Claiming Colleges are Too Censorious, They Claim to Be Starting One Dedicated to Free Inquiry

A group of scholars and activists are planning to establish a new university dedicated to free speech, alarmed, they said, “by the illiberalism and censoriousness prevalent in America’s most prestigious universities.”

The university, to be known as the University of Austin, or UATX for short, will have a soft start next summer with “Forbidden Courses,” a noncredit program that its founders say will offer a “spirited discussion about the most provocative questions that often lead to censorship or self-censorship in many universities.”

The university then plans to expand to master’s programs and, in several years, to undergraduate courses.

The planned university is a throwback to tradition in many ways. Contrary to the trend among new universities, it will be based on a physical campus in the Austin, Texas, area, and classes will be taught in person, its founding documents say.

The university’s inaugural president, Pano Kanelos, the former president of St. John’s College in Annapolis, said in a phone interview on Monday that the concept had begun with conversations he had with a small group of people: Bari Weiss, a journalist who once worked as an Opinion editor for The New York Times; Niall Ferguson, a historian and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution; Heather Heying, an evolutionary biologist; and Joe Lonsdale, a technology entrepreneur and co-founder of Palantir Technologies, the data analytics firm.

The discussion spread from there, Dr. Kanelos said, to “others with similar concerns.”

The university attracted withering criticism on social media. Many students and faculty members believe that universities should not invite speakers who do not share their values on social issues like racial injustice; their words, they believe, can slide into harassment and hate speech.

Students have also protested speakers with divisive political views, including the social scientist Charles Murray and the geophysicist Dorian Abbot.

The prospective university’s board of advisers features some of the most prominent iconoclasts in the country, including Lawrence H. Summers, the former Harvard president; Steven Pinker, a Harvard linguist and psychologist; David Mamet, the playwright; and Glenn Loury, an economist at Brown.