Building the Alt-Academy

A guest essay by Albert Eisenberg

The dire state of our universities is a recurring theme in this space. On far too many campuses, faculty, administrators, and students find themselves silenced, ostracized, or even fired when they voice opinions or raise questions that run against the grain of certain progressive orthodoxies. The university’s awesome ability to produce innovation and new knowledge relies on the relatively uninhibited freedom to exchange and explore ideas and to follow them wherever they may lead. When that freedom is curtailed—either through administrative action or public pressure campaigns—the university becomes a less dynamic place. It’s less able to address itself to hard problems, less able to imagine new modes of inquiry, and less able to offer students an intellectually transformative experience.

I want to believe that we still have the ability to right the ship, to abandon suffocating speech codes and woke political imperatives that prevent vital work from getting done. But we can’t simply wait around and hope these institutions will correct themselves. The stakes are too high. It’s time to start thinking about how we can build and sustain alternative institutions that will do the work our traditional universities may find themselves unable to do in the not-too-distant future.

Albert Eisenberg, a young political consultant and founder of the non-profit media outlet Broad + Liberty, has some ideas that may help balance the scales. In the essay below, Albert calls for the creation of an “alt-academy,” a new kind of institution that will support the kind of serious research and teaching that is increasingly difficult to do in traditional universities. He has some intriguing ideas, especially regarding how a resource intensive endeavor like a new university could get up and running. We need energetic, committed people like Albert working on this problem, as its his generation and those younger who will reap the benefits of action or suffer the consequences of indifference.

Getting something like an alt-academy up and running is going to take a lot of work and a lot of new ideas. So if you have any thoughts about what the alt-academy might do, how it might conceive its mission, and how it can sustain itself, let me know in the comments!

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To save higher education, free thinkers must launch an alt-academy

by Albert Eisenberg

America’s system of higher education, the prize of our nation and our most powerful tool for innovation, is in a death spiral. The evidence of endemic academic and student self-censorship on campus continues to mount, as do outrageous examples of students, administrators, and professors chasing off (and sometimes literally attacking) bearers of unpopular opinions. The costs on students and their families have spiraled in tandem with the quality of education. The temptation to turn away from the rot of the American campus is nearly overwhelming. 

But if we care to foster an American society that will endure, we must examine the problem and find solutions. As many have noted, America’s new radical elites have spilled out of the classroom and into the boardroom. We are all living on campus now. To keep living, we must save that campus—or build a new one.

Our country cannot support a population that has been indoctrinated to hate its foundation, its institutions, and its national symbols. To save the liberal order and build a more perfect union (not burn it down), we must reimagine the campuses that shape the minds of our future leaders. Free thinking people, those shut out or priced out of the current campus, and anybody who cares to see our society move forward, must found and fund an alternative academy.

The alt-academy is an institution that brings together, in person, a few key groups that are crucial to the endeavor and longing to meet: students who are paying through the teeth for a diploma but long for an education, professors who yearn to teach free from the heckler’s veto, and donors who no longer wish to fund the institutions teaching their children and grandchildren to despise them and everything they have contributed to the world.

Of these groups, students are the most vulnerable. I recently discussed this problem with Glenn Loury. “The situation is grave,” he told me. “I do think the situation is quite serious.” Loury has helped found a new venture meant to address this problem, the University of Austin. It’s an exciting idea, one worthy of attention as a response to a campus climate mired in groupthink. “These kids are really, really hungry for a breath of fresh air,” Loury says. “They’re not especially conservative, either.” 

A LIBERAL EDUCATION

Most young thinkers know that what they are learning in the classroom is a certain version of things, not the whole truth. This is especially the case when it comes to any subject touching the academic third rails of race, gender, sexuality, the Western canon, and American history. And what has become the de facto pedagogical angle in the social sciences is increasingly true in the hard sciences as well, with calls to “decolonize STEM,”and eliminate objective standards and objective research. The post-structuralist dream — the atomization of every hard truth into its subjective, component parts — finds its apex among the “objective standards are white supremacy” fringe that tends to drown out any other voice in the classroom.

Between a lowering of academic standards and a hard-left political ideology that prizes postmodern rhetoric over clear thinking, an Ivy League or equivalent degree represents an increasingly expensive “ticket in” to the American elite, but not much else in terms of intellectual attainment or self-actualization.

Professor Loury’s experience, as well as my own, is that many students—not just political conservatives —are desperate to experience freer discourse and debate based on a broader set of established facts. I believe they would flock to an alt-academy after receiving their pedigree, during a “semester abroad,” or instead of attending a traditional university at all. Increasingly, young men in particular are opting out of higher education. But that does not mean they don't crave knowledge.

