from the land-of-make-believe dept

Bari Weiss’ Tiny Fake Austin College Sees Mass Staff, Advisor Exodus

Before she was hired by right wing billionaire Larry Ellison to turn CBS into a right wing propaganda and safe space, Bari Weiss tried her best to create a fake propaganda-fueled college in Austin.

If you recall, Weiss (alongside Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale) helped create the University of Austin in 2021 under the pretense they were creating an “anti-woke” (read: right wing) corrective to “campus leftism running amok” (read: a handful of young people annoyed by systemic racism, broad U.S. corruption, or Benjamin Netanyahu’s industrialized mass murder of toddlers).

The “university” pretended to champion free speech and the truth, but, much like the “renovation” of CBS, the pseudo-university is really part of a larger right wing initiative to reshape journalism and education in order to coddle right wing ideology, eradicate uncomfortable truths right wingers don’t like, and distort reality into a strange, delusional safe space (the exact thing the experiment professes to be combating).

There’ve been a lot of desperate efforts to pretend this is some storied institution, despite the fact the billionaire-backed prop comprises just a few floors of an Austin office building. It’s just a few blocks from the Joe Rogan “anti-woke” Comedy Mothership man-baby safe space in Austin, which is effectively trying to similarly disembowel U.S. comedy.

There’ve been hints for a while that the adorable fake university hasn’t really fared all that well. Like earlier this year, when one staffer was unceremoniously cancelled from the “free speech” focused university for politely suggesting on LinkedIn that the war on inclusion in diversity had maybe gone a little too far.

But a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education indicates there’s been a larger recent mass exodus of staff:

“According to LinkedIn, roughly 20 university employees have left this year. That’s a lot for a new institution that had 34 staff members listed on its website this week (the number is separate from faculty). The departures include the president, the provost, the lead fund raiser, the executive director of admissions, as well as people who worked in events, operations, and other positions.”

In addition to a mass exodus of an already small staff, there’s also been a notable departure among key advisors (like Jeffrey Epstein pal Larry Summers) who claim they are only just now figuring out that the entire project might not be entirely on the up and up:

“Over the summer, the provost and the lead fund raiser also left the university, according to their LinkedIn profiles. Summers, the former Harvard president, stepped down from the advisory board in July, saying that he was “not comfortable with the course that UATX has set nor the messages it promulgates and so am withdrawing.” (His colleagues on the board, Zimmer and Pinker, stepped down shortly after the university’s launch, with Zimmer saying that UATX’s critical statements about higher education “diverged very significantly from my own views.”

The inability (or refusal) of highly educated people to see this project for what it was (a billionaire-backed ideological assault on reality and common sense), doesn’t speak particularly well to our broader cultural awareness or ability to defend ourselves from deep-pocketed bad actors. And while this university, like Weiss’ “new CBS,” may fail due to ham-fisted incompetence, they (and their unlimited budgets) still leave a very ugly mark on informed consensus and a semi-coherent electorate.