The July 14 release of the Manhattan Statement on Higher Education, authored by conservative activist Christopher Rufo and endorsed by a network of public intellectuals including Jordan Peterson and Victor Davis Hanson, signals a renewed attempt to politicize and reengineer U.S. higher education from the top down. The University of Austin (UATX), founded in 2021 as a counter to so-called "woke" universities, quickly aligned itself with the statement’s aims. In his July 17 response, UATX President Carlos Carvalho embraced Rufo’s framing, declaring that his institution was created to reverse what he and others call a crisis of truth and national identity in American academia.
But as previously noted by the Higher Education Inquirer in the article “Socrates in Space: University of Austin and the Art of Selling Platitudes to the Powerful” (July 2024), UATX is not a revolutionary institution. It is a repackaged version of elite academia, complete with wealthy donors, highly connected board members, and a PR strategy rooted in grievance politics. The school’s language of “freedom,” “truth,” and “rigor” masks a political project designed to shape a new generation of conservative elites, while marginalizing alternative perspectives and undermining the pluralism that genuine education requires.
The Manhattan Statement claims that American universities have become engines of ideological tyranny, no longer serving the public good. It calls on the President of the United States to draft a “new contract” that would tie federal funding and accreditation to ideological conformity, enforced through policy tools like grants, loans, and eligibility restrictions. In short, it advocates for government control over academic speech and governance—precisely the kind of top-down coercion that critics of higher education claim to oppose.
President Carvalho responded with a full-throated endorsement of this approach, asserting that universities today lack rigor and suppress dissent, and that UATX alone fosters true academic freedom and civic responsibility. He describes a meritocratic admissions process based on quantitative performance metrics, a rigorous curriculum rooted in “civilizational survival,” and a mission to produce citizens capable of preserving “constitutional liberty and national prosperity.”
In practice, UATX is a selectively curated intellectual space, one that draws heavily on a Western classical canon and excludes broader traditions of inquiry. The “quantitative metrics” for admissions echo longstanding tools of exclusion used by elite schools, masking inequality behind a rhetoric of objectivity. The institution is unaccredited, but wrapped in the trappings of prestige: slick marketing, elite endorsements, and curated media profiles. It critiques the influence of DEI offices while quietly building its own ideological infrastructure, funded by libertarian and neoconservative donors.
UATX claims to break from the existing higher education establishment, but in many ways it reflects its worst tendencies: elite gatekeeping, narrow curriculum design, and a penchant for cultivating future power brokers under the guise of critical thought. Its alignment with figures like Rufo and institutions like the Manhattan Institute reveals that its primary mission is not educational transformation, but political reprogramming.
The true crises in higher education—mounting student debt, the precarity of adjunct labor, bloated administration, and the deepening divide between elite and non-elite institutions—are ignored in both the Manhattan Statement and UATX’s institutional messaging. Instead, culture war narratives dominate the agenda. Rather than addressing the exploitative political economy of higher education, Rufo and Carvalho advance a project that serves to consolidate influence among ideologically aligned elites, while framing dissent and diversity as existential threats to the republic.
UATX is not a path forward for American higher education. It is a reflection of its decay—an institution more interested in slogans and spectacle than in solving the structural issues that actually imperil the future of learning and equity in the United States.
Sources:
Christopher Rufo, Manhattan Statement on Higher Education, July 14, 2025
Carlos Carvalho, UATX Response to the Manhattan Statement, July 17, 2025
University of Austin promotional materials and public statements, www.uaustin.org
Higher Education Inquirer, Socrates in Space: University of Austin and the Art of Selling Platitudes to the Powerful, July 2024
New York Times, The University That War on “Wokeness” Built, December 2021
Inside Higher Ed, UATX and the Spectacle of Merit, February 2024
Chronicle of Higher Education, Is UATX a University or a Political Project?, January 2023
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