On 8 November 2021, the founders of the University of Austin (UATX) announced the launch of their new project—a school where students would receive “an education rooted in the pursuit of truth.” Unlike Ivy League universities, where “illiberalism has become a pervasive feature of campus life,” the school’s founding president declared, this would be a place “where intellectual dissent is protected and fashionable opinions are scrutinized.” On a web page titled, Our Principles, UATX pledges that it will “renew the mission of the university, and serve as a model for institutions of higher education by safeguarding academic freedom and promoting intellectual pluralism.”

The creation of UATX was heralded as a bold initiative in some circles, but also attracted a number of skeptics. Some wondered if this ostensible homage to the values of classical liberalism wasn’t just a glorified right-wing think tank. Under the headline, Does America Actually Need a New Conservative University?, for instance, Wesleyan University president Michael S. Roth warned Politico readers that UATX was missing the mark by targeting other universities. “I realize that the University of Austin is trying to raise money from donors whose wallets will open more quickly when they hear complaints about woke warriors or pronoun police,” he wrote. “But you shouldn’t misleadingly disparage higher education in general in order to make a place for yourself—especially when declaring one’s devotion to truth.”

At the time, however, I found such criticisms unpersuasive. I’d graduated from a Harvard doctoral program in education leadership three years earlier, and so was well aware of the problems that the UATX founders had described. In our program, the social-justice marching orders were explicit: We were to fight for equity in education, with systemic bias presumed to be the primary cause of unequal outcomes among students. A mass-emailed memo we all received from the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) Student Council shortly after Donald Trump became President in 2017 urged us to “pledge our support and solidarity with all individuals who face discrimination and systemic injustice,” and “to reflect on concrete steps each of us can take as individuals and collectively to affirm our deeply-held values of equity and inclusion.”

I was hardly a fan of Trump, but bristled at the pressure to conform to such a sweeping directive. And I will quote at length from the frustrated reply I sent in response to that email, as it captures the mindset that would, in time, bring me into the UATX orbit:

It is no secret that the HGSE community bears a strong political and social bias. In some ways, that is appropriate. Most, if not all of us are here because we are dedicated to social justice and because we want to be a part of changing our society for the better. We have spent years dedicated to teaching, learning from, and loving kids… And because we are working for them, we are obligated to not lose sight of the injustices they experience and to face the discomfort that accompanies examining our own role in participating in or benefiting from those injustices. And yes, we should also be fighting against those injustices.

Yet this work and these ideals are contradicted when we fall into the trap of shutting down in the face of conflict or opposing ideas, demanding that total agreement with a single narrative is the price of admission we as HGSE students must pay in order to belong to this community. By demanding that we “raise a loud and strong voice against all actions and messages contrary to our ideals,” this pledge is asking us to act reflexively and unthinkingly towards anyone who espouses a thought or an idea we dislike. It also contradicts the idea of “learning through disagreement” mentioned in the pledge.

As it happens, President Obama dedicated his farewell address to this very problem, saying, ‘For too many of us, it’s become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighborhoods or college campuses or places of worship or our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook’… Yet, as he states earlier in the speech, ‘Democracy does not require uniformity’… We NEED contradiction, disagreement and opposition to do our work better. New ideas are not born from repetition and habit. They are born out of surprise, new insights and often discomfort or even anger.

The atmosphere I observed at Harvard was starkly different from what I’d experienced elsewhere. In 2005, while in my mid-twenties, I left jobs teaching middle and high-school students to earn an MBA at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto (something my family and friends joked about given my propensity to wear flowy skirts and play folk songs at open-mic events). Business school proved an eye-opening experience. It forced me to confront ideas about economics, capitalism, and social welfare that I’d always taken for granted. Is corporate greed a force for evil if it leads to innovations that save lives? Is protectionism good if it leads to higher prices for consumers and bankrupts farmers in other countries?

I developed an appreciation for the sinking feeling I got when I suddenly realised I’d been limited in my thinking—an appreciation bolstered by the vigorous approach my classmates and professors brought to debates. This, in turn, led me to found a new initiative at the business school following graduation, called I-Think (a play on then-dean Roger Martin’s term, Integrative Thinking), which helped teach secondary school teachers and administrators how to explore opposing ideas.

A decade later, I felt duty-bound to put these ideas into practice at Harvard by pushing back against what seemed like a newly ascendant form of ideological tribalism. A teacher’s mandate should be to provide students with a tapestry of ideas, and the tools to evaluate them; not tell them to conform. I believed that education should enable each student, in the words of James Baldwin, “to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions.” This is the path, he explained, to forming one’s very identity.

So when I saw the original UATX press release, I went all in. It helped that I’d already started a similarly oriented project with my friend Ilana Redstone, a sociologist at the University of Illinois whose work on examining the dangers of settled thinking had already started to attract public attention. (I particularly recommend her popular video series, Beyond Bigots and Snowflakes, which explores the underlying mechanisms that lead to polarised and oversimplified forms of thinking.) We’d founded what we called the Mill Center—the name being a homage to English philosopher John Stuart Mill—which, like I-Think, was focused on working with educators to support free-thinking classroom environments.

Things moved quickly, as the leaders of UATX knew of Ilana’s work, and had recruited her to serve as one of the university’s founding faculty fellows. When she shared details about the Mill Center, UATX saw an obvious fit, and so invited us to join as an affiliated institute in Fall 2022.

We agreed, and in so doing surrendered our independent organisational status. We’d be responsible for raising our own funds, but the school provided a two-year start-up loan to help us get off the ground. Shortly thereafter, a private donor came away from a meeting with Ilana so impressed that he dedicated his substantial UATX donation to our new project.

At first, the UATX start-up team was working in a nondescript office park. By 2023, however, it was operating out of Austin’s Scarborough Building, steps from the Texas Capitol, as a fully-fledged private liberal-arts university. Ilana and I ran the newly launched Mill Institute remotely, with a double mandate to support K-12 educators across the country, and to advise the university leadership in regard to fulfilling its larger mission.