Cancel culture at Bari Weiss U.

When reading Evan Mandery’s report on the inevitable transition of UATX into an explicit copy of Prager U rather than one with the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability, it’s hard to get over the fact that he didn’t (and still doesn’t) see this as an obvious right-wing grift from the get-go. But his credulousness makes his account of the final destination as a vanity project for Niall Feruson and some reactionary tech bros all the more undeniable:

The campus was quiet that Wednesday, the first of the spring term. The college, which operates under a quarter system, doesn’t schedule classes on Wednesdays, and so no students would be around to see the staff coming and going from the conference room in the elegant, former department store where UATX had made its home. Through the window, one could see the huge American flag in the atrium, illuminated by a skylight in the ceiling. It was a warm, pleasant day in Austin, but Lonsdale’s mood didn’t match the weather.

“Let’s get right into it,” he said. Then, with heightened affect, Lonsdale explained his vision for UATX — a jingoistic vision with shades of America First rhetoric that contrasted rather sharply with the image UATX had cultivated as a bastion of free speech and open inquiry.

“It was like a speech version of the ‘America love it or leave it’ bumper sticker,” one former staffer told me, and if you didn’t share the vision, the message was “there’s the door, you don’t belong here.” Like many of the people I spoke with for this story, the staffer was granted anonymity for fear of reprisal. “It was the most uncomfortable 35-to-40ish minutes I’ve ever experienced. People were shifting uncomfortably in their seats.”

The chancellor, Pano Kanelos, who’d recently been nominally promoted from the presidency, sat silently, noticeably ill at ease.

The harshness of Lonsdale’s diatribe would have been out of place on any college campus, but was particularly so at UATX, which had framed itself as a bulwark against the cancel culture that many contend has become common in the American academy. UATX’s image had never been entirely nonpartisan, but Lonsdale’s message signaled a decisive, rightward turn.

How disruptive!

The endorsement of Trump’s systematic attacks on academic freedom — attacks, of course, the government of the state Bari chose to locate Trump University 2.0 on has also pursued aggressively — was inevitable:

On July 15, the conservative Manhattan Institute issued a statement calling on Trump to draft a new contract with universities, violations of which should be punishable by revocation of all public benefit. “Beginning with the George Floyd riots and culminating in the celebration of the Hamas terror campaign,” the statement read, “the institutions of higher education finally ripped off the mask and revealed their animating spirit: racialism, ideology, chaos.” Universities had become tyrannical agents of “the Left” and forgotten that they and the state were “bound together by compact.” The signatories included Ferguson, Ali, Boghossian, now a faculty advisor at UATX, and UATX professor Alex Priou.

Oh look, it’s Peter “I don’t consider myself a conservative” Boghossian celebrating Donald Trump using state coercion to punish speech he disapproves of as a model for academia! Gee, those media outlets who didn’t see his decision to resign in order to make more money for doing less work a blockbuster story must really be kicking themselves now.

But at least the Bari U. is fully committed to due process because that’s definitely the reason it opposes Title IX, right?

In July, the constitution was changed yet again, significantly expanding the president’s power. Under the new rules, the president had ultimate authority to appoint investigators and impose sanctions. There would be no more public hearings or impartial juries.

Ah, well, nevertheless. So where is noted Sincere Free Speech Warrior Bari Weiss in all this, as everybody not a hardcore MAGA crank decided to get out of town?

During the many conversations I had reporting this story, two questions came up more than any other.

The first: Where was Bari Weiss? Many of the people I interviewed told me about internal conversations and shared internal emails. Weiss, who remains on the board of trustees, was almost never present in the conversations as they were related to me, and while I saw many emails on which Kanelos and Ferguson were copied, I never saw any including Weiss.

One person I spoke to, who was present during the early planning stages, told me that Weiss was “very elusive” and almost never present in person. This was ironic since UATX was closely associated with Weiss — a bust of whom now resides in the school library. Weiss, meanwhile, has only risen further during the Trump 2.0 era and is now editor-in-chief of CBS News, where she has been criticized as genuflecting to the Trump administration. A spokesperson for CBS News did not respond to a request for comment from Weiss.

One former member of the development team told me that they would routinely ask prospective donors how they got to know UATX. “Eighty percent of the time, the answer was Bari Weiss,” they said. “It was very often referred to as Bari Weiss’ University, or Bari Weiss’ University Project, or Bari Weiss’ University of Austin.”

For several people, this was a source of resentment. “I don’t care whether she wants to pretend this is all gone now — she is the reason that this place exists. She was huge, she was held in such high regard, she had such an enormous impact,” the former staffer said.

“I want her to be held to account,” she added. “I’m pissed.”

I mean, Bari is busy with other things right now:

Unbeknownst to Trump, sources told The Independent, Weiss was actually on location for the interview and quickly approached the president to introduce herself. “He was so happy to see her and she was so excited to meet him, they both leaned in and exchanged kisses on the cheek,” one source said.

Kissing Donald Trump — she may have lost interest in UATX, but she still defines its ethos:

When students returned for UATX’s second year, it was difficult not to notice the drift. The Tuesday night speaker series, at which attendance is mandatory, leaned unmistakably rightward — guests included Patrick Deneen, originalist judge Amul Thapar and Catherine Pakaluk, a Catholic University business school professor who’d written Hannah’s Children, about the 5 percent of American women who have five or more children.

Finally on Oct. 1, UATX delivered the coup de grace and announced Kanelos’ resignation. We can’t be entirely certain of his side of the story, but one thing was abundantly clear.

The pluralists had lost.

On thing about real universities rather than crude indoctrination factories — whatever you think of the invited speakers, attendance generally isn’t mandatory.