The models that locked us down, closed our kids’ schools, and put us in masks are not different in kind from the models that determine our interest rates. They are constructed the same way, fail the same way, and have similar – illiberal – consequences. If the pandemic made you skeptical of overweening experts wielding model-based predictions, then you have grounds for skepticism about mathematical economics.

Pandemic Modeling

The COVID models were not fraudulent; they were just models. Someone, somewhere constructed equations meant to represent their best guess about disease spread, fed in numbers and produced a prediction. Many of these predictions were, as it turned out, ruinously wrong, but governments had already acted on them before their failings became apparent.

The problem was twofold.

Some of what was included in the models was statistically measured – e.g., the age structure of the population – but much else was mere conjecture. Models, however, do not distinguish between measurement and guess. A model is a device for transforming assumptions into conclusions and the precision of the predictions that emerge is a consequence of the model not a reflection of the real world.

But, beyond the issue of what went in to the models, there was the perhaps more fundamental problem of what did not – indeed, often could not – go into the models. The educational consequences of closed schools. Once-thriving businesses locked down, never to re-open. The elderly relatives who died alone without loved ones at their bedsides. These were not the sorts of things easily entered into an equation and what did not get modeled was treated as nonessential.

Behind every modeling exercise is an implicit assumption, rarely made explicit as it sounds absurd when stated in plain language: everything measurable is meaningful, and everything meaningful is measurable.

The first clause makes that which happens to be quantifiable the determinant of policy. During the pandemic, decisions were made primarily on the basis of case counts because these were all we had.

The second clause is even more problematic. Consider all of the fundamental motives of human action that defy simple measurement: love, passion, patriotism, charity, friendship, fear, justice, to name but a few. None of these figured among the factors deciding COVID policy.

We have been making economic policy according to this rarely explicated assumption since the end of World War II.

How Economics Became a Technocratic Discipline

For most of its history, economics was a philosophical discipline, a subject in which arguments were presented in ordinary prose. Adam Smith, no less than his intellectual descendant, F. A. Hayek, wrote paragraphs, not proofs. Before the postwar “mathematical turn,” economists made claims about direction: rent control leads to fewer rentals; more money in the economy means higher prices. For the most part, however, prewar economists did not claim knowledge of magnitudes. Few tried to predict how many apartments would be available for rent given a particular rent cap, or how high prices would rise given a particular expansion of the money supply.

This changed after the war. Many promising economists spent the war years in government, engaged in procurement or military planning and logistics, and developed the habits of engineers in the process. Keynesian economics, difficult to mathematize (and, thus, of limited policy value) in its original form as bequeathed by Keynes, was dumbed down for the purposes of mathematization. Economics textbooks were rewritten with mathematics front and center. Modeling techniques were refined and applied. Perhaps most importantly, institutions emerged or expanded – a newly created Council of Economic Advisers, a more activist Federal Reserve, and a growing federal bureaucracy – to employ thousands of economists who could produce numbers. Hayek and others more philosophically inclined either withdrew in favor of other pursuits or were sidelined from the profession.

Technocratic Economics

What the equations offered was not merely a façade of scientific rigor, but numbers, precise predictions for policy use. A prediction of mere direction cannot be used to fine-tune an economy, but an exact numerical prediction can.

As Hayek showed, an economy functions primarily according to factors that cannot be counted, because they are either not of a countable nature or are known only to people on the spot, e.g., what merchants know about their equipment and vendors, what consumers know about the reputations of local businesses, the billions of small judgments that people make every day given their proximity to relevant circumstances, all beyond the purview of statisticians. To generate a prediction useful for policymaking, all of this is averaged or otherwise assumed away. The result is a number that does not reflect many of the considerations that inform individual economic decisions.

Such model-generated predictions make managing an economy appear easy, a mere matter of pulling the levers of society to make the numbers line up as desired. Goals that any sensible policymaker should reject as beyond their competence look easily realizable. And because policymakers make decisions for the rest of us mortals, their mathematically distorted decisions become our collective destiny.

Once a problem has a modeled policy solution, moreover, disagreement becomes error, if not immoral. Skeptics of such policies are no longer respectable citizens with differing opinions, but menaces to society. We witnessed this during the pandemic, of course. “Follow the science” turned a debatable decision about shutting down society into a technical matter with a definitively correct answer, making anyone who disagreed a “denier.” Something similar, if less obvious, happens with economic policymaking.

The Illiberal Consequences

The knowledge needed to manage the economy from the top down does not exist in a conveniently quantifiable or easily collectable form. The price system, as Hayek famously emphasized, provides the signals that tell us “what to do” in the economy, how to adapt to circumstances that otherwise escape our attention. Interfering with the price system on the basis of figures no one actually possesses doesn’t stabilize the economy at equilibrium, it scrambles the signals we need to adjust to economic change. The disorder that follows often becomes the premise of future interventions.

The technocratic approach exempts questions from democratic deliberation that properly belong to it. What risks we’re prepared to take to maintain our freedoms, how much unemployment is worth a given amount of price inflation – these are not technical questions answerable by a mathematical model, but matters about which citizens in a liberal society can and should disagree, and be left free to trade off as each deems appropriate.

This is not an argument against all applications of mathematics to society. Some of the strongest arguments against economic intervention are mathematical, but they succeed by showing precisely how unlikely effective intervention is, given the staggering scope and scale of the knowledge that policymakers must possess. The problem appears at the last step, the point where criticism is replaced with blind faith, where a theorem known to hold only under particular conditions becomes the basis of a policy applied to a world in which no one has bothered to ask whether these conditions obtain.

Properly done, economics can tell you which direction, but never how far. Anyone claiming precise magnitudes is doing something other than economics. If you can’t spot the difference, reflect again on the COVID years.

Scott Scheall is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Economics at UATX. His Substack is The Problem of Policymaker Ignorance.

*The views expressed in this essay are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Austin (UATX), its faculty, staff, leadership, or trustees.

Public Events This Fall

All events are on campus in downtown Austin and free to attend.

• September 15 · 5:00–7:00 PM: RSVP
  UATX Annual Constitution Day Address
  The Honorable James C. Ho, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, with special guest Sheldon Gilbert, President and CEO of The Federalist Society.

• September 22 · 5:30–7:00 PM: RSVP
  How Think Tanks Think
  Robert Doar, President, American Enterprise Institute.

• September 24 · 5:30–7:30 PM: RSVP
  Impact in the Federal Government
  Scott Kupor, Director of the Office of Personnel Management, and Joe Lonsdale, Co-Founder of UATX. Co-sponsored by The David Network.

• September 29 · 5:30–7:00 PM: RSVP
  Are Recessions Inevitable?
  Tyler Goodspeed, Chief Economist, ExxonMobil.

• October 13 · 5:30–7:00 PM: RSVP
  The Myths of American Capitalism
  Phil Gramm, former U.S. Senator and economist.

• November 3 · 5:30–7:00 PM: RSVP
  Allies at War
  Tim Bouverie, author and historian.

