2/2
Yass, who has long pushed for school choice and is UATX’s biggest donor, said in a statement, “Higher education needs competition. It is time for philanthropists to start new colleges in keeping with the way American learning institutions were founded.”
PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who has long known Lonsdale and has separately been paying students to skip college, made a small gift. Former energy trader John Arnold and his wife, Laura, who are advocates of criminal-justice reform and open debate on campus, are major donors. Alex Magaro, co-president of investment firm Meritage Group, gave $10 million last month.
The campus turmoil over the war in Gaza accelerated fundraising, school administrators said, including from those who felt universities selectively applied free-speech principles.
Blavatnik, who is Jewish, gave $1 million through his family foundationin the days after Hamas attacked Israel.
He later paused his giving to Harvard University, his alma mater.
Daniel Lubetzky, founder of snack-bar maker Kind Snacks and a son of a Holocaust survivor, donated early on and continued to give after the attacks.He became increasingly alarmed at the rise of “us vs. them” thinking on campuses. Active discussions are ongoing with others, including Ackman, who washarshly critical of elite colleges’ diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and their handling of antisemitism on campus.
“It took what happened in the wake of Oct. 7 on the major campuses to convince Wall Street, to convince people in Silicon Valley, that there really was a problem” with higher education, said historian Niall Ferguson, another school founder.
A larger fundraising campaign is expected to start in January.
Whether prospective students find UATX as attractive as donors remains to be seen. UATX currently lacks accreditation and can receive it only after its first class graduates. As a way to offset the risk students are taking, the first class of students is receiving full-tuition scholarships worth about $130,000. More than 40% of the students in the class hail from Texas and a third are female.
Executives fromElon Musk’s SpaceX and Boring Company are helping to develop the school’s engineering curriculum. Lonsdale, the school’s board chair, is gifting a few acres of land outside Austin, adjacent to SpaceX and Boring, for a science and technology center. UATX is also searching for a main campus.
While UATX says it isn’t an explicitly political school, some of its most prominent backers are big donors to Republican candidates and causes, including Yassand Crow. Yass co-founded trading giant Susquehanna International Group, which has a big stake in TikTok.
Kanelos, the University of Austin’s president, said the school’s top 10 donors vary in political ideology but that,“Everyone who gives to us is a critic of higher education.”
https://archive.is/oiIDC