physical fitness. There's going to be somebody clipping the bushes. You've got to have a laundry service, a police force. It's like when you're a college president, you're not President of a college. You're like the mayor of a small town. And all of that does cost quite a lot of money. But the schools that don't have that aren't as competitive on the market. Because when somebody goes around, when families go around, and I just did this last year with my daughter, we did college tours. Family goes around. What are they actually looking at? The sushi bar, the workout facility. They don't. Nobody asks about the actual curriculum. They don't ask. And so the schools play to that market. So I think the consumers, if you want to call them that, are also part of the problem.
- [13:23]
A
Interesting. So you're entering this marketplace with a very different product then. Because I don't know if the University of Austin has a nice sushi bar.
- [13:32]
B
But.
- [13:33]
A
But that's not.
- [13:33]
B
There's a Chick Fil A across the street.
- [13:35]
A
Chick Fil A that might actually be better, I'll be honest. But you're. You're making a very different value proposition and in some ways, sort of a. An ancient proposition. There was this time when you went to school to expand your mind and learn about things you don't know and ultimately learn how to think. Is that. I'm characterizing your pitch. But what is the pitch?
- [14:00]
B
Yeah, I mean, that is the pitch that the core purpose of a university is the fearless pursuit of truth and that the experience of young people at that university should be to engage in the scrum of the battle of ideas in pursuit of truth. And what does that mean? It means you have to have classrooms that are open to true debate, where every opinion can be heard. The way I put it is every opinion must be heard, but every opinion must also be backed up by evidence. So you don't get to just say something. You have to explain why you've said what you said, why you believe, so that others can evaluate the claims you're making. So you have to create an environment where ideas are really contested. You have to create an academic experience that's really rigorous. The studies today show that most university students are spending less than three hours a week studying outside of class. What are they doing? They're at the workout facilities. And the. You know, we went to one school that had a tanning beach that they created an artificial beach in the camp for tanning. I'm just side book. That's how bad it is.
- [15:15]
A
That's pretty blatant.
- [15:16]
B
Yeah. And so you have to make sure that the education is really, really rigorous. Students at University of Austin in freshman year, Intellectual Foundations program, which our core program, they're reading like 500 pages a week. They have to be in class. They're not allowed to be on devices. No devices in class. We tell them they can bring the original handheld device. It's called a book. They are responsible for participating and participating in a civil way, and then we hold them accountable. We have no grade inflation. Every faculty member has to grade on a kind of prescribed curve to make sure that grades are distributed according to effort and merit. And what you create is this kind of intellectual boot camp. And the students love it because they feel like they're. They feel like they're utilizing their time at university for the right reason.
- [16:16]
A
Thank you for joining me today on Kibbe on Liberty and for being part of our fiercely independent audience. Every week, my organization, Free the People, partners with BlazeTV to bring you this show. My guests bring smart perspectives on everything from current events to timeless philosophical debates. If you like what you hear, go to freethepeople.org kol and support Kibbe on Liberty so we can continue to produce these honest conversations with interesting people. Now, let's get back to it. Do you find, and you may not know the answer to this, but do you find that parents are seeking out the University of Austin or is it the students themselves that are looking for something radically different?
- [16:58]
B
That's a great question. I think in the first class, we just started our second year in our second class, so now we have freshmen and sophomores. So that very first class, I think quite a lot of the initiation within families came from parents because of a lot of people that were involved with the project. So we had Barry Weiss and Neil Ferguson and sort of public figures that parents were more likely to encounter than 17, 18 year olds, and they would sort of read about something in the free press and then pass it on to their daughter or their son. In fact, I think many of the, in our sort of first group of families, I think the parents were often more evangelical than the students, just excited. But now I think we're, you know, I think we're seeing now that we've been out, you know, we've been public for a long period of time, and more and more young people have heard about us. The inquiries, I think, are coming more from the students themselves.
- [17:54]
A
Even though your model is classic, the creation of the university was in many ways a reaction to speech censorship and sort of this monolithic, you must believe a certain thing in order to attend this university. So it was a reaction. And maybe those parents are just like, yeah, screw that, we need something more.