UATX Events

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“This summer we tracked down the great Iain McGilchrist, tucked away in the bleak moors of the Isle of Skye. We talked about the divided brain, the end of the world, and our opportunity to repair the civilization we’ve inherited. I never dreamed an education at UATX could take me across the world!”

— Yale Abernathy, rising UATX junior and journalist

Classical texts in the morning, nuclear crisis simulation in the afternoon

“No two days were ever the same. One morning we’d be locked in heated debates over classical political texts, and by the afternoon, we were thrown into a high-stakes nuclear crisis simulation, making rapid-fire strategic decisions under pressure.

We traveled to iconic sites like Gettysburg and Arlington National Cemetery, and even wrote and delivered original speeches channelled through assigned Civil War figures. Between sessions with top foreign policy minds, exploring DC’s monuments, and constant conversations with an incredible group of peers, it was a whirlwind of deep ideas, immersive strategy, and hands-on history.”

— Olivia Antunes, rising UATX junior and Hudson Institute Political Studies Summer Fellow

A big brother to campers

Patrick de la Garza, rising UATX sophomore, worked as an overnight counselor, serving as a big brother to campers ages 4 to 17.

Interned for a US Senator

Deacon Donahoo, rising UATX sophomore, interned with US Senator Ted Cruz in Houston.

Interviewed Europe’s major intellectuals

“This summer I traveled around Europe with three UATX peers to interview prominent intellectuals about immigration, religion, cultural decline, and right-wing populism. I’m so grateful to have gotten the opportunity to meet thinkers such as Pascal Bruckner, Iain McGilchrist and Diego Fusaro.”

— Caterina Erlinger, rising UATX Junior & Journalist

Worked inside a Tennessee publishing house

Ewa Flake and Sophia Portesi, rising UATX Juniors, interned at Post Hill Press in Tennessee – Sophia with the editorial team, and Ewa with marketing.

Combed Texas border history for the Governor

Rising UATX sophomore Rebekah Harris interned with Dissident Communications, organizing research and culling primary texts from Texas border history on behalf of Governor Greg Abbott.

Ran the hydraulics on an Alaskan fishing boat

Incoming freshman Will Heard spent his summer operating the hydraulic systems on a commercial fishing boat in Bristol Bay, Alaska.

Investigated the feminization of Western institutions

This summer, UATX students Emerson Lau and James Peery worked as journalists under UATX professor Michael Shellenberger, investigating the impact of feminization on Western institutions.

Reported on politics in Mexico

UATX students Annelise Parker and Raymond Leschber worked as journalists, investigating politics and crime in Mexico alongside UATX professor Michael Shellenberger and journalist Ioan Grillo.

Read Plato, then war-gamed the next global crisis

Rising UATX junior William Posey spent his summer at the Hudson Institute Political Studies Summer Fellowship in DC — reading Plato, Machiavelli, and Lincoln, workshopping policy, and war gaming security challenges.

Harvested seaweed in Panama

Rising sophomore Vasilis Psathas spent his summer harvesting seaweed with Brontide Corporation in Panama.

Farmed seaweed, pitched investors

“This summer, three of my peers and I interned in Panama with Brontide Corporation, an agricultural tech company. Our internship was split into two parts. The first involved hands-on farm work: cleaning and repairing equipment, as well as planting, harvesting, and pruning the seaweed crop. The second part took place in the office, where we learned about the company’s business operations and assisted with investor outreach for future fundraising.”

— Dylan Roemer, rising UATX sophomore

Launched a new membership program

Jack Rubocki, rising UATX sophomore, spent the summer at Trailhead Boise helping build a new membership program from the ground up.

Handled public affairs at the SEC

This summer, rising UATX junior Ben Solin interned with the SEC Office of Public Affairs in Washington, DC.

Interviewed a French philosopher about Islam in Europe

UATX students Eliana Ulloa and Dylan Wu traveled to La Chapelle-Saint-André, a village in central France, to interview philosopher Rémi Brague about Muslim migration and the rise of populism in Europe.

Analyzed policy

Rising UATX junior Andrew Viot analyzed policy in Senator Ted Cruz’s office.

Turned a text message into a podcast

“It all started with a text message from a tech investor I met while volunteering at a local product launch event during my freshman year at UATX. I wanted to create a resource that any young, ambitious person could turn to for wisdom and guidance from exceptional people on how to think about important long-term decisions and ultimately build lives they’re proud of.”

— Rising UATX junior Max Weinstein on launching his podcast this summer

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Represented UATX on a London stage

Students Eliana Ulloa, Francesca Naugle, Marin Medefind, and Luke Bradley represented UATX at the ARC Conference in London.

Took third place in a hackathon

UATX students Luke Bradley, Patrick de la Garza, Pierce Crist, and Angelos Psathas placed third in FEE's hackathon this summer.

Asked Europe’s top thinkers big questions

“This summer we tracked down Europe’s top intellectuals and asked the big questions: about migration, modernity, identity, ideology, guilt, faith, and the future of the West.”

UATX students Eliana Ulloa, Dylan Wu, Caterina Erlinger, and Yale Abernathy, supervised by UATX professor Michael Shellenberger. (See more details above.)

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Read the Address

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High Schoolers: Spend a Day with UATX

Free, one-day pre-college programs: a UATX faculty-led seminar, meals with peers, and an afternoon presentation, Q&A, and reception for families.

• Los Angeles, CA: Saturday, September 12, 2026

• New York, NY: Sunday, October 11, 2026

• Austin, TX: Saturday-Sunday, October 31-November 1, 2026

“Seminars at UATX are wholly different from anything a standard classroom can provide.” — Rocco Fazio, High School Honors L.A. 2025, UATX Class of 2030

Learn More

Public Events This Fall

All events are on campus in downtown Austin and free to attend.

• September 15 · 5:00–7:00 PM: RSVP
  UATX Annual Constitution Day Address
  The Honorable James C. Ho, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, with special guest Sheldon Gilbert, President and CEO of The Federalist Society.

• September 22 · 5:30–7:00 PM: RSVP
  How Think Tanks Think
  Robert Doar, President, American Enterprise Institute.

• September 24 · 5:30–7:30 PM: RSVP
  Impact in the Federal Government
  Scott Kupor, Director of the Office of Personnel Management, and Joe Lonsdale, Co-Founder of UATX. Co-sponsored by The David Network.

• September 29 · 5:30–7:00 PM: RSVP
  Are Recessions Inevitable?
  Tyler Goodspeed, Chief Economist, ExxonMobil.

• October 13 · 5:30–7:00 PM: RSVP
  The Myths of American Capitalism
  Phil Gramm, former U.S. Senator and economist.

• November 3 · 5:30–7:00 PM: RSVP
  Allies at War
  Tim Bouverie, author and historian.

