Forbidden courses
Join courageous academics and leaders to explore the great questions of our time
JANUARY 17-20, 2025
WHY FORBIDDEN COURSES?
At UATX, we recognize that truth-seeking requires courage, rational judgment, and intellectual humility. Changing our minds is not a sign of weakness, but of strength and maturity.
We named our program Forbidden Courses because higher education has made it difficult to inquire openly into vexing questions with honesty and without fear of shame.
The end is not to prove that we are right. Rather, our program brings diverse minds together so that we can clarify what we do and do not know. This passionate pursuit of truth, however elusive it may be, is at the heart of all of our programs.
UATX is a beacon for curious minds committed to cultivating the habits of civil discourse. Via small discussion-based seminars, lectures, and social activities, our students join courageous academics and leaders to explore the great questions of our time.
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program overview
Who’s to Blame for Inflation?
Professor Thomas Hogan
Partisan Politics and the Decline of Democracy
Professor Alex Priou
Discrimination in High Ed Admissions: What Do the Numbers Tell Us?
Professor David Puelz
When the Truth Is Too Much to Bear: The Fearful Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Greek Tragedy
Professor Isabella Reinhardt
Why Does Government Fail So Often?
Professor Scott Scheall
Friday, January 17, 2025
Saturday, January 18, 2025
Sunday, January 19, 2025
Monday, January 20, 2025
Program schedule remains subject to change.
2023 courses
session 1
June 18-24, 2023
Science & Christianity
Do Christianity and science flourish together, mutually informing and enriching one other, or are they fundamentally at odds?
In this course, we will examine major points of tension and synergy between Christianity and science — considering evolution, extraterrestrial intelligence, consciousness, and particulars of the Christian faith. Through open discussion, students will be encouraged to think more deeply about their own beliefs. Readings will include works by Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Thomas Nagel, David Bentley Hart, John F. Haught, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, and Bishop Robert Barron.
Dorian Abbot
AboutDorian Abbot
Associate Professor of Geophysics, University of ChicagoAuthor of Heterodox STEM and 90+ Scientific Papers
Dorian Abbot is an Associate Professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, where he uses mathematical and computational models to understand and explain fundamental problems in Earth and Planetary Sciences. He has worked on problems related to climate, paleoclimate, planetary habitability, and exoplanets and was principal investigator for a National Science Foundation award. Abbot first arrived at the University of Chicago as a Chamberlin Fellow in 2009 and has served as a faculty member since 2011. He has an undergraduate degree in Physics (2004, Harvard) and a Ph.D. in Applied Math (2008, Harvard). Abbot is the author behind the Substack Heterodox STEM.
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David Ruth
AboutDavid Ruth
Dean of Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics, UATX
Professor David Ruth is Dean of UATX’s Center for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. Previously, Ruth held several leadership positions as a Permanent Military Professor of Mathematics at the United States Naval Academy, where he was an award-winning teacher from 2009 until 2022. Ruth has authored several articles in a variety of statistics journals, as well as a book chapter on mathematics in cybersecurity. Prior to his academic work, Ruth led and served as a naval officer with operational experience in submarine and surface warfare, nuclear power, oceanography, and meteorology.
The Psychology of Morality
In this seminar, we will explore the psychological factors that influence moral beliefs and behaviors.
We will consider the origins and development of moral reasoning, the role of intuitions and emotions in moral considerations, and the cultural and social factors that shape judgments of right and wrong. Students will learn about psychological theories and research on morality, and will have the opportunity to analyze and discuss the polarization of moral views, political correctness, the disconnect between intentions and actions, and why well-meaning people disagree. Readings will include works by Jonathan Haidt, Paul Bloom, and Geoffrey Goodwin.