- [18:17]
B
So they really are looking for institutions that have a robust commitment to intellectual exchange and academic freedom. The public forum is making the case for us. And it was actually really rather the timing, our timing couldn't be better because these issues really were rising to a head at the very moment we were starting the university.
- [18:42]
A
Yeah. And maybe you can't answer this question, but have you had an instance where those ideals of open discourse and students allowed to engage teachers and teachers allowed to engage students? Have you had to adjudicate some sort of breakdown?
- [19:01]
B
Not in the classroom, that I'm aware of. Outside the classroom, Maybe a little bit. I mean, we have some students who really want to push those boundaries. And when you're trying to create a community and you're kind of all packed in these dorms together and that sometimes you have to step back and say, okay, where are the limits of speech? Where does something go from being acceptable to being a first amendment threat or something like that? And we don't have terrible or serious incidents. But so I think more on the social side of things, we had to work on that kind of civil discourse building. But as far as I know, in the classroom, there's been none of that. Yeah.
- [19:44]
A
I mean, you have to build a culture that understands kind of how to govern itself in those conversations.
- [19:50]
B
Yeah. And even these kids, you know, these like, young edgelord guys who are, like, out there, I mean, they're doing it. I mean, you can understand why they're doing it, why they're pushing boundaries, because they feel like they've been held back. And here's an institution that says, hey, speak your mind, and they just want to do that. They almost feel like they're obligated to do that, and that's okay. I mean, look, I have no problem with. I'm a free speech maximalist. I have no problem with pushing the boundaries. But there are outer edges somewhere, and there is real harm. And figuring that out in a sensitive way is really what universities have to spend a lot of time doing. Because what we've done is we've taken that notion of harm and we've just sort of let it bleed into everything. So harm is making me feel a little bit queasy or harm's. And that's not right.
- [20:40]
A
Do you have little safe space zones?
- [20:44]
B
No, no. There's no room with crayons and teddy bears to retreat to or anything like that. Blankets and blankets. Yeah.
- [20:57]
A
So you're entering this marketplace, and I view higher education in many ways. The thing that you guys are reacting to is kind of a cartel and one of the challenges you face is accreditation. Accreditation. And what is your status right now you're accredited in the state of Texas?
- [21:25]
B
Not exactly. It's a complex process. And I'll take issue with one thing that he said. He said it's kind of a cartel. It is a cartel. It is as anti competitive as an environment.
- [21:38]
A
A guild?
- [21:38]
B
Yes, it's a guild. So there are sort of two steps you have to take as a university. The first is that you have to be authorized by the state you're in to be a degree granting institution. And that's a pretty complex process. We went through that process. We jumped on that right from the beginning. By fall of 23, we were now a university in the state of Texas capable of granting degrees. Accreditation is like bond rating. It's a way to assess whether or not an organization or institution is living up to standards. So you can't become accredited until you're actually operating as a university. So you get the permission to operate by your state. And then these kind of their national orientation accreditors then allow you to apply for accreditation. And when we first started the process, they told us it was going to take at least six or seven years to achieve full accreditation because they wouldn't accredit us until we had graduated our first class of students because they wanted to see the entire program run. And that in and of itself is probably the greatest hurdle that new schools face. Because now you have to go to market and you have to attract students and the students have innumerable options out there in other institutions. And they look at you and they say, well, you're not accredited. And they're not even sure that you're going to be accredited because nothing's guaranteed yet. They're putting their entire future in your hands. So you have to be very persuasive. That, number one, it's worth the risk. And that number two, that what they're going to get out of this kind of education is worth taking that step. The accreditation process is really set up to deny new entrants the ability to compete against existing institutions. To start, until you're fully accredited, you have no access to any federal money. So your students can't take out federal student loans they can't take up. They won't get Pell Grants or grants like that. Why is that important? Well, if you can't take out a federal student loan, you're going to go to a bank and you're going to say, I need a student loan because I'm going to college. And the banks will say that that college isn't accredited. Well, we're not going to give you a loan to go there. And you're stuck in this rabbit hole. So the financial challenge becomes extreme. And then the accreditation process is also designed to make universities as uniform as possible in what they deliver. They said, here's our standards, and to be accredited, you have to meet these standards. And everything kind of just the aperture of possibility narrows and narrows. So it also creates disincentives for trying new things out, for experimentation. And so what you have over time is just this calcifying system of schools. Once you're in the club, you're in the club. I had a conversation one time with a woman who ran one of the accrediting agencies. There's six big ones in the country. And I asked her, I'm like, why do you make it so hard for new schools to be accredited? And she looked at me and she said, well, we have to protect the students. We have to make sure that. And I looked at her, I said, you're currently accrediting universities that have 20% graduation rates, and yet you keep accrediting them over and over. Are you protecting those 80% of the students who don't get their degree? And just to say we did not go without a creditor, I don't think she was very pleased with what I had to say.