UATX Events

Faculty Spotlight

• Boris Fishman, The New York Times, “To Find Happiness, I Stopped Talking. It Helped.” (08.01.26)

• David Puelz, Annals of Applied Statistics (accepted), “Heterogeneous Treatment Effect Estimation under Noncompliance in the Illinois Workplace Wellness Study with Bayesian Tree Ensembles” (07.29.26)

• Alex Priou, Rufo & Lomez, Interview on Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey (07.24.26)

• Alex Priou, University of Austin, “How to Be an Elitist” (07.20.26)

• Scott Scheall, The Problem of Policymaker Ignorance, “WIPMI Book Club - David Zweig’s An Abundance of Caution and Stephen Macedo & Frances Lee’s In Covid’s Wake” (07.17.26)

• Spencer Klavan, Free Press, “There Is Good and Evil. Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ Isn’t Afraid to Say So.” (07.17.26)

• Spencer Klavan, Wall Street Journal, “What Nolan’s ‘Odyssey’ Leaves Out” (07.16.26)

• Scott Scheall, Smith and Mark Walk into a Bar: A History of Economics Podcast, “Episode 102: Adventures in HET Podcasting with Maria Bach and Scott Scheall” (07.15.26)

• Spencer Klavan, Washington Post, “Nolan’s gorgeous ‘Odyssey’ makes the controversies evaporate” (07.15.26)

• Clay Greene, University of Austin, “What Dante Teaches Us About Beauty” (07.13.26)

• Spencer Klavan, Free Press, “AI Isn’t Human. Stop Talking About It Like It Is.” (07.10.26)

• Alex Priou, Ascend Podcast, “The Odyssey Book 22 with Dr. Alex Priou” (07.07.26)

• Spencer Klavan, Unherd, “Lupita Nyongo’o doesn’t understand women in the Odyssey” (07.07.2026)

• Jacob Wolf, Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy, “American Civilization: Ideals, Institutions, and Culture” (chapter) (07.01.26)

• Alex Priou, European Journal of Political Philosophy 1.2, “Nietzsche’s New Socrates” (07.01.26)

• Spencer Klavan, Free Press, “AI Is Recovering the Ancient World’s Lost Library” (06.29.26)

• Jacob Wolf, What We Can’t Not Talk About podcast, “America 250 and What it Means to be an American: A Conversation with Dr. Jacob Wolf” (06.26.26)

• Boris Fishman, Noble Rot Issue 41, “Psychic Terroir” (06.23.26)

• Spencer Klavan, Wall Street Journal, “Are You There God? It’s Me, Spielberg” (06.10.26)

• Boris Fishman, Food & Wine, “The Most Exciting Place to Eat in America Right Now is in Texas” (06.08.26)

We charge you nothing, except everything you’ve got.

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It's an honor to stand here and welcome the third class at UATX, the most exciting university in America.

To the freshman: thank you for choosing us. I know you had options, and you picked our ambitious experiment. In return, we can promise you that we will stop at nothing to help you become worthy of great things.

***

In the 1830s, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville traveled across America and admired much of what he saw. But he observed a dangerous paradox in the American love of equality. As the old ties of class, tradition, and community dissolved, he predicted, each citizen would retreat into a small world of narrow concerns — until every American would end up "thrown back forever upon himself alone," confined at last "in the solitude of his own heart." A man with nothing above or beyond him has nothing important to strive for and becomes focused on himself alone.

Tocqueville called this danger individualism. Paradoxically, he worried that the more independent the citizen feels, the weaker and less independent he actually becomes. And weak men are more susceptible to being governed by others. They are dominated by the ideas and fashions of the majority and look to a government bureaucracy to take care of them. Tocqueville saw this individualism as a path to comfort in servitude.

America's version of individualism led to something quite different.

The pilgrims and pioneers were the most self-reliant people on earth. They persisted against nature and starvation to set up the colonies; they headed West on wagon trains even as they buried their children on the Oregon Trail. They formed volunteer fire brigades before any government services existed. They ran their own towns without deferring to a distant capital. They carved farms and opened shops and built railroads. They turned wilderness into civilization. Their grandchildren stormed the beaches at Normandy, and their great-grandsons walked on the moon.

That kind of relentless pursuit of greatness was self-uninvolved. It was strong and persistent, and the opposite of introspective. America's self-reliance and rugged individualism produced achievements that were only possible because we escaped the old aristocratic order and its unmeritocratic privileges of birth.

These great achievements begin, however, with the recognition that there's something greater beyond us, that much of life's meaning comes from duties imposed on us and loyalties we did not choose. To strive beyond ourselves we first need to understand ourselves, and that means fully understanding our inheritances before we presume to improve or criticize them.

Greatness starts with recognizing that we incurred a debt to the past, to the family that raised us, to the founders of our country, to the dead who built everything around us and fought our enemies so that we can live in freedom and prosperity. Greatness starts with the recognition of virtue.

For most of Western history, the highest compliment you could pay someone was to call them virtuous. A virtuous father was devoted to his children. A virtuous friend was loyal even when it was costly. But over the last century, virtue gave way to authenticity — being true to whatever feels right.

Today's young people are the most self-aware, validated and as Tocqueville warned us, individualistic. A free and enterprising America became the richest society in human history. And yet, your generation is the most anxious, fragile, and lonely.

American capitalism succeeded in producing unprecedented wealth and opportunity not by rewarding self-obsession. But instead, rewarding the founder obsessed with a product, the engineer obsessed with a problem, a doctor obsessed with getting his patient healthy. It's two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio taking their shop profits and betting on a wind tunnel in the back of the store. It's an immigrant entrepreneur taking his profits from an internet company and betting it on a rocket to take us to Mars.

Short of the military, our universities are the institutions best positioned to cultivate a free and virtuous citizen. Instead, they've become sanctuaries for the authentic self. Having lost the confidence to distinguish between good and bad, universities pretend that all ideas are equal and promise a curriculum to "reflect" your interests. They've traded the question of "what is true and good?" for the question "how does this make you feel?" Universities keep offering a self-affirming mirror when what you need is a window.

But not at UATX. You are here because you are the tiny minority in our country that wants something different. A place that hands you books chosen for you, where you will sit next to people not selected for "fit" but for raw intellect, a place that asks you to defend your opinions, and holds everyone to the highest standards. You are here because you want a real education that humbles you without humiliating you, that challenges you without flattering you.

You are going to live together, eat together, argue together. And, as you share the labor of maintaining a community, we trust you'll pass down to the class behind you what the class ahead passed on to you.

Freshman, look around. You are sitting near a classmate you don't yet know who will argue with you until late at night. They will be the friends standing by you at your wedding. In this room is a professor who will pour red ink on the margins of your essay. That professor will be the mentor you call when deciding what new job offer to take a decade from now.

So, to the class of 2030, the whole world will keep telling you to find yourself. We're hoping for something better: that you forget yourself and discover the durable joy of being absorbed in something greater than you.

Years from now, you'll be in a room where something serious is on the line. Maybe a dinner table where a troubling question gets asked, or a courthouse where a big decision is made, or a board meeting where a serious mistake is about to be made. Those rooms will need at least one person who knows how to think through hard things. We want you to be the person the rest of the room quietly turns to.