At the alt-academy, students would gather to receive a first-class education in civics, world and American history, philosophy, law, sociology, economics, psychology, and more. They would be educated by the small but growing army of researchers, journalists, and entrepreneurs who are operating outside of legacy institutions. Some of them, like Peter Boghossian and Bret Weinstein, had callings as educators before they were forced off campus. These nonconformists would be the instructors at the alt-academy. Their lessons and research, which until now have been relegated to podcasts and online publications, could finally be taught in person, where they will have the most impact.

This would all come at a significantly cheaper cost than a standard liberal arts degree, since such an institution could resist the bloated administrative apparatus that hoovers up tuition money in order to push endless self-justifying paper.

The pool of potential applicants is enormous, from conservative-leaning students to apolitical, centrist, and heterodox scholars to STEM researchers who don’t want to “deconstruct” geology or be force-fed mathematics-as-racism. The alt-academy could start small and still have a large impact. Graduates with newly opened minds would be armed with logic and clarity to confront a complicated world. Faculty could breathe easier, no longer under the thumb of today’s campus revolutionaries.

A LIFELINE FOR ACADEMICS

Innumerable academics and would-be professors have found their careers to be a perilous tightrope walk or a total dead-end. How many have opted out of academia entirely? What path forward exists for a traditional classics professor or a sociologist interested in root causes of poverty beyond “systemic racism”? Scores of stifled academics would leap at the opportunity to research and teach open-minded students in their chosen field and to be well-compensated for it. An alternative academy would offer these scholars a lifeline and a future.

Colleen Sheehan, a professor of classics and former state legislator in my home state of Pennsylvania, has written about campus groupthink on her former campus, Villanova University. Sheehan thinks the alt-academy should be built: “If places like Harvard and Princeton, and my old university that I still love very much, Villanova, aren’t going to do right by the students, then it’s very much worth considering founding new universities that do.”

Where to begin? Sheehan suggests it may start with the parents, those “who don’t go along with this radicalization” they’ve seen from their kids returning to campus. Both Sheehan and Loury confirm a number of cases of academics corresponding with them in private: “the implicit threat is clear” to their tenure-track prospects, Loury says.

INVESTING IN THE FUTURE

There is a third, restive group without whom the alt-academy will remain an idea on paper: a donor base that no longer wants to send money in perpetuity to the institutions that hate capitalism, America, and the lives and businesses they have built.

I have spoken to some of these people myself. They are wealthy individuals and families, many of them right-leaning, who could make the idea into a concrete reality. They could provide the seed funding to foster this bulwark against campus groupthink and its poisoned fruit.

Organizations that have emerged as warriors against the new campus censors (and grabbed headlines doing so) include groups like the National Association of Scholars, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and the newly formed Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism could provide institutional support. Media figures like Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald—high-profile journalists who left their legacy media outlets—could provide publicity and thought leadership. 

There has been a concerted effort in recent years to reclaim online discourse from the authoritarian campus radicals. The natural next step is to move the fight offline, where knowledge, learning, and connections are far more tangible and durable. Anybody who has tried to “work” a day on Zoom while simultaneously scrolling through multiple browser tabs and washing their dishes knows that virtual meetings will never replace in-person ones. Similarly, podcasts and YouTube are not enough to educate the public. The great renegade thinkers who are pushing back against conformity and providing solutions to our society’s problems must be brought offline and into reality.

Loury is bullish on the concept: “I think there’s something here.” He flatters one writer’s dreams of grandeur: “You could be a billionaire with this idea,” he says, recognizing the alt-academy as a completely unfilled market niche. The aim, money aside, is to reclaim the model of intellectual flourishing that made our country the prize of Western civilization. Conformists will not solve the types of complex problems that exploded in 2020; in fact, conformists won’t solve any problems at all. Vision and free thinking are required for us to advance.

TOWARD A NEW MODEL

America’s elite—and the institutions that churn them out—have drifted far from the reality of how “the other half” (more like 80-90 percent) of their countrymen live. The campus debate is grounded in post-structuralist philosophy rather than the actual structure of the world. Graduates are leaving their campuses ill prepared to contribute and carrying mountains of debt.

But back in reality, a critical mass of students, academics, and donors could form a new academy, where ancient knowledge is shared and new research is published, far from the smog of today’s identity politics, thought-policing, and campus bureaucrats. Its output, produced by freethinkers who are prepared to make change in the world, could lead our society forward.

The stakes are higher than any one campus or any one generation of Americans. “This isn’t just a question of politics,” says Sheehan. “It’s a question of the human mind and the human soul—and what people are doing to attempt to destroy that.” 

Those who are convinced of the dire need for change must gather together to support our intellectual heritage and build on innovative ideas that will shine a light through the morass. The alt-academy is one such idea. Building it would bring together students, academics, and funders in pursuit of knowledge once again.

Albert Eisenberg is a millennial political consultant based in Philadelphia, and is a founder of the non-profit media outlet Broad + Liberty. He has been featured on Fox, RealClearPolitics, the Philadelphia Inquirer and elsewhere. He is a Young Voices commentator and a MaverickPAC Future 40 awardee. @Albydelphia.