- [25:22]
A
Yeah. So a quick observation. I wonder if this way of making all of these programs exactly the same is what forces competition. Like you can't compete on programs or being an alternative to the standard way of doing things. So you gotta have sushi bars and tanning beaches instead.
- [25:46]
B
Yep. No, that's exactly right. I mean, it's. I often think that universities have become something like modern movie theaters. So movie theaters today don't have a monopoly on movies. You can watch that movie in many different formats. So what do they have to provide you with? Alcohol and cush seats and ice cream sundaes? They have to provide all the luxuries that may convince you that that experience is worth the price you're paying for.
- [26:22]
A
So who determines? Who decides who runs the accreditation system? Is this government? Is this existing universities? I assume there's some sort of symbiotic relationship between regulators and educators.
- [26:38]
B
Less than you would think. So the accreditors are nonprofits. They. The. They are bound to federal and state regulations because essentially what they're doing is they're certifying a school to be eligible for state and federal funding. So they have to follow whatever guidelines are coming down from Department of Ed or individual state guidelines in that. And so it's sort of, it's kind of, you know, the pyramid is like somewhere at the top are, or the federal government and various state governments that kind of set the parameters. And then these accreditors sort of use those as their guidelines for accreditation. There's small variation between the accreditors, but they're pretty similar. And then there's also the kind of cultural guidelines that aren't as explicit but are sort of culturally resonant. So you know, we saw the rise of, you know, the requirement of DEI statements, for example, from the accreditors. Nobody was telling them they had to do it, but it just, you know, they didn't want to be the accredited that didn't do it. And I will tell you, when we were doing our application with our accreditor recently, we're doing some of the paperwork. We had this the second where they said will you please insert your, your statement on diversity here. So we cut and pasted the Declaration of Independence and put it in. I think they accepted it.
- [28:12]
A
If you got accepted, that's amazing. Well, I want to know who funds these nonprofits because again, going back to the guild thing, it sounds like the monopolists probably set up the barriers to.
- [28:26]
B
Entry somehow the universities fund them. So you pay to be accredited. It's pay to play. Ah, so and that's why they. And, and how do they. Even though they're non profit, every organization wants to maximize its revenue, which means maximize its customer base. And because there's several of these accreditors, they're competing against each other so they don't want to lose customers. So once the school's accredited, you, you pay your fees to continue. Because accreditation by the way, is not a one time thing. It's a. Every seven or so years you're on a cycle, you have to be re accredited over and over again. So those, you know, it's not like you get in the door and then you're kind of like okay, we can do whatever we want now. No, you're going to go back to the accreditors in a few years and they're going to take out the checklist and make sure you're following all the rules and you know, coloring between the lines and all that.
- [29:15]
A
It's very archaic because everything I know about this is what Grok told me this morning when I groked you guys. But there's state based accreditation and then there's regional accreditation and is there national accreditation?
- [29:29]
B
Regional is really national because the nation used to be divided into six regions, and so each regional creditor was at the national level. Now we still call them regional creditors, but the first Trump administration actually deregulated it so that you could use any of the six, no matter where you were located. But there are state accreditors, authorizers. There are also accrediting organizations for particular professions. Law, medicine, engineering, nursing, et cetera. You have to do a separate accreditation for those.