But today, we turn to you and ask you to forget yourself. We want you to read books that have no interest in your identity, and to wrestle with facts that don't care how they make you feel. We want you to help your classmate at an inconvenient hour, to listen and learn from the professors, and to find ways to contribute to this young university without demanding that it conforms to you. Forget yourself and find something greater than you.

Forget yourself today, then wake up tomorrow and forget yourself again. Spend four years doing that, and you will cross this stage in 2030 strong, free, surrounded by friends who will help you build a good, virtuous and successful life.

Welcome to the University of Austin.

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Watch: Dr. Pakaluk on the birth dearth

The University of Austin comes to you.

College-level seminars for smart high schoolers. Real faculty, rigor, and a sample of life at UATX. For free.

• L.A.: September 12.

• NYC: October 11.

• Austin: October 31 – November 1.

Learn more

We’re already receiving apps for Fall 2027. It’s not too early — apply now.

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Diana Schaub is Professor Emerita of Political Science at Loyola University Maryland and a non-resident Senior Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She was the Garwood Teaching Fellow at Princeton University in 2011-12 and Visiting Professor of Political Theory in the Government Department at Harvard University in 2018, 2020, and 2022. She is the author of a book on Montesquieu, along with numerous articles in the fields of political philosophy and American political thought. She is a coeditor (with Amy and Leon Kass) of What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song. A member of the Board of Directors of the Abraham Lincoln Institute, she also sits on the publication committee of National Affairs. Her book on Lincoln’s rhetoric and statesmanship, His Greatest Speeches: How Lincoln Moved the Nation, appeared in 2021 from St. Martin’s Press.

Recorded: February 17, 2026 at UATX.

00:00 — Preview
00:57 — A young Lincoln
02:42 — Should unjust laws be obeyed?
06:40 — The threat of time
09:52 — Lincoln’s favorite rhetorical technique
13:50 — The incident Lincoln stepped around
15:14 — Civic discourse
17:25 — Do the direct consequences matter?
19:30 — How Lincoln linked self-interest to rule of law
21:05 — What the vigilantes really did
23:03 — Regime change
24:27 — Obedience not from fear but from reverence
26:41 — Are there exceptions to the first commandment of democratic life?
28:56 — "Slaves remain in a state of war”
32:01 — Why Lincoln refused to accept civil disobedience
37:56 — Why America is in danger
41:02 — Resistance requires the people
42:10 — Will passion destroy us?
46:32 — Q&A: Does passion have any place in war?
49:03 — Q&A: How to handle partisanship
51:56 — Q&A: What would have happened if a runaway slave came to Lincoln’s door?
57:29 — Q&A: Habeas corpus
1:01:23 — Q&A: What is the place of mercy?
1:05:08 — Q&A: Lincoln: “The insidious debauching of the American mind”

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This fall: 3 cities. 3 chances to learn what it takes to study at UATX.

• UATX has hit the road, bringing smart high schoolers a glimpse of life at UATX — for free.

  • Los Angeles: September 12.

  • New York City: October 11.

  • Austin: October 31 - November 1.

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UATX YouTube

Watch Rod lecture at UATX

Spotlight: Siblings at UATX

Our family continues to choose UATX because we believe in the mission of pursuing truth. Our world-class professors and superb classmates create the most intellectually stimulating environment we’ve ever been part of. Every day we grow, and the people of UATX are always there supporting us.

— UATX students Angelos and Vasilis Psathas (Class of 2029)

We’re already receiving apps for Fall 2027. It’s not too early — apply now.

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• Winter 2026 visiting lecturers & guests: Hayes Barnard, Jean Yarbrough, Bill Ackman, Carrie Sheffield, Joshua Mitchell, Judge Thomas R. Phillips, Bernhardt Trout, Diana Schaub, Chance Weldon, Yeonmi Park, Devin Stauffer, Courtney and Ted Balaker, Zachary Dell, Ben Rubenstein, James Hankins, The Honorable Charles Eskridge, Liel Leibovitz, Luke Nichter, Nicholas Aroney, Rob Henderson, Bohan Lou, Nancy and Dan Garrison, Sam Ennis, Banks Chisum, Daytona Stanga, Tyler Cowen, George Packer, Laura Dunn, J.D. Sewell, Alec Titterton, Zach Rivkin, Jon McLoone, Spencer Klavan, Bob Wright, Dorian Abbot, Arnold Kling.

• February 21: Students, faculty, and staff gather at the Winter Ball.

• Journalist Michael Shellenberger teaches a class on “Journalism Tradecraft” while writer Spencer Klavan teaches on “Plato’s Republic” and “Knowing, Doing, Making, Wisdom.”

• March 7: Jewish and non-Jewish students and leaders gather for the first UATX Shabbat at the UT Chabad House.

• March 11: Three UATX students visit Allen Control for an invite-only demo of Bullfrog M240, the fully autonomous weapons station that handles the full kill chain up to group 3 UAS.

• Spring 2026 visiting lecturers & guests: Ben Shapiro, Jeff Yass, Rob Henderson, Zuby, Niall Ferguson, Jim Meigs, Chase Koch, Brendan Boyle, Arif Panju, Joe Lonsdale, Ken Hersh, Brent Bellm, Brittany and Gabriel Hugoboom, Daniel Di Martino, David Booth, Charles Fain Lehman, David Rose, Henry Oliver, Judge Roy Altman, Jim Gash, Scott Jennings, Tony Abbott, Michael Pakaluk, Elise Stefanik, Bert “Tito” Beveridge, Garett Jones, Bryan Caplan, Jerrod Ankenman, Andy Aymeloglu, Coleman Hughes, Yaron Brook, Daniel Samet, Robert Wright, Dennis Wilkinson, Evan Young, Andrew Oldham.

• Susquehanna Poker Pro Jerrod Ankenman teaches a hands-on class on game theory and Palantir’s 12th hire Andy Aymeloglu teaches “Software Engineering.”

• April 4: Four UATX students – Judah Levin, Max Weinstein, Sam Indyk, and Eitan Zarin – arrive at the Boring Company in Bastrop to compete against engineering teams of up to 60. Over the year, they spent 50+ hours a week building a tunneling machine for the Not-a-Boring Competition — in addition to their academic load.

• April 9: UATX sophomore Sam Indyk co-authors a paper with Luminar Technologies’ Stephen Gaalema and STEM Dean Clint Staley on a distributed panel architecture for space-based AI data centers—integrating solar cells, compute, and radiators to reduce satellite mass.

• April 26: Three UATX students join Niall Ferguson on stage to question him on AI, populism, and warfare in the modern age.

• April 26: Ben Shapiro and Joe Lonsdale speak on epistemic humility, emotivism, and the death of politics.

• May 8–9: UATX hosts Torchlight Summit, convening astronauts, scientists, and political thinkers to investigate how emerging technologies shape the institutions that will govern outer space.

