The video discusses the current challenges in higher education, focusing on issues like rising tuition, campus culture controversies, and political dynamics affecting universities in the U.S. It highlights the nomination of Linda McMahon to lead the Department of Education and explores how these factors are shaping the landscape of higher education, with institutions facing criticism for stifling free expression and leaning politically left.

The video also introduces the University of Austin (UATX), a new educational startup founded by professors and entrepreneurs from prestigious universities. UATX is portrayed as a potential antidote to current higher education woes, emphasizing open debate, free tuition for the time being, and a curriculum focused on the pursuit of truth. It differentiates itself by promoting a politically diverse student body and facilitating discussions across the political spectrum.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. unchecked [ʌnˈtʃɛkt] - (adjective) - Not controlled or restrained. - Synonyms: (uncontrolled, unrestrained, rampant)

These are not soaring times for higher education. Tuition costs rise unchecked.

2. revitalizes [riːˈvaɪtəˌlaɪzɪz] - (verb) - To imbue with new life and vitality. - Synonyms: (renew, rejuvenate, invigorate)

From a historian's point of view, it's terribly important that the United States improves, reforms, revitalizes its universities.

3. fearless [ˈfɪrləs] - (adjective) - Showing a lack of fear. - Synonyms: (brave, bold, intrepid)

Pursuit of truth, fearless pursuit of truth to me is I have this kind of mentality.

4. contradictory [ˌkɒntrəˈdɪktəri] - (adjective) - Mutually opposed or inconsistent. - Synonyms: (inconsistent, conflicting, paradoxical)

What is going on on campuses that are leading you to draw this conclusion? It's as if people have come to expect that they're just sort of two versions of everything.

5. discriminatory [dɪˈskrɪmɪnəˌtɔri] - (adjective) - Showing prejudice or bias, particularly on the grounds of race, age, or sex. - Synonyms: (prejudiced, biased, unfair)

My concern is to try to eliminate the underlying discriminatory attitudes.

6. ostracized [ˈɒstrəsaɪzd] - (verb) - Exclude someone from a society or group. - Synonyms: (exclude, shun, reject)

A culture where, per one study, nearly 80% of today's students self censor on campus for fear of being ostracized.

7. accreditation [əˌkrɛdɪˈteɪʃən] - (noun) - The action or process of officially recognizing someone as having a particular status or being qualified to perform a particular activity. - Synonyms: (certification, validation, authorization)

UATX's national accreditation won't be decided until the first class has graduated.

8. echo chambers [ˈɛkoʊ ˈtʃeɪmbərz] - (noun phrase) - Environments where a person only encounters information or opinions that reflect and reinforce their own. - Synonyms: (feedback loop, closed circle, insular environments)

He says that to the detriment of learning, colleges have become echo chambers.

9. debated [dɪˈbeɪtɪd] - (verb) - To argue about (a subject), especially in a formal manner. - Synonyms: (argued, discussed, deliberated)

Why do you think it's important to be at a college where differing views aren't just accepted, tolerated, but welcome?

10. innovative [ˈɪnəˌveɪtɪv] - (adjective) - Featuring new methods; advanced and original. - Synonyms: (original, inventive, novel)

But if America does one thing well, it's innovation.

UATX says it fights college censorship culture with a focus on free speech - 60 Minutes

These are not soaring times for higher education. Tuition costs rise unchecked. Contempt for today's campus culture, the trigger warnings, safe spaces, and microaggressions, helped swing the election. This past week, President-elect Donald Trump nominated former WWE executive Linda McMahon to lead the Department of Education, an agency that each year distributes billions to US colleges, some that Trump has vowed to tax and sue for their quote wokeness. But if America does one thing well, it's innovation.

Conceived largely by frustrated professors at schools like Harvard, Princeton, and Brown, the University of Austin started classes this fall. A college startup touting open debate, a shout anything but say nothing philosophy, and for now, free tuition. Will this be just another politicized campus swinging right or a true disruptor resetting the marketplace of ideas?