- [30:01]
A
At Kibbe on Liberty. Freedom is a lifestyle24.7, something you live and breathe and wear every day. If that describes you, you need the very best Liberty swag in the market today, just like this shirt I happen to be wearing. Go to freethepeople.org kol and check out our exciting merch. You too can love Liberty and look cool. We're here in Mexico City and I've heard some of these guys talking about a global accreditation system. That sounds pretty disruptive. Are you free to talk about this?
- [30:37]
B
I will talk about this. Yeah. Since I'm one of those guys. So there's under development now something called the Global Accreditation Project, which is the easiest way to think about it is it's like the Bitcoin of accreditation, creating an independent accreditor. That is an accreditor that is not tied to any particular federal regulator or state regulator, that is global, in which the member institutions come together and set the guidelines for accreditation based upon not whatever federal government says, but what the schools determine mutually. Signs of excellence should be. So it's a creditor that's going to be looking at outcomes, it's going to be looking at merit, it's going to be looking at excellence as opposed to box checking a whole bunch of things as whether or not you have the DEI statement in that. But I think that the most dynamic thing about this is that the schools that are coming together across the globe to shape and form this accreditor are vastly different from each other. And so one of the features of the accreditor is going to be that it's going to encourage experimentation, encourage dynamism, and make sure that when you're building a new institution, if you have a model that's outside the box, that, that is not prohibitive. That that's actually, that's. That's a feature that will be taken into account when you were accredited. So, so it's meant to be independent. It's meant to be fast moving, low cost. If and, and. And then, you know, a kind of coalition of the willing sort of setting, setting the, the guidelines.
- [32:31]
A
Yeah, I Mean it. It strikes me that something has to give. Something like that has to happen because the alternative to the system, the education industrial complex, which is overpriced and underperforming and focusing on sushi bars and tanning beaches, the alternative to that is the Internet. And you can self educate, you can self. I make up this word, you can self curriculate. And my hero from the lyricist from the Grateful Dead, maybe you've never heard of this guy, John Perry Barlow. He was one of these Internet optimists. He was kind of a libertarian techno optimist. He used to talk about the right to know. And he said that the Internet could potentially create an environment where someone in the uplands of Mali with the intellectual capacity and access to the Internet could compete with someone in downtown Manhattan and they could do it by themselves. So the pressure on institutions like yours is how do you add value in an environment where I can go watch the best professor in nuclear physics on a YouTube video or a TED Talk or something?
- [33:52]
B
No, I think that's exactly right. Look, the legacy institutions are failing. There's a university a week closing in the United States right now. It's partially because of some of its demographics, some of it's because of the expense of delivering higher ed, but it's mostly because they're just not prepared for what's happening in the early 20th century. What we think of as the modern American university at the end of the 19th century, 20th century, that's when it was born, when we adopted from Germany the research model. And there was a period there of a time when University of Chicago and Stanford and Cornell and Hopkins, these were all brand new institutions and they were purposefully research oriented. Why? Because we were moving globally from an economy that primarily made things to a knowledge based economy. And we needed institutions to prepare people to operate in a knowledge based economy, which means master numbers, master letters, master symbols, master critical thinking. And because we did this so well in the U.S. the U.S. dominated that economy for over a century. Well, things are changing because we don't need human beings to be grinding out the numbers right now. We don't need human beings to be doing the kind of basic, you know, sort of basic, you know, knowledge level grunt work. And we're discovering what we do need human beings to be doing. It's still kind of misty, to be honest with you, but it's the institutions that are taking that seriously and have the capacity and flexibility to shape themselves around, you know, this new turning in higher education. Those are the ones that are going to lead the way. And this is a moment, I think, where we're going to see tremendous, tremendous number of new institutions forming. I mean we're in one right now.
- [35:58]
A
Yeah, it gets back to your early point about like if you're going to college to get training to do job X, and maybe that job was coding. Learning to code used to be a.
- [36:13]
B
Lucrative business path like three years ago by the way, like a long time ago.
