(Joshua Paladino, Headline USA) The University of Austin, which disaffected liberals launched last year to provide free speech a safe home, will offer free “Forbidden Courses” this summer to incoming, current, and recently graduated college students.
For two weeks at the Old Parkland campus in Dallas, Texas, students will learn from liberal intellectuals, discuss timeless and contemporary questions, “cultivate the habits of civil discourse,” and promote “intellectual humility,” the university reported.
“Changing one’s mind is not a mark of weakness, but a sign of intellectual strength and maturity,” UoA wrote about the courses.
“Moreover, allowing others the space to be mistaken, even as we try to achieve mutual understanding, is essential to establishing the trust that authentic conversations are grounded upon,” the post continued.
The first week’s seminar, from June 13 to 17, will wrestle with the question, “Who am I as an individual?.”
The second weeklong seminar, from June 20 to 24, will consider “contours of debates over freedom, science, capitalism, and liberalism in Western history and development.”
Students will hear opening lectures from Founding Faculty Fellow Peter Boghossian and then participate in seminars led by Rob Henderson, Dorian Abbot, Kathleen Stock, Deirdre McCloskey, Niall Ferguson, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
David Mamet, Bari Weiss, Arthur Brooks, Nadine Strossen, Joe Lonsdale, Peter Boghossian, and Carlos Carvalho will lead workshops on their specialties.
Accepted students will receive free tuition, lodging, and meals as well as a $300 travel stipend from the University of Austin.
The “Forbidden Courses” title responds broadly to the cancel-culture climate in the West and particularly to the free-speech crisis on university campuses.
“We call our summer program Forbidden Courses because the current turbulence — political, social, and cultural — is forbidding us from encountering one another honestly and authentically,” UoA wrote on the website.
Course descriptions include flammable topics, like “varieties of feminism,” “approaches to climate change,” and “free vs. unfree societies in the 20th century.”
“Those who are going to lead, innovate, and create, must learn how to rise above the static noise of social media, commerce, and ideology,” UoA wrote. “Most importantly, we must learn again how to learn from one another.”