Welcome to the Quillette Podcast, which is usually hosted on alternate weeks by me, Jonathan Kay, and by Iona Italia. Quillette is where free thought lives. We are an independent, grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

And this week, we have an unusual story for you about a controversy at an American university.

Now, Quillette does a lot of stories about scandals in higher education, particularly in regard to scholars who are seeking to stifle free speech and open inquiry.

But this one is an outlier—at least for us—because this isn’t a story about wokeness gone amok on a progressive campus. Rather, it’s something closer to the opposite.

And if you’re a reader of the Quillette website—which you should be—you’ll know the story I’m talking about, which was published on May 16 under the headline, Is the University Of Austin Betraying Its Founding Principles?

Is the University Of Austin Betraying Its Founding Principles?

Created as a haven for free thinkers, UATX was the last place where I’d expected to encounter ideological litmus tests.

QuilletteEllie Avishai

It’s by education expert Ellie Avishai, whose Mill Institute was formerly affiliated with the University Of Austin (also known as UATX), a school founded in recent years specifically as a haven for free intellectual inquiry. It’s a project that’s become widely celebrated by American conservatives and classical liberals alike.

In her essay for Quillette, Ellie—who’s my podcast guest today—described being drawn to the free-wheeling UATX ethos after she’d become disenchanted with the puritanical progressivism she’d observed at Harvard University in the late 2010s. And her Mill Institute, which teaches educators how to have constructive and candid classroom discussions about sensitive topics, seemed like a natural fit.

But the relationship between Ellie’s Mill Institute and UATX fell apart abruptly in early 2025. Her ouster, she argues, is related to a LinkedIn post she’d made, expressing moderate views about diversity, equity, and inclusion that were seen as out of step with UATX’s stridently expressed rejection of DEI principles.

In effect, Ellie argues, the Mill Institute was pushed out of its affiliation with UATX because it was seen as insufficiently doctrinaire in its anti-woke politics. And if you’re interested in what you hear today, I’d urge you to read her full article, including UTAX’s official response.

In the interview that follows, Ellie and I will discuss the ideological tension that exists not just at UTAX, but at all organisations that have opposed the harsh strictures of rigid social-justice ideology.

In many cases, these groups have operated as coalitions between disaffected liberals and committed conservatives; and their alliance is beginning to show signs of strain now that Donald Trump is the US President again, and progressives find themselves on the defensive.

Unlike Ellie, some conservatives—including a few influential members of the UATX community, she maintains—are more than happy to see conservatives use illiberal tactics to rout their culture-war opponents.

Ellie and I will also discuss the unusual communications strategy that UATX has employed, which has sometimes featured provocative social-media posts designed to goad other universities that are deemed to be in thrall to progressive orthodoxy—a practice that raised eyebrows among some UATX community members even before the controversy caused by Ellie’s recent Quillette story.

Finally, Ellie and I will also discuss the substance of her work as an educator—which isn’t really about politics at all, but rather is about how to talk about politics without conversations degenerating into shouting matches, broken relationships, and cancel campaigns.

Please enjoy my interview with Ellie Avishai, author of the widely circulated Quillette article, Is the University Of Austin Betraying Its Founding Principles?

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