• May 13–14: Four UATX student entrepreneurs pitch their startups at Capital Factory’s Health Supernova.

• May 27–28: UATX Theater Society produces its first performance, Hamlet.

• June 10: Australia’s 28th Prime Minister, Hon. Tony Abbott, joins UATX to discuss civilizational self-loathing and the need for liberal education.

  

• June 12: UATX ranks its top students and rewards them with stacks of books.

• UATX gifts incoming freshmen summer reading: E Pluribus Unum by Forrest MacDonald, The Life of George Washington by John Marshall, and
  The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay.

• Summer 2026: Students travel across Europe, Mexico, and the UK to study democracy, feminization, and migration. Others intern with our nation’s leaders – at the SEC, in a senator’s office, at the Texas AG. Some join top think tanks and private equity firms. And still others farm the ocean off Panama, test the boundaries of space, build software at Wolfram in London, and use technology to map the growth of cities. One spends the summer tending a vineyard in France.

This is the perfect time to apply for fall 2027 to secure a limited spot:

Apply in less than five minutes.

UATX Filmed Seminar: Build a Modern Web App from Scratch

Palantir’s 12th hire and former Director of Engineering, Andy Aymeloglu, recently taught UATX students how modern web apps are built. We turned the seminar into a five-part miniseries covering the core building blocks: databases, web servers, testing, clients, and deployment.

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In this six-part series, UATX Professor J.J. Kimche traces the intellectual and spiritual drama of Ecclesiastes—its historical world, its haunting questions, its theology of finitude, and its enduring wisdom. Drawing on philosophy, theology, and literature, these lectures reveal Ecclesiastes as the Bible’s most profound meditation on meaning: a book that strips away illusion to uncover, at last, the quiet radiance of joy and the fear of God.

This series explores:

• What kind of book Ecclesiastes is: a sermon, diary, philosophical treatise, or theological rant?

• The problem of hevel: why one slippery Hebrew word is the key to the whole book

• Whether there’s a way out: the answers the author refuses to give, and the surprising company he keeps—from the Stoics to the Epicureans

• A God who is everywhere yet answers no one: and the strange, solitary picture of human life that follows

Professor Kimche takes Ecclesiastes on its own terms and uncovers a book that speaks, with startling force, to how we live and how we die.

Watch the full series

Spotlight: Siblings at UATX

We chose UATX because we believe that this university molds its students in a way that is unlike anywhere else. It is challenging, but it is also a community where people are not just concerned with remembering your name; they are concerned with shaping your character.

— UATX students Analina Naugle (Class of 2028) & Francesca Naugle (Class of 2029)

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The University of Austin (UATX) recently did something that should be commonplace in higher education but is surprisingly rare. The new university posted its entire undergraduate reading list online - 224 books, essays, and primary sources, course by course and professor by professor -for anyone to examine. Regardless of one’s views of the school itself, that decision deserves attention and every college and university in America should consider doing the same....

What is really unusual here is that because the UATX list is public, we do not have to take the university’s word for being a place that seeks balance. We can directly verify and that is exactly what transparency is so critical to higher education....

What distinguishes UATX today is that no board or legislature compelled the school to do anything. What a handful of states have had to mandate, UATX has done voluntarily and it has wisely gone further by publishing not merely course syllabi but a consolidated, university-wide reading list.

As UATX co-founder and historian Niall Ferguson put it on X: “Just the latest way we at UATX are revitalizing higher education. We’ve reinvented university governance. We’ve restored meritocracy to admissions. We don’t charge tuition. We don’t let AI chatbots do students’ work for them. Established institutions could learn from us.”

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Shop Class as Soulcraft at UATX

Four roommates from UATX’s inaugural class showed up to college in fall 2024 to study philosophy and history. They read Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft and decided a one-year-old university needed to get its hands dirty.

They taught themselves to weld, wire, and machine. A year later, with no engineering background, they had designed and built most of a 7,000-lb tunnel boring machine from scratch, and competed at a Boring Company competition. A final three-week crunch ended with their tents blowing off the site in a thunderstorm on the big day.

The machine wasn’t finished by then. But The Boring Company inspectors were impressed enough that two of the students (Eitan and Sam) landed engineering internships there this summer.

Rising junior Eitan Zarin on the conversations he has with his peers.

Inside the Classroom: Andy Aymeloglu on Unix and Git

Watch visiting professor Andy Aymeloglu explain Unix, Git, and source control—the latest lecture in his software engineering course, taught to UATX students on campus. You can watch the entire series here.

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UATX Professor Michael Hoffpauir on how to become free.

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This is the second class in Andy Aymeloglu’s spring 2026 course, Software Engineering.

Andy Aymeloglu was Director of Engineering at Palantir Technologies from 2005 to 2015, growing it from a fledgling company to an 1800-person company with offices across the globe. He has since served as VP of Engineering at Hexagon Bio, Alcor member, and Founding Partner at Commit Capital, while advising startups in the Bay Area.

Rather than offering a list of commands to memorize, this class builds a mental model of the terminal, beginning with the anatomy of a Unix command and walking through file navigation, grep, pipes, redirects, and shell scripting. The second half of class focuses on Git internals. What actually happens when you run git commit? What lives inside that .git folder? How do commits, trees, and blobs form a directed acyclic graph, and why does the cryptographic structure underpinning Git also underpin blockchains? By the end, you will have a clear grasp of the commands you've been running for years, and know how to dig out issues when they arise.

This lecture was recorded at UATX on April 2, 2026.

00:00 — Why learn the CLI?
01:18 — Anatomy of a command
02:23 — How to navigate the file system
08:25 — How to control where the output goes
09:35 — Setting up the chat-app
11:54 — The command loved by Linux users
13:45 — Shell scripts
18:23 — Another way to put commands together
21:56 — A practical exercise: find this file
23:49 — Key takeaways
25:07 — How git actually works
33:05 — Commits, trees, and blobs
34:43 — Inspecting git objects
35:24 — What branches enable you to do
37:15 — What git checkout actually does
42:59 — Building the commit graph
48:12 — How to use merge and rebase
52:55 — Rebase's golden rule

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Spotlight: UATX Engineers

Four roommates from UATX’s inaugural class showed up to college in fall 2024 to study philosophy and history. They read Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft and decided a one-year-old university needed to get its hands dirty.

They taught themselves to weld, wire, and machine. A year later, with no engineering background, they had designed and built most of a 7,000-lb tunnel boring machine from scratch, and competed at the Boring Company competition. A final three-week crunch ended with their tents blowing off the site in a thunderstorm on the big day.

The machine wasn’t finished by then. But the Boring Company inspectors were impressed enough that two of the students (Eitan and Sam) landed engineering internships there this summer.

We’re already receiving apps for Fall 2027. It’s not too early — apply now.