Rob Henderson
AboutRob Henderson
UATX Founding Faculty FellowWriter for the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Quillette, and Substack
Rob Henderson, who serves as a UATX faculty fellow, is perhaps best known for his coinage of the term "luxury beliefs” to describe the American status system. His writing and research focus on psychology, social status, and class divides, among other topics. Henderson publishes a regular Substack titled Rob Henderson’s Newsletter. He has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and Quillette, among others, and has appeared on countless podcasts. He earned his B.S. in Psychology from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Cambridge (St. Catherine's College), where he studied as a Gates Cambridge Scholar.
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Writing Sexual Politics
Political narratives often attempt to reduce or flatten the complexity of human experience. Yet, sex and the realities of gender imbalance require more subtlety than is often afforded by the writers of standard feminist texts.
In this course, we will (i) consider how to write and think in a rigorous manner about issues of sexual politics and (ii) tackle the nuances and intricacies of such issues without resorting to easy or reductive political narratives. Readings will include works by Simone De Beauvoir, Joan Didion, Virginia Woolf, and Zadie Smith.
Katie Roiphe
AboutKatie Roiphe
Professor of Journalism, New York University
Author of The Morning After: Sex, Fear, Feminism; In Praise of Messy Lives; and The Violet Hour
Katie Roiphe is the author of several books, including The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism,Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages, In Praise of Messy Lives, and The Violet Hour. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Paris Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Harper’s, Vogue, Esquire, Slate, and Tin House, among others. Roiphe has a Ph.D. in literature from Princeton University. She is the director of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
Anglo-American Grand Strategy
The United States has been the predominant power in global politics since the end of the Second World War. Taking over from the British, America has pursued a grand strategy focused on safeguarding the maritime, global, and commercial order — a strategy that has been shaped by both domestic and foreign interests.
In this seminar, students will examine the history of Anglo-American grand strategy with an eye toward future global power struggles. Readings will include Walter Russell Mead’s God & Gold and select Wall Street Journal columns.
Walter Russell Mead
AboutWalter Russell Mead
Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy & Statesmanship, Hudson InstituteGlobal View Columnist, The Wall Street Journal
Walter Russell Mead is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College. He is also currently a Distinguished Fellow in American Strategy and Statesmanship at the Hudson Institute, a member of Aspen Institute Italy, and a board member of Aspenia. From 2008 to 2011, he was the Brady-Johnson Distinguished Fellow in Grand Strategy at Yale University. From 1997 to 2010, he was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, serving as the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy from 2003 to 2010. Mead also previously served as the Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Stiftung. From 1987 to 1997, he served as the President’s Fellow at the World Policy Institute at The New School. Mead has authored numerous books, including The Arc of the Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People (2022); God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (2008); Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America’s Grand Strategy in a World at Risk (2004); and Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (2001). In February 2018, he was named "Global View" columnist at The Wall Street Journal. In 2012, the Foreign Policy Research Institute awarded him its Benjamin Franklin Prize for his work in the field of American foreign policy. Mead was the winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize and nominated for the 2002 Arthur Ross Book Award. He writes articles, book reviews, and op-ed pieces for Foreign Affairs and other magazines and newspapers. He was a finalist for the National Magazine Award (essays and criticism) in 1997. Mead earned his B.A. as an undergraduate at Yale University.
session 2
June 25-July 1, 2023
Racial Inequality in America
This seminar surveys the social disadvantage of African Americans in the United States from the perspectives of economics, sociology, politics, and history.
Students will be encouraged to take a holistic view of the relevant issues including racial affirmative action, reparations for past injustices, and inequalities in the criminal justice system. Readings will include works by Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, Brendan O'Flaherty, and Rajiv Sethi.