The story will continue in a moment. 140 years old, the University of Texas at Austin ranks among the country's largest schools. Football games draw more than 100,000 fans. But blocks away, in between a velvet taco and a Chris steakhouse on a floor of what was once a downtown department store, one of America's smallest universities, UATX, the University of Austin.

How would you describe members of the founding class? Very outspoken. You'll never enter a conversation and leave without learning something new. Olivia Antunes, Dylan Wu, Konstantin Whitmire, Grace Price, and Jacob Hornstein are among the 92 students in the inaugural class. If UT is built around Longhorn football, the focal point of UATX is pursuing the truth.

So you start by telling the truth. Pursuit of truth, fearless pursuit of truth to me is I have this mentality that the best way you should go about your life is to always assume that you're wrong in some capacity. You're prepared for that right to be challenged, stressed, and confronted. Not just even prepared; it's why I'm at this school. I want to be challenged because I know that I'm wrong in some way.

What are some things that differentiate you guys? We're very intellectually diverse. I've met people of every political persuasion here, from far-left Democrats who are for Bernie Sanders or to the left of that, even to people who make Donald Trump look like a liberal. Roughly half the students come from Texas, a third are female. They share academic strength, averaging in the 92nd percentile on the SAT.

Some were accepted at schools like the University of Chicago and Georgetown, but chose UATX for what it is and is not. I remember visiting a college in the northeast of the US, and the student guiding me there was like, ah, we have different dorms for different student groups. I didn't want to go to a space like that. Why do you think it's important to be at a college where differing views aren't just accepted and tolerated, but welcome?

We're actually listening to the other side and understanding each other, and still we're friends. I vehemently disagree with many things Jacob says, and I think you do too. I don't want to; that's why I'm still getting along. It's a beautiful thing, not exactly the vibe on so many other campuses.

Long before Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, colleges have been sites of protest and leaned left. But the atmosphere has intensified over the past decade: speakers shouted down, professors canceled. When students feel unheard, end Hamas now. Then the reckoning.

This past year, campus chaos led first to congressional hearings. Ms. McGill, the fact is that Penn regulates speech that it doesn't like, then to the resignation of the president at Columbia University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. From a historian's point of view, it's terribly important that the United States improves, reforms, revitalizes its universities.

Scottish-born, Oxford-educated, and recently knighted, Neil Ferguson is one of the founders of UATX. A historian also known for his conservative views, Ferguson spent more than a decade as a professor at Harvard and is now a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. He says something is rotten in the state of academia.

Right up until, I guess, the early 2000s, it still seemed like universities were where you could think most freely and speak most freely and take the most intellectual risks. At some point in the last 10 years, that changed in a way that began to stifle free expression. We came across data that less than 3% of the Harvard faculty identify as conservative, more than 75% liberal. Wildly out of proportion with the American public. A huge disconnect now exists between the academic elite and the average American voter.

Ferguson says this political imbalance, plus social media, plus an army of campus administrators monitoring speech, equals a culture where, per one study, nearly 80% of today's students self-censor on campus for fear of being ostracized. Faculty feels the chill too. The president of a university I won't name once told me he received, on average, one email a day from a university community member calling for someone else to be fired for something they said.

That reminds me vividly of the bad days of Stalin's Soviet Union. And yet it's happening on American campuses. The stakes are that high. If a university system starts to go wrong, then something is bound to go wrong for society as a whole. The ideas that start on campus spread quickly to corporations and media organizations. University forms the way you think about the world for the rest of your life. If our universities are screwed up, and I believe they are, then that will screw up America as a whole quite quickly.

In 2021, Ferguson launched UATX with former New York Times journalist Barry Weiss. Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of data analytics company Palantir, and Pano Canelos, the former president of St. John's College in Maryland. Larry Summers, the former Harvard President and U.S. treasury Secretary under Clinton, became an advisor.

In this ad, they announced they were done waiting for America's universities to fix themselves. UATX received initial approval from the state of Texas and raised nearly $200 million from private donors, in part to cover tuition. Good morning, everyone. Canelos was named president.

Our work is to stir up settled ideas. He says that to the detriment of learning, colleges have become echo chambers. What is going on on campuses leading you to draw this conclusion? It's as if people have come to expect that there are just two versions of everything. Therefore, there's a right or wrong version, depending on which side you stand.

