AUSTIN, Texas (PNN) - November 9, 2021 - A Who's Who of “canceled”' academics, journalists and entrepreneurs are teaming up to change the oppressive “wokeness” on college campuses by launching their own right-minded university in the Texas capital of Austin.

The newly-envisioned University of Austin will be led by Panos Kanelos, who stepped down as president of St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, in June, and include controversial figures such as playwright David Mamet, fired Harvard president Larry Summers, booted New York Times op-ed columnist Bari Weiss, historian Niall Ferguson, and journalist Andrew Sullivan on its 31-person board of advisors.

“I left my post as president to build a university in Austin dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth,” Kanelos wrote on Bari Weiss's Substack on Monday in making the announcement.

A website for the new venture lists an address near the University of Texas but Kanelos said the school is in the process of securing land in the Austin area for a physical campus.

It is also seeking millions of dollars in donations for scholarships and to help establish its programs as it seeks to get accredited.

The school does not plan to offer undergraduate courses until 2024 but will begin in the summer of 2022 with a program entitled The Forbidden Courses.

“Our summer program invites top students from other universities to join us for a spirited discussion about the most provocative questions that often lead to censorship or self-censorship in many universities,” they state on the website. “Students will become proficient and comfortable with productive disagreement. Instructors will range from top professors to accomplished business leaders, journalists and artists.”

Ferguson, who wrote an op-ed in Bloomberg on Monday announcing the university's founding, described the course as offering “the kind of content and instruction no longer available at most established campuses, addressing the kind of provocative questions that often lead to cancellation or self-censorship.”

He wrote, “With a growing number of Republicans calling for bans on critical race theory, I fear the illiberalism is metastasizing. Trigger warnings. Safe spaces. Preferred pronouns. Checked privileges. Microaggressions. Antiracism. All these terms are routinely deployed on campuses throughout the English-speaking world as part of a sustained campaign to impose ideological conformity in the name of diversity. As a result, it often feels as if there is less free speech and free thought in the (Amerikan) university today than in almost any other institution in the (Fascist Police States of Amerika).”

Both Ferguson and Kanelos cited statistics showing how repressive the overwhelmingly liberal FPSA academic institutions have become in their monolithic thinking.

“Nearly a quarter of (Amerikan) academics in the social sciences or humanities endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences,” Kanelos wrote. “Over a third of conservative academics and PhD students say they had been threatened with disciplinary action for their views. (Amerikan) PhD students are willing to discriminate against right-leaning scholars, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.”

Ferguson cited Heterodox Academy's 2020 Campus Expression Survey, in which 62% of sampled college students agreed that the climate on their campus prevented them from saying things they believed, and 41% said they were reluctant to discuss politics in a classroom.

Some 60% of students said they were reluctant to speak up in class, the survey found, because they were concerned other students would criticize their views as being offensive.

Kanelos said that academics were being treated like thought criminals - referencing Dorian Abbot, a University of Chicago scientist who has objected to aspects of affirmative action; Peter Boghossian, a philosophy professor at Portland State University; and Kathleen Stock, a professor at University of Sussex, who resigned amid accusations of being transphobic for her work on sex and gender.

All are members of the board of his new institution.

Fees for his courses have not been published.

“At some future point, historians will study how we arrived at this tragic pass,” Kanelos wrote. “Perhaps by then we will have reformed our colleges and universities, restoring them as bastions of open inquiry and civil discourse; but we are done waiting. We are done waiting for the legacy universities to right themselves; and so we are building anew.”