- [36:18]
A
That's how quickly it's happening. And now all those guys are going to be obsolete unless they know how to think critically, they know how to think their way out of a problem and they understand the systems and they understand how to code. But they're not needed as coders, they're needed as strategic thinkers.
- [36:39]
B
And that's what, and what is emerging is exactly that what we need are not people who have particular areas of expertise or particular fields of knowledge. Because GROK can tell you everything you need to know in the morning when you're having your coffee, but who know how to ask the questions that need to be asked. And this is where I'm a little skeptical about being self educated on the Internet because the Internet's great for skimming things and absorbing things and collating things and handing them to you. But if you don't know how to ask the right questions, if you don't know where to take that knowledge, then all you're really doing is kind of vacuuming up data and facts, but you're not converting it into something that makes you into a kind of more developed logos based creature.
- [37:35]
A
Yeah, no, I, I've learned this just by monkeying around with grok, asking the right question and more importantly the follow up question and challenging the robots and saying, I'm not sure you're right on that. You can actually get to some, some pretty useful functionality. But you have to be able to think for yourself.
- [37:57]
B
You have to be steps ahead of the robots. If you're not, you know, and I mean that's really, if I had to, if I, if you asked me to describe what universities need to achieve in the next, you know, in this next era, it's to keep us a few steps ahead of the robot.
- [38:14]
A
Yeah.
- [38:14]
B
So that we're leading the way and they're not.
- [38:16]
A
Right.
- [38:17]
B
Because you know, I think an important thing that we need to consider as, as universities, as educators is, you know, we, you know, we now have all knowledge, all information available. You know, the touch of a button or, you know, by asking a question, the, these, you know, these chatgpts, these GROX and that are really great at sort of emitting data, emitting knowledge, like sort of sending it out. What's most important in the future, though, is what we put in. On the other hand, what are we feeding these systems? How are we feeding them? How are we making them into tools that then can benefit us? If we stay passive in this role, then actually our critical capacities are just going to, over time, become denuded and ineffective. So what's most interesting to me is not what we get out of things like ChatGPT or Grok, but how we start to learn how to fill them with the right sorts of things.
- [39:22]
A
Yeah. So I have a lot of anxious parents watching this show right now, trying to figure out if they should send their kids to an overpriced university where they'll probably come back and be an insufferable, indoctrinated communist without any sort of critical thinking skills. Give us your pitch. Why should they go to the University of Austin?
- [39:46]
B
Yeah. You know, my, my friend Neil Ferguson, who's on the board of trustees, likes to describe our mission at the University of Austin as training the Navy SEALs of the mind. I mean, this is a school that's really dedicated to taking young people and transforming them. I always say that the purpose of education is not the transfer of information, it's transformation, transforming them into the next generation of builders and creators and innovators. You know, we often hear we're teaching young people how to lead or, you know, you can't teach young people how to lead, how to build, how to create, unless you sort of build in them the capacity to be that sort of person. And that's what we're achieving. And right now our intention is to stay small, very selective. We believe so strongly in the future success of our graduates that we're giving them all free tuition, four year scholarships because we know they're going to be successful and we know at some point that they'll support the school. In fact, one of my greatest challenges in year one of operating the university was keeping a lot of the people I know who are massively successful in the world, keeping them away from hiring our students. They were coming in and trying to swoop up these students. If this kid's going to University of Austin, I want them, I want them now and offer them these crazy internships and overpaid things. And I'm trying to tell this kid, I know he's offering 100 bucks an hour for an internship, but you got to stay in class and that we have a lot of confidence in where these students are going to go and what they're going to do in the future. And so we built a university. We are builders because the world needs builders. And that's what that's our goal. That's our mission.
- [41:38]
A
Well, against my expectations, you've given me some hope in the future of the university system. I appreciate it.
- [41:46]
B
I'm very glad to hear that. Thank you.
- [41:48]
A
Thanks. Thanks for watching. If you liked the conversation, make sure to like the video, subscribe and also ring the bell for notifications. And if you want to know more about Free the people, go to freethepeople.org org.