Apply now

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Yet a quick look around our institutions reveals that we encourage also a collective aimlessness, a general lack of seriousness in the ends we allow our most precious resource, the young, to pursue. We are slow as a society to pass judgment on their choices. Reasonable worries are dismissed with a wave of the hand. “He’s living his best life,” we say. Or, “She’s pursuing her own truth.” Nietzsche, I think, put it best: we believe we have invented happiness, that it’s whatever we want it to be, nothing more. And then we blink, in empty-headed self-contentment. Young men and women graduate from college knowing at twenty-two what they ought to have learned by sixteen, having acquired in that extra time all the bad habits that come from working little and thinking less. And for that they earn a “college degree,” whose true value does not extend much beyond the cost of the heavy stock paper and fancy printing. Economically we reward industry and inventiveness, yet socially we are guilty of an indefensible toleration of vice.

Herein lies the paradox of a regime such as ours. The best thing about freedom is that you can live any life you want. And the worst thing about freedom is that you can live any life you want. We have jettisoned the sclerotic hierarchies of old as arbitrary, but with them have gone the sensible, natural hierarchies to which they appealed. Baby and bathwater thus share the same fate. The cream still rises, to be sure, yet it is decidedly in spite of our collective tendencies, not because of them. We dare not say publicly to the children of others what we say privately to our own, that they are wasting their time, their talents, and their opportunities on idle pastimes and entertainment, the evil end that lays claim to our leisure. Vigilant opposition to the lowering of expectations, to the flattening of all heights, is required, if more is to be made of oneself than a cog in the commodification of one’s attention for likes, views, and clicks. To live well today, one must first stand athwart.

I recently discussed this problem with some students attending UATX’s high school honors program in Austin this past June. The course was called “How To Be An Elitist,” a title meant to appeal to a dissatisfaction with the present and a longing for more, while suggesting tongue-in-cheek that everything one needs to know about excellence can be learned on a single Sunday afternoon. Students read and discussed two essays, Winston Churchill’s “Mass Effects in Modern Life” and Leo Strauss’s “What Is Liberal Education?” Together they offer a remarkably lucid and accessible diagnosis of our problem, how modern mass democracies tend to degrade political and educational institutions. Both offer biting critiques of how society, in expecting so little of us, habituates us to expect very little of ourselves. Young men and women everywhere would do well to read and discuss them. And any parents reading this ought to encourage the same.

Churchill observes that events have largely fallen out of the control of individual men, that rather chance or history rules our lives in every essential respect. No longer, then, do “the Master Teachers, Thinkers, Discoverers, Commanders” chart the course of civilization. Rather, at their heights sit “vacant Thrones.” And so we find “strutt[ing] conscientiously around the seats of the mighty decked in their discarded mantles and insignia” an “array of blameless mediocrities.” The only exception in our “scientific and organized civilization” is Science. Yet who sits atop this peak are not individuals but large corporate bodies: “The throne is occupied; but by a throng.” Leadership of these and other entities, including the state, therefore falls on men “admired for their free and easy manners, their readiness to mingle with all classes, their matter-of-fact work-a-day air, their dislike of pomp and ritual.” Today, we tend to ask ourselves if we’d enjoy having a beer with a presidential candidate before deciding our vote. Churchill is right that such a sovereign is “no longer a figure of mystery and awe,” and he rightly worries, too, that he “looks upon himself as quite an ordinary fellow.” “The question is whether the sense of leadership, and the commanding attitude towards men and affairs, are likely to arise from such simple and unpretentious customs and habits of mind.” Perhaps, we might counter, our mass society no longer needs great men. Perhaps not, Churchill concedes. But if somehow the systems we rely on should collapse, and we have taken no trouble to prepare our leaders for greatness, then to whom will we turn in our hour of need? Will nobody be there?

What matters, then, is that we educate the young for greatness, regardless of whether they will ever encounter opportunities for it. On this topic, students set aside Churchill for Strauss, whose appreciation for the connection between liberal education and greatness proves much deeper. For Strauss, liberal education is above all the cultivation of our intellectual faculties, and such cultivation should be understood as precisely as the cultivation of the soil, as agriculture or horticulture. The term “culture,” therefore, should not be used in the plural and indiscriminately, as in our phrases “corporate culture” and “drug culture,” but in the singular, as “the culture of the human mind.” Our lax use of this lofty term leads Strauss to paint a much darker picture than Churchill had, with his “vacant Thrones” and “blameless mediocrities”: “If we contrast the present day usage of ‘culture’ with the original meaning, it is as if someone would say that the cultivation of a garden may consist of the garden’s being littered with empty tin cans and whiskey bottles and used papers of various descriptions thrown around the garden at random.” Dark though this cloud may be, it bears a silver edge Churchill’s does not. For Churchill is convinced that our age is a high plateau, well above the peaks of the past, yet lacking “a monarch peak, with base enormous, whose summit is for ever hidden from our eyes by clouds.” Strauss disagrees. He contends that the ancient peaks rise high above us today, no less than those in ages past. For “the greatest minds…are extremely rare. We are not likely to meet any of them in any classroom. We are not likely to meet any of them anywhere. It is a piece of good luck if there is a single one alive in one’s time.” Practically speaking, then, we have access to these minds “only through the great books.” But still, they rise high above us.

Strauss poses the question, “What can liberal education mean here and now?” And he answers, “Liberal education is the counterpoison to mass culture, to the corroding effects of mass culture.” It is through a great books style education, then, that one most effectively stands athwart the worst tendencies of our time. Or, as Strauss puts it, “Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society. Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.” UATX’s great books curriculum and culture of excellence, in academics as in character, consist of such reminders of greatness, day in and day out. We take seriously in everything we do the challenge to educate, not just in this or that civilization and culture, but in civilization and culture simply. Last Fall, our President Carlos Carvalho delivered an address with the title, “In Defense of Inequality,” where he exhorted the incoming class to embrace their excellence, whether it lay in their curiosity, their intellect, their courage, or their achievements. It may be a long time before the West needs “a monarch peak, with base enormous.” Yet indispensable for the present is a taste for what separates such mountains from our molehills. And yes, it takes more than a pair of essays and a Sunday afternoon.

Alex Priou is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Austin (UATX). He is the author of three books on Plato, most recently Musings on Plato's Symposium, as well as numerous articles and chapters on the history of political philosophy.

*The views expressed in this essay are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Austin (UATX), its faculty, staff, leadership, or trustees.

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What should a software engineering course look like in 2026?

According to Andy Aymeloglu, nothing like the one you’d have taken 25 years ago.

This is the first class of his spring 2026 course at UATX, and it’s now online for anyone to watch.

Andy Aymeloglu was Director of Engineering at Palantir Technologies from 2005 to 2015, growing it from a fledgling company to an 1,800-person company with offices across the globe. He has since served as VP of Engineering at Hexagon Bio, Alcor member, and Founding Partner at Commit Capital, while advising startups in the Bay Area.

