An American Education:Notes from UATX

link: thenewinquiry.com/an-american-education-notes-from-uatx/

I hadn’t heard of UATX before reading this essay by Noah Rawlings.

Inside the “Forbidden Courses” at the billionaire-backed University of Austin, the campus of the “anti woke” commentariat. Student names have been anonymized.

This was a fascinating portal into a bizarro “academia”.

And if you need to leave to use the bathroom, you’ll get to pass by a massive oil painting of George W. Bush making the Hand of Benediction in front of the wreckage of 9/11, beside a Madonna-figure whose halo glows, I shit you not, with the Coca Cola logo.

I couldn’t find a picture of this painting, but I would love to see it—it sounds fascinating!

The whole endeavor is presented as being wrapped up in a logically shaky environment.

…she told us that we also needed the “genuinely safe space” that UATX provides, disregarding that UATX’s Academic Programs Manager had recently promised the school would “permit no safe spaces.”

[…]

But UATX is a “genuinely safe space,” as Weiss put it, in the sense that it isolates students from the inconvenient opposition of other peers and professors. It is a monoculture of free-market faith which provides, in the end, a venue for young people seeking success in tech and finance to network and to fortify the rightwing ideas that brought them here in the first place.

The founders appear to be disturbingly powerful religious zealots.

This past October, Weiss posted on Twitter, where she has over a million followers, that Palestinian writer Refaat Alareer had tweeted about the murder of an Israeli baby. (As other of Refaat’s posts make clear, the tweet in question was about the generation of false information by Zionists, not an actual case of infanticide.) In consequence, Alareer’s own Twitter inbox was flooded with death threats that same day. Just over a month later, Israeli forces killed Alareer, his brother, his sister, and three of his sister’s children, in what Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor concluded was a “deliberate and targeted” airstrike.

It seems their goal is to strengthen the foundation of institutionalized racism.

UATX could present rightwing business leaders with a new, particularly convenient recruitment scenario: they would know in advance the political commitments of the student body, making it that much easier to maintain a conservative culture within their companies.

[…]

There’s something very scary in our society—where this idea of a natural aristocracy,” Lonsdale said at the end, “has like really fallen out of favor.” Here it was, for a flash unconcealed by euphemism: “a natural aristocracy.”