The truth is that one opinion meeting another opinion shouldn't leave us with two opinions; it should leave us with better opinions. Let me ask, what do you mean by exactly the Christian values that we have to combat fears of saying the wrong thing in class. UATX comes armed with a weapon.

Tell an American audience what you mean by Chatham House Rule. The Chatham House Rule is a great British invention and it says if you are a participant in a discussion and you hear an interesting or controversial thing, you can refer to the information you’ve gleaned, but you can't attribute it to a person.

People fear that the thing they said that was not right or politically incorrect ends up on X or for that matter, on Instagram. That which happens in the classroom should stay in the classroom. At UATX, classes are small seminar-style and based in Western civilization. The Bible, Greek classics.

Faculty includes a former Navy captain, a Greek Orthodox priest. Father Maximos teaches a class on chaos and civilization, and a tech entrepreneur. You're trying to play the Steve Jobs role here, right? There are no on-campus science labs, but founders chose Austin for its booming startup culture, linking students with companies like Elon Musk's Neuralink.

How do you take this cutting-edge research and help the kids sharpen their tech skills and even fund their own ideas? We have both a nonprofit and a startup side to stem the scandalously high costs of higher education. The UATX campus is barebones.

How many potatoes do we need? All of them. There are no dorms. Students live in apartments next to UT undergrads and have no meal plan. Cook for yourselves, kids. The closest thing we found to a college rager is students learning the Texas two-step.

When the guys next door are playing beer pong and you're reading Aristotle and working with lasers, any envy? That's not to say that we're all prudes and we just spend all day reading Aristotle. We have fun.

As for admissions, UATX swaps DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) for what some call MEI (merit, excellence, and intelligence). Gender, race, ethnicity. What factors into your admissions decisions? We don't take any of that into consideration in admissions. The primary thing we're interested in is the mind.

Meaning what? The kind of capacity to think deeply, to answer questions, to challenge norms. I gotta tell you, we did not see a diverse student body. We're putting resources into finding talent of an intellectual variety. If you're interested in diversity, I recommend you look at the social backgrounds of our students and the family circumstances of our students.

High-profile UATX donors include Trump-backing billionaire Bill Ackman, a Harvard grad who vocally criticized his school after October 7th, and Harlan Crow, close friend of conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Critics attack UATX as a right-wing university simply wearing the cloak of free speech.

UATX has been called the anti-woke university. Harvard is a liberal university. UATX is going to be a conservative university. Politics should be studied at a university; it shouldn't be the operating system of the university. Any university that is identifiably political is not fulfilling its highest mission.

Pushback might be, are you going to be too dependent on donors? We've seen what happens on other campuses when the donor class gets dissatisfied. Do you worry about that if donors are ever pushing us in a way that is not aligned with our mission and that somebody's going to call us out on it?

And the backers aren't solely from the right. A liberal legal scholar, Nadine Strossen, was president of the ACLU for nearly 20 years. She is now a UATX advisor. The most important topics of public policy debate are not being candidly and frankly discussed on campus. Including abortion, immigration, police practices, anything related to race and gender, provided it comes with no serious harm.

Strossen argues all speech should be allowed. You think censorship leads to worse outcomes than allowing even the most objectively hateful speech? My concern is to try to eliminate the underlying discriminatory attitudes. You don't do that by punishing expression. You do it through education, through more speech, not less.

Free range. Free speech resonated when UATX announced its founding. Thousands sent in job inquiries. Some of UATX's academics were disciplined or canceled, they may say, at their previous schools.

Some of the advisors and faculty came here under clouds of controversy. I mean, that's not what we're seeking. We're not a shelter for people, even the canceled, even people who've been canceled. But many of the people who are pushing boundaries in academic culture have paid a price for that and still should be heard.

UATX's national accreditation won't be decided until the first class has graduated, a standard for new universities. Meanwhile, applications are open for the second class. Tuition's still free. So is the speech.

EDUCATION, INNOVATION, LEADERSHIP, UNIVERSITY OF AUSTIN, FREE SPEECH, HIGHER EDUCATION, 60 MINUTES