Glenn Loury
ABoutGlenn Loury
Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Science, Brown UniversityCreator of the Glenn Show and Paulson Fellow at the Manhattan Institute
Glenn Loury is Professor of Economics and Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences at the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University. An academic economist, Professor Loury has published mainly in the areas of applied microeconomic theory, game theory, industrial organization, natural resource economics, and the economics of race and inequality. He is a fellow of the Manhattan Institute, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Econometric Society as well as a member of the American Philosophical Society. In 2005, he received the John von Neumann Award, given annually by the Rajk László College of the Budapest University of Economic Science and Public Administration to "an outstanding economist whose research has exerted a major influence on students of the College over an extended period of time." He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Carnegie Scholarship to support his work. He has given the prestigious Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford (2007), the James A. Moffett '29 Lectures in Ethics at Princeton (2003), and the DuBois Lectures in African American Studies at Harvard (2000). A prominent social critic and public intellectual writing mainly on the themes of racial inequality and social policy, he has published more than 200 essays and reviews in journals of public affairs in the US and abroad. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a contributing editor at The Boston Review, and was for many years a contributing editor at The New Republic. His book One by One, From the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America (The Free Press, 1995) won the American Book Award and the Christianity Today Book Award. Loury holds a B.A. in Mathematics from Northwestern University and a Ph.D. in Economics from M.I.T.
Conservatives & Reactionaries
In journalism, and even in scholarship, the terms conservative and reactionary are often used interchangeably notwithstanding important conceptual differences between them.
We will first explore these differences, and then discuss contemporary political debates on the right in light of them. Readings will include works by Edmund Burke, William F. Buckley, Eric Voegelin, Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneen, and Rod Dreher.
Mark Lilla
AboutMark Lilla
Professor of Humanities, Columbia UniversityAuthor of The Once and future Liberal: After Identity Politics
Mark Lilla was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1956, and was educated at the University of Michigan and Harvard University. After holding professorships at New York University and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, he joined Columbia University in 2007 as Professor of the Humanities. He has been awarded fellowships by the Russell Sage Foundation, the Institut d’études avancées (Paris), the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and the American Academy in Rome. In 1995 he was inducted into the French Order of Academic Palms. Lilla is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and publications worldwide. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He lectures widely and has delivered the Weizmann Memorial Lecture in Israel and the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford University. In 2015, Overseas Press Club of America awarded him its prize for Best Commentary on International News in Any Medium.
The Invasion of Ideology into Evolutionary Biology
In this course, we will examine the intrusion of ideology in biology. We will focus on five topics: (i) sexual selection and the nature of sex and gender (is sex binary?); (ii) genetic variation behind human traits (heritability of traits); (iii) human population genetics (are there human races?); (iv) evolutionary psychology (do men and women have different evolved behaviors?); and (v) the role of indigenous knowledge in biology (are there other ways of knowing?).
The course will have lectures and debates focusing on controversial areas; sides will be assigned and students may have to defend positions with which they personally disagree. Readings will include works by Steve Stewart-Williams and various scientific papers.
Luana Maroja
ABOUTDorian Abbot
Chair of biochemistry and molecular biology & professor of biology, Williams collegeAuthor of 30+ scientific papers and recipient of awards from the national science foundation
Luana Maroja is a Professor of Biology at Williams College where she serves as Chair of the Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Program. Her areas of expertise and research focus include evolutionary genetics, speciation, and landscape genetics. Maroja has received National Science Foundation awards for her work in these areas. She holds an undergraduate degree from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (B.S., 1999), a graduate degree from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (M.S., 2001), and a Ph.D. from Cornell University (2008).
The Battle of the Sexes
At present, relations between men and women are shot through with a dreary political moralism. There is little sense of play, or delighting in sexual differences. How did we get to this point? Whence our determination to feminize the male, butch up the female, and conceive the act of love on the model of a legal contract? How might this trajectory express a central tendency of our broader political regime? Is there a way out?
To answer these questions, we will read a collection of historical works, cultural criticism, and political philosophy. Readings will include works by William Shakespeare, Christopher Lasch, Ivan Illich, and Camille Paglia, as well as selections from the Book of Genesis.
