One of the few bright spots in American higher education is the recent founding of the University of Austin. The school intends to have a solid liberal-arts curriculum, taught by serious scholars who care about transmitting knowledge and skills, not about indoctrinating students to hold certain beliefs.
So, how did the officials go about finding and hiring that faculty?
In today’s Martin Center article, Jacob Howland (one of those officials, and formerly a philosophy professor whose career was wrecked when he dissented from woke ideals) explains the process.
Howland writes:
Many useful inventions are born of necessity and fathered by good luck. We decided to bring six candidates to campus at a time for two days, selecting each cohort so that they would not be competing for the same faculty positions. In structuring the interviews, we considered our need for literate scientists and numerate poets — faculty who employ multiple languages of understanding in the hope of becoming capable, as John Henry Newman writes, of forming “an instinctive just estimate of things as they pass before us.”
That worked out very well. The candidates regarded it as an intellectual feast, giving them the chance to open up about their academic interests without worrying about careerism and having to worry if they sufficiently embrace the diversity mania.
Read the whole thing.