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“The University of Austin Did Something Every College Should”
Why one professor thinks our decision to post our course reading lists online is something the rest of higher ed should copy.
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This week in RealClearEducation, Sarah Lawrence professor and AEI senior fellow Samuel J. Abrams spotlights a decision he thinks every college in America should copy:
The University of Austin (UATX) recently did something that should be commonplace in higher education but is surprisingly rare. The new university posted its entire undergraduate reading list online - 224 books, essays, and primary sources, course by course and professor by professor -for anyone to examine. Regardless of one’s views of the school itself, that decision deserves attention and every college and university in America should consider doing the same....
What is really unusual here is that because the UATX list is public, we do not have to take the university’s word for being a place that seeks balance. We can directly verify and that is exactly what transparency is so critical to higher education....
What distinguishes UATX today is that no board or legislature compelled the school to do anything. What a handful of states have had to mandate, UATX has done voluntarily and it has wisely gone further by publishing not merely course syllabi but a consolidated, university-wide reading list.
As UATX co-founder and historian Niall Ferguson put it on X: “Just the latest way we at UATX are revitalizing higher education. We’ve reinvented university governance. We’ve restored meritocracy to admissions. We don’t charge tuition. We don’t let AI chatbots do students’ work for them. Established institutions could learn from us.”
Shop Class as Soulcraft at UATX
Four roommates from UATX’s inaugural class showed up to college in fall 2024 to study philosophy and history. They read Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft and decided a one-year-old university needed to get its hands dirty.
They taught themselves to weld, wire, and machine. A year later, with no engineering background, they had designed and built most of a 7,000-lb tunnel boring machine from scratch, and competed at a Boring Company competition. A final three-week crunch ended with their tents blowing off the site in a thunderstorm on the big day.
The machine wasn’t finished by then. But The Boring Company inspectors were impressed enough that two of the students (Eitan and Sam) landed engineering internships there this summer.
Rising junior Eitan Zarin on the conversations he has with his peers.
Inside the Classroom: Andy Aymeloglu on Unix and Git
Watch visiting professor Andy Aymeloglu explain Unix, Git, and source control—the latest lecture in his software engineering course, taught to UATX students on campus. You can watch the entire series here.
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UATX Professor Michael Hoffpauir on how to become free.
We’re already receiving apps for Fall 2027. It’s not too early — apply now.