The course picks up where two prior courses in programming fundamentals and data structures left off. Andy’s core argument: coding agents belong in the workflow, treated as a supervised pair programmer rather than a novelty. In this opening session he gets specific about what agents are genuinely good at, where they get sloppy, and how to think about vibe coding. From there he introduces client-server architecture, the model underpinning nearly every modern app, and walks through the full tech stack students will use all term.

00:00 — Introduction
01:19 — Course overview
03:01 — How UATX teaches software engineering
06:27 — Defining and using AI agents
10:37 — AI coding horror stories
11:52 — Are you truly vibe coding?
15:40 — Most web apps exhibit client-server architecture
17:35 — The tech stack for this course
20:44 — User interface and user experience
23:35 — The backend is where most of your business logic will live
25:30 — The class Andy wishes he had paid attention to
27:32 — How code communicates
31:00 — Carrying projects over the finish line
35:05 — A crucial tool
35:45 — Ways to think about testing
38:58 — Discussing coding agents
50:12 — Install a coding agent and make sure it works
50:47 — Linux is better for deploying to the cloud
52:36 — The Unix philosophy
53:07 — Why you should learn the CLI
55:08 — Looking ahead

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Rising Junior Eitan Zarin on Why He Chose STEM at UATX

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If you ask most people, beauty is for stuffed shirts with too much time on their hands. But if you ask them about their favorite film, or artist, they will whirl toward you with judgments of beauty and declarations of the personal meaning it has for them.

What do people mean by the meaning beauty has for them? They do not mean the straightforward sense of ordinary communication. Rather, they recognize the fact that an atmosphere of meaningfulness hangs around things we consider beautiful. Beauty promises importance, significance, communion with the most vital and compelling forces in the world. In the idiom of common reactions to beauty, it “speaks to us,” though when we put words to the experience, we often find them falling short of the meaning we intuit.

“Correspondances,” a famous poem in Charles Baudelaire’s collection Les Fleurs du Mal, exemplifies beauty’s uncertain atmosphere of meaningfulness. “Nature,” he says, “is a temple in which living pillars / Sometimes give voice to confused words” (William Aggeler translation). Baudelaire’s words suggest that nature’s beauty speaks, but it speaks confusingly. Nature always seems to suggest more than what is actively said. Baudelaire’s poem provides a vision where beauty and meaning are perpetually coming in and out of our awareness, that each new look suggests further depths and further darknesses.

Beauty asks us to discover what it means. My favorite example of this quest comes from La Vita Nuova, or The New Life, the earliest work of Dante Alighieri, the famous medieval author of The Divine Comedy. Compiled when Dante was about thirty, The New Life combines Dante’s early poems with an autobiographical account of the inspiration of the poems and the role they played in his life.

The new life Dante describes is about Beatrice, his great infatuation and the muse of his greatest poetry. Probably Beatrice Portinari, the daughter of a Florentine banker, Beatrice was a young woman of Dante’s own age, about whom we know very little. In Dante’s poetry, however, she is the embodiment of human virtue, a sign of the miraculous deliverance of God, and the incarnation of all beauty. Dante meets her at nine years old, again at eighteen years old, and sporadically thereafter. Though he does not have a significant relationship with Beatrice, her beauty enthralls and captivates him, even when he is not in her presence.

La Vita Nuova is an effort to uncover the meaning of the beauty Dante glimpsed in those early encounters. In the opening chapter, he promises to show “the significance” that exists in his memory of Beatrice. Mysteriously, the life of Beatrice seems surrounded by the number nine. Dante first meets her at a party when they both are but nine years old. He feels the mysterious discombobulation of love even then. The second time they meet is nine years later, when she is eighteen, walking along the street dressed in white flanked by two older women. Much to Dante’s surprise and joy, she greets him, and this greeting overwhelms him. He runs to his room, where he falls asleep and dreams he sees the God of Love feeding her his heart. His dream occurs at the ninth hour of the night. The obscure repetition of nine draws him on like the confused words of Baudelaire’s living temple of nature.

Like any young man, Dante is thrown into confusion by his newborn feelings of romantic love. He writes poems attempting to put words to his feelings. Some of these poems are slight exercises compared to the achievements of Dante’s mature period. But they testify to a mind astounded by beauty and attempting to explain “the significance” this beauty should have for his life, poetry, and, finally, for his soul.

It is only when Beatrice dies that Dante begins to understand the meaning of her beauty. In his grief, Dante realizes why Beatrice “was a nine.” Nine is three times three, the number of the Holy Trinity. All this indicates that she was a product of the Trinity, meaning she was a miracle born from God’s miraculous triform existence. Dante comes to understand Beatrice as a reflection of Christ. Her beauty draws him upward to the source and end of all happiness in God, a journey that forms the center of the Divine Comedy.

But he had to look for this meaning, to repeat the encounter with beauty, including in the contemplative mind. The meaning was not visible, but it was also through visibility that the meaning drew him toward it.

Did Dante make or discover this meaning? The text does not definitively tell us. Even the miracle of the nines is given only as his opinion. Regardless, Dante’s perception of beauty invigorates a lifelong quest for meaning. Beatrice’s meaning is never fully exhausted. He includes her as his guide in Paradiso, the last part of The Divine Comedy, which he works on in the last years of his life.

Dante’s experience is a lesson in how to interpret beauty. My own field, literary interpretation, is essentially a romance with beauty. Often students in literature class are quick to try to fix the meaning of a poem or novel. It is better for them to sit with the meaningfulness for a while. They should commune with the confused words of Baudelaire’s temple, with the young Dante’s amazement over Beatrice’s beauty. A genuine literary interpretation is not merely the reception of the meaning an author intended or his culture would have received. It must also be a reckoning with the fact of beauty itself.

The true end of a literary education is the ability both to understand and to appreciate—to reconcile the author’s meanings with the meaningfulness that arises from its beauty. This reconciliation can only be partial in this life, for the meaningfulness of a work is never exhausted, and the meanings of a work assume new aspects as life and experience change. But if a scholarly reading dispenses altogether with the meaningfulness of a first encounter, that scholar has lost his connection to the primary taproot of the experience of art—beauty and its mysterious meaningfulness.

The meaningfulness of beauty prompts us to seek out meanings, which are experienced as a form of recognition in the way they seem to “explain” the beauty. At that point the recognition of beauty becomes the recognition of a specific meaning—beauty transforming into conceptual understanding. But beauty troubles these clear meanings. The meaningfulness remains, confused words awaiting reinterpretation. This is not because beauty is meaningless, but because beauty exceeds conceptual understanding. The effort to gather that something into our understanding is like the effort to reclaim a beach from the sea. It can be done for a time, but the sea will always wash back upon us.

Clay Greene is Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of Austin (UATX). He received his Ph.D. in English and Renaissance Studies from Yale University. His research focuses on Renaissance literature, intellectual history, and the intersections of poetry, philosophy, and religion in the early modern period. He is currently completing a book on the doctrine of the preexistence of the soul in seventeenth-century England.

*The views expressed in this essay are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Austin (UATX), its faculty, staff, leadership, or trustees.