Matthew B. Crawford
AboutMatthew B. Crawford
Senior Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of VirginiaAuthor of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the value of work
Matthew B. Crawford attended the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he majored in physics. Later he earned a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago, specializing in ancient political thought. He is the author of three books: Shopclass as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, The World Beyond Your Head, and Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road and writes a Substack, titled Archedelia: Toward a Political Theory of the Present. Currently he is a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, but lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Marilyn Simon
AboutMarilyn Simon
Author at QuilletteInstructor of English, University of Winnipeg
Dr. Marilyn Simon is a Shakespeare scholar and university instructor. Simon fell in love with Shakespeare's sentences, became curious about the world as he saw it, and ended up with a Ph.D. on Shakespeare from the University of Toronto. She loves poetry because it's beautiful, and fictions because they're imaginative. Her current research interests are on love and the relationship between men and women. Simon is interested in reaching a broad audience rather than a strictly academic one. She is currently working on a book entitled In a Mutual Flame: Coming Together in Shakespeare.
View previous Forbidden courseS
2022 courses
session 1
June 18-24, 2022
Critical Thinking and Freedom of Expression
Readings include selections from John Stuart Mill, Kathleen Stock, Stephen Feldman, and more.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
AboutAyaan Hirsi Ali
Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Ayaan is a Somali-born classical liberal. A free speech advocate. An activist for the rights of women and girls. A public intellectual with a powerful voice. A woman that does not back down when she sees a problem. Previously a Member of the Dutch Parliament (2003-2006), she regularly called for furthering the integration of non-Western immigrants into Dutch society, and defending the rights of Muslim women. Now, a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and Founder of the AHA Foundation, she regularly comments on today's issues and offers a platform to exchange perspectives that lead to real solutions. She has written several books including Infidel (2007); Nomad (2010); Heretic (2015); and The Challenge of Dawa (2017). Her newest book Prey is available now. Her podcast, The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast, launched in 2021.
Global Warming
Readings include selections from SciTechnol, Scripps Institution of Oceanography (USDC), Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, The Review of Economics and Statistics, and more.
Dorian Abbot
AboutDorian Abbot
Associate Professor of Geophysics, University of ChicagoAuthor of Heterodox STEM and 90+ Scientific Papers
Dorian Abbot is an Associate Professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, where he uses mathematical and computational models to understand and explain fundamental problems in Earth and Planetary Sciences. He has worked on problems related to climate, paleoclimate, planetary habitability, and exoplanets and was principal investigator for a National Science Foundation award. Abbot first arrived at the University of Chicago as a Chamberlin Fellow in 2009 and has served as a faculty member since 2011. He has an undergraduate degree in Physics (2004, Harvard) and a Ph.D. in Applied Math (2008, Harvard). Abbot is the author behind the Substack Heterodox STEM.
Freedom and Unfreedom: Lesson of the 20th Century
Readings include selections from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Czesław Miłosz, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, Sinclair Lewis, and more.
Niall Ferguson
AboutNiall Ferguson
Historian, The Hoover Institution at Stanford University
Niall Ferguson, MA, DPhil, FRSE, is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. He is the author of sixteen books, including The Pity of War, The House of Rothschild, Empire, Civilization and Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist, which won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Prize. He is an award-making filmmaker, too, having won an international Emmy for his PBS series The Ascent of Money. His 2018 book, The Square and the Tower, was a New York Times bestseller and also adapted for television by PBS as Niall Ferguson’s Networld. In 2020 he joined Bloomberg Opinion as a columnist. In addition, he is the founder and managing director of Greenmantle LLC, a New York-based advisory firm, a co-founder of Ualá, a Latin American financial technology company, and a trustee of the New York Historical Society, the London-based Centre for Policy Studies, and the newly founded University of Austin (UATX). His latest book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, was published last year by Penguin and was shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize.
The Psychology of Social Status
Readings include selections from Pierre Bourdieu, Charles Murray, Robert Abelson, Paul Fussell, and more.
Rob Henderson
AboutRob Henderson
UATX Founding Faculty FellowWriter for the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Quillette, and Substack
Rob Henderson, who serves as a UATX faculty fellow, is perhaps best known for his coinage of the term "luxury beliefs” to describe the American status system. His writing and research focus on psychology, social status, and class divides, among other topics. Henderson publishes a regular Substack titled Rob Henderson’s Newsletter. He has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and Quillette, among others, and has appeared on countless podcasts. He earned his B.S. in Psychology from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Cambridge (St. Catherine's College), where he studied as a Gates Cambridge Scholar.
session 2
June 25-July 1, 2022
The Opium of Ideology
Readings include selections from Aristotle, Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Orwell, Soren Kierkegaard, Alexis de Tocqueville, the Bible, and more.
Jacob Howland
ABoutJacob Howland
PROVOST AND DEAN OF INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATIONS, UATX
Professor Jacob Howland is Director of UATX’s Intellectual Foundations program, which comprises the first two years of our undergraduate curriculum. Previously, Howland served as McFarlin Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tulsa and Senior Fellow at the Tikvah Fund. He is the author of five books and one edited book, including two on Plato’s Republic as well as studies of Kierkegaard and the Talmud. Howland’s articles have appeared in The New Criterion, City Journal, and The Nation, among others.
Capitalism: Tragedy or Triumph?
Readings include selections from Ludwig von Mises, David Harvey, Deirdre McCloskey, The Communist Manifesto, and more.
Deirdre McCloskey
AboutDeirdre McCloskey
Distinguished professor emerita of economics and of history, University of Illinois at Chicago
Sole author of fifteen books and about 356 articles, Professor McCloskey is an economist and economic historian who around 1980 got interested in the rhetoric of persuasion in her field, and then wider literary matters, such as literary and social theory. Her main project for the next few years will be writing a six-volume tome on “The Bourgeois Era.” Volume 1, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, came out from the University of Chicago Press in 2006. Volume 2, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World, came out in 2010. Her early “cliometric” work on British economic history concerned the performance of the British economy in the late 19th century and the workings of open-field agriculture in the 13th. Thus Economic Maturity and Entrepreneurial Decline: British Iron and Steel, 1870-1913 (1973) and Enterprise and Trade in Victorian Britain: Essays in Historical Economics (1981) and numerous articles on open fields, the industrial revolution, and the gold standard. After a long excursus into rhetoric (The Rhetoric of Economics [1985] and other books in the 1990s), the “bourgeois” project is a return to history, viewed more than quantitatively.
Varieties of Feminism and their Political Subjects
Readings include selections of John Stuart Mill, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mary Harrington, Catherine A. MacKinnon, and more.
Kathleen Stock
ABOUTKathleen Stock
Philosopher and author
Kathleen Stock is an UnHerd columnist, former professor of philosophy and Founding Faculty Fellow at UATX.
Learning from Native Sons: The Pain, Rage, and Hope of America's Most Loyal Critics
Readings include selections from Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and more.
Thomas Chatterton Williams
AboutThomas Chatterton Williams
Author
Visiting professor of humanities and senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College
Thomas Chatterton Williams is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a Visting professor of humanities and senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, a 2022 Guggenheim fellow, and a visiting fellow at AEI. He was previously a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a Columnist at Harper’s. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Le Monde and many other places, and has been collected in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing. He has received support from New America, Yaddo, MacDowell, and The American Academy in Berlin, where he is a member of the Board of Trustees. His next book, Nothing Was the Same: The Pandemic Summer of George Floyd and the Shift in Western Consciousness, will be published by Knopf.
details And Requirements
Eligibility
Participants must be (i) U.S. citizens or permanent residents and (ii) current students enrolled as college freshmen or high school seniors. Exceptions may be made for promising candidates in other grade levels. Participants under 18 years of age upon commencement of the program are required to be accompanied by a responsible adult for the duration of the program.
Location & Dates
University of Austin campus in Austin, Texas
January 17-20, 2025
deadline to apply
November 30, 2024
11:59 PM Central
cost and Credits
This is a non-credit enrichment program. There is no program or activity fee. Meals are provided. Participants are responsible for their travel and lodging, as applicable, as well as any additional expenses. There are a limited number of scholarships available, awarded based on demonstrated need.
Contact programs@uaustin.org with questions.