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UATX Faculty Reading Recommendations:

Carson Bay, Professor of Classics and Biblical Studies

• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt

Claire Brickman, Industry Expert in Residence

• The Most Powerful Court in the World: A History of the Supreme Court of the United States, Stuart Banner

• Courtwatchers: Eyewitness Accounts in U.S. Supreme Court History, Clare Cushman

Father Maximos Constas, Professor of Humanities

• Up From the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times, Aaron Sachs

• Dreaming Reality: How Neuroscience and Mysticism Can Unlock the Secrets of Consciousness, Vladimir Miskovic and Steven Jay Lynn

• Who Owns Beauty?, Bénédicte Savoy

• Phenomenology of the Icon, Stephanie Rumpza

Dorothy Dickmann, Professor of Accounting and Data Science

• Foundation, Isaac Asimov

Patrick Gray, Dean for the Center for Arts and Letters, Professor of Literature

• Canzoniere, Petrarch (newly translated by A.M. Juster)

Clay Greene, Professor of Literature

• Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, Roger Scruton

Phil Greenwald, Executive Director of the UATX Innovation Labs

• Universal Principles of Design, William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler

• Venture Deals, Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson

• The Innovators, Walter Isaacson

• Einstein: His Life and Universe, Walter Isaacson

Kirsten Herlin, Professor of Literature

• The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco

Michael Hoffpauir, Professor of Political Theory

• Washington: The Indispensable Man, James Thomas Flexner

• The Red and the Black, Stendhal

• A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

Arnold Kling, Visiting Professor (Winter 2026)

• The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro

• The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, William Manchester

Alex Priou, Professor of Political Philosophy

• Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Plutarch

• Serotonin, Michel Houellebecq

• The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Isabella Reinhardt, Professor of Classics

• Dracula, Bram Stoker

• I, Claudius, Robert Graves

• The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin

• Little, Big, John Crowley

• Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon

• Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

• The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Roberto Calasso

• Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs, Camilla Townsend

Loren Rotner, Professor of Politics

• An Intellectual History of Liberalism, Pierre Manent

• White Noise, Don DeLillo

• The Captive Mind (especially the chapter on “The Pill of Murti-Bing”), Czesław Miłosz

• What the Anti-Federalists Were For: The Political Thought of the Opponents of the Constitution, Herbert J. Storing

Clint Staley, Interim Dean for the Center for STEM, Professor of Computer Science

• Foundation and Empire, Isaac Asimov

• Second Foundation, Isaac Asimov

• 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke

• Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention May to September 1787, Catherine Drinker Bowen

• Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Steven Johnson

Ricardo Vilalta, Professor of Computer Science

• I, Robot, Isaac Asimov

Learn Software Engineering With Andy Aymeloglu

UATX’s five-part series covers the fundamentals of the modern web app: databases, web servers, testing, client, and deployment.

Andy Aymeloglu was Director of Engineering at Palantir Technologies from 2005 to 2015, growing it from a fledgling company to an 1,800-person company with offices across the globe. He has since served as VP of Engineering at Hexagon Bio, Alcor member, and Founding Partner at Commit Capital, while advising startups in the Bay Area.

Watch "The Modern Web App"

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The Modern Web App | TRAILER

Watch the full series

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UATX Freshman Book Awards

Excellence in STEM Award - Awarded by STEM Dean Clint Staley to freshman Will McCollom.

• Lectures on Physics, Richard Feynman

• Numerical Methods for Engineers, Steven C. Chapra

• Stuff Matters, Mark Miodownik

• The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes

• Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman, Richard Feynman

• Atoms in the Family, Laura Fermi

• To Engineer Is Human, Henry Petroski

• The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman

  

Excellence in the Center for Arts and Letters (CAL) Award - Awarded by CAL Dean Patrick Gray to freshman Raymond Leschber.

• After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Alasdair MacIntyre

• Against the Protestant Gnostics, Philip J. Lee

• The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, Eric Voegelin

• The Ethics of Authenticity, Charles Taylor

• Plotinus: An Introduction to the Enneads, Dominic O’Meara

• Neoplatonism, Pauliina Remes

• A Secular Age, Charles Taylor

• Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge, Thomas Pfau

Excellence in the Center for Economics, Politics, and History (CEPH) Award - Awarded by CEPH Dean Tim Kane to freshman Madeleine Meegan.

• The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama

• The Speeches & Writings of Abraham Lincoln: A Library of America Boxed Set

• 1776, David McCullough

• Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith

Plus: School-Wide Awards

Tocqueville Prize for Citizenship and Service to the Polity - Awarded by University Dean Ben Crocker to sophomore Jack Erickson.

• Tribal Leadership, Dave Logan

• Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville

• The Old Regime and the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville

• Boston: A Revolutionary History, Brian Deming

• Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation, John Carlin

• Tom Brown’s School Days, Thomas Hughes

• Manliness, Harvey Mansfield

Intellectual Foundations Essay Prize - Awarded by Provost David Ruth to sophomore Faith Brown.

• The Hebrew Bible, translation by Robert Alter, with commentary

• Complete Works, Plato

• What Are We Doing Here? Essays, Marilynne Robinson

Student Spotlight: Liora Zarin

“Between philosophy and physics, we spend a lot of time at UATX trying to understand the world that is. As a student photographer, I find candid photography to be a natural extension of that exploration. From seminars, guest speakers, and MMA to hackathons and campus dinners, I have thoroughly enjoyed documenting student life this past year. I am grateful to have captured the joy here.” — Liora Zarin, UATX freshman and student photographer

Deposit by August 1 to secure your spot.

Apply for Fall 2026

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Bryan Caplan is a Visiting Professor at UATX. He is a professor of economics and senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University. Caplan is also the bestselling author of Open Borders and The Myth of the Rational Voter.

Garett Jones is a professor of Economics and BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University. He has written two books published by Stanford University Press: Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own, and 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less.

Coleman Hughes is a Visiting Professor at UATX. He is the host of the Conversations with Coleman podcast at The Free Press, and the author of the book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America.

This was recorded on May 29, 2026 at UATX.

00:00 — Intro by Yale Abernathy, president of the Austin Union
00:56 — Bryan Caplan advocates for mass immigration
08:54 — Garett Jones responds
20:38 — Coleman Hughes: Does culture matter?
23:32 — Should America boost immigration to offset low birth rates?
26:46 — Closed borders vs. low-skill mass immigration
28:26 — Would Bryan Caplan ever advocate for closed borders?
31:29 — Q&A: How to assimilate the best culture
34:36 — Q&A: Demographic collapse
35:44 — Q&A: "Your neighbors shape your productivity”
39:32 — Q&A: Global connectivity
43:29 — Q&A: Against mass immigration
48:17 — Q&A: Is GDP per capita the right metric for immigration policy?
51:28 — Q&A: Gulf monarchies
55:28 — Q&A: Past immigration policies
56:51 — Garett Jones: Simple models are a poor guide
59:29 — Bryan Caplan: We